Haruki Murakami wrote this line into Norwegian Wood in 1987, in the voice of a university student in 1960s Tokyo. The student is a little pleased with himself about the observation, the way twenty-year-olds can be, and Murakami is gently ironic about that too. The sentence has survived the irony because it is still right.

The mechanism is simple. Inputs shape outputs. If everyone sources thought from the same five podcasts, the same trending subreddits, the same Twitter threads that went viral last Tuesday, the thinking converges. The diversity of opinion is a surface effect on a narrow substrate. You can hold a strong, contrarian, well-argued position and still be part of the same monoculture as the person arguing the opposite, if you both ate from the same trough.

The cat peeking from under the bed at exactly what it wants to peek at, ignoring everything the household is putting on television, is practicing editorial selection. It watches the dust mote. It watches the wall outlet. It refuses, without apology, to care about the latest episode. There is a dignity in that refusal. Pay attention to what you choose to pay attention to. The feed is not neutral, and neither, as Murakami's narrator noticed, is the person who only drinks from it.