A culture that thinks like an algorithm also “projects a future that is like the past,” James Bridle explains, because “that which is gathered as data is modelled as the way things are, and then projected forward — with the implicit assumption that things will not radically change or diverge from previous experiences.” In a world reliant on computation to make sense of things, “that which is possible becomes that which is computable.”
Yea, I think on some level pipelines are definitely a thing. We're all constantly becoming, makes sense that media consumption and media consumption choices have some (complex, reciprocal, probably not straight-forward, though still real) relationship to how we do become, who we are after time has passed. I figure we've always already been in some form of tube of becoming, it's just that this complex web of 'becoming-tubes' around us is getting reduced in complexity; the accumulating and stratifying forces of capital is merging these organic becoming-tubes to fewer and fewer pipelines, making them more easily perceivable as amorphous forces/objects influencing our becoming.
In general, I'm very sympathetic to the 'Internet but with less/no algos'-sentiment, but I don't think that's feasible at all anymore. The incredible amount of content produced constantly makes some form of aggregation absolutely necessary or else the site would be unusable and unattractive, you'd drown in bad content nobody wants to watch. And the sheer volume of that content is too much to be handled by humans, it must -to some extend at least- be automated, at least for sites that rely heavily on user generated content, like YT. Twitter is indeed doing something a bit differently, and it very well could be the fact that it relies less heavily on recommendation systems and more on actual human recommendation for feed curation. While Twitter has some sort of 'frontpage feed', it's really not why users make accounts there, I think - it's real people pulling them to the platform by their presence there; not necessarily so much the content itself.
I kinda love that idea, reminds me of that old promise of ten minutes of fame, but I'll have to think about that for a bit. My first intuition is that attention is scarce, and this will probably run in the face of (attention) economic considerations on closer inspection