Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-bubbles by David Sumpter – review

We are too smart to be manipulated by algorithms, argues a mathematican. But the maths misses the crisis we are facing

"Space is big," wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

Adams's assertion comes repeatedly to mind when reading David Sumpter's Outnumbered, which attempts to reckon with the sheer scale of the systems that manage much of our digital lives. It's easy, when faced with the numbers at hand, to succumb to a kind of vertigo: Facebook has two billion users, who make tens of millions of posts every hour. From this data, along with millions more photos, likes and relationships, Facebook builds models of all of us that extend in hundreds of dimensions - the puny human mind, at best, is capable of visualising four.