Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

“The algorithm is metonymic for companies as a whole,” he told me. “The Facebook algorithm doesn’t exist; Facebook exists. The algorithm is a way of talking about Facebook’s decisions.”

With new technology, the miraculous quickly becomes mundane, any glitch in its function is felt as bothersome, and finally it becomes ignorable, the miracle forsaken. We forget that life wasn’t always this way, that we couldn’t directly speak to people across long distances, that ceiling lights didn’t make every room bright, or that we didn’t have our information and media automatically filtered by machines.

A joke written on Twitter by a Google engineer named Chet Haase in 2017 pinpoints the problem: “A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What’ll you have?’ The algorithm says, ‘What’s everyone else having?’ ” The punch line is that in algorithmic culture, the right choice is always what the majority of other people have already chosen. But even if everyone else was, maybe you’re just not in the mood for a whiskey sour.

My favorite bookstore has long been McNally Jackson, a collection of New York City–area stores whose first location was in SoHo (in 2023, the original

Giorgio Agamben summarized in his 1979 monograph on taste, “Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it.”

“We become aware of the presence of great beauty when something inspires us with a surprise which at first is only mild, but which continues, increases, and finally turns into admiration.”

Building your own sense of taste, that set of subconscious principles by which you identify what you like, is an uphill battle compared to passively consuming whatever content feeds deliver to you.

Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it’s also boring.

Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism.

While the magazine fashion editor may periodically use their ability to pick out and promote a previously unheard voice, the algorithmic feed never will; it can only iterate on established engagement.

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. Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture—whether films on DVD, albums on vinyl, or books on a shelf—has shifted from being a necessity to appearing as an indulgent luxury. Why would I bother worrying about what I have access to at hand when digital platforms advertise their ability to provide access to everything, forever, whenever I want? The problem is that there is no guarantee of permanence in what digital platforms offer—the appearance of totality is a facade, buttressed by recommendations—and their interfaces are constantly changing.

1961 jazz album by Yusef Lateef called Eastern Sounds. Many

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.”

The most committed among the cafés would offer a “flat white” (an Australian cappuccino variant) and avocado toast, a simple dish, also with Australian origins, that over the 2010s became synecdochic for millennial consumer preferences. Infamous headlines blamed millennials’ predilection for expensive avocado toast for their inability to buy real estate in gentrifying cities.

Koolhaas described his philosophy in a 1995 essay titled “The Generic City,” which is one of those short pieces of writing that you read once and it never leaves your mind.

The peak of this phenomenon might have been a brunch-focused restaurant called Carthage Must Be Destroyed. It opened in my then neighborhood of Bushwick in 2017, on a block full of forbidding warehouses. The interior was bare—exposed brick and plumbing, communal wood tables—but it had a single, aggressive design gimmick: Everything was painted pale pink. The door was pink, the counter was covered in pink tile, the espresso machine had pink housing, and the dishes were glazed-pink ceramic. The menu wasn’t particularly distinctive, offering the usual array of toasts, avocado and otherwise (its co-owner Amanda Bechara is Australian), so the main attraction was the aesthetic. The moment press photos were released, everyone wanted to go to “that pink restaurant.”

In that, they served a very clear purpose. 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.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.” “No one sees the barn,” he concludes. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures.” In Filterworld, it becomes hard to separate the nature of something, or its reality, from its popularity in terms of attention.

In a 2022 essay, Jeremy Larson, an editor at the music magazine Pitchfork, complained that the algorithmic experience of listening to music on Spotify was getting in the way of the music itself. “Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal,” Larson wrote. Though the artists’ intentions may not have changed, “music becomes an advertisement for the streaming service, and the more time and attention you give it, the more it benefits the tech company.”

The 2020 TV iteration of Normal People might be best interpreted as a series of softcore-pornographic GIF sets that would have been extremely popular on Tumblr had the platform not banned adult material in 2018.

Frequenting Manhattan cafés before magazine work, Janelle started an Instagram hashtag, #dailycortado, referring to the short cappuccino that was a favorite of coffee aficionados at the time.

Patrick Janelle as a photographer—we

But perhaps this expectation needs to change, and we need to learn to exist in a digital world without so much automated acceleration. Reaching wide audiences of strangers isn’t a right; it’s a privilege that doesn’t need to be possible for every individual user or post.

Algorithmic recommendations are addictive because they are always subtly confirming your own cultural, political, and social biases, warping your surroundings into a mirror image of yourself while doing the same for everyone else.

Ultimately, my sense of self was beholden to the responses I got from my invisible audiences, whose attention was algorithmically mediated, too. I wasn’t sure who I would be without algorithmic recommendations; I don’t know that anyone else who has spent years of their life on digital platforms can be totally sure. A fear took hold: In passively consuming what I was interested in, had I given up my agency to figure out what was truly meaningful to me?

you should look at a painting for as long as it took the artist to paint it.

As anyone who has been on the Internet knows, it is difficult to learn via feeds. Learning, in the sense of the accretion of understanding, always happens off the platform, when you have time to put things together for yourself. Even then, organizing material on the Internet, as my artist friend Hallie Bateman said, is like building sandcastles on the beach as the tide comes in—your careful collections are almost inevitably going to be destroyed, just as Spotify’s interface changes once messed around with mine.

John Coltrane’s recording of “My Favorite Things” from 1961, the full version rather than the much shorter radio

prompted Criterion to launch its own digital streaming service, called the Criterion Channel. Today, Criterion is available anywhere with Internet access, a hypercurated version of Netflix.

constant writing soundtrack had been the Bill Evans Trio’s 1961 concert at the Village Vanguard,

Awakening, by the Japanese musician Hiroshi Sato,