The character of Don Quixote reads to me as the original content creator. He’s very consciously creating content for the “algorithm” of his time (chivalric literature). I would be surprised if others have not already made the comparison.

A key moment for me was when Sancho finds out that Quixote's much-ballyhooed “Dulcinea Del Toboso” is actually a woman he knows from the village. He points out that she can't read and spends her time threshing in the barn. Don Quixote responds:

It's true that not all poets who praise ladies under fictitious names actually have these women as loves. Do you think that the Amaryllises, the Phyllises, the Sylvias, the Dianas, the Galateas, the Alidas and others that fill books, ballads, barbershops and theatres were really women of flesh and blood and really belonged to those who praise and praised them? No, certainly not, for most of them are fictional, and serve only to give a subject for their poems, and so that they themselves might be taken for lovers, and worthy to be so. So, it's enough for me to think and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and chaste; her lineage matters little since no one is going to investigate her background to give her an honorary degree - the only thing that matters is that I believe she's the greatest princess in the world. …To sum up, I make myself believe that everything I say about her is the absolute truth…

This kind of self-awareness seems to complicate Quixote’s condition above simple madness: it’s a case of a terminally online guy going all-in on what the algorithm wants, which presents as madness (then as now!). At every turn, whenever Sancho points out the obvious disconnect between Quixote’s preferred narrative and plain reality, his response is, of course it's a bit — that's the point. Committing fully to all this keyfabe is how you win the game of chivalric literature.

Quixote fixates on how cool the edited content will be, while Sancho can only think about how cringe an influencer looks while they’re filming in public. The glory of the eventual online result is lost on him.

I would liked to have read The Chivalric Turn before reading this book. From Venkat Rao’s notes:

The basic thesis is that there was a “Chivalric turn” in Central and Western Europe around 1200 that is widely misunderstood to be an intrinsically aristocratic phenomenon, but was actually an aristocratic capture and enclosure of a more democratic society-wide phenomenon.

With this summary rolling around in my head, I had some idea that Don Quixote could be read as a pretty direct response (“backlash”) to the “society-wide phenomenon” of chivalry and chivalric literature. Venkat points out, though, that the Arthur tales had been stable for ≈150 years at this point, so it would be like saying a piece written today could be considered backlash against horse-riding culture or Charles Dickens.