Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

On the other side of our algorithmic anxiety is a state of numbness. The dopamine rushes become inadequate, and the noise and speed of the feeds overwhelming. Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises, as powerful artwork is meant to do. Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted.

The culture of Filterworld is the culture of presets, established patterns that get repeated again and again. The technology limits us to certain modes of consumption; you can’t stray outside of the lines. “Maniac fun,” as Yuri says, is gone—that is to say, a certain degree of originality, unprecedentedness, creativity, and surprise disappears when so much weighs on culture’s ability to spread through digital feeds.

“The human element of fallibility is eliminated, although it may to an extent be replaced by mechanical fallibility,” Turing continued.

Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism.

“Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.” We talk about politics, culture, and travel becoming globalized, but on a more fundamental level, Spivak is correct that what really flows across the planet are various forms of money and information: investments, corporations, infrastructure, server farms, and the combined data of all the digital platforms, sluicing invisibly like wind or ocean currents between nations. We users voluntarily pump our own information through this same system, turning ourselves into flowing commodities, too.

GDPR recognizes that these days, we are our data—data both documents what we have done and influences what we are able to do, or are most likely to do, in the future, oftentimes through algorithmic decisions. Thus, we should have some of the same kinds of control over it, and rights to it, that we have over our physical bodies.

We should talk even more about the things we like, experience them together, and build up our own careful collections of likes and dislikes. Not for the sake of fine-tuning an algorithm, but for our collective satisfaction.

It is very much possible to host enormous bodies of culture online without the help of algorithmic feeds; after all, culture itself offers a kind of algorithm to follow, as each artist influences and inspires others, referencing and building on history. Those are the kind of connections from which Paul Cavalconte built his radio playlists. I thought about Janczukowicz’s description of the need to “maintain a culture.” It’s not just that the music needs to be available to be listened to online; it’s that it must be presented in a coherent fashion, in a way that allows for education beyond passive consumption. The same applies to any other cultural form. If you enjoy something, why not learn more about it and dive deeper?

We turn to art to seek connection, yet algorithmic feeds give us pure consumption. Truly connecting requires slowing down too much, to the point of falling out of the feed’s grip. You can’t stay in an algorithmic flow state while reading a CD booklet.

I found that the way to fight the generic is to seek the specific, whatever you are drawn toward. You don’t need to be a credentialed or professionalized expert to be a connoisseur. You don’t need to monetize your opinion as an influencer for it to be legitimate. The algorithm promises to supplant your taste and outsource it for you, like a robotic limb, but all it takes to form your own taste is thought, intention, and care. Curation is a natural facet of human behavior: Just as we select which food to eat or which colors go together in an outfit, we organically form opinions about which pieces of culture appeal to us and which don’t.

Culture is built on personal recommendations, not automated ones, as we share, interpret, and respond to the things that we love.

To resist Filterworld, we must become our own curators once more and take responsibility for what we’re consuming. Regaining that control isn’t so hard. You make a personal choice and begin to intentionally seek out your own cultural rabbit hole, which leads you in new directions, to yet more independent decisions. They compound over time into a sense of taste, and ultimately into a sense of self.

The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet.

Eventually Filterworld itself, with its set of entrenched styles, will prove to be a finite phase of culture, precisely because it will run out of fuel and run aground on its own self-referentiality. Something new is on the horizon; whether it is a flood of even more artificial content generated by artificial intelligence machines or a renaissance for human self-expression depends on our choices. As Benjamin wrote: “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself.”