But I don’t want to blame these patterns on technology alone. People can choose to be ruled by algorithmic thinking without running a literal program to figure out what’s popular. And the fact that we have a specific form of technology that makes it easier to squash risk and creativity is hard to separate from wider trends toward sclerosis, repetition, what I spent an entire book calling decadence.

Consider a couple of recent controversies in medicine and medical research, fields distant from Miranda Priestly’s world. First, there was the revelation that billions of dollars and years of Alzheimer’s research were based on papers that appear to include significant fabrications. If it pans out, this is a remarkable example of the medical establishment marching into an incredibly expensive blind alley, without skeptics getting a full hearing for about a decade and a half.

Second, there’s the continuing discussion, pegged to a pair of studies that came out this spring and summer, about how and whether the most commonly prescribed antidepressants actually work. Some of the new research has been overread by psychiatry’s critics; the assumptions that depression has important chemical components and that antidepressants help people, especially people with severe depression, have not suddenly been overturned. But both papers add to the strong suspicion that these drugs are oversold and overprescribed — that we’ve made them a default response to late-modern misery based more on hopeful groupthink than on certain evidence.