Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

Algorithmic recommendations shape the vast majority of our experiences in digital spaces by considering our previous actions and selecting the pieces of content that will most suit our patterns of behavior. They are supposed to interpret and then show us what we want to see.

Yet as international as these effects are, the platforms that undergird them are Western, largely based in the tiny American locus of Silicon Valley and controlled by a handful of unfathomably wealthy white men—the opposite of diversity.

In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data. Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.

New tools like ChatGPT

The temporal perspective here is WILD. How earlier this year, when this book was published, ChatGPT was considered a new tool. Seven months later, GenAI seems to be a ubiquitous, universal, daily tool scaled across businesses