The bookstore selection driven by the average of all of Amazon’s data was curiously homogenous and ultimately boring. It had been aggressively filtered in advance to appeal to me—or at least myself as a generic consumer—with abundant reassurances that other people did like the books on display. But I wasn’t excited or encouraged to page through any of them. Rather, I was overwhelmed, which might be the default state of consumers in Filterworld: surrounded by superabundant content, but inspired by none of it.
