An algorithm

There is so much in our lives that was due to opinions other than our own.
We are an amalgam of the pressures which formed us as we grew up. These pressures themselves were part of the attitudes that people held during ones adolescence and youth when most of the character traits are formed. We owe who we are to these pressures and the pressures reflect attitudes that are ever forming and reforming from year to year.
Attitudes are the consolidation of what is deemed acceptable but is often conflated with what people are told by the forth estate (the press/media) to think. We have become more afflicted by what others wish us to think than at any time in our history. The media have grown out of all recognition and have consolidated ownership of the papers and media empires such that we seem to get much of what we hear and see from the same script. The independent argument that evaluated a different position has to be looked for from overseas. The era when you could attend meetings on street corners and find intelligent but diverse opinions from a multitude of news-papers, each with an editorship/ownership ploughing their own definitive furrow is long gone.

Globalisation has catapulted the global reach of a relatively small number of companies into the stratosphere and like CCTV, they monitor our every move through the Internet. The crazy situation of a  financially secure person not being able to secure loan finance because they haven't had the need to borrow money and therefore don't have a financial profile on the mainframe is ludicrous !
The fact that industry and commerce rely on third party financial information consolidators like Experian to grade an individual but who, (Experian) themselves glean their 'unaudited information from the data base of Banks, Building Societies, Insurance Companies, and the Public Sector where the information is so huge that the incidence of inaccurate information is high and can be potentially harmful to the individual.
The reliance on the Internet and a company data base to present an alternative to a face to face meeting and a handshake has taken humanity out of the equation, we are but so many bits and bytes in an an algorithm.