Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

The technology limits us to certain modes of consumption; you can’t stray outside of the lines. “Maniac fun,” as Yuri says, is gone—that is to say, a certain degree of originality, unprecedentedness, creativity, and surprise disappears when so much weighs on culture’s ability to spread through digital feeds.

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is now widely regarded as the first computer programmer; she wrote algorithms for the machine as Babbage designed it, including a process for calculating Bernoulli numbers.

In 1946, with the war over, Turing wrote a report for the National Physical Library proposing the development of an “Automatic Computing Engine.” It was the first description of artificial intelligence as a real possibility instead of a theoretical concept.

All programming languages, for example, are Turing-complete because they can model any kind of equation. (Even the spreadsheet software Excel became Turing-complete in 2021.)

New tools like ChatGPT seem to be able to understand and generate meaningful language, but really, they only repeat patterns inherent in the preexisting data they are trained on. Quality is subjective; data alone, in the absence of human judgment, can go only so far in gauging it.

“Knowledge itself is power,” Francis Bacon wrote in the sixteenth century, but in the Internet era, sorting knowledge might be even more powerful. Information is now easy to find in abundance; making sense of it, knowing which information is useful, is much harder.

Facebook’s Like button, with its signature thumbs-up, was introduced in 2009, providing one form of data on how interested a user might be in a particular piece of content.

The increasingly out-of-order feed induced a sense of confusion and anxiety akin to the feeling of someone rearranging the furniture in your house without your knowledge. Before, by scrolling through the feed, you were moving back in time. But suddenly, a post from two days ago appeared at the top of your feed.

When feeds are algorithmic, they appear differently to different people: It’s impossible to know what someone else is seeing at a given time, and thus harder to feel a sense of community with others online, the sense of collectivity you might feel when watching a movie in a theater or sitting down for a prescheduled cable TV show. The advent of Filterworld has seen a breakdown in monoculture.

Like many things that operate at the scale of the Internet, the bookstore was inhuman.

Rather, I was overwhelmed, which might be the default state of consumers in Filterworld: surrounded by superabundant content, but inspired by none of it.

Love, money, and beauty could all be as easily lost as gained, and gaining may not always be better than losing.

As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction.

Jada Watson, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies country radio airplay,

We took that stability for granted. In 1931, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called “Unpacking My Library,” describing our relationship with physical cultural objects. In the essay, Benjamin narrates removing his book collection from dusty crates, where the volumes had been enclosed for years. The volumes are splayed loose on the floor, “not yet touched by the mild boredom of order,” all set to be rearranged on shelves once more. For Benjamin, the very possession of these books formed his identity as a reader, writer, and human being—even if he hadn’t read all of them. They sat proudly on his shelves as symbols, representing the knowledge that he still aspired to gain or the cities to which he had traveled. Accumulating books was his way of interacting with the world, of building a worldview that he furthered in his critical writing.

The constructive relationship between collecting and culture goes in both directions. When we find something meaningful enough to save, to add to our collection, the action both etches it a little deeper into our hearts and creates a context around the artifact itself, whether text, song, image, or video. The context is not just for ourselves but for other people, the knit-together, shared context of culture at large. That’s what Benjamin described when he wrote, “The phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.” Collections need individual caretakers, whose voices and tastes they express. The mass of Spotify isn’t a coherent collection; it’s an avalanche.

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. The cultivation of taste is discouraged because taste is inefficient in terms of maximizing engagement.

The most committed among the cafés would offer a “flat white” (an Australian cappuccino variant) and avocado toast, a simple dish, also with Australian origins, that over the 2010s became synecdochic for millennial consumer preferences. Infamous headlines blamed millennials’ predilection for expensive avocado toast for their inability to buy real estate in gentrifying cities.

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.

The tourists’ experiences are flattened, not because they have no other option but because the digital platform has made it incredibly convenient to simply follow in the steps of everyone else, a turbocharged, more coercive version of the old-school tourist guidebook.

You could use a service like Geocities, which launched in 1994, to build and host a website using basic tools, but no two Geocities pages looked the same. They were quirky collisions of animated GIFs in messy frame layouts, as though a child had made them.

dutifully paying attention in high school classes where computers existed to play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail.

Tumblr, for example, once on par with Twitter and Facebook, was bought by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Yet it suffered through years of mismanagement and declining growth, barely changing its initial product. It finally sold again in 2019 to WordPress for just $3 million.

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the American public became slightly more aware of how we were being manipulated by algorithmic feeds. Democrats couldn’t understand how anyone had voted for Trump, given that their Facebook and Twitter feeds didn’t promote as many posts from the other side of the political spectrum, creating one of Eli Pariser’s filter bubbles, a digital echo chamber. Online, they lived in an illusion of total agreement that Trump was ridiculous. At the same time, his supporters were surrounded by content that reinforced their own views—another form of homogeneity. Recommender systems had sorted the audiences into two neat categories that didn’t need to overlap, whereas in a human-edited newspaper or television news program, some mutual exposure might have been more likely. More likely but not guaranteed: traditional media can be biased into homogeneity just as well, as in The New York Times’s unwillingness to cover the possibility of a Trump win.

His campaign bought space for 5.9 million Facebook ads, spending $44 million in the five months before November, many times more than Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which bought 66,000 ads.

The precedent for Section 230 came from two 1990s cases. In 1991, Cubby v. CompuServe began as a conflict between two digital media companies. Robert Blanchard’s Cubby Inc., publisher of a news service called Skuttlebutt, sued Don Fitzpatrick’s publication Rumorville because it had published an article that defamed Skuttlebutt. Rumorville was available on an online forum hosted by CompuServe, an early provider of home Internet that was a major force in the 1990s. Blanchard sued CompuServe itself as well as Fitzpatrick. The US District Court concluded that CompuServe was only a distributor, not a publisher of the allegedly defamatory content. In other words, as a host, CompuServe acted more like a newsstand or bookstore. It didn’t control the contents of what got published, just how the material reached consumers.

One of Prodigy’s users published defamatory comments on the forum, targeting the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, Inc., and its president Daniel Porush. This case would seem similar to Cubby v. CompuServe, but Prodigy was more involved in the actual content that was published on its service. The forum had rules about what could be posted and imposed moderation systems, including automatic filtering and human moderators. The court determined that in this context, Prodigy was a publisher, not a distributor, and so was legally responsible for the material on its site. “Prodigy is clearly making decisions as to content…and such decisions constitute editorial control,” the court decision read. Prodigy requested a dismissal of the case, based on the precedent of Cubby v. CompuServe, but to no avail.

In May 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the tech companies were not liable, and upheld the strongest interpretation of Section 230 once again.

millennials in the late 1990s and early 2000s had online forums and MP3 piracy. These required much more labor to find what you like and consume it than the frictionless avenues of algorithmic feeds. While avoiding that labor may be convenient, it also makes our personal tastes flimsier, less hard-won.

but when I wanted to find more complex storytelling than its endless adolescent battles, I had to go online. I found forums where much more experienced anime fans debated their favorites, not in order to gain followers or monetize their expertise as on today’s platforms, but out of personal passion. Those forums were “communities of consumption,” a term that academics have used to describe the diverse groups of people that congregate online around a particular shared pursuit, whether swapping product tips or discussing avant-garde literature.

Years later I discovered that the show was inspired by Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, originally published in 1985.

I must admit that my admiration for this period is driven in part by nostalgia. We all dream of that period of youth when the self is relatively unformed and encounters with art have a staggering power.

The word’s etymology hints at the importance of curating, not just as an act of consumption, taste displaying, or even self-definition, but as the caretaking of culture, a rigorous and ongoing process.

“the rise of the curator as creator,”

Given the scope of their careers—truly one of the world’s coolest jobs—it is no wonder that the figure of the curator has become a glamorous archetype and a label that others want to latch on to. Even machines are trying to become curators.

DJ kept up his patter, we began noticing a deeper structure. Cavalconte made a kind of daisy chain as one artist covered another: the band Death Cab for Cutie covered Cat Power’s “Metal Heart,” then Cat Power covered Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” then Bob Dylan covered Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” The juxtaposition of covers unveiled links of influence within a realm of singer-songwriters. Each artist was an admirer of the other and brought out specific qualities of their songs that hinted at the artist’s own original musical sensibility as well, like Cat Power highlighting the underrated melody and propulsion of Dylan’s singing with her own smoky, wry voice. Particularly since I was starved for recommendations in the midst of my algorithm cleanse, it made a powerful impression.

The recommendation algorithm is a kind of opponent for the curator, like the steam-powered machine that John Henry raced in the folktale to build a railroad tunnel. The fact that this “thing”—the algorithm—“has now become your friend, your arbiter of taste, it’s gross. I don’t want any part of that; I want a real person, someone to invest in,” Cavalconte said.

“You must get somebody to come on board with the idea that they don’t have control. In fact, the whole point is that you acquiesce to the loss of that control,” Cavalconte said.

In my conversations with curators, I found a tone of caring and caretaking that is missing entirely from massive digital platforms, which treat all culture like content to be funneled indiscriminately at high volume and which encourage consumers to stay constantly on the surface.

You can’t stay in an algorithmic flow state while reading a CD booklet.