Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

You may not use social media, but it’s using you. —Eileen Myles

The message of many things in America is “Like this or die.” —George W. S. Trow

In 1769, a civil servant in the Habsburg Empire named Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen built a device nicknamed “the Mechanical Turk.” It was a gift created to impress the Habsburg empress, Maria Theresa of Austria. Von Kempelen’s nigh magical machine could play and win a game of chess against a human opponent simply by means of internal clockwork gears and belts.

So befuddling was von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk that it traveled internationally, matching up with the likes of Benjamin Franklin in 1783 and Napoleon Bonaparte in 1809. Both men lost.

What the Mechanical Turk could not actually do, however, was play chess. There was no artificial intelligence driving the machine, no set of gears that mechanically determined its next move. Instead, a short-statured human pilot curled himself inside the cabinet. He was a chess expert who could observe the game by means of magnet-connected markers underneath the board that corresponded to the pieces on top—marking the locations of the pawns, the knights, the king as the game was played. The pilot maneuvered the automaton’s hand by means of levers and strings to grab the pieces and move them, moving the magnets in turn.

(In 2005, Amazon named its service for accomplishing digital tasks, like tagging photos or cleaning data, using an invisible marketplace of outsourced human labor “Mechanical Turk.”)

Algorithmic recommendations shape the vast majority of our experiences in digital spaces by considering our previous actions and selecting the pieces of content that will most suit our patterns of behavior. They are supposed to interpret and then show us what we want to see.

Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day, the technology is both constructed by us and dominates us, manipulating our perceptions and attention. The algorithm always wins.

Each platform develops its own stylistic archetype, which is informed not just by aesthetic preferences but by biases of race, gender, and politics as well as by the fundamental business model of the corporation that owns it.

As the Indian literary theorist Gayatri Spivak wrote in 2012, “Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.”

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.

In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers.

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. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.

The culture of Filterworld is the culture of presets, established patterns that get repeated again and again. 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.

Algorithm as a term simply describes an equation: any formula or set of rules that produces a desired result. The earliest examples come from ancient Babylon, in the region that is now Iraq. Cuneiform tablets, dating back to 1800–1600 BCE, record algorithms for purposes like calculating the length and width of a cistern using its depth and the volume of earth excavated for it.

In 1145, Robert translated The Rules of Restoration and Reduction into Latin. Al-jabr became “algeber,” and al-Khwarizmi became “Algoritmi.” At that time, “algorismus” referred generally to any kind of mathematical procedure using Hindu-Arabic numerals, and those who practiced such an art were called algorists. (That term was adopted by visual artists using algorithmic processes beginning in the 1960s, but it seems apt for anyone working on today’s version of algorithms.) The long arc of algorithm’s etymology shows that calculations are a product of human art and labor as much as repeatable scientific law.

“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.

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” the entrepreneurs wrote in 1998. Yet, in 2000, they launched Google AdWords as the company’s pilot product for advertisers. It is amusing to read their critique today, as advertising now provides the vast majority of Google’s revenue—more than 80 percent in 2020.

This history is also a reminder that recommender systems are not omniscient entities but tools built by groups of tech researchers or workers. They are fallible products.

The advent of Filterworld has seen a breakdown in monoculture. It has some advantages—more than ever before, we can all consume a wider possible range of media—but it also has negative consequences. Culture is meant to be communal and requires a certain degree of consistency across audiences; without communality, it loses some of its essential impact.

Marcel Proust excavated such subtle changes in personal sensibilities against the backdrop of evolving technology. In one passage, Proust’s narrator describes the telephone as “a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream.”

Proust wrote: “Habits require so short a time to divest of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that, not having had my call at once, my immediate thought was that it was all very long and very inconvenient, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint.”

In 1933, the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki memorialized another moment of technological change when he wrote In Praise of Shadows, a book-length essay about electric lights arriving in Tokyo. The metaphorical switch had flipped; within Tanizaki’s lifetime (he was born in 1886), electric lights had gone from unknown in his country to ubiquitous, thanks to the intrusion of the West beginning in 1867, in a wave of increasing globalization and subsequent clashes of cultures. The Westerner’s “quest for a brighter light never ceases,” Tanizaki wrote. In the essay, Tanizaki mourned the unique forms of Japanese culture that the old dimness of candlelight had inspired, from the gleam of gold leaf on a home’s interior sliding door to the murky appearance of miso soup in a darkened restaurant: “Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness.”

“It was not that I objected to the conveniences of modern civilization,” he wrote. As he described in his fiction, the novelist loved movie theaters and modern architecture as much as he appreciated tradition. In Praise of Shadows tracked how technology changed, culture adapted, and personal taste shifted in turn—a pattern we see throughout Filterworld in our own time.

Social networks and streaming services have become the primary way a significant percentage of the global population metabolizes information, whether it’s music, entertainment, or art. We now live in an era of algorithmic culture.

Technology companies have long sought to achieve this massive scale. Monopolistic growth is more important to these entities than the quality of user experience and certainly more important than the equitable distribution of culture through the services’ feeds.

the attitude that if people are using a platform, staying engaged and active, then it counts as successful—no matter what they are doing.

The consequences of such anxiety include “algorithmic determinism, fatalism, cynicism, and nihilism,” de Vries wrote. It builds to a sense that, since we users cannot control the technology, we may as well succumb to the limits of algorithmic culture and view it as inevitable. Many users have already entered such a state of despair, both dissatisfied and unable to imagine an alternative.

“Just as the fear of heights is not about heights, algorithmic anxiety is not simply about algorithms,” de Vries said.

Voltaire wrote, “In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it. It is not even enough to feel, to be moved in a vague way: it is essential to discern the different shades of feeling.” Taste goes beyond superficial observation, beyond identifying something as “cool.” Taste requires experiencing the creation in its entirety and evaluating one’s own authentic emotional response to it, parsing its effect. (Taste is not passive; it requires effort.)

Taste is not necessarily wholly positive or efficient. In 1930 the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo wrote an essay attempting to define a Japanese cultural value called iki, which amounted to a kind of urbane world-weariness, a pronounced ambivalence in all aspects of life. (W. David Marx, an American writer and friend of mine long living in Tokyo, compared it to aspects of New England WASPiness.) Love, money, and beauty could all be as easily lost as gained, and gaining may not always be better than losing. Absence must be appreciated as much as presence. “Iki is understood as a superior form of taste,” Kuki wrote.

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. “Our soul often experiences pleasure when it feels something it cannot analyze, or when an object appears quite different from what it knows it to be.” Understanding this feeling of surprise can take time. Taste is not necessarily instantaneous and changes as you consider and digest the experience of an artwork: “We become aware of the presence of great beauty when something inspires us with a surprise which at first is only mild, but which continues, increases, and finally turns into admiration.”

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.

In some ways, this shift to algorithms is convenient. It’s tiring to interrogate your preferences all the time: researching which new cultural products are available to you; reading magazines or requesting book suggestions from friends; and making decisions about what and where to eat. It’s a luxury form of labor that eighteenth-century French philosophers may have had plenty of time for, but in the much faster-paced contemporary world, most of us cannot afford.

Taste can also feel more like a cause for concern than a source of personal fulfillment. A selection made based on your own personal taste might be embarrassing if it unwittingly clashes with the norms of the situation at hand,

As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction. Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it’s also boring. Over the twentieth century, taste became less a philosophical concept concerning the quality of art than a parallel to industrial-era consumerism, a way to judge what to buy and judge others for what they buy in turn.

As Sandvig wrote: “Over time, if people are offered things that are not aligned with their interests often enough, they can be taught what to want…. They may come to wrongly believe that these are their authentic interests, and it may be difficult to see the world any other way.” The Internet has been increasingly enclosed into a series of bubbles, self-reinforcing spaces in which it becomes harder to find a diverse range of perspectives. This idea is familiar from politics—liberals mainly consume digital content that reflects their beliefs, as do conservatives—but it applies to culture as well. In the matter of personal taste, knowing what you like is difficult, but it’s equally hard to know when you don’t like or don’t want something when it’s being so strenuously presented as “For You.” In Filterworld, it becomes increasingly difficult to trust yourself or know who “you” are in the perceptions of algorithmic recommendations.

We often build our senses of personal taste by saving pieces of culture: slowly building a collection of what matters to us, a monument to our preferences, like a bird constructing a nest.

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.

It was hypnotic, not least because I didn’t have to do anything. I could just lean back and let my brain almost subconsciously decide what was interesting.

One category of video I started to see in my feed was quick, narrative-less montages of everyday life: glimpses of coffee being poured, beds being made, light coming through windows of apartments. These were mostly anonymous, the creator holding their phone in front of them and assembling a portrait of their surroundings. Pop music provided the soundtrack: familiar songs that imbued the moment with a cinematic ambience.

Though it emerged in the twentieth century, one of the most relevant concepts for culture in the twenty-first century is the composer Brian Eno’s coinage “ambient music.” Eno named the new genre in the liner notes of his album Music for Airports in 1978. Ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” he wrote. “An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint.”

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. When we embrace ambience, we lose the meaning of the finite and the discrete.

While personalized feeds create algorithmic anxiety, the only salve they provide is this form of ambient culture, which can feel personal without actually being so—if you don’t have to think too much about the art you’re consuming because it’s so bland, you don’t need to worry about if it truly represents you or not. 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.

In a way, the perfect generic café was like the blank space of a fresh Word document or a website background: what filled it was what you projected upon it.

Just as early Western coffee shops in the seventeenth century provided a venue for the proliferation of democratic and egalitarian ideas, by mingling different classes in one physical space, the cafés of the 2010s also created a form of social organization. They offered a casual gathering point for the growing economy of “gig workers” and digital creative laborers, people whose schedules didn’t align with the usual nine-to-five of the traditional office, and who lacked the infrastructure of an office entirely.

I remember feeling bemused at how easily I could consume K-Pop, as smoothly as watching any American music video. It was thanks to YouTube that the experience was so frictionless, and due in part to the platform’s algorithmic recommendations that so many people saw it. (Remember that in Filterworld, attention begets attention.)

In 1989, the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells conceived of the “space of flows,” which he defined as “the material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity,” as he wrote in a 1999 article. In other words, Castells argued, electronic telecommunications infrastructure like the Internet enabled shared culture to be collectively developed across distances rather than relying on physical proximity. The culture that formed was the same across the disparate places that the telecommunications networks covered. It was a departure from physical geography, which Castells labeled the “space of places.”

I referenced one of Spivak’s aphorisms in this book’s introduction: “Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.” We talk about politics, culture, and travel becoming globalized, but on a more fundamental level, Spivak is correct that what really flows across the planet are various forms of money and information: investments, corporations, infrastructure, server farms, and the combined data of all the digital platforms, sluicing invisibly like wind or ocean currents between nations. We users voluntarily pump our own information through this same system, turning ourselves into flowing commodities, too.