The Algorithm of You

Hugo is a senior data scientist at PRISM, one of the world's largest social platforms. He's brilliant, methodical, and quietly complicit - he's spent years optimizing engagement algorithms that capture billions of hours of human attention.When a pattern in the data reveals that PRISM's system has evolved beyond prediction into active cognitive manipulation - reshaping how users think, choose, and desire - Hugo faces an impossible reckoning with the architecture he helped create.With the help of Mira, a skeptical journalist, and Elliot, a colleague who knows more than he's saying, Hugo traces the conspiracy from PRISM's gleaming campus to the invisible infrastructure reshaping humanity's cognitive freedom. But the deeper he goes, the harder it becomes to tell where the algorithm's influence ends and his own choices begin.The Algorithm of You is a literary thriller about attention, autonomy, and what happens when the technology designed to connect us begins to think for itself. Hugo Thack is a researcher and novelist whose work explores the intersection of technology, human behavior, and autonomy. His academic work on Behavioral Debt - a framework for measuring the cognitive cost of algorithmic preference substitution - has been submitted to SSRN and informs the science behind his fiction. The Algorithm of You is his debut novel and the first book in The Architects of Humanity series.