Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

Yet the image of perfection entails a degree of emptiness. When taste is too standardized, it is degraded. “Their still-wavering taste, their over-hesitant meticulousness, their lack of experience, their rather blinkered respect for what they believed to be the standards of true good taste, brought them some jarring moments, some humiliations,” Perec wrote.

There are two forces forming our tastes. As I described previously, the first is our independent pursuit of what we individually enjoy, while the second is our awareness of what it appears that most other people like, the dominant mainstream. The two may move in opposite directions, but it’s often easier to follow the latter, particularly when the Internet makes what other people are consuming so immediately public. (If you didn’t post about it, did you really watch a TV show?) Algorithmic feeds further reinforce the presence of that mainstream, against which our personal choices are evaluated. Taste is inescapable; it involves “the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing, or decoration,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his 1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. These choices can be symbolic of a range of things beyond just our aesthetic preferences, such as economic class, political ideology, and social identity. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” Bourdieu wrote. No wonder that we worry about what to like, and sometimes find it simpler to export that responsibility to machines.

I keep being shown it. This is ruining my life.” Not only does the feed try to guess what you like, it may not understand when your preferences move on or evolve. Algorithmic anxiety is fueled in part by the scourge of targeted online advertising, which uses the same kind of algorithms as the feeds. Your engagement is tracked by digital surveillance, and then you are served ads for products that match what you engage with, from brands that pay for your attention. Since ads are the primary way that many digital platforms and online publications make money, they are everywhere, interrupting articles, popping up with autoplay videos. Unlike a television commercial or a print magazine ad, they are personalized, and reiterate subjects you might prefer to ignore—because so many publishers sell their ads through the same software, like Google’s AdSense, the same ads might appear on every website.

Rather than making me desire the credenza more, however, I’ve grown tired of it, suspicious of my own preferences.

“I just want to know that what I like is what I actually like.”

It may be that the algorithmic feed will convince me that I don’t like what I thought I liked, or at least turn my taste against it much faster than otherwise due to its oversaturation, the way a meal seems less appetizing when you eat it too often. Algorithmic taste, in Peter’s case as a consumer, was both boring and alienating. On the creator side, by contrast, ubiquity can be profitable.

Fascism means being forced to conform to the tenets of a single ideological view of the world, one that may utterly discount a particular identity or demographic. It is the mandate of homogeneity. Filterworld can be fascistic, in that the algorithmic feeds tend to create templates of how things are supposed to be, always informed by inherent biases—a bracketing of reality that is then fulfilled by users creating content that fits the mold. That bracketing includes forms of culture as well as identities. It might also be accurate to describe Filterworld as dictatorial or feudal: we all reside online within spaces we have no power over, following capricious rules that we don’t approve.

The Netflix algorithm factors in a user’s viewing history and ratings; the actions of other users with similar preferences; and information about the content itself, like genre, actors, and release dates. It also includes the time of day the user is watching, what device they’re watching on, and how long they tend to watch in that context. Netflix states that specific user demographics like age, ethnicity, and gender are not factored in—those variables might be perceived as adjacent to bias—but such identities can often be implied from other information about a user.

“Algorithms are replacing the fundamentally human—or at least, the less digitally mediated—process of cultural meaning—and decision-making,” he wrote. Pajkovic set out to test Netflix’s impact on personal taste, and to do so designed a set of fake accounts with different archetypal personalities. The

Netflix also algorithmically changes the thumbnail art on all its content to tailor it to the specific user. That trick began in late 2017 under the label of “artwork personalization.” Pajkovic observed it happening to his test accounts.

The hollowed-out meaning of taste in the Filterworld era has something in common with the way engagement is measured by digital platforms: it’s a snap judgment predicated mostly on whether something provokes immediate like or dislike. Taste’s moral capacity, the idea that it generally leads an individual toward a better society as well as better culture, is being lost. Instead, taste amounts to a form of consumerism in which what you buy or watch is the last word on your identity and dictates your future consumption as well.

the Netflix algorithm ends up defining our taste as only one fixed thing, made more rigid by every successive interaction on the platform, moving deeper into a pigeonhole. Even when the recommendations are accurate, they can become limiting. As Pajkovic wrote, “Feedback loops reinforce a user’s pre-existing preferences, diminishing their exposure to a diverse range of cultural offerings and denying art, aesthetics and culture of its confrontational societal role.” That lack of confrontation is concerning. It’s not that great art needs to be inherently offensive; rather, when everything conforms to established expectations, we miss out on culture that is truly progressive and uncomfortable, that might subvert categories rather than fit neatly into them.

The company profits, but the user may suffer, and it degrades the overall cultural ecosystem. As Sandvig wrote: “Over time, if people are offered things that are not aligned with their interests often enough, they can be taught what to want…. They may come to wrongly believe that these are their authentic interests, and it may be difficult to see the world any other way.” The Internet has been increasingly enclosed into a series of bubbles, self-reinforcing spaces in which it becomes harder to find a diverse range of perspectives. This idea is familiar from politics—liberals mainly consume digital content that reflects their beliefs, as do conservatives—but it applies to culture as well. In the matter of personal taste, knowing what you like is difficult, but it’s equally hard to know when you don’t like or don’t want something when it’s being so strenuously presented as “For You.” In Filterworld, it becomes increasingly difficult to trust yourself or know who “you” are in the perceptions of algorithmic recommendations.

In 2011, the writer and Internet activist Eli Pariser published his book The Filter Bubble, describing how algorithmic recommendations and other digital communication routes can silo Internet users into encountering only ideologies that match their own. The concept of filter bubbles has been debated over the decade since then, particularly in the context of political news media. Some evaluations, like Axel Bruns’s 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, have concluded that their effects are limited. Other scientific studies, like a 2016 investigation of filter bubbles in Public Opinion Quarterly, found that there is a degree of “ideological segregation,” particularly when it comes to opinion-driven content.

The user experience of today’s platforms tends to be overwhelmingly passive. You’re not supposed to look under the hood too much, just consume what’s already in front of you—theoretically, the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself, though that’s patently untrue.

We often build our senses of personal taste by saving pieces of culture: slowly building a collection of what matters to us, a monument to our preferences, like a bird constructing a nest.

But the more automated an algorithmic feed is, the more passive it makes us as consumers, and the less need we feel to build a collection, to preserve what matters to us. We give up the responsibility of collecting.

The way we interact with something, and where we store it, also change the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update forcibly reminded me.

All these changes make me crave the opposite: a fixed, stable, reliable way of accessing whatever culture you want. Which is exactly what earlier forms of collecting and consuming culture once offered. We took that stability for granted. In 1931, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called “Unpacking My Library,” describing our relationship with physical cultural objects.

Accumulating books was his way of interacting with the world, of building a worldview that he furthered in his critical writing.

Benjamin’s library was a personal monument, the same kind that we all construct of things we like or identify with, building our sense of taste. Its importance lay in its permanence—collections are made up of things that we own, that don’t go away unless we decide they should. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Benjamin wrote. “Not that they have come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” In other words, we often discover, and even rediscover, ourselves in what we keep around us. But that codependence or co-evolution of collection and person wouldn’t happen if the order of Benjamin’s shelves and the catalog of his books kept changing every few months. That’s what Spotify’s interface updates and algorithmic changes felt like to me: a total disruption of the pieces of art and culture that shaped me.

this lack of agency is undermining our connections to the culture that we love. We don’t often think about bookshelves on their own, separate from what they contain, but they are great devices. They display books or albums, and you can choose from among the displayed options in a relatively neutral way. The collector is the only one who decides how to arrange their possessions, ordering books by author, title, theme, or even color of the cover—and they stay in the same places they’re put. That’s not true of our digital cultural interfaces, which follow the whims and priorities of the technology companies that own them.

Benjamin wrote that collectors have a “feeling of responsibility” to their collections. But it’s very difficult to feel such ownership for what we collect on the Internet; we can’t be stewards of the culture we appreciate in the same way as Benjamin. We don’t actually own it and can’t guarantee accessing it in the same way each time.

This instability only intensifies the cultural flattening going on, since users can’t store or revisit their past experiences within their original context. All that exists is a relentlessly changing digital present tense.

The disappearance or overhauling of a particular app throws the content gathered there to the wind. The Internet is not like a bunch of eight-track tapes that can be played again with the proper technology and experienced in full once more. Building a collection online more closely resembles building a sandcastle on the beach: eventually the tide washes in, and it’s as if it never existed in the first place.

The shifting sands of digital technology have robbed our collections of their meaning. They appear only as nostalgic ruins, the remains of once-inhabited metropolises gone silent. Many of the images I once shared on Tumblr are now broken links.

as a collector and cultural consumer is ultimately better for the platform: I’ll keep subscribing to Spotify because it’s the only way I’ll have access to my music.

While we have the advantage of freedom of choice, the endless array of options presented by algorithmic feeds often instills a sense of meaninglessness: I could be listening to anything, so why should any one thing be important to me? The constructive relationship between collecting and culture goes in both directions. When we find something meaningful enough to save, to add to our collection, the action both etches it a little deeper into our hearts and creates a context around the artifact itself, whether text, song, image, or video. The context is not just for ourselves but for other people, the knit-together, shared context of culture at large. That’s what Benjamin described when he wrote, “The phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.” Collections need individual caretakers, whose voices and tastes they express.

There are “lean-in” moments, when the user is paying attention, choosing what to consume and actively judging the result. And there are “lean-back” moments, when users coast along with content running in the background, not worrying too much about what it is or what plays next.

As consumers become increasingly passive, failing to exercise distinctly cultivated tastes, artists are forced to contend even more with algorithmic pressures, because working through the feed is the only way they can reach the scale of audience and engagement that they need to make a living. They need to reach us where we are, and where we are is leaning back in the feed, not paying too much attention, both accepting of the newest algorithmic recommendation and likely to flip away at a moment’s dissatisfaction. There is no choice but to adapt.

It was hypnotic, not least because I didn’t have to do anything. I could just lean back and let my brain almost subconsciously decide what was interesting. Gradually, new themes would emerge in the feed: travelogues, cooking videos, crafts constructed with rudimentary tools in the wilderness.

Kabvina whenever he pulled out his phone while they were hanging out. We’re in the moment; you’re capturing it, you’re ruining it, they said. Back in my day we used to talk to people. His hesitancy was partly due to the entrenched British sense of shame and a reluctance to look silly in public—which is coincidentally the act that the TikTok feed prizes most.

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.”

This perception that culture is stuck and plagued by sameness is indeed due to the omnipresence of algorithmic feeds.

In Filterworld, culture is becoming more ambient. Like Sleepify, it’s designed to be ignored, or, like the Marvel movie franchise, no single moment or fragment of it is particularly significant because there is always more to be consumed.

There is nothing to alienate personal taste but also nothing to deeply compel it. Such feeds encourage the quality of ambience because they allow for a consistent baseline of engagement; the user never stops the flow. Yet consuming it for too long at a stretch, like during a TikTok binge, leads to a feeling of depersonalization: Are you becoming the person the algorithmic feeds perceive you as, or were you already?

the culture disseminated through algorithmic feeds is either designed to produce a sensory void or to be flattened into the background of life, an insidious degradation of the status of art into something more like wallpaper. While personalized feeds create algorithmic anxiety, the only salve they provide is this form of ambient culture, which can feel personal without actually being so—if you don’t have to think too much about the art you’re consuming because it’s so bland, you don’t need to worry about if it truly represents you or not. Like a corporatized form of Buddhism, the implied answer to anxiety is to learn not to desire differentiation in the first place, to simply be satisfied with whatever is placed in front of you. The cultivation of taste is discouraged because taste is inefficient in terms of maximizing engagement. While the obstruction of taste and the tactic of corrupt personalization may feel like individual problems—users must work harder to identify what they truly like—it also quickly scales up into massive social issues.

Filterworld is not limited to digital experiences on our screens. It is a pervasive force that shapes the physical world, too. Because algorithmic systems influence the kinds of culture we consume as individuals, molding our personal tastes, they also influence what kinds of places and spaces we gravitate toward. And where our preferences go, businesses hoping to sell us things or grab our attention will follow, catering to those preferences.

Coffee shops provided a perfect test case for my theory of digital geography. They were spaces of consumption, in which members of a certain demographic, who were also very active on the Internet, expressed their personal aspirations by spending money. The café space integrated aesthetic decisions across architecture, interior design, and tableware. They showcased trends in both beverages and food.

Tarde predicted that in the future stylistic difference would be based not on “diversity in space” but “diversity in time.”

sabi. It is not a space in which to linger, but it is aesthetically perfect. You almost have to Instagram it, capturing your cappuccino in bright daylight on the polished concrete of the bar.

The homogeneity contrasted with the general hipster philosophy of the 2010s, namely, that by consuming certain products and cultural artifacts you could proclaim your own uniqueness from the mainstream crowd—in this case a particular coffee shop rather than an obscure band or clothing brand. “The irony of it all is that these spaces are supposed to represent spaces of individuality, but they’re incredibly monotonous,” Gonzalez said. Her comment echoed another paradoxical message of Filterworld and algorithmic recommendations: You are unique, just like everybody else.

The major culprit for this popular idea was the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World Is Flat. It felt like common wisdom: flatness meant that people, goods, and ideas flowed across physical space faster and easier than ever. It

“The world is flat” thus became an ambivalent lesson: You can consume plentiful products manufactured in China, but what happens in China might also affect you personally.

In his book, Friedman wrote about various “flatteners,” forces that were knitting the planet closer together. Several of these were digital technology: affordable Internet browsers like Netscape; workflow software that enabled collaboration between international businesses and factories; and search engines like Google, which expanded access to information. “Never before in the history of the planet have so many people—on their own—had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people,” Friedman wrote. The book mostly addressed the macroscopic level of nations and corporations (which were rapidly becoming more similar). The “playing field” was being leveled, which meant that any company could compete against any other no matter where they were located. Hierarchies were being flattened, so a small company or a freelancer could compete with much larger enterprises. Just as highways interconnected the United States, the fiber networks of the Internet created “a more seamless global commercial network,” Friedman wrote, and “helped to break down global regionalism.”

Globalization is often used as a term in relation to the availability of commercial products like smartphones; political ideas like democracy; and intervention in international conflicts like the American-led Iraq War. But such interconnection has also led to a more mundane and pervasive flattening of individual experiences.

In fact, for more than a decade before The World Is Flat, cultural theorists were already describing how globalization, particularly the accelerated version caused by the Internet, breeds sameness and monotony. There was also a rising anxiety about this sameness, a disaffection with the cultural consequences of globalization. In 1989, the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells conceived of the “space of flows,” which he defined as “the material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity,” as he wrote in a 1999 article. In other words, Castells argued, electronic telecommunications infrastructure like the Internet enabled shared culture to be collectively developed across distances rather than relying on physical proximity. The culture that formed was the same across the disparate places that the telecommunications networks covered. It was a departure from physical geography, which Castells labeled the “space of places.”

Castells wrote. The significance of geography thus receded further. In 2001, Castells wrote that the space of flows “links up distant locales around shared functions and meanings…while isolating and subduing the logic of experience embodied in the space of places.” Where you were physically mattered less, both to your experiences and your affinities, than which channels of media you were consuming.

Marc Augé wrote a book titled Non-Places, which studied the sensory experiences of highways, airports, and hotels: zones that had become reliably similar the world over. They lent a distinct, paradoxical sense of comfort to the modern nomad, who belonged to

the placeless zone. In non-places, “people are always, and never, at home,” Augé wrote. The book’s introduction narrates a French businessman driving to the Charles de Gaulle airport, zipping through security, shopping duty-free, and then waiting before the plane boards.