The Strangers don't force their rewrites—they broadcast them through the city's infrastructure, and the citizens accept.
The algorithmic feed doesn't work that way, and that's what makes it so different from the film's premise.
Dark City understood that identity is manufactured by environment. It completely missed that we're manufacturing it willingly — paying for the tools, optimizing our own surrender.
The film's visual language—those massive gears and mechanical city blocks that physically reshape—is actually more honest than the abstract code that actually does this work now. Murdoch's escape works because he can physically flee and mentally resist, but algorithmic capture doesn't require escape routes because you've already internalized the cage as identity. The film's climactic assertion that 'it's not where you are, it's who you are' becomes the trap it didn't anticipate — we've made that choice structural.
Dark City wanted external villains, but the real system doesn't need them because it runs on your participation, your optimization, your constant self-rewriting against metrics you helped normalize.
Watch the 1:03:40 scene where Murdoch sees the city reconfigure in real-time, then read Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' chapter on 'prediction products'—specifically the section on how users become the raw material they're also consuming.
Alex Proyas's director's commentary on the theatrical cut vs. the 2004 restoration reveals he explicitly added exposition about The Strangers' motivations because test audiences found them too alien—a choice that actually neutered the film's own insight about how we accept incomprehensible systems as long as they feel familiar.