Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

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. This process happens not by force, in the way of a mold stamping metal, but by compliance, as creators voluntarily shape their work to pursue the motivation of algorithmic exposure and access to audiences. This is not to say the creators are cynical; they have few other options, because garnering attention on digital platforms is the most reliable method of earning a living in the culture industries of the early twenty-first-century Internet. What we gain in acceleration—ever more content, ever faster—we lose in individuality and texture, the quality that makes great works of art compelling.