The Autoplay Society: Algorithms, Agency, and the End of Choice

Autoplay was never meant to be philosophy. It was a button. A small, innocuous piece of UX meant to keep you watching one more episode of Friends before you lost the remote. But like so many digital “features,” it metastasized. What started as a nudge became a default. What became a default hardened into an ideology. Today, autoplay is less a button than a cultural operating system: we no longer choose what’s next, we accept it. And we convince ourselves this passivity is efficiency.