Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

“We enshrine in steel, glass, and semiconductors those very limitations of hand, eye, and brain that the computer was invented precisely to transcend,” Beer wrote in his 1968 book Management Sciences, pinpointing the paradox.

Technology often appears to belong to the distant future right up until the moment the switch flips, and the leap forward becomes totally mundane, a simple fact of daily life.

The possibilities that we perceive for ourselves—our modes of expression and creation—now exist within the structures of digital platforms.

Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism.

“Platforms have offered us up something that is meant for intimate, connected speech. Then they moderate it in a statistically broad, systematic way,” Gillespie told me.

This had made me anxious, the possibility that my view of my own life—lived through the Internet—was a fiction formed by the feeds.

This enforced ephemerality of feeling and impermanence of context has hollowed out contemporary culture, leaving it less experimental and powerful than it might have been otherwise, without these pressures.

The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet.