You may have witnessed feedback in a concert or when your speaker output in a live chat feeds back into your microphone input. A high pitched noise slowly gets louder, then raises exponentially until someone pulls the plug and suddenly a breakdown of signal strength occurs.

You have experienced a bubble.

Being a designer of digital filters, I want to raise awareness of how destructive these bubbles may be to democracy and diversity of opinions - contributing to instability and irrationality.

Stockmarkets, search ranking algos, facebook likes, reddit/mastodon upvoting, opinion polls, “news” in general - all have their respective feedback channels built in.

Feedback is established when past voting results are visible to those voting in the future.

This may seem benign. It is not. It creates a exponential response. It risks getting chaotic and tends toward bifurcations/splitting. The complexity of not one but many such feedback channels will be explored next.