The feed begins with a golden retriever posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. It belongs to Alex, a fourteen-year-old in Los Angeles, and it plays on a long screen in a darkened room at Fotografiska Berlin, part of Lauren Greenfield's exhibition Social Studies.

An hour in, a screen-time warning appears. Alex swipes it away. At ninety minutes, videos about male attractiveness have started sliding toward fantasies of sexual violence. Then come promises of extreme physical transformation. By the five-and-a-half-hour mark, the feed is celebrating Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014.

No one chose this for Alex. Not his parents, not a teacher, not really Alex himself. It was chosen for him, one swipe at a time, by a system with no name on its door.

Greenfield spent 150 days following thirty Los Angeles teenagers and gathered more than 2,000 hours of their screen recordings. Reviewing the show for Sleek, Lucie Rittau, who belongs to Gen Z herself, writes that "we like to say that you are what you consume." In Alex's room, she found, the phrase stopped being a figure of speech.

Here is the uncomfortable part: Alex's feed was edited. Something decided the dog came first and the murderer came last. Something judged what would hold a boy's attention in the fourth hour. We spent a century building rules for editors: bylines, corrections, letters pages, libel law. The most influential editor of this generation has none of them.

It would be easy to stop there, and wrong. Greenfield's exhibition doesn't. It leaves room for the friendships, support and belonging that young people find online, and it lets them speak instead of lecturing them. Rittau says it made her feel seen rather than reduced to her screen time. The same machine that led Alex downward also helps a lonely kid in a small town find people like her.

So the trouble is not that the feed shows us things. It is that it decides, privately, what we never see. In Vanzago, a town outside Milan, Pietro Valisi and his father run a library of more than 80,000 fashion publications, thousands of which exist nowhere online. Valisi's point, made to 10 Magazine, is simple: "The web does not show you everything." The internet is not a record of the world. It is a record of what someone uploaded, sorted by what a system calculated we would keep watching.

This month, that calculation reached a ballot box. In Brazil, a judge on the top electoral court ordered Meta to give President Lula and his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, equal treatment, after Lula's campaign complained that its posts were being held back, the Associated Press reports. Meta denies any bias and blames technical glitches. Whatever the facts turn out to be, the case shows where the argument is heading: reach, the invisible number behind every post, is becoming a question of law.

Greenfield asked the teenagers what they wanted. Many, she has said, wished for something ordinary: time with their friends, without their phones. It is a modest request. It is also an indictment, because nobody should have to wish for an afternoon of talking.

Courts move slowly, and Alex's feed moved in a single afternoon. Whatever rules arrive will arrive late for the fourteen-year-olds scrolling now. The least we can do is stop calling what happens on their screens a window on the world. It is an edition, assembled for one reader, by an editor nobody hired.