Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

Koolhaas’s generic city is the place that all urban residents inhabit, with gentrified AirSpace buildings and coffee shops; coworking spaces serving tech workers; and the same set of restaurants and bars. It is the familiar place we arrive at, stepping off a plane, rolling through an airport, and taking a car to a loft-style hotel, where we check in using our phone. Koolhaas poses the international flattening of identity as something that can be positive, or at least include its own advantages: “The stronger identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.” Take Paris, for example: “Paris can only become more Parisian—it is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature.”