On September 23, at its Made on YouTube event, the platform unveiled a feature that sounds like liberation: custom feeds. You type what you want to watch in plain language (“long documentaries to unwind at night,” “help me discover DIY creators”) and Gemini builds you your own tab on the home page that updates itself. According to TechCrunch and The Next Web, it will roll out first to U.S. users on web, mobile and TV.
The obvious reading is that users are finally taking the wheel from the algorithm. The PRAXMA reading is different: nobody is handing you back control; they're offering you the guard's uniform. The cage used to be designed by a machine. Now you design it yourself, in your own words, and you call it freedom on top of that.
The habit that passes itself off as a choice
The thesis is simple and cruel: the vices that do the most damage aren't the ones we hide. They're the ones we accept as "controlled spending." The guy who drinks "only on weekends," the one who bets "only what's left over," the one who spends three hours on his phone "because he earned it." A vice doesn't need to defeat your willpower. It's enough that you manage it.
A made-to-measure feed is exactly that: consumption on a budget. It's no longer the algorithm dragging you along; you're the one signing off on every tab. And what we sign, we rarely question. It's the same mechanism that turns a bet into an "investment": the vice learned to speak the language of reason. There, it dressed up as probabilities. Here, it dresses up as curation.
What you say you want vs. what you actually do
There's a huge gap between what you say you want to watch and what you actually watch. We'd all type “documentaries, languages, personal finance.” Few of us would type “strangers fighting, other people's drama and fourteen-second clips at 2 a.m.” But that's what behavior reveals when nobody's looking.
The feature doesn't close that gap; it hides it. It gives you a respectable display case for your intentions while the habit underneath stays intact. It's the old reflex of assuming you're already right: the mind builds a version of itself where error doesn't exist. "I'm not distracted. I chose my feed."
Three questions before you build your perfect tab
- What will you stop doing in order to watch it? All content is paid for in hours. If you don't know where they're coming from, they're coming out of whatever you were building.
- Does your prompt describe who you are, or who you'd like to look like? If it's the second one, you're not curating information. You're decorating an image.
- Could you go a week without that tab? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, it isn't a tool. It's a dose with a fancy name.
The echo you program yourself
There's a second, less visible cost. When you write the filter, only what you've already approved gets in. A feed built from your tastes is, by definition, a feed that never contradicts you. And a man who's never contradicted goes soft. It's bad enough to measure truth by how many repeat it. Here the problem is worse: the consensus is now a consensus of one. You, repeating yourself on a loop, with good lighting.
The old algorithm at least had the decency to be an outside enemy. You could blame it. The new one leaves you no alibi. If your attention rots, the recipe has your signature on it.
What sovereignty would actually look like
Sovereignty isn't choosing the flavor of your distraction. It's deciding when you don't need it. This isn't about smashing your phone or preaching a digital purity nobody practices. It's about something colder:
- Treat entertainment as an expense, not a right. With a budget, a schedule and an audit.
- Measure behavior, not intention. Your screen time doesn't lie; your prompt can.
- Go looking for what makes you uncomfortable: an author who doesn't think like you, a fact that dismantles your position.
When pleasure turns into a managed routine, the next stage isn't euphoria. It's flatness: everything entertains and nothing satisfies. That's what happens when pleasure gets consumed without hunger. And once you finally see that distraction was a comfortable way to avoid facing what you feared, you realize fear was running things from the back seat: the point isn't to run away better. It's to stop running.
Choosing your cage doesn't make you free. It makes you responsible for the lock.
YouTube isn't doing anything illegitimate. It's selling what people ask for: the feeling of control. The problem was never the tool. The problem is believing a good tool can stand in for character.
If this analysis made you uncomfortable, there's a longer exploration of how "controlled" vices keep taking ground Spanish only without you noticing. We also talk it through on the podcast.
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