I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my AirPods. Then I choose some music, set up the coffee maker, and sit and listen while the coffee brews.

It’s in this liminal state that my encounter with the algorithm begins. Groggily, I’ll scroll through some dad content on Reddit, or watch photography videos on YouTube, or check Apple News. From the kitchen island, my laptop beckons me to work, and I want to accept its invitation—but, if I’m not careful, I might watch every available clip of a movie I haven’t seen, or start an episode of “The Rookie,” an ABC police procedural about a middle-aged father who reinvents himself by joining the L.A.P.D. (I discovered the show on TikTok, probably because I’m demographically similar to its protagonist.) In the worst-case scenario, my kids wake up while I’m still scrolling, and I’ve squandered the hour I gave up sleep to secure.

If this sort of morning sounds familiar, it’s because, a couple of decades into the smartphone era, life’s rhythms and the algorithm’s have merged. We listen to podcasts while getting dressed and watch Netflix before bed. In between, there’s Bluesky on the bus, Spotify at the gym, Instagram at lunch, YouTube before dinner, X for toothbrushing, Pinterest for the insomniac hours. It’s a strange way to live. Algorithms are old—around 300 B.C., Euclid invented one for finding the greatest common divisor of two integers. They are, essentially, mathematical procedures for solving problems. We use them to coördinate physical things (like elevators) and bureaucratic things (like medical residencies). Did it make sense to treat unclaimed time as a problem? We’ve solved it algorithmically, and now have none.

A feeling of overstimulation is one consequence of algorithmic life. Another is a certain jumbledness in our ideas. Why do we care about what we care about? Walking into your basement in the dark, you might stumble into a cobweb; one strain of philosophical thought holds that this is how caring works. We become ensnared by the possibilities that happen to present themselves as we live—we get caught in webs of care. You run into your elderly neighbor in the morning and, that night, wonder how he’s doing. Your middle schooler likes Chappell Roan, and soon you do, too. A single encounter with “The Fountainhead” at thirteen might make you a lifelong libertarian. Algorithmic culture taps into the casual randomness with which we apportion our care; it takes advantage of the fact that what we bump into today might obsess us tomorrow. Its webs, meanwhile, are woven by machines that are owned by corporations.

I’ve long felt caught in my personal web, and have struggled to get out. Then, one morning last year, I started chatting with the A.I. system Claude in my predawn kitchen, in an experimental spirit. “I’m finally starting to make progress on the article I’m writing,” I typed on my phone while the coffee brewed.

“Good morning!” the system replied. “That’s wonderful to hear—there’s nothing quite like that feeling when a piece you’ve been working on starts to come together. What’s the article about, and what helped you break through to this progress?”

I didn’t answer. I had no desire, at that hour, or any hour, to let an A.I. act as a writing coach. But, having used my phone, I could now put it down. I sipped my coffee and began marking up an old draft.

I kept chatting with Claude and ChatGPT in the mornings—not about my writing but about subjects that interested me. (Why are tariffs bad? What’s up with crime on the subway? Why is dark matter dark?) Instead of checking Apple News, I started asking Perplexity—an A.I.-based system for searching the web—“What’s going on in the world today?” In response, it reliably conjured a short news summary that was informative and unsolicitous, not unlike the section in The Economist headed “The World in Brief.” Sometimes I asked Perplexity follow-up questions, but more often I wasn’t tempted to read further. I picked up a book. It turned out that A.I. could be boring—a quality in technology that I’d missed.