Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

Trump’s use of Twitter, until he was banned in 2021 after the Capitol riot, only intensified its presence: the algorithmic feed ensured as many users as possible saw his tweets, even if they hated their originator.

Netflix has gone so far as to produce replicas of its shows, set in different countries and using different languages. Home for Christmas began as a Norwegian miniseries about a single woman in the rural town of Røros trying to find a boyfriend before the holidays; it was remade almost shot by shot in the Italian I Hate Christmas, set in Chioggia—a cheap way to double your content. Once a formula works, it is repeatable, or scalable, across Netflix’s vast global audience, who end up unknowingly consuming the same material. The replicated show can be served to any possibly interested viewer via algorithmic recommendation.

All culture is now content, and the platforms we use to access it encourage us to treat it as interchangeable.

In other words, much of literature is forced to move through Amazon’s platform to reach consumers, which pressures books into particular forms—high-volume series confined to specific genre categories and released consistently over time in a drip of content—the same way a tweet has to be written to succeed in the Twitter feed.

The literary canon, McGurl wrote, is “a thing Amazon has no particular relation to at all except as a list of books that students tend to purchase.”

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.

Where the term blogger described a literal activity of writing, “influencing” is closer to the financial side of what’s going on. It’s a sales job, convincing audiences to buy something, first a vision of aspirational lifestyle and then the products that make it up.

For so many career paths in Filterworld, following the demands of various feeds has become an almost unavoidable commandment. The pressure is so great that the promotional content has a way of superseding the actual craft.

Social media has quantified culture into a banal set of metrics measuring views, click-throughs, and, ultimately, purchase rates. The net effect is homogenization as creators all chase the same incentives to attract more attention, copying whichever formula works best in a given moment.

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.

Ultimately, the algorithmic feed may not be the death of art, but it often presents an impediment to it.

“The problems of homogeneity are not just that it is boring; the most or least offensive stuff rises to the top, because that gets clicks,” Depp said.

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.

We don’t have enough alternative options to navigate the Internet outside of algorithmic feeds, in part because the Internet is now so dominated by just a few companies.

Instagram gradually became more and more like Facebook itself: a mishmash of different content types; personal and impersonal social connections; and a feed that gave you less what you wanted than whatever the company was emphasizing at the moment, like videos or shopping opportunities.

Users jump on board with newfound excitement about their old apps, but the newness fades as the innovations are monetized to death.

Content creators may have their choice of platform, but the platforms themselves increasingly resemble one another and function in similar ways.

Our relationship to algorithmic feeds feels like a trap: we can neither influence them nor escape them.

While the system may treat all content the same, the consequences of promotion are not.

Yet regulation cannot be the only answer when it comes to culture. (Governmental policy rarely succeeds in that arena.) A law can force a platform to ban problematic content, but it can’t make Spotify recommend you a more challenging or creatively interesting playlist of music. Unfortunately, we do not have a constitutional right to personal taste. Therefore, we also must change our own habits, becoming more aware of how we consume culture and how we can resist the passive pathways of algorithmic feeds. The same way we might choose to buy organic-labeled food in a grocery store, we have to seek out the digital spaces that support nonhomogenized culture and that allow artists to express themselves without the crushing pressure toward sameness.

The most powerful choice might be the simplest one: Stop lending your attention to platforms that exploit it.

But the more dramatic option is to log out entirely and figure out how to sustain culture offline once more.

By 2023, social media seems to have entered a new phase in which its downsides are more obvious than its advantages.

While regulations can provide for some minimum of control over algorithmic feeds, the reconstruction of culture is a different process, more like planting and cultivating a garden. It takes time. First, we need to seek out the appropriate digital structures, and then we need to carry out the daily labor of determining a new way of living online.

It’s hard to overstate just how smoothly the feeds infiltrated my life. Following them all was like chain-smoking throughout the day, one information binge at a time, from the wake-up Twitter scroll to find out about overnight news to the nighttime crawl of the Netflix home page to determine what to watch.

If one form of algorithmic anxiety is about feeling misunderstood by algorithmic recommendations, another is feeling hijacked by them, feeling like you couldn’t escape them if you tried.

The TikTok “For You” feed was a fulfillment of “the Entertainment” in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest: a piece of content so compelling that no one could stop watching. As addictive as it was, Wallace described his fictional Entertainment as “oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement toward a real story”—which is an apt description, too, of TikTok’s drift toward formless vibes and feelings, away from coherent information.

even thousands, of individual bits of information and multimedia a day to just a handful.

The question I’m pursuing is not whether we should abandon our digital lives, but how we can improve them, make them even more valuable.

One paper described communities of consumption as a form of “mutual learning”—we collectively figure out what it is that we’re looking for and how to find it. The likes of Twitter and Facebook, with their unstable interfaces and manipulative algorithms, are less conducive to mutual learning.

The benefit of the slower, self-managed approach to culture is that it might lead to a greater appreciation of the content at hand, and you might be able to lead another person down the same path that you followed, showing them how to appreciate the same things.

In a way, this book is an attempt to recapture recommendations from recommender systems. We should talk even more about the things we like, experience them together, and build up our own careful collections of likes and dislikes. Not for the sake of fine-tuning an algorithm, but for our collective satisfaction.

In a 2012 lecture, the Internet artist Jonathan Harris summarized the shift: “Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression.” Rather than a form of committed caretaking, it more appears as an act of narcissism.

The Internet might have an overflow of curation, but it also doesn’t have enough of it, in the sense of long-term stewardship, organization, and contextualization of content—all processes that have been outsourced to algorithms.

My point is not that we must gather an understanding of art only through museum exhibitions; rather, it’s that the view we have of culture through algorithmic feeds is often so blinkered as to be useless. We’re not encouraged or informed enough to get beyond it, because that would not provide fodder for the app’s advertising revenue.

Listening to Cavalconte’s show, by contrast, I could always feel the human intelligence behind it, which made it infinitely more compelling.

While it may seem as though culture online is more commodified when it is paid for directly, in reality, culture should be the product, as classical music is on Idagio, not your attention.

Maintaining culture” is precisely what Filterworld fails to do, in its accelerated race to the lowest common denominator.)

Sustainability at a small scale still counts as success. That is something we’ve missed as the Internet has prioritized frictionless convenience and broadcasting to as many people as possible at once.

We turn to art to seek connection, yet algorithmic feeds give us pure consumption.

In a 1984 article for the journal Popular Music titled “The Walkman Effect,” the Japanese musicology scholar Shuhei Hosokawa wrote that the “listener seems to cut the auditory contact with the outer world where he really lives: seeking the perfection of his ‘individual’ zone of listening.” With the Walkman, physical reality conformed to the listener’s mood, the same way recommendations bend digital spaces toward users’ desires.

Guided along by the feed’s recommendations, a global population of users collectively converge on a particular set of cultural themes like so many monarch butterflies instinctively migrating to a particular grove of fir trees in Mexico.

To resist Filterworld, we must become our own curators once more and take responsibility for what we’re consuming. Regaining that control isn’t so hard. You make a personal choice and begin to intentionally seek out your own cultural rabbit hole, which leads you in new directions, to yet more independent decisions. They compound over time into a sense of taste, and ultimately into a sense of self.

Technology changes both the forms of culture that we produce and our perception of that culture, the way we take in the man-made world around us. (Both changes happen at the same time.)

Any piece of content, whether image, video, sound, or text, must compel an immediate, albeit often superficial, response from the viewer. It must make them tap the Like or Share button, or prevent them from hitting Stop or Skip, anything that would interrupt the feed.

Like water flowing into a pot, the creative impulse changes to fit the shape of the containers that we have for it, and the most common containers now are the feeds of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok.

“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.

entrenched styles, will prove to be a finite phase of culture, precisely because it will run out of fuel and run aground on its own self-referentiality.