Re:We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World

I would never have thought that Pinocchio, a childhood fairy tale, could resonate so strongly in today's world of algorithms, polarisation, and post-truth.Malik's post is incredible. The way he spotted the similarities between the 19th-century story written by Carl Collodi - the author of Pinocchio - and a modern world dominated by algorithms, convenience, entertainment, polarisation, and showmanship, meant that with every paragraph of his story, my eyes opened wider and wider.Om Malik writes: The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break. This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself. Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass…