Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

The overall digital environment is dictated by tech companies with ruthlessly capitalist, expansionary motives, which do not provide the most fertile ground for culture. While the magazine fashion editor may periodically use their ability to pick out and promote a previously unheard voice, the algorithmic feed never will; it can only iterate on established engagement.

“There’s a pressure to be normal. That pressure is just saying: Be the same, whatever’s familiar to you is safe and somehow makes you feel like part of the group,” Krukowski said. “There’s a horrible vanishing point to that, and that is fascism.”

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.

In so many cases, the culture disseminated through algorithmic feeds is either designed to produce a sensory void or to be flattened into the background of life, an insidious degradation of the status of art into something more like wallpaper.

The flywheel has accelerated even outside of Hoover’s control: “I read other people’s books, and I’m so envious. I’m thinking, Oh my God, these are so much better, why are mine selling the way they are?” she told the Times in 2022.

We users can’t fight against this stultifying environment on our own. Switching between apps and toggling settings can accomplish only so much. To break down Filterworld, change has to happen on the industrial level, at the scale of the tech companies themselves. Decentralization tends to give users the most agency, though it also places a higher burden of labor and responsibility on the individual. It’s also the best way to resist Filterworld and cultivate new possibilities for digital life. But companies are unlikely to embrace decentralization on their own, because it’s usually less profitable. The only path for change may be to force them.

The path of chasing something that will appeal to, or at least avoid offending, the highest number of people leads to homogeneity. And that homogeneity is inevitably cast in the mold of dominant groups: white, cisgender, heterosexual.

The algorithm promises to supplant your taste and outsource it for you, like a robotic limb, but all it takes to form your own taste is thought, intention, and care.

(Contrary to the 2000s hipster credo, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s bad, and obscurity doesn’t make something de facto good.)

In Filterworld, the most popular culture is also the most desiccated. It is streamlined and averaged until, like a vitamin pill, it may contain the necessary ingredients but lacks any sense of brilliance or vitality.

Something new is on the horizon; whether it is a flood of even more artificial content generated by artificial intelligence machines or a renaissance for human self-expression depends on our choices.