Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

As the Indian literary theorist Gayatri Spivak wrote in 2012, “Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.” In the Filterworld era, digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have accumulated and spread their data, in the form of user activity, and their capital, in the form of server farms and algorithmic technology, around the world, capturing billions of users. The homogenous culture is the inevitable reaction to the damage of that spread, a way of coping with or adapting to it.

“Knowledge itself is power,” Francis Bacon wrote in the sixteenth century, but in the Internet era, sorting knowledge might be even more powerful.

Taste is a fundamental part of the self; developing or indulging it means constructing a firmer sense of self. It becomes the basis for identity.