Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

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.”