Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

In early-twentieth-century Japan, a culture of kissaten emerged: quiet tearooms that served coffee and excluded alcohol, catering to groups of writers and intellectuals seeking calm environments. Coffee had been officially imported to the isolated country only in the late nineteenth century, after it was first introduced by Dutch traders. The Japanese cafés were modeled on Parisian ones—though Paris was a place few Japanese people traveled to at the time, save the wealthy and the academic intelligentsia, who were beginning to read and translate French authors.

Instagram walls or experiences attracted visitors to a locale and kept them engaged by giving them an activity to perform with their phones, like a restaurant providing coloring books for kids.

Posting a photo was a way of showing that you took part in the aspirational international non-place, the always-and-never home of the hypermobile twenty-first-century creative traveler. I appreciated the effect—after all, I had sought out that experience of sameness and achieved it. 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.

Popularity has less to do with how the coffee tastes than how it looks in an Instagram photo. Online appearance outweighing almost all else is a law that now applies to all kinds of businesses: bars, bakeries, fashion boutiques, and even art museums. (In the last case, it helps that galleries were already designed as spaces for looking at stuff, creating a perfect visual framing that could be translated to Instagram.)

Pursuing Instagrammability is a trap: the fast growth that comes with adopting a recognizable template, whether for a physical space or purely digital content, gives way to the daily grind of keeping up posts and figuring out the latest twists of the algorithm—which hashtags, memes, or formats need to be followed. Digital platforms take away agency from the business owners, pressuring them to follow in lockstep rather than pursue their own creative whims. There’s a risk as well in hewing too closely to trends. Cliché is not desirable.

I rely heavily on Google Maps to guide me to my destination, having long since forgotten any driving directions I once memorized. Consulting maps of highways is a distant memory from childhood; I have fully surrendered to automated navigation.

Leaked data from the video-game streaming platform Twitch suggested that only the top .01 percent of Twitch creators were able to earn the median U.S. income.

Digital content promises to be scalable: the same file can serve an infinite number of consumers, as long as the server space exists to host it. Larger audiences don’t change the experience. But physical places are not scalable.

A TikTok video from Santorini in 2023, during a post-pandemic resurgence of tourism, observed that this flattening had only intensified, with crowds lining up on the rooftops. “Just going somewhere to visually consume it because it’s beautiful is not really what tourism should be about,” the poster, Nikki Gibson, said in voiceover.

In ancient Roman gladiatorial contests, the emperor dictated the loser’s fate with a hand gesture, thumbs up for a death sentence and thumb pressed down to the fist for mercy. On Twitter, the assembled users fill the metaphorical colosseum, and we’re all raising our hands in real time to pass judgment with our likes. (Facebook still uses a thumbs-up icon, though it no longer means death.)

Art itself—not to mention artists as people—tends not to be bound by the quest for likability, and yet likes are what the current tyranny of quantification prioritizes most. In Filterworld, what is likable succeeds and what is not likable is doomed to fail, particularly in any arena of culture where audiences are requisite for survival. And because our American cultural landscape is almost entirely subservient to capitalism, that means more or less all of it.

Ninon de L’Enclos was born into a wealthy family in Paris in 1620; after her father was exiled and her mother died, she was left to make a life on her own, and she committed to never marrying. She became a courtesan with a succession of noble lovers, as well as an author and anti-religious philosopher. In one particularly dramatic episode, she broke up with a long-term lover in the countryside and moved back to Paris. Her ex, the Marquis de Villarceaux, promptly moved into a house across the street to spy on her, watching for new visitors. To mollify him, she chopped off a length of her hair to send to him as a parting gift. It worked, but also launched a mania for copycat bob haircuts, called “cheveux à la Ninon,” as Betsy Prioleau recounts in her book Seductress. It was a hairdressing meme from a consummate influencer.

anyone within a TikTok feed appears just as famous as everyone else, another form of flattening. Warhol once said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In 1991, the musician and online blogging pioneer Momus presciently updated the prediction to “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 people.” On social media, that has simply become fact. Every user is famous to their followers.

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.

Janelle became disaffected with Instagram but also didn’t want to switch to newer alternatives like TikTok—a game of hopscotch that is often required to survive in the current influencer economy.

The constant need to figure out the next big social media platform is reminiscent of early silent-film stars trying to make the switch to talkies in the early twentieth century, or theater actors moving to television: not everyone made it, and not everyone’s artistic approach functioned in the new medium.

While the overall industrial-chic vibe of the 2010s that Janelle espoused is still very prevalent, cutting-edge taste has moved on to the messier and more chaotic, even the aggressively inauthentic. Influencers now regularly have millions of followers, a scale at which personal connection is barely possible, replicating the remove of traditional celebrity.

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.

In Filterworld, culture has become increasingly iterative. It’s harder for a creator to go straight to making a movie or publishing a book; she needs to first publish her sample material, describe her vision, and gather an audience online who are engaged fans of her work.

And in Filterworld, making art without the goal of it being consumed is almost unimaginable. It’s the opposite of the way a painter like Carmen Herrera, who didn’t achieve fame until her nineties and passed away in 2022, toiled in obscurity on her minimalist canvases for the better part of a century. Today, it can often feel like there is no creativity without attention, and no attention without the accelerant of algorithmic recommendations.

I decided long ago against fully adapting my voice to the algorithmic feed—or perhaps not decided so much as felt incapable of doing it. I wasn’t cool enough, funny enough, attractive enough, or Machiavellian enough to know exactly which variables to manipulate. My tweets rarely went viral, and I certainly didn’t have enough lifestyle material to fill an Instagram feed. I could never be that kind of influencer.

The instantaneous wave of likes in response to a post helps the recommendation algorithm evaluate which pieces of content should be promoted, but it also gives the creator an unprecedented real-time measure of what resonates with their audiences, as if every thought was gauged by a Nielsen rating viewable on a smartphone. Cultural flattening is one consequence. But the same mechanism is also what makes our public political discourse more and more extreme, because conflict and controversy light up the feed and attract likes in a way that subtlety and ambiguity never will.

Rupi Kaur is the most famous: a Canadian woman born in India in 1992, she has amassed 4.5 million followers by posting brief poems, broken into short lines, fit into the Instagram image square along with her own simple line drawings. The poems are written in a standard serif font and all lowercase, as if dashed off on a phone keyboard—though also in reference to the Punjabi language, which doesn’t have different cases.

It doesn’t hurt that Kaur herself is visually striking: her long face, sharp jawline, and wide, dramatic eyes star in the copious selfies that also fill her Instagram account. In recent years, she has settled into a pattern of alternating between poem-images and self-portraits, most fully posed (rather than the standard casual snapshots), costumed in elaborate high-fashion outfits and makeup. She poses her physical presentation as equal to her art, a conflation that not every creator is capable of or desires to make. (We are all unequal in the very human evaluation of beauty, which is a different kind of algorithm.) Does one have to be attractive to be a successful artist? Of course not, but it helps, particularly in the Instagram era.

There is an element of elitism at play in any evaluation that casts social media as the opposite of art. Not everyone has access to the traditional, more acceptable routes of art making: Ivy League universities, literary magazines, Chelsea galleries. Leveraging a compelling image or Internet presence can be a way to cultivate an initial audience, prove a level of established interest that some artists don’t have to demonstrate, and break into the closed ecosystem.

There’s a homogeneity to the kind of literature that influencers promote, too, narrowing down to the kinds of books that can accelerate through feeds. “The top-selling folks are straight white women writing somehow emotional books: self-help-oriented books, romance, or romance-adjacent,” Depp explained.

High on one wall above the mirrored closet, she taped pieces of paper with a simple message written on them in tall capital letters: I believe in you.

Hallie’s comments made me feel a kind of personal grief: Have I been left incapable of truly thinking for myself, or unwilling to do that creative work without the motivation of an invisible audience? The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has described how people living in post-Internet society may “no longer have an unconscious.”

She explained that not relying on algorithmic feedback and the numbers continually going up actually made her feel like she was creating a more stable base for her creative practice. Trends and platforms always change, but she could be sure she knew where her work was going: “If I adapt to every trend, if I hop on every new platform and try to build a following there, I’m going to be building sandcastle after sandcastle. If the algorithm is failing us now, that means it was never stable. It was like a fair-weather friend.”

There’s little room for considering the specific nature of a given piece of content, since it lacks context and becomes atomized in the overall feed. That means we have also developed expectations about how the content we post travels online—namely, we most often expect it to travel as far as possible. “People have developed a notion not just that they get to speak, but there’s some expectation of where it’s supposed to go,” Gillespie told me. In other words, we have come to expect algorithmic promotion almost as a right.

In 2008, the Wired editor Kevin Kelly famously wrote that a creator needs to find only “1,000 true fans” to fund their work and allow them to make a living—one thousand people who might pay them $100 a year. It’s an entirely different model from the larger digital platforms, where audiences have to be as big as possible. “A thousand customers is a whole lot more feasible to aim for than a million fans,” Kelly wrote. Yet all of these smaller platforms face the temptation of becoming more algorithmic as they try to grow and serve the maximum number of users, creators and consumers alike.

The most powerful choice might be the simplest one: Stop lending your attention to platforms that exploit it. There is a way to do that while continuing to use digital technology, sticking to websites and companies that treat users better. We can return to a more DIY Internet. But the more dramatic option is to log out entirely and figure out how to sustain culture offline once more. The digital identity crisis of the past decade has made change seem impossible. Facebook slowly choked the open Internet like bright-blue digital kudzu. As the platform became inescapable, I felt myself losing interest in it as well, because it’s impossible to serve every purpose at once and remain successful at all of them. If Facebook was everything, it was also nothing, an undifferentiated mass of content. Other platforms decayed in the same way: Instagram under Mark Zuckerberg, Spotify under Daniel Ek, Twitter under Elon Musk. By 2023, social media seems to have entered a new phase in which its downsides are more obvious than its advantages.

Posting online is like the artist On Kawara’s series “I Am Still Alive,” begun in 1969, in which he sent out hundreds of telegrams with the titular phrase, as if to constantly prove it.

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. Surely bingeing on these technologies wasn’t making me any smarter or able to generate more complex thoughts, which was presumably my job as a writer.

My thumb itched for swiping, and my brain went through withdrawals from not having the constant onslaught of information. The symptoms were akin to the physical manifestations of anxiety: nervous twitching, short temper, general discomfort. Far from being relaxed by the change, I was perturbed by the absence. Perhaps I was being dramatic, but the difference was dramatic, too. I had gone from seeing hundreds, or even thousands, of individual bits of information and multimedia a day to just a handful. By cutting out algorithmic feeds, I had stomped on the brake pedal of my digital consumption habits.

In my list of untweeted tweets I instead observed how little the kind of thoughts that get posted on Twitter resemble normal, coherent thoughts, as they are shorn of context and forced to exist as atomized bits of ambient consciousness. (As the saying goes, “Twitter is not real life.”)

But it was the shift in my relationship to photography that was the most striking. Nothing had changed about my iPhone camera, which I still had in my pocket at all times, but without the public venue of Instagram I had much less desire to take photos. The few photos I did take were different, too: they were images that I wanted to capture for myself, more often weirder or uglier than the established aesthetic of Instagram. I took fewer photos at parties and dinners and more of city streetscapes and my neighborhood dog park lit up in the dark, images that wouldn’t have read well in the app’s frame. (Snapshots of my dog did not decrease, however.)

Despite my hesitancy around algorithmic feeds, I could never give up the Internet entirely, because it has brought me too much over my lifetime. Its positives still outweigh its negatives. As it did for Lain, the Internet has defined my life. 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. (A globalized world seems unlikely to ever forgo digital networks again.)

It recalls the term connoisseur. In an art history context, the descriptor dates as far back as the eighteenth century, when connoisseurship referred to amateur collectors who could tell which artist painted a work based solely on looking at it. They sought out the artist’s signature gestures in a given work, which they had studied and cataloged. Connoisseurs developed expert knowledge, largely through the act of consumption. The German Johann Joachim Winckelmann was one such connoisseur; though he was not born into nobility and began his career as a schoolteacher, he became one of the foremost collectors and scholars of ancient Greek and Roman art. His efforts helped form the basis for the discipline of art history.

A lot of human effort is required to create something original, no matter the intended outcome. As my art-critic friend Orit Gat once told me, partly joking but also serious, you should look at a painting for as long as it took the artist to paint it. Flipping through so much incoherently assembled content in our feeds, we don’t have the opportunity to assimilate it, to learn and understand, much less pass on that understanding to others. That encouraged shallowness of consumption contributes to the overall flatness of culture in Filterworld.

Curation begins with responsibility. The etymological ancestor of the word curatore was a term for ancient Roman “public officers,” according to an 1875 dictionary, positions that predated the emperor Augustus, whose reign began in 27 BCE. They managed various aspects of the city’s upkeep: there were curatores of the Tiber River, the purchase of foodstuffs, the aqueducts that carried water into the city, and the hosting of public games. In Latin, curare meant to take care of, and curatio indicated attention and management. Over the centuries, the word’s meaning became less mundane and more spiritual, but still related to caretaking. By the fourteenth century, the noun curate referred to a person working as a religious guide. In the 1662 English-language Book of Common Prayer, a curate was the deputy priest of a parish, guiding his parishioners and looking after the “cure”—care—of their souls. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, curator has specifically described the manager of a museum and its collections, whether artworks or historical artifacts—a steward of objects instead of people.

Beginning in 1932, Philip Johnson, the Museum of Modern Art’s first curator of architecture (a department that his family wealth also funded), was one of the figures responsible for popularizing the aesthetic of modernist design. By showing off the stark industrial furniture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and others, which appeared shocking at first, in the space of a museum, Johnson gradually made it palatable. In the 1960s, the Belgian-born Henry Geldzahler worked as a curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum, gradually focusing on living artists, which was rare at that time for such an institution.

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. Human curation is the expanded and deepened view, and ultimately the more satisfying one.

During his Thanksgiving set, that took the form of adding in a few Taylor Swift songs. The choice of the contemporary pop star was an “ironic brushstroke” amidst the more classic musicians and cover songs, Cavalconte said. (Try asking the Spotify algorithm for irony or humor.)

It’s very possible to be interested in something but not like it, in the case of a difficult piece of music or an abstract painting. A piece of art can provoke you and leave you confused or perturbed but still drawn in. Perhaps more commonly in Filterworld, you can also like something but not find it interesting, as in the case of Netflix’s Emily in Paris: it’s pleasant enough to watch, but when it’s over, the experience immediately leaves your mind like the bubbles effervescing in seltzer.

In the mid-2010s, YouTube’s recommendations began fixating on a Japanese genre called “City Pop,” a nebulous musical movement that emerged in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It began with bands like Happy End, an influential outfit in Tokyo that was the first to make rock and psychedelic-folk music with Japanese lyrics. Happy End didn’t last long, but its members included Haruomi Hosono, who collaborated with many other musicians like Sato and experimented with synthesizers in the more avant-garde band Yellow Magic Orchestra.

In 1977, the critic Tōno Kiyokazu (quoted in an authoritative 2020 paper by the scholar Moritz Sommet) described “City Music” as music with an “urban feeling.” The critic also noted, though, that the term “doesn’t hold any particularly deep meaning.” It is “something that looks like you understand it, but you don’t.” In other words, a certain ambiguity might be part of its nature. It is evasive, reflecting back whatever you project at it.

City Pop was also influenced by another technological innovation: the invention, in 1979, of the Sony Walkman. The device was created because Masaru Ibuka, a former executive of Sony, wanted to be able to listen to long classical music recordings on international flights. So he asked the company to make him a portable music-listening device, which the engineers accomplished by modifying a portable tape recorder. Ibuka liked it so much that he passed it on to the company’s chairman, Akio Morita, who decided to manufacture it.

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.”

In the “Jakarta Night Drive” video, a specific culture has been reduced to a vaporous mood, to be adopted, replicated, and distributed online as fast and as far as possible, attracting shallow engagement that in turn drives advertising revenue for the creator and the platform.