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Homogenization is beginning to alienate consumers rather than entertain them, and the entity to blame is “the algorithm.” In recent years, an underlying sense has emerged that algorithmic culture is shallow, cheap, and degraded in the washed-out manner of a photocopy copied many times over.
Complaints regarding this pervasive shallowness have popped up increasingly often and with increasing intensity. I’ve taken to collecting them to document the growing antipathy.
A list of examples follows.
But it’s not that innovation isn’t happening; it’s that innovation is improving only in the direction of the feed, encouraging the development of products that serve the structure of digital platforms,
The perfect piece of algorithmic culture, after all, is almost intentionally uninteresting. Its emptiness can at times be literal.
Though it emerged in the twentieth century, one of the most relevant concepts for culture in the twenty-first century is the composer Brian Eno’s coinage “ambient music.”
Ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” he wrote. “An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint.”
The TikTok “For You” feed is a good example of this tendency. The feed flows by without the user needing to pay attention to any one thing too closely, since another is always about to load, personalized to some degree by their previous actions.
Yet consuming it for too long at a stretch, like during a TikTok binge, leads to a feeling of depersonalization: Are you becoming the person the algorithmic feeds perceive you as, or were you already?
In so many cases, the culture disseminated through algorithmic feeds is either designed to produce a sensory void or to be flattened into the background of life, an insidious degradation of the status of art into something more like wallpaper.
if you don’t have to think too much about the art you’re consuming because it’s so bland, you don’t need to worry about if it truly represents you or not. Like a corporatized form of Buddhism, the implied answer to anxiety is to learn not to desire differentiation in the first place, to simply be satisfied with whatever is placed in front of you.
It’s strange to think of a “feed” existing outside of a screen, but these apps work like an algorithmic Netflix home page for physical space. You can scroll down the list and select the experience you want to have.
These cafés had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself.
Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafés had all drifted toward the same end points.
Places that connect gradually grow to resemble each other in certain ways simply because of their interconnection, in the sense of the movement of products, people, and ideas.
What I eventually concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the Internet, particularly the 2010s Internet of algorithmic feeds.
To court the large demographic of customers molded by the Internet, more cafés needed to adopt the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms.
When a café was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimization and homogenization continued.
Coffee shops provided a perfect test case for my theory of digital geography. They were spaces of consumption, in which members of a certain demographic, who were also very active on the Internet, expressed their personal aspirations by spending money.
They offered a casual gathering point for the growing economy of “gig workers” and digital creative laborers, people whose schedules didn’t align with the usual nine-to-five of the traditional office, and who lacked the infrastructure of an office entirely.
Like all fashions, the visual style of that moment in the mid-2010s decayed.
The elements of style—Edison bulbs versus neon signs—turned out to be less important than the fundamental homogeneity, which became more and more entrenched. The signs changed, evolving one step at a time over the years, but the sameness stayed the same.
The homogeneity contrasted with the general hipster philosophy of the 2010s, namely, that by consuming certain products and cultural artifacts you could proclaim your own uniqueness from the mainstream crowd—in this case a particular coffee shop rather than an obscure band or clothing brand.
Her comment echoed another paradoxical message of Filterworld and algorithmic recommendations: You are unique, just like everybody else.
Gentrification is a form of flattening, too—a fact visible not least from the aesthetics of renovated buildings that take over affordable neighborhoods,
The AirSpace cafés “are oppressive, in the sense that they are exclusive and expensive,” Gonzalez said. When whiteness and wealth are posed as the norm, a kind of force field of aesthetics and ideology keeps out anyone who does not fit the template.
In the early 2000s United States, I grew up with the idea that the world was flat. Those years saw the dawning mainstream awareness of globalization, the way that colonialism and capitalism had led to a planet that was more interconnected and felt smaller than ever before.
“The world is flat” thus became an ambivalent lesson: You can consume plentiful products manufactured in China, but what happens in China might also affect you personally.
Not only were industries and economies being flattened in the new globalized order, but culture trended that way as well. The nascent Internet exerted a pressure to share, and it connected individuals on a microscopic level in the same way that countries and corporations were being connected.
Nothing epitomized the shift more than “Gangnam Style,” the music video from the South Korean rapper Psy, directed by Cho Soo-hyun, that premiered on YouTube in the summer of 2012.
When the song and video became popular, I remember feeling bemused at how easily I could consume K-Pop, as smoothly as watching any American music video. It was thanks to YouTube that the experience was so frictionless, and due in part to the platform’s algorithmic recommendations that so many people saw it.
Friedman’s model of increased international competition has resulted in only a few overall winners, which profit hugely from their monopolization of the internationalized digital space.
Where you were physically mattered less, both to your experiences and your affinities, than which channels of media you were consuming.
In the 1990s and 2000s, there was a kind of optimism or utopianism to the march of globalization and this etherealization of experience. If the planet was brought closer together, with new airports and international hotel chains, perhaps people would understand each other better.
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.
The characterlessness of the architecture, its easy merger into the burgeoning realm of non-places, was a purposeful part of the design—an aesthetic that embraces the generic.
The same is true in Filterworld for those who are willing to take up whichever content and aesthetics algorithms are prioritizing in a given moment, not anchored by any one identity.
In this description, there are shades of how Manuel Castells explained the space of flows draining meaning away from the space of places, as more of life and culture took place between or across physical locations than within them.
In the place of physical hotels and airports, we have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as spaces of congregation that erase differences.
In some cases, we conduct our lives more in the space of flows than the space of places. We are only beginning to understand how, along with our world, we are now flat, too.
But most of Filterworld’s inhabitants are either unwilling or unwitting. Simply by trying to make a living or entertain ourselves we accelerate the flattening.
These installations became utterly exhausting to encounter by the end of the decade. So-called Instagram Museums arose that made the taking of the photo the intentional goal of the experience, as if the only point of going to the Louvre was to take a selfie in front of the Mona Lisa.
Each failed as compelling visual art because they required the presence of the subject and the taking of a photograph to make sense—outside of digital platforms they were incomplete; the production of the content was all that mattered.
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.
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.
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.
The end 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.
Online appearance outweighing almost all else is a law that now applies to all kinds of businesses: bars, bakeries, fashion boutiques, and even art museums.
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.
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.
