Before technology, experience would be based on choice — exploration, creation, and participation with others.

Theater maximized sedentary and passive absorption of someone else’s scripted information. School made that setting mandatory for our children.

The printing press decentralized scriptwriting, preserved relatively active participation, and allowed choice in what to consume; radio and television programming made it mostly passive, written by few, and common in the living room.

With Internet, we actively choose our own adventure again, but artificial intelligence suggestion algorithms and autoplay threaten to take it away. Big-tech filters narrowly contain the boundaries of our thinking; they choose self-fulfilling prophecies for us; they tell us what is popular before it is.

Long live the mixtape.