Welcome to Eff the Algorithm.
I’m Kate Argent, and I write about surveillance capitalism, AI, and the illusion of choice online. My goal isn’t to scare you. It’s to help you see it and take your power back.
I grew up in Silicon Valley. My father was an early VP at Intel and later at Sun Microsystems, so tech has always been part of my life. I fell in love with personal computers in the 1980s, built a data-entry business in college, and created my own knowledge base long before anyone called them wikis.
I designed game content for AOL and ran a BBS during law school. I was among the first bloggers on the internet in the early 2000s and have continued to publish content online ever since.
But the internet has changed from being a place that brought us together to being a place that’s now breaking us. So now I’m taking a stand.
What you’ll find here
On this Substack, I write about the systems behind the screens we all use: how Big Tech rewired the internet to harvest our attention, reshape our behavior, and train AI on the backs of our unpaid labor.
This isn’t just about data. It’s about power imbalances, our autonomy, and the future of human work and creativity.
Who this is for
Eff the Algorithm is for anyone who feels the internet has stopped working for us and started working on us. If you’ve ever sensed that your feed is shaping you more than you’re shaping it, you’re in the right place.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe for essays that dig into how it all works: how big tech uses dark patterns, AI and algorithms against us… and what we can do about it.
Free subscribers get the latest posts in their email. Although I’m grateful to all of my subscribers, paid subscribers make work like this possible and get access to the full conversation and publication archives.
Be the first to know
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Break the system
Want to be part of a community of people who share your concern about where Big Tech is leading us and what it’s doing to our lives?
System Breakers are the founding members who make my work possible. Their support funds the research behind my forthcoming book and helps me keep digging instead of getting buried by the platforms.
As a thank you, every System Breaker will be acknowledged in the book. Without them, this work would be slower, harder, and far more lonely.
