This is my second article, a continued riff on Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009), a book whose insights permanently changed how I think about history, culture, and the divided brain. McGilchrist’s work was original and controversial when it appeared, and the world has since changed rapidly in ways that now test his theory. His follow-up, The Matter With Things (2021), does not abandon that framework but expands and deepens it. He broadens the hemispheric thesis into an exploration of how left-hemisphere dominance contributes to delusion, fragmentation, and the unmaking of the world. My essay, which frames algorithms as the latest and most pervasive expression of left-hemisphere reductionism, extends his core thesis rather than diverging from it. By focusing on AI-driven engagement loops, I offer a concrete contemporary case study of the dynamics McGilchrist describes in more abstract terms across his later two-volume work. In this essay, I attempt to update his thesis for an era defined by algorithms. And in 2025, the urgency is clear: algorithms are not just an example of left-hemisphere reductionism, they are the most consequential test of hemispheric imbalance in history, unfolding in real time on the devices in our hands.
Picture a pendulum, heavy and deliberate, swinging across centuries: narrowing cultures into reduction and control, then pulling them back toward reintegration and wholeness. Agriculture, writing, and clocks pushed us toward the narrow. The Renaissance and Romanticism pulled us back toward breadth. The rhythm was uneven but persistent.
In my last essay, I argued that this oscillation between the left hemisphere’s reduction and the right hemisphere’s reintegration defines much of our history. Today, however, the rhythm faces a new threat.
Artificial intelligence changes the equation. It does not simply accelerate the oscillation; it hijacks it. And it is happening now, not tomorrow or next year. The systems already running on our phones and shaping our feeds are warping the rhythm of culture in real time.
Historical Counterfeits: Old Corruptions
False reintegration is not new. Throughout history, leaders and institutions have manipulated culture to gain power.
Totalitarian regimes of the 20th century mastered this tactic. Nazi Germany’s mass rallies and the Soviet Union’s choreographed parades created a powerful sense of community and shared identity. They looked like reintegration, but they were counterfeit: built on propaganda, rigid reduction, and the erasure of dissent.
Corporations used similar tactics. During the early labor struggles in the United States, some companies funded “workers’ associations” that mimicked unions while serving management’s interests. They offered workers a sense of belonging while blunting their real power.
These examples remind us that culture has always been vulnerable to hijacking. Until now, corruption has come through deliberate human campaigns, leaders, or corporations bending culture to their ends.
The Third Axis: The Algorithmic Engine
The present moment is different. False rhythm has become the default setting of digital life. The tools are in every hand, shaping every hour of attention. What once required months of propaganda can now be accomplished in seconds by automated systems indifferent to truth. Here, the conversation shifts from a critique of technology to a deeper critique of a corrupted rhythm. In the past, manipulation was top-down, staged by regimes or corporations. Today, it is bottom-up, automated, and profitable by design, with algorithms managed by human hands yet operating at a scale and speed that makes distortion the baseline condition.
The driver is not ministries of truth or corporate astroturfing but an automated editorial system: the algorithm. It runs on a single metric, engagement, and is optimized to maximize clicks, shares, and watch time. Out of that metric emerges a cultural machine. Its emergent property is the collapse of oscillation into a self-perpetuating loop. The algorithm’s optimization for engagement is the ultimate expression of the left hemisphere’s fragmented, abstract, and utilitarian logic.
On one side, algorithms reduce: they reward fragmentation, privileging memes, slogans, and outrage that fit the tempo of a scroll. On the other hand, they mimic reintegration: they offer belonging, digital tribes united by anger, nostalgia, or pride.
It feels like coherence, but remains hollow. Like eating cotton candy for dinner, sweet in the moment, gone before you swallow.
And crucially, this is not an accident of technology. It is profitable. Engagement metrics were chosen to serve an advertising model. The more time we spend online, the more data harvested, the more revenue generated. What once required deliberate manipulation is now automated at scale. Human attention is no longer a resource we command; it is a commodity traded in real time. And here lies the cultural friction: once, coherence was tethered to anchors like religion, art, and civic ritual, institutions that bound memory and meaning across generations. Today, those anchors are bypassed by metrics that monetize reaction. The result is not distraction but disinheritance.
The Continuum of Control
Algorithms are not stand-alone machines. They are built, owned, and tuned by human beings who set the goals and adjust the levers. In that sense, today’s social platforms are not so different from the newspapers of the 19th century or the broadcast networks of the 20th.
What has changed is the form of editorial power. A newspaper editor could shape a front page once a day for a limited audience. An algorithm, by contrast, is an automated editor, endlessly adjusting what billions of people see in real time. The continuum runs from word of mouth to print to broadcast to digital to AI, each step increasing speed, reach, and precision. What is novel today is not that humans shape the medium, but that they have delegated curation to a metric. The engagement loop replaces the judgment of an editor, producing distortions that feel less intentional but more totalizing.
Never before has culture been edited by a metric indifferent to truth, beauty, or meaning. This is not just bias; it is a structural subversion of judgment itself.
The Third Axis in Action
The evidence is everywhere. What looks like diversity of experience, politics, wellness, activism, hobbies, and even childhood, is the same distortion across domains.
Consider politics. The MAGA movement thrives in this environment. Its reductionist story is simple: America was once great, something was lost, and only a strong leader can restore it. Its counterfeit reintegration follows: instant belonging in a community bound by nostalgia and resentment, amplified by feeds that filter out dissent.
It feels like restoration. But it is not. Outrage is rewarded. Identity is reinforced by opposition. The movement grows only by deepening division.
This pattern is not confined to politics; the same dynamics appear in wellness culture. On Instagram and TikTok, advice is compressed into slogans and quick fixes. Complex science is reduced to mantras that fit a graphic or reel. Around them arise communities that look integrative but often spiral into obsession, anxiety, and disordered behavior.
The same pattern surfaces in online activism. Hashtags flatten systemic issues into symbols. Viral campaigns generate solidarity, sometimes globally. For a moment, belonging feels real. But the reintegration is fragile, often collapsing into outrage with little follow-through.
Even in hobbies, the pattern repeats. One gaming community I followed began as a welcoming space to share strategies and celebrate achievements. As the algorithm rewarded heated posts, arguments escalated. Factions formed over tiny disagreements. What began as shared joy splintered into purity tests and flame wars amplified by the feed.
Education and childhood show the same cycle. Platforms like TikTok or YouTube Kids condition attention spans to crave novelty every few seconds, making it harder for classrooms and families to sustain narrative or coherence. What once built identity through stories, rituals, and play is fractured into bursts of stimulation that mimic engagement but hollow out coherence. This counterfeit rhythm undermines identity formation at its earliest stage, turning childhood into a site of distortion. As I argue in the Dual Arc Project, when children lose the rhythm of integration, they lose the foundation needed to build a resilient identity.
The stakes are not trivial. This distortion is now the norm, shaping health, civic bonds, and the leisure that once restored us. Unlike older distortions, which eventually yielded to cultural repair through faith, ritual, or art, algorithmic loops corrode the very institutions that once held us together. They also erode democracy itself: by fragmenting public attention, they weaken deliberation. Even nostalgia is no refuge, because algorithms sell fragments of coherence back to us as branded belonging. And if rhythm is permanently severed, what happens not just to politics, but to art, identity, and human continuity? The risk is existential.
The Human Cost
I have felt the pull myself. Once, during a family dinner, I caught myself sliding my attention to my phone, chasing political updates I barely remembered an hour later. It did not make me more informed; it left me hollow. My daughter noticed before I did. She asked, half-joking, “Dad, are you debating your phone?” The truth stung. She was not wrong.
That is the pattern in miniature: a momentary rush that leaves nothing behind. The algorithm pulls us away from the integrative whole of life, a meal, a conversation, a community, into narrowing cycles of reduction and false belonging. What should have been nourishment became emptiness, and what should have been connection became absence.
Multiply that by millions of families, classrooms, and workplaces, and the cost is staggering. We are not just losing focus; we are forfeiting presence, memory, and the chance to see one another whole. The erosion of coherence is not just personal. It is civilizational. And that erosion is not a future threat; it is happening in our institutions today.
Reclaiming the Rhythm
If history has taught us anything, it is that reintegration requires patience, art, reflection, and the right hemisphere’s ability to hold the whole. None of these thrives in an economy of clicks.
The task is not just to resist reduction or chase belonging. It is to recognize when reintegration is being counterfeited, when the promise of wholeness is really another algorithmic narrowing. The challenge of our time is to rescue the pendulum itself.
A different future is possible if we replace engagement with what might be called a coherence metric. Instead of optimizing for clicks per second, systems could be measured by whether they help us sustain long-term goals, reinforce narrative continuity, and strengthen identity. In practice, that could mean algorithms valuing depth per unit time, rewarding students for returning to knowledge weeks later rather than scrolling endlessly, or supporting communities that build memory and meaning instead of fracturing them. AI, in most cases, is a force for good, but only if its incentives align with coherence rather than its erosion.
That work begins with practice, both personal and collective:
Read for 30 minutes a day, a book, an essay, or any long-form work that resists the tempo of the feed.
Protect one daily feed-free ritual, breakfast, an evening walk, or dinner with family.
Join one in-person group each week, faith, civic, art, or sport, where disagreement and nuance are part of the fabric.
Create without posting, cook, draw, write, or build something never meant for performance.
Pause before posting and ask, Does this add depth or just noise?
But the scale of the problem demands more than individual willpower. Platforms are not neutral utilities; they are profit machines optimized for distortion. If distortion is now the default condition of culture, systemic interventions matter too: regulation of engagement-driven models, public-interest alternatives to corporate platforms, even cooperative or civic forms of ownership. Changing what we celebrate also means changing what we allow.
We cannot unplug from technology. But we can decide what kind of editorial systems we accept, and what we demand of them. The natural rhythm of history may not save us this time. Reintegration must be chosen, deliberately, collectively, and against the grain of the feed.
If we do not reclaim the rhythm, we will not just lose attention, we will lose the very pattern that made coherence possible. And with it, the possibility of culture itself, a culture without rhythm, unable to remember itself, condemned to live only in fragments.
Reference
Dr. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Link to book
Dr. Iain McGilchrist, Psychiatrist Explains The Difference Between Right and Left Brain
YouTube
This essay is a continuation of my reflections on McGilchrist’s framework. Where The Long Oscillation: From Plow to Pixel explored the historical rhythm of reduction and reintegration, this piece turns to how AI-driven social media algorithms distort culture into a synthetic cycle, an emergent property of the engagement metric, but one still rooted in human design and responsibility.