"For most, the pleasures of digital cultural consumption are uncoupled from the exertions of curatorship. Today’s digital consumers are no longer being fed a limited diet of standardized cultural products, but they are still being fed. Consumption may be personalized, but it would be a stretch, in most cases, to call it self-directed — and it is not necessarily more active than pre-digital forms of “mass” cultural consumption. (...) Cultural populists, to be sure, tell a different story about the democratization of consumption. They are less concerned with self-directed, active consumption than emancipating people from elite cultural tutelage. If the TikTok algorithm delivers what people like and want, that makes it democratic in their eyes. (...) Moreover, as the critic Rob Horning has argued with respect to TikTok, algorithms do not simply discern what we want and serve it to us; they train us to want what they can serve us. Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need. "