Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

There was an argument to be made that sameness was more efficient, not only for comfort’s sake (at least for the wealthy Western traveler) but for the nurturing of capital as it flowed from one place to another in the form of investments or infrastructure.

essay titled “The Generic City,” which is one of those short pieces of writing that you read once and it never leaves your mind. Its sharp declarations of aesthetic and architectural theory have proven prophetic in the twenty-first century. “Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport—‘all the same’?” the essay begins. “What if this seemingly accidental—and usually regretted—homogenization was an intentional process, a conscious movement away from difference toward similarity? What if we are witnessing a global liberation movement: ‘down with character!’ ”

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.”

place’s uniqueness only attracts more tourists, which gradually grind it into dust with the increasing flow of travelers, who arrive to consume its character as a product and leave it ever more degraded. Difference just gets in the way; it creates friction in a world t...

Zygmunt Bauman observed with his circa-2000 concept of “liquid modernity”: “It is the most elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule.” The same is true in Filterworld for those who are willing to take up whichever content and aesthetics algorithms ...

His essays are best read as provocations, brief, ecstatic visions of how architecture might work or how people might live in it in the future.

Koolhaas saw the decline of local identity as a consequence of the Internet, even from the perspective of 1995: “The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace,” he wrote. “It is a place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions, discreet and mysterious like a large space lit by a bed lamp.”

The generic city or the space of flows, or the flattened world, gradually creates its own context with its own norms and expectations. It “induces a hallucination of the normal,” Koolhaas wrote. A “hallucination” because it isn’t purely organic, it is a vision induced by technology, like a fever dream, and “normal” because it is a homogenized template, a repeating pattern whose ubiquity establishes its own normalcy. The generic city has spread implacably, unchecked.

2012 collection An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. By evaluating everything solely in terms of financial productivity, capitalism has turned so many aspects of life into “nearly complete abstraction,” she wrote. One consequence is “the mind-numbing uniformization of globalization.”

“Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.”

Thinkers like Augé, Koolhaas, and Spivak all cited software as a metaphor to describe how geographical places and nations came to resemble each other in an era of overwhelming global interconnection, and as a factor in how such homogenization happened. But in the era of social media, the same effect has occurred at the level of the person, including both cultural consumers and cultural creators, who all log in to the same set of apps. In the place of physical hotels and airports, we have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as spaces of congregation that erase differences.

Instagram walls or experiences attracted visitors to a locale and kept them engaged by giving them an activity to perform with their phones, like a restaurant providing coloring books for kids. It was a concession to the fact of our growing addictions—you can’t just go somewhere; you must document your experience of it.

The installations were a physical form of search-engine optimization. Rather than including keywords on a website, the Instagram walls ensured that as many photos of a place as possible would exist on digital platforms, building a wider footprint. The more posts there were, and the more often they happened, the more promotion algorithms would also pick up on the place and display it to more potential customers. The walls spoke to the looming fact that even physical places have to exist as much on the Internet as they do in real life.

Posting a photo was a way of showing that you took part in the aspirational international non-place, the always-and-never home of the hypermobile twenty-first-century creative traveler. I appreciated the effect—after all, I had sought out that experience of sameness and achieved it. But there was also something missing: I wasn’t surprising myself with the unfamiliar during traveling, just reaffirming the superiority of my own sense of taste by finding it in a new place. Maybe that’s why it felt hollow. The influence of technology on culture is often subtle. It can be so pervasive or change things so quickly and completely that you miss the connection between cause and effect. It simply becomes the new reality.

The pressure to conform was real.

“There’s this constant urgency to be producing content. We are constantly feeling like we have to be in people’s phones, be in people’s desktops,” Walsh said. They had to fill the algorithmic feed. Simply existing as a coffee shop isn’t enough; the business has to cultivate a parallel existence on the Internet, which is a separate skill set entirely. “It almost feels like, you must have a social media acumen, you must be savvy in this area that is adjacent to your business, but not directly embedded in your business, in order to be successful and visible,” Walsh continued. That means achieving metrics like plenty of tagged photos on Instagram and positive user reviews on the business’s listing on Google Maps.

point of this pressure to have a digital presence was a form of restaurant that only existed online. “Ghost kitchens” were listings for simple delivery food, like burgers or pizza, that had brand identities on Uber Eats or DoorDash but no physical location; they were run out of another restaurant or an industrial group kitchen. The food existed as digital content first and traveled through the same channels.

Social media acumen requires awareness of each platform’s recommendation algorithm as much as anything else. Walsh observed that some companies may have great stories to tell, but they “are not attempting to keep up with these algorithmic patterns that will allow them to be visible to a larger audience.” Maybe they don’t post often enough, or they don’t keep up with shifts like Instagram promoting videos more than s...

Facebook and Instagram seemed to throttle their reach—unless they bought ads and boosted the social media company’s own profits. It felt like algorithmic blackmail: pay our toll or we won’t promote you. The tools that had served the café to grow and access new customers were suddenly being turned against it. Facebook and Instagram “don’t let you take advantage of the community you’ve already built. From a certain moment onward, things are unfair,” Ungureanu said.

She feels the app is “pushing its users to pay for boosting posts, which we are not comfortable doing.” That discrepancy feels like a broken promise for a social network that was premised on democratized, user-generated content. We users are what makes social media run, and yet we also aren’t given full control over the relationships we develop on the platforms, in large part because algorithmic recommendations are so dominant.

May observed an effect that might be called follower inflation. High follower numbers correlate less and less to actual engagement over time, as the platform’s priorities change and as some active accounts leave, or the same content tricks stop working. It’s a familiar feeling for all of us who have been on Instagram over the past decade. While it might hurt your ego to receive fewer likes on a selfie, it’s a real financial problem when that follower footprint is how a business makes money, whether it’s a café attracting visitors or an influencer selling sponsored content. Pursuing Instagrammability is a trap: the fast growth that comes with adopting a recognizable template, whether for a physical space or purely digital content, gives way to the daily grind of keeping up posts and figuring out the latest twists of the algorithm—which hashtags, memes, or formats need to be followed. Digital platforms take away agency from the business owners, pressuring them to follow in lockstep rather than pursue their own creative whims. There’s a risk as well in hewing too closely to trends. Cliché is not desirable. If a trope is too stale, the algorithmic audiences won’t engage with it, either. That’s why the perfect generic coffee shop design keeps changing slightly, adding more potted plants or taking a few away. In the algorithmic feed, timing is everything.

The other strategy is to remain consistent, not worrying about trends or engagement and simply sticking to what you know best—staying authentic to a personal e...

a certain amount of homogeneity might be an unavoidable consequence of algorithmic globalization, simply because so many like-minded people are now moving through the same physical spaces, influenced by the same digital platforms. The sameness has a way of compounding.

Recommendations on Yelp or Google Maps reshape the geography of a city by slightly redirecting the steps of individuals: a visitor walks to one café instead of another, or easily finds the neighborhood with the kind of restaurants they like even though they are new in town.

In the mid-2010s, Los Angeles residents discovered that the map app Waze, which offered driving directions based on real-time data from other cars automatically filtered into an ideal route, was ruining otherwise quiet neighborhoods. When traffic was bad on the highway, the app would reroute drivers through residential streets in an attempt to get them to their destinations faster. “The algorithm is God,” a 2018 article in Los Angeles Magazine proclaimed. The trick worked while not too many people were doing it, but then it caused its own problems. The neighborhoods of North Hollywood and Studio City became crowded with cars and trucks, which got stuck on steep hills and tight corners. It turned out that the Waze algorithm was treating such smaller streets as having the same capacity as much larger ones; it made recommendations as if the streets could handle the flow of another hundred cars, though of course they could not. The traffic caused noise pollution and accidents, to the point that the local government began negotiating with Google to get the data changed. Neighborhood residents took to fighting back against the algorithm themselves, logging in to Waze to report fictional accidents and roadblocks, thus signaling to the app that an alternative route past their house wouldn’t save any time. Hacking the algorithm made an immediate change in their physical environment.

It’s only because of the app itself that this strange movement can happen with such speed and intensity, another kind of “decentralized sameness,” but of action rather than aesthetic.

taste.) I rely heavily on Google Maps to guide me to my destination, having long since forgotten any driving directions I once memorized. Consulting maps of highways is a distant memory from childhood; I have fully surrendered to automated navigation. The Waze algorithm is a new agglomeration of capital and data that warps the world around it in unexpected ways. It both generates the real-time traffic data, through the omnipresence of personal smartphones, and leverages it to create driving recommendations, calculated by traffic patterns, gas efficiency, and tolls. Yet

Even today the population numbers under four hundred thousand, with one of the lowest densities in the world at around eight people per square mile. And yet Iceland has regularly attracted over two million tourists per year (five times the number of locals), who stay at least one night in the country. Tourism accounted for 35 percent of the nation’s export revenue in 2019, reaching a peak just before the COVID-19 pandemic halted international travel.

The other cause of the tourism boom, according to some Icelanders, was Instagram.

Social media attracted new demographics of tourists, too, who behaved in unexpected ways.

“Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass,” Anderson predicted. We know now this is not the case. If anything, mass culture lately appears more aesthetically homogenous than ever.

There is only one way to interact with content: ingest it and like it.

“The cinema has always been much more than content, and it always will be.” What gets lost is the deeper art form of cinema, the medium that changed his life and the lives of so many others, the aesthetic and even moral challenges that come through the silver screen. Watching great movies was not always comfortable; the experience went beyond banal consumption and aspired to interrogating social norms and enabling viewers to discover new senses of self.

That may be because to fit into digital feeds, in order to attract those pernicious likes and further promote itself as much as possible, culture has to be content first and art second—if at all.

The world has changed since his youth; he no longer needs to think about what is new, because his reputation and level of access mean he can create whatever he wants. But others shared his sense of ennui and anxiety, echoing Scorsese’s lament that something about algorithmic recommendations has robbed culture of its innate meaning.

Nothing stuck in the way that a masterpiece that will be revisited decades hence sticks.

In 2014, the art critic and painter Walter Robinson coined the term “zombie formalism” to describe it. Zombie formalism was abstract expressionism shorn of its emotion and grandeur, with canvases of mushy brushstrokes or cold monochromes from the likes of Oscar Murillo and Jacob Kassay. The critic Jerry Saltz echoed that it was “look-alike art.” Their tendency toward the meaninglessly decorative led the way to a slew of painters depicting glossy surrealist scenes, like Emily Mae Smith’s paintings of anthropomorphized broomsticks. (Dean Kissick labeled it “zombie figuration.”)

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.)

The superficiality of the word itself is indicative: “influence” is never the end point, only a means of communicating a particular message. An influencer is easiest to define by how they make money. Like a media company producing magazines or podcasts, they sell advertising shown to the audiences that they have gathered. But the content that draws the audiences in in the first place is most often the influencer’s personal life, their aesthetically appealing surroundings (as well as aesthetically appealing selves) and entertaining activities. The material of their lives—in varying degrees of organic and staged—is copiously documented on social media platforms like Instagram, where they also publish sponsored posts for brands. Another difference is that unlike a free newspaper distributed on the street or a radio station sending out a signal, influencers don’t own the infrastructure of their medium. They piggyback on the digital platforms’ ability to distribute content, both through widely installed smartphone apps and through in-app feeds.

Consumers have always cared about the lifestyle decisions of celebrities famous for something else: the actor’s diet regimen, the tycoon’s racehorses, the painter’s affairs. Fame—which could also be defined as attention—casts its own aura, making just about anything interesting.

The videos demonstrate that we need do nothing more than gaze at someone to feel as though they are important—the framing of the camera lens and the projector casts a spell.

The computer or phone screen accomplishes the same feat: anyone within a TikTok feed appears just as famous as everyone else, another form of flattening. Warhol once said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In 1991, the musician and online blogging pioneer Momus presciently updated the prediction to “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 people.” On social media, that has simply become fact. Every user is famous to their followers.

“influencing” is closer to the financial side of what’s going on. It’s a sales job, convincing audiences to buy something, first a vision of aspirational lifestyle and then the products that make it up.

Janelle was capturing a moment of slowing down and paying attention: when you set down your coffee cup, sit down, and appreciate it for a split second before drinking. It’s a restful moment in bustling city life; you stay still while everyone else on the street careens by. And yet each Instagram post feeds the beast of the feed, which sends as much content as possible by your eyes as fast as possible—the opposite of slowing down.

He enacts upper-class consumerist tropes and in doing so achieves them, reinforcing their status signaling, as many influencers do. (Influencing runs on jealousy.)

The ever-shifting nature of Instagram’s design means it is almost impossible to experience Janelle’s work in the context in which it originally existed.

Digital platforms lack the kind of stability that is vital for the longevity of culture, the way you might see a photographer’s decades-old film negatives displayed in a museum. Context is swept away as the companies change priorities. “Not only are things changing in the moment, but because all of this is digital, it could be changed retroactively, because we don’t own the thing. We have no control over how it’s presented or used at all,” Janelle said.

The need to pivot now happens every few years (if not annually) instead of decades and requires a stronger sensitivity to technological bullshit.

Individual influencers are less remarkable in this decade also because so many users of digital platforms are pressured to act like influencers themselves, constantly creating content, accruing an audience, and figuring out ways to monetize it—either immediately through literal advertising or more gradually through the attention of their peers.

“We’re so plugged in that we’re almost not plugged into ourselves,” she said. According to some interviews, Kaur doesn’t have social media on her phone and, like many celebrities, has a team of staff to manage her actual accounts, separating herself from her online presence even while benefiting from its suggestion of intimacy.