I am, as you know, oddly fascinated with the Internet and Social Media (see: last year when I decided to binge read a bunch of books on social media). So when a friend shared a long-form article about how internet algorithms were leading to oddly homogenous coffee shops, I knew that I had to read the book this article was based on. 

My summary/understanding of Filterworld

Filterworld is “the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed.” In six chapters, Kyle Chayka looks at how the rise of the algorithm, its impact, and what we could possibly do about it. 

The way I see it, there are two main arguments in this book:

The first, that the algorithms are flattening culture. This is not a new thing, Chayka makes the point that globalisation itself will create a sense of interconnection that results in a growing similarity between people and places, but the speed at which the algorithms work serve to accelerate this flattening. Sometimes it seems good, as Chayka admits that he feels paradoxically at home in a generic hipster coffee shop, but also admits that overtourism and the influence of the algorithm can take something unique about a city and grind it to dust. 

The second, that the algorithms are creating a state of algorithmic anxiety, where our helplessness and inability to customise these algorithms that we interact with every day produces a sense of passivity and numbness. 

Question #1: Is culture for the masses or should it be challenging the masses?

There is a lot I agree with in Filterworld. One description of algorithmic anxiety, for example, had me thinking of what Ted Gioia terms ‘Dopamine Culture’. And his chapter on personal taste and why the algorithms are eroding it had me thinking of why A Simpler Life advocates what it does; so we can free up time and energy to pursue what we’re truly interested in. In a way, it’s pretty obvious that what Chayka is talking about has been resonating with others and has been a topic of conversation for a while.

And yet, I found myself disagreeing with him a lot over the course of the book. I think the first major instance was from this paragraph: 

“a marginalised fashion designer might find a way to game the Instagram algorithm and spark their own popularity without waiting to be noticed by a white editor who might be biased against them. But they are conforming to the tenets of a tech company even more powerful and more blinkered than the editor”

To me, this example reads as though it’s worse to find success via the algorithm rather than through the “conventional” methods of going through a (biased) editor. But is it really? If a marginalised person finds success through self-publishing, all the more power to them, I say. Given the dominance of the Big Four publishers, I wouldn’t necessarily hold up publishers as an industry model that must be protected. 

But then I realised, actually, maybe he is for elitism. Take this next quote about MFA programs:

“The handpicked nature of such programs, and the insular, handshake nature of the publishing industry, maintain the ability to promote a singular or challenging artist – an act of tastemaking – though they are by nature somewhat elitist”

The question remains: why is this a good thing? Given that Chayka conceives of taste as a moral thing (he says: that “ Taste’s moral capacity, the idea that it generally leads an individual towards a better society as well as better culture, is being lost.”), why would we want to be pushing forth a culture that is elitist and exclusivist? How is that the better preposition? 

But I started to get it after starting Chayka’s earlier work, The Longing for Less. Chayka is very much an Art person in a way that I am not. He speaks fondly of challenging pieces of art – a wall of plain dirt, for instance, that made me realise that I perhaps don’t grasp things the way he does. But understanding more of his worldview didn’t really soothe my sense of unease, because I still can’t tell what counts as art and what counts as emptiness. In Filterworld, an album that is apparently a modern classic but which sounds “more a wash of synthesized sound, and the lyrics were vague to the point of inscrutability” is appraised favourably (specifically that “the album’s abstraction was the point, its elusiveness a portrait of modern alienation and the need to keep living despite it.”) while another person’s tiktok videos, which are described as “early atmospheric clips and speech-less cooking feats impart a mood without concrete meaning, which is left up to the consumer’s interpretation.” is immediately followed with the appraisal “They can mean, or not mean, anything.” 

Both sound equally inscrutable and/or atmospheric, why is one accorded more meaning than the other? I wonder if it’s because one has been deemed as artistic by a collection of critics and the other is just a series of videos on tiktok. 

This sense of incongruity gets even stronger after I read the transcript of the interview Chayka did with The Verge. The interview actually feels more nuanced than the book, where I think Chayka’s position that taste is a moralising force in culture (see quote above) means that he falls on the side of the human gatekeepers, elitist as they may be, because culture should somehow be challenging and not catered towards the masses. 

Question #2: Did the Internet create a new form of culture or did it reveal our latent preferences? 

One of the things I was looking forward to in the book was a discussion of how Filterworld impacts the material world, but I found that to be a bit lacking. Yes, we heard about coffee shops, but there is one question that isn’t explored: why are we drawn to certain types of content? Is it really only the power of the filters, or are there social, political, and economic factors that lead us to crave the same things? China’s “revenge bedtime procrastination” has been written quite widely about; I imagine that’s one example of how pressures from non-algorithmic sources are affecting what we consume on the internet and why. Is the way society in English-speaking countries structured in such a way that we are driven to seek comfort in certain types of content, a cycle which is exacerbated by the speed at which the algorithms move? 

Reading the book, I get the sense that Chayka is nostalgic for a time where culture was the province of a select group of people. He casually writes that 

“Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture – whether films on DVD, albums on vinyl, or books on a shelf – has shifted from being a necessity to appearing as an indulgent library.” 

Which made me think: for who has it been a necessity? How many people could afford large collections of films or books? Are we talking just about a narrow period of time before the internet but where there was economic prosperity and enough technological development to make culture available to the masses? Which is a pretty narrow time period if you ask me. In my family, that would roughly be my parents’ young adult years to my early childhood days, perhaps a generation. Anytime earlier and symbols of culture (books, music, etc) would have been the province of a small group of rich people, or at the very least, most people would not be able to really build up a large collection) and anything later crosses into Internet culture. 

I keep going back to this point, perhaps too many times, because as I read the book, I kept wondering about whether the Internet has helped put our formation of what is popular as a society into the hands of masses of people… and we have found out that what people like isn’t what critics think we should like. And is it such a bad thing to give the masses what they want? 

Where I Attempt to Piece My Thoughts Together

At the core of it all, I think I disagree with Chayka on how we should appraise art and culture. As Chayka says in his first chapter, algorithms are created by humans and what we are really looking at is not man vs machine, but man vs man. The algorithms/curators that we interact with most value engagement and “likes”, while I think he is looking at whether the content is “challenging” when determining its worth. For me, I don’t think it’s wrong for content (music/art/books) that appeals to a wide audience to be given more prominence; he might think that Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore are “nearly indistinguishable”, but the day before I read that chapter, I also had dinner with friends who were talking about how they felt Taylor Swift’s output was increased during that period because she wasn’t touring and how they still felt those songs held a lot of meaning. Clearly, they (and many other fans) evaluated her lyrics differently. 

Viewed in that light, it’s no wonder that I agree and disagree with so much of this book. I’m definitely not a huge art critic, I know what I like and I don’t pretend what I like is something that is morally good for society at large (I really don’t think of taste in that way). And that’s why I could read his last two chapters on regulating Filterworld and the search for human curators without the influence of the middle section of the book hanging over me. 

Misc. Thoughts on the Filterworld

The chapter on regulating Filterworld was interesting and I do agree that amplification is not a right. We shouldn’t expect our posts to always go viral or that the act of creating content on the internet means that we deserve attention and validation. I also agree that a more decentralised internet is better. But I’m still a bit uncomfortable with the suggestion that social media platforms should be regulating what we see more – I can get behind bringing the algorithm back to chronological or removing suggested posts – but the introduction of neutral content as “veggies” is going to be difficult, something Chayka admits. 

The last chapter on human curators made me wonder why some form of curation is “better” than the other (given he had a chapter on Internet Influencers; surely they also count as curators?). And the fact that his partner considered staging an intervention (however jokingly) when Chayka, out of boredom, read an op-ed from a writer on a topic he wouldn’t normally be interested in while on an algorithm fast made me laugh because Chayka previously complained about tiktok being too personalised – would you prefer to “have to” read new things or do you want personalised content served up to you? But that is also part of the algorithmic anxiety Chayka writes about – I’m sure he would be happier if he could control what the algorithm shows him a bit more (and what it does not show him, perhaps) and perhaps would not feel the need to distance himself from them. 

My Takeaway: Be Intentional About What You Consume Online

The book ends on a strong note, perhaps what Chayka believes can be the algorithm working with humans as he describes how his intentional foray into the background of a song that Youtube recommended to him lead that song to becoming an intricate part of music taste. 

That is perhaps the best takeaway from the book – we should be intentional about what we choose to consume. It’s fine to use social media, it’s fine not to be on it. After all, the algorithms can introduce us to something new, but it’s up to us whether we choose to take the recommendation and have it form part of our taste. 

Reading this while still on my Instagram pause and blogging break made me realise that it is possible to wean ourselves off the algorithm. I have been announcing to people for months that I have not been looking at Instagram, yet that doesn’t seem to have impaired my ability to talk to my friends and catch up with them; I just have to be intentional about it. 

The algorithms can be ignored, Filterworld is optional (most of us aren’t trying to make a living on the Internet anyway) and it’s a good thing to be reminded of this message.