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“Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend considerable time producing (or paying someone else to produce) content about themselves and their work,” Eichhorn wrote.
It’s the opposite of the way a painter like Carmen Herrera, who didn’t achieve fame until her nineties and passed away in 2022, toiled in obscurity on her minimalist canvases for the better part of a century. Today, it can often feel like there is no creativity without attention, and no attention without the accelerant of algorithmic recommendations.
The problem was that I began to confuse the subjects rewarded by the feed with my personal taste—I wrote what Twitter wanted to see, which began to occlude my awareness of what I would have written or been interested in on my own.
The kinds of culture rewarded by digital platforms and algorithmic feeds are markedly different from what was successful in the traditional model of human tastemakers, both in form and content.
Over the past decade, a generation of “Insta-poets” have emerged on Instagram and sold millions of books to their followers by shaping their work to the structure and demands of the platform.
Critics—long the sole arbiters of the niche art form of poetry—largely hated Kaur’s work, however. They likened it to greeting card copy and bemoaned its literalness. It didn’t bear thinking about for any length of time.
“Kaur’s achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet,”
In recent years, she has settled into a pattern of alternating between poem-images and self-portraits, most fully posed (rather than the standard casual snapshots), costumed in elaborate high-fashion outfits and makeup.
She is an influencer as much as a poet, two identities that in her case don’t cancel each other out but are mutually reinforcing: she is a popular influencer in part because of her poetry, and her poetry is popular in part because of her established online platform.
Being a working artist has always meant being something of a public figure, but in Filterworld the perfected image is a prerequisite to the art.
According to some interviews, Kaur doesn’t have social media on her phone and, like many celebrities, has a team of staff to manage her actual accounts, separating herself from her online presence even while benefiting from its suggestion of intimacy.
Leveraging a compelling image or Internet presence can be a way to cultivate an initial audience, prove a level of established interest that some artists don’t have to demonstrate, and break into the closed ecosystem.
Blatant clarity and simple, literal takeaways versus linguistic difficulty and the need to accept irresolution: one aesthetic approach is not better or worse than the other;
Yet in Filterworld, we face a cultural environment that inevitably prioritizes the former over the latter because it travels more effectively through algorithmic feeds,
If you want something to be popular in Filterworld, the fastest way is to get the influencers on your side. Entire industries have been reshaped around their gravity.
she decided to design it around the burgeoning group of influencers that made up “Bookstagram.” Rather than fashion or travel, these influencers gained their audiences by recommending books, and their power and authority in the staid publishing industry was growing.
Later, she adapted her stores to the literary-influencer side of TikTok, called Booktok, too, making space for shooting videos instead of still images.
Bookstagrammers also felt isolated from the literary establishment. They were ignored in favor of traditional critics at print publications;
Bookstagrammers “tend to be female or queer,” Depp said. “They wanted a bookstore that wouldn’t be like, ‘Why are you taking pictures?’ or treat their reading taste as inherently lesser.”
It’s optimized for online content creation, because the store as well as the books must be distributed through algorithmic feeds just as much as function in physical space: for the online passerby as well as someone walking in from the sidewalk.
“The top-selling folks are straight white women writing somehow emotional books: self-help-oriented books, romance, or romance-adjacent,” Depp explained.
TikTok-era popularity tends to be all or nothing, and when one book or topic becomes popular, it drives copycats who want to get in on the traffic.
TikTok encourages users to slot themselves into particular categories or genres of identity, just as it brackets genres of culture.
On the platform, books are popularized less as texts to read than as purchasable lifestyle accessories, visual symbols of an identity. Such is the narcissism encouraged by Filterworld.
The arc of Hallie’s career and artistic practice online sketch out a history of creativity on the Internet over the late 2000s and 2010s, as user-made, small-scale websites gave way to massive social platforms where the algorithmic feed dictated what audiences saw.
Hallie also realized that the Instagram feed rewarded specific qualities. She had always combined visual art and writing, but posts with clear written messages got the most engagement.
This effect isn’t solely a consequence of the algorithmic feed; consumers have tastes that don’t always mesh with an artist’s own vision. But the acceleration of the feed and the instantaneousness of the feedback begets an intensified self-consciousness on the part of the artist.
The pressure that Hallie felt to make the rest of her artwork similarly bright, clear, and simple is much like the pressure that a musician feels to frontload the hook of a song so it succeeds on TikTok or a writer feels to have a take so hot it lights up the Twitter feed.
The artist-as-influencer isn’t introspective; she exists on the ephemeral surface of things, iterating and adapting according to reactions.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has described how people living in post-Internet society may “no longer have an unconscious.” The way that art is made and distributed now is not how it was for the past few centuries.
Innovation came not from adaptation to a metric of constant engagement but in creative leaps that might have been shocking at first glance. When you conform to expectations too much in advance or rearrange your imagination to fit a particular set of variables, it can mean that that leap is denatured or cut short.
“If I adapt to every trend, if I hop on every new platform and try to build a following there, I’m going to be building sandcastle after sandcastle. If the algorithm is failing us now, that means it was never stable. It was like a fair-weather friend.”
The recent history of the 2010s, with the rise and then growing irrelevance of Facebook, has shown that no social network is too big to fail or get supplanted by a competitor that chooses to play by a new set of rules, social or technological. When that happens, users are left to fend for themselves, as our digital lives are dictated more by business concerns than our best interests.
Russell’s death was part of the human toll of algorithmic overreach, when content moves too quickly at too vast a scale to be moderated by hand. No magazine’s editor would have published a flood of such depression content, nor would a television channel broadcast it.
Though so much of the content we see online is “user-generated”—uploaded freely, without either gatekeeping or support—it still has to fit into preestablished molds determined by corporations.
If ARPANET was like a subway system, only connecting specific points, then Usenet, created in 1980, was more like a roadway: anyone with the right equipment could get on it.
Most people accessed Usenet for the first time, as well as the Internet itself, at universities when they went to college, leading to a peculiar problem. Every September, a flood of new students would make their way into the newsgroups without knowing the rules or etiquette.
Corporations also began to offer access to Usenet over home dial-up connections. America Online (AOL) incorporated Usenet in 1993, and the sudden influx of noobs became known as “Eternal September.”
Being on the Internet in the early aughts was still a nerdy enough pursuit that few people understood what it meant. It didn’t incite teasing at school because other kids didn’t know what a forum was, and digital life was quieter, too, because the public arenas of social media, where personal attacks are now rampant, did not yet exist.
