Until a decade or two ago, people who exposed us to new tastes had significant cultural status. Yoav Kutner had a tremendous influence on an entire generation of music lovers, and film critics were demigods: their taste, their preferences, their recommendations determined the fate of films, elevated or destroyed the careers of directors and actors. But gradually these people made way for something else: ranking algorithms, recommendation algorithms. These algorithms, which pulsate at the heart of services like Facebook, Amazon, Spotify or Netflix, influence the content, products, songs and films that billions of people are exposed to. So what happened from the moment we replaced the recommender? What happened from the moment these algorithms, which I call the bland algorithms that navigate us, all of us, to certain content, took over culture? The answer to this is strange, funny but mainly disturbing

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