Watching the Apple show yesterday, as Tim Cook and company unveiled the new Apple Watch, you couldn’t help noticing how carefully, ritualistically they landed on the words “personal” and “intimate.” Steven Levy noticed this, and wrote:

Apple is one of the world’s biggest, most profitable and most powerful companies. It is a corporate Leviathan. Yet it has staked its claim on intimacy, tapping the private impulses of hundreds of millions of users.

Two ways in which the Watch gets personal: It’s backed with four sensors that both track your vital signs and can nudge and tap you. (Levy: “When it ‘pokes’ you, it’s not virtual. You feel it.”) And you can take the data from your heartbeat and share it with others — who’ll see an animated heart on their watches, throbbing in time to your actual pulse.

So what is this all about? On one level, Apple is taking a shot at Facebook. It’s saying, forget your faux friending. We are going deeper here. We are going to return the idea of digital relationships to something real. We will touch and connect hearts. (On Tuesday, Apple chose to share its own heart with Twitter by posting live tweets beneath the video stream of its product unveiling, and apparently the technical fallout from that choice led to the disastrous failure of the broadcast.)

Levy recounts the “thrilling and disturbing” implications of this ultrapersonal datasharing. The idea of “biorhythm hacking” is certainly hackle-raising. But it’s also an essentially abstract fear — creepy but not imperilling (yet). My nightmare scenario is different: It lies in the dangers of putting the marketplace on our wrists –use under eye masks when have a bad night – giving merchants a line on our pulses and access to our sensitive skin.

We’ve already witnessed how quickly smartphone notifications moved from convenience to annoyance. The Apple Watch represents the next loop of this cycle: We will invite its alerts onto our arms for their utility, and then hve to deal with a tangle of permissions and restrictions — or soon face tap overload.

It’s easy to imagine useful and convenient applications of the Apple Watch’s private wrist-tap. You’re in line at a restaurant, and instead of having to carry one of those buzzing-flashing hunks of plastic, you just await a gentle watch nudge.

“Your table is ready” sounds pretty great. But then you’re walking past a display in a store — one enhanced by an Apple iBeacon, perhaps — and your watch throbs. Its message: “Buy this toaster! It’s on sale!” Maybe not so great.

When your watch knows that your heartbeat has quickened as you stand in front of a product display (or, for that matter, as you scan a review), it knows that you are what the ad people call a “qualified prospect.” Will the companies involved be able to resist using that data?

Here, history is not on the individual’s side. Every opportunity that large public companies have had to use our data to sell us things has been grabbed. We have mumbled the occasional objection but mostly gone along with these passive transactions, in which bits and pieces of our behavioral data become imperfect but irritating marketing profiles. The Apple Watch could be an alarmingly efficient interface between the corporate and the corporeal, messaging our nervous systems and monetizing our gestures.

We don’t have to let this happen, of course. Sometimes we jealously guard the realm of the “personal” and “intimate”; other times, we casually open it to strangers. We make these choices based on whims and hunches more often than on forethought and reason.

Apple is betting that we will fall so goofily in love with its tiny gleaming bundle of silicon and sapphire that we will overlook these qualms. Based on recent experience, I would not rush to bet against the company. We might be so mesmerized by Apple’s interface magic and gadget smarts that we don’t care that it is invading our bodies. Or we might look down at our own wrists and say, “This has gone too far.”

This month I have watched with fascination the unfolding of what future historians may dub the Great Reverse Engineering of the Facebook algorithm.

It is a noble and important effort! I applaud those who have labored valiantly in its trenches. And I also have to say: It's doomed, hopeless, a dead-end street.

Here's what's been going on: People are playing public games with Facebook in an effort to get a finer-grained understanding of how, exactly, the newsfeed algorithm decides to hoist or bury individual postings.

To wit: Caleb Garling wrote in the Atlantic about his effort to trick Facebook into displaying a post more widely by sprinkling it with ringer language. "Hey everyone, big news!!," he wrote. "I've accepted a position trying to make Facebook believe this is an important post about my life!" Sure enough, the post went into heavy rotation.

Garling's post was content-free — an elaborate self-referential stunt. Next, media scholar Jay Rosen started applying the same technique as a tactic for boosting the visibility of his posts on the future of journalism: "Big news in my family! (You can ignore that. Just messin' with the FB algorithm so maybe you will see this.) I have a new post up at my blog, PressThink." It seemed to work pretty well.

Meanwhile, Wired's Mat Honan conducted an experiment to see what would happen if he "liked" everything he encountered on Facebook for 48 hours. He fell into a rabbit-hole of alienation, and discovered that there is no end to the like — it is an infinite loop.

Elan "Schmutzie" Morgan took precisely the opposite tack, forswearing all use of the "like" button. Morgan found that removing the "like" option from her palette forced her to connect more substantively by writing actual comments on posts if she wanted people to know what she thought:

It seems that the Like function had me trapped in a universe where the environment was dictated by a knee-jerk ad-bot… Now that I am commenting more on Facebook and not clicking Like on anything at all, my feed has relaxed and become more conversational. It’s like all the shouty attention-getters were ushered out of the room as soon as I stopped incidentally asking for those kinds of updates by using the Like function.

One inspiration for all these experiments is the long-term success that outfits like Buzzfeed and Upworthy have found in plumbing the mechanics of virality. Another, I'm guessing, was an event at Harvard's Berkman Center last month, at which scholars talked about the results of a "collaborative audit" of the Facebook newsfeed algorithm.

Their findings were fascinating, but the single most important result was also the simplest: a majority of the people in the study didn't have a clue that Facebook filtered their newsfeeds at all. That should give the rest of us pause: While we struggle to fathom the nuances of Facebook's post filters, it seems likely that a vast number of users don't even understand that their feeds are shaped to begin with. So there’s one beneficial side-effect of these various experiments in fooling Facebook’s machine: they help make people aware of the machine’s presence.

But the biggest problem with the reverse-engineering project is that we are not studying some natural phenomenon or physical product. The newsfeed algorithm is malleable software that's mutating all the time. The harder we game it, the faster its operators will change it.

An algorithm’s flexibility is one of its great strengths. Facebook’s changes for all sorts of reasons — including the well-intentioned efforts of Facebook developers to improve users' experiences, the competitive demands of the social-media marketplace, and the specific needs of Facebook-the-corporation to satisfy shareholders.

But the algorithm also moves in specific reaction to just the sorts of reverse-engineering projects I've compiled here. Any edge you can build by faking Facebook out isn't going to last long. A decade's worth of SEO-expert experience with Google bears this out. It's a game of Whac-a-mole that's rigged in favor of the platform owners, who have a direct line into the code that the rest of us are just speculating about.

Rosen, like many other journalists, expresses a preference for Twitter's structure, which by default shows you all the updates of every user you've chosen to follow. That makes it more transparent and gives users more direct control over their informational diet. There’s less guesswork involved, and that gives it far more value for sharing news.

But you can't count on it to stay that way. Twitter looks likely to evolve in Facebook's direction — it has shareholders to satisfy, too.

In any case, the longer we play this cat-and-mouse game with the social network operators, the clearer we can see that we are the mice. The experiments we perform from the insides of our Facebook compartments will grow increasingly desperate — like the ruckuses prisoners create as they try to capture or divert the attention of their jailer. But they'll never give us answers we can rely on.

All the reverse engineering in the world won't solve our deeper problem as users and builders of digital networks. The more we depend on such networks for our information, our social connections, our government and our entertainment, the more vital it becomes for their workings to be transparent, fair, and organized for the public good — and the less willing we should be to subject ourselves to the vagaries and whims of fickle companies. (This week, for instance, Twitter — which has touted its free-speech credentials — decided to censor controversial images of a reporter’s beheading. The images are loathsome; but do we really want Twitter-the-company to make these calls for us?)

Services like Facebook and Google don’t share the details of their algorithms because that code is their “secret sauce.” We’ve all heard that cliche. Secret sauce can be tasty. But if it's a big part of your diet, sooner or later, you're going to need to want to get a full breakdown of the ingredients.

Once upon a time, "retweeting" was something you did by copying the full text of someone else's Tweet and adding "RT @username:" to it. If there was space, you could add your own comment in front.

Then Twitter incorporated retweeting into its software — you just pressed a button to share someone else's message with everyone who follows you. Retweets became a lot easier; and overnight, the old-school technique became known as a "manual" retweet. For a while, old-school users (like me) stuck with it, either out of habit, or as a badge of ur-Twitter cool, or because we actually relished the opportunity to add our two cents. Meanwhile, more modern social-media mavens began complaining that it was a bad practice — it messed up their analytics. Some indignantly told us that manual retweets were actually evil self-promotion, because they go out under your own name rather than that of the author of the original tweet.

Today, those of us who still use it occasionally are like drivers who still like a shift and a clutch. Don't we know the technology has moved on?

Now Twitter is tinkering again! The latest change is that the "favorite" — a tool most users rely on either to bookmark links they want to return to or to send a little head-nod of acknowledgment out to the tweet's creator — is being put to use in a new way. Twitter is experimenting with showing you tweets from users you do not follow if those tweets are favorited by lots of other users (presumably, a lot of other users who you follow).

Like most of Twitter's steady evolution since its debut in 2006, this change pushes the service away from early-adopter enthusiasts and toward a bigger crowd. Twitter already has hundreds of millions of accounts and probably tens of millions of actual real people using it. But that's not enough to support Wall Street's expectations; post-IPO Twitter has billions in its eyes.

Quartz's Dan Frommer thinks that's all OK: "Twitter needs to keep growing," he writes, and "if additions like these…could make Twitter useful to billions of potential users, it will be worth rewriting Twitter’s basic rules."

Over at The Next Web, Jon Russell is less enthusiastic, calling the changes "confusing and seemingly unnecessary." When will Twitter no longer be Twitter?, asks Robinson Meyer in the Atlantic.

Russell argues that, even though you could always look up someone's list of Twitter faves, "favoriting is inherently a private action" — you were saving something for yourself or winking at some specific other person, not broadcasting.

Guess what? Twitter doesn't care. It's doing the same thing that Web platform-builders have been doing since the early days of Web 2.0, when Flickr and Delicious set "public" as the default for bookmarks and photo posts. They did so because there was so much interesting stuff you could surface that way.

Facebook moved that whole dynamic in a different direction by figuring out that if you trained people to share the details of their lives, and then kept changing the rules in ways that made those details more and more public, you could mine a network of billions of people for billions of dollars.

Back in 2007 Jason Kottke observed that what many Web companies do is "take something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent." A decade ago, this technique seemed to be a method of expanding creative horizons, broadening the possibilities of online sharing, and enabling exciting new data mashups. Then we began to see its darker side, as financial incentives drove services to get aggressive about flipping the switch from "private" to "public."

Twitter may find that its "favorites" experiment works well. Maybe it "increases engagement" or improves the experience for casual users. It is also reminding us, as Facebook's mood experiment did, who is in charge, and what their motivations are. They control the vertical; they control the horizontal.

“I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the Web,” Ethan Zuckerman declared last week, in a remarkable essay posted at the Atlantic.

The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see.

Regular readers here know that I largely agree with this view. It’s possible to imagine a different world in which advertising actually serves us as individuals: This is the work Doc Searls has been doing in defining and building VRM (“Vendor Relationship Management,” which turns the corporate world’s “Customer Relationship Management” on its head). it is also possible to point to ads that are respectful and effective (I admire the way The Deck works, for instance).

But mostly, advertising online today is a plague. I don’t believe advertising itself is inherently evil — so Zuckerman’s “original sin” formulation might ring the wrong bells. But it warps the good things about the Web. It stands between us as we encounter one another online. It creates incentives for publishers to make things less usable and less useful, and to blur distinctions that should be crystal clear (as with the new “native advertising”/advertorial fad). So far, it has kept us from fulfilling the potential of the medium we are building.

I argue that nearly every characteristic of the digital medium that critics abhor — its pileup of distractions, its invasions of privacy, its corrosions of trust — turns out not to be an inherent characteristic of the technology at all. These modern media maladies are byproducts of bad business models.

In a retort to Zuckerman, Jeff Jarvis says, “it’s not advertising itself that’s the problem, it’s that we’re doing advertising online wrong.” Maybe so. But this sounds a little like the insistence by political purists (old-school leftists, or present-day libertarians) that their particular system is The Answer, despite repeated failures to implement it in the real world, because “nobody’s done it right yet.”

I’ve been doing this Web thing for 20 years now, and in all that time, no one has solved the basic problems with online advertising that existed from the start. If someone does, I will cheer along with everyone else. But the calls to “give it time” because “we’re just at the beginning” have started to sound hollow. In the meantime, I will explore other options, and I encourage you too, as well.

If you keep noticing that every implementation of an idea sucks, it might be that you just haven’t found the right one. But it could be that the idea itself is simply wrong.