Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

The poet Eileen Myles said that it is impossible to separate the creative process from digital technology: “You may not use social media, but it’s using you. You’re writing in tweets, like it or not.” The playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar described our “click-bait consciousness,” trained to interact with anything in the feed designed to be triggering. “The worship of algorithms is mutilating creative industries,” the television writer Cord Jefferson complained. “Culture is no longer made. It is simply curated from existing culture, refined, and regurgitated back at us. The algorithms cut off the possibility of new discovery,” wrote Paul Skallas, an anti-technology lifestyle influencer, bemoaning the 2010s’ plague of movie sequels and endless continuations of Marvel superhero franchises. Skallas labeled this lack of innovation “stuck culture.” “Algorithms are limiting the future to the past,” the futurist Jarod Lanier said. As the late British philosopher Mark Fisher wrote, “The twenty-first century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future.”