It took a few hours of scrolling before Clara understood why NeoncortexT was causing a small voice of anxiety to rise in the background of her mind.
The garbage wasn't there. The ads for products she never wanted, the "hot takes" from vile people trying to grow rich from a platform built on hate, the topics that she didn't hate but also had no interest in. She hadn't encountered anything close to something she could be consciously certain she didn't want to see. It was too good to be true. It had to be a lie.
It took a few minutes, but through the lens of an alternate account with specific changes to the profile Clara was able to find that the landfill of the internet did extend to this platform as well. NeoncortexT presented a timeline that assumed that the user was the kind of person who would vote to repeal every human right they could, and it somehow managed to hit through her desensitization towards that bleak side of humanity. So she put the phone down, focused on some stress relief techniques for a few hours, then picked up the phone to switch back to her main account.
But the presented timeline wasn't the corrosive mess she saw earlier. Now it was back to the uncomfortably pleasant feed that her main account was supposed to show her. How did it adapt so quickly, how did the algorithm know it was her?
It bothered her enough to spend a few minutes of each subsequent day performing "research" in the form of browsing other platforms for discussions on how NeoncortexT worked. Apparently this was the first social media platform to use that new processor tech that exchanged microcircuits for a vat of modified algae. Official statements talked about how it could emulate organic thought well enough to give its users the content they actually wanted to see. The actual workings were proprietary, so the closest she got to details on its actual workings were the varied and implausible theories that formed a forest thick enough to hide whatever the singular tree of truth looked like. Clara's friends shared her initial reaction to the new platform, which was already being condensed into "NexT" for shorthand reference, agreeing that it was uncanny to see an app actually know what they wanted.
It didn't take long after that for the unease of using NexT to fade. No matter how implausible it was for the timeline to follow even her most recent thoughts and whims, the accuracy of its algorithm made it that much harder to excise it from her habits. Finally, like most everyone else, she stopped questioning it entirely. It was a part of life, a welcome replacement over its contemporaries. So it was easy to ignore when a whistleblower from NexT claimed the company seeded the algae in the drinking water. The claim was rather far-fetched. An algae that would briefly parasitize a person until it could leave with a rough neurological imprint of its host? That the NexT corporation would fish out these expelled algae at the water treatment plants and add them to the main vat, all so it could wait to synchronize to the account of its former host? Nonsense.
The claims never went anywhere. NexT had enough capital to stall or shut down any investigation into its activities. Clara never made the connection when she was diagnosed with a brain abscess a decade after she had started using the platform. Corporate-acceptable collateral harm from algae mutations wasn't even a possibility to be considered. She died three years later, spared the sight of watching the rest of humanity succumb to the same fate through the remainder of the century.
