Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

Filterworld culture is ultimately homogenous, marked by a pervasive sense of sameness even when its artifacts aren’t literally the same. It perpetuates itself to the point of boredom.

The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us, and yet we have little way of talking back to it or changing how it works. This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material.

On the other side of our algorithmic anxiety is a state of numbness. The dopamine rushes become inadequate, and the noise and speed of the feeds overwhelming. Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises, as powerful artwork is meant to do. Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted.

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.

“The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs,” McLuhan wrote.

In 2016, Facebook added “reactions” to posts, so that viewers could respond with a range of emoticons rather than just the Like button. Posts that received many emoticon reactions got more promotion. But that change backfired, too, when incendiary content—posts that received many angry-face reactions, for example, like rage-inducing political stories—was getting too much promotion and souring the tone of the entire site. That they attracted more engagement didn’t mean the posts were necessarily more worthwhile.

Culture is meant to be communal and requires a certain degree of consistency across audiences; without communality, it loses some of its essential impact.

But I wasn’t excited or encouraged to page through any of them. Rather, I was overwhelmed, which might be the default state of consumers in Filterworld: surrounded by superabundant content, but inspired by none of it.

Physical amazon bookstore

when consuming content through digital platforms, what we see at a given moment is determined more directly by equations than such tastemakers. With Netflix’s home page, Facebook’s feed, and Spotify’s automated radio, there is no direct influence from editor, DJ, or booker, but, rather, a mathematical processing of crowdsourced data stretching to encompass every user on the site.

Today, most or all content is consumed in this passive algorithmic way.

Montesquieu crucially argued that surprise, which can be alienating or challenging, like a particularly ugly wabi-sabi Japanese tea vessel, is a fundamental element of taste. “Something can surprise us because it excites wonder, or because it is new or unexpected,” he wrote—it exists outside the realm of what we already know we like.

Surprise as an element of taste

If taste indeed must be deeply felt, requires time to engage with, and benefits from the surprise that comes from the unfamiliar, then it seems that technology could not possibly replicate it, because algorithmic feeds run counter to these fundamental qualities.

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.

The home page becomes a magic mirror, requiring no input from the user to present what they might want to consume in that moment. It removes the burden of choice and the more intentional process of selection that had to happen in earlier eras of digital culture.

Over time, the system will “provide less diverse recommendations,” as Zhang told the podcast Planet Money. Eventually, she said, it will “provide similar items to everybody, like, regardless of personal taste.”

When you listen to the album, it lightly colors your sensory environment without getting in the way—you can do work while listening to it, or carry on a conversation, or meditate on it as an artwork. It rewards all forms of attention, adapting to any purpose. In Filterworld, culture is becoming more ambient. Like Sleepify, it’s designed to be ignored, or, like the Marvel movie franchise, no single moment or fragment of it is particularly significant because there is always more to be consumed.

Brian Eno music for airports

The procession to the flight and then the numbing experience of flying itself involves a kind of stripping-away of the self and surroundings until everything becomes smooth and uniform. It’s a recognizable feeling—that slight separation from reality that happens when the plane takes off, or the clean burst of anonymity when opening the door of a hotel room for the first time.

Culture and experience detached from physical space

A place’s uniqueness only attracts more tourists, which gradually grind it into dust with the increasing flow of travelers, who arrive to consume its character as a product and leave it ever more degraded.

Both OTAs and Instagram have contributed to turning Iceland into a symbol of “overtourism,” the term coined by travel-media entrepreneur Rafat Ali in 2016 and increasingly used to describe places that are being damaged or irrevocably altered by the sheer volume of travelers moving through them.

The end point of algorithmic culture is a constant flow of similar-yet-different content, varied enough so as not to be utterly boring but never disruptive enough to be alienating. Reaching toward an ambitious artistic ideal may have faded in favor of refinement toward the goal of likes and engagement above all.

In other words, the emphasis is not on the thing itself but the aura that surrounds it, the ancillary material that one produces because of living the lifestyle of a creator. That ancillary content might be Instagram selfies, photos of a painting studio, evidence of travel, tossed-off observations on Twitter, or a monologue on TikTok.

This is often what artists bemoan, the related content not directly about your art.

That is not to say that content begets art. In fact, the excess content demanded by algorithmic feeds more often gets in the way of art, because it sucks up an increasingly high percentage of a creator’s time.

I thought about Janczukowicz’s description of the need to “maintain a culture.” It’s not just that the music needs to be available to be listened to online; it’s that it must be presented in a coherent fashion, in a way that allows for education beyond passive consumption. The same applies to any other cultural form. If you enjoy something, why not learn more about it and dive deeper?

All kinds of cultural experiences have been reduced to the homogenous category of digital content and made to obey the law of engagement, the algorithms’ primary variable. Any piece of content, whether image, video, sound, or text, must compel an immediate, albeit often superficial, response from the viewer.

In terms of how culture reaches us, algorithmic recommendations have supplanted the human news editor, the retail boutique buyer, the gallery curator, the radio DJ—people whose individual taste we relied on to highlight the unusual and the innovative.