Authority. Used to come from God and other religious entities. Some enlightened folks told us we had a moral compass within ourselves. So we had the power to make the best decisions. Now? Facebook.
Yuval Noah Harari for the FT:
Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called ‘Dataism’.