What the money wants to show us

When a family in Bulaq had two or three channels, the evening serial was gentle, familiar and cheap to make. Its job was simple: keep the family from turning the dial. Nothing in it needed to shock anyone, because there was nowhere much else to go.

Now the same family has hundreds of things to watch, most of them chasing paying viewers who could leave at any moment. So the shows are darker, faster, more expensive, built to hook you in the first minute and keep you past midnight.

It is easy to say people's taste changed. Mostly it did not. What changed was how the shows get paid for, and the shows followed the money.

The same is true of the news on a phone, which is now written to be clicked and shared rather than read. It is true of the endless advice on health and diets, produced by the yard because it fills space between adverts. The world did not become more alarming overnight. The reporting of it found that alarm pays.

Products work this way too. A pack on a shelf is the shape it is because of how it is sold, stocked and paid for, not only because of what the shopper wanted.

But the change that matters most on that street in Bulaq is not on the screen.

The plastic chairs outside the building used to fill up after sunset. People talked about the price of things, the neighbour's son, the match. Nobody owned that conversation and nobody earned from it.

That conversation still happens, on phones, in the same flats. But it now takes place inside a business that is paid by how long it holds attention. The model decides what rises to the top and what is shown next.

We did not stop wanting community. We swapped it, without quite noticing, for a company's version of it.