This presentation examines the connection between the utopian promise of personalization in digital media and the contemporary political culture of populism, as exemplified by the current administration of the United States. It argues that both personalization technologies—now pervasive across media environments, from social platforms to AI systems—and populist ideology are grounded in a shared promise. Specifically, they converge in their responses to two key questions: an epistemological one (“What is the true will of the people?”) and a methodological one (“How can that will be accessed?”). Both frameworks posit that modern, reflexive subjectivity obscures an authentic popular will. In response, they propose alternative mechanisms—algorithmic extraction in the case of personalization, and direct political appeal in the case of populism—to recover and enact this will. In doing so, they reconfigure the relationship between knowledge, subjectivity, and collective agency in contemporary culture.