Tim O'Reilly adopted this phrase from Alvin E. Roth's book, Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design.

We used to think that the free market got to determine who gets what and why, but nowadays algorithms do a lot of deciding instead. Even markets are now mostly designed by somebody, like Google or Facebook, and the political battles are now about having controls over the rules for those markets.

You can read more about this in Tim's new book, WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us .