Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

That the show celebrated being an influencer made a kind of sense; in 2022, a United States survey found that 54 percent of the respondents, ages thirteen to thirty-eight, would become influencers if given the opportunity. Another survey of three thousand children in 2019 found that 30 percent of them would choose to be a YouTuber—another kind of influencer—over other careers like professional athlete, musician, and astronaut. In the 2010s, the figure of the influencer was both invented and metastasized, becoming perhaps the single dominant protagonist of the cultural landscape. After all, if the bulk of culture now takes place on social media, what more powerful role could there be than controlling the flow of attention and being able to direct an audience in particular ways? (Influencers are the cowboys of algorithms.)