Filterworld Quotes

“Corrupt personalization is the process by which your attention is drawn to interests that are not your own,” Sandvig wrote. The recommendation system “serves a commercial interest that is often at odds with our interests.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“In passively consuming what I was interested in, had I given up my agency to figure out what was truly meaningful to me?”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“if you don’t have to think too much about the art you’re consuming because it’s so bland, you don’t need to worry about if it truly represents you or not.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“In a way, this book is an attempt to recapture recommendations from recommender systems. We should talk even more about the things we like, experience them together, and build up our own careful collections of likes and dislikes. Not for the sake of fine-tuning an algorithm, but for our collective satisfaction.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Algorithmic recommendations are addictive because they are always subtly confirming your own cultural, political, and social biases, warping your surroundings into a mirror image of yourself while doing the same for everyone else. This had made me anxious, the possibility that my view of my own life—lived through the Internet—was a fiction formed by the feeds.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“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.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it. It is not even enough to feel, to be moved in a vague way: it is essential to discern the different shades of feeling.” Taste goes beyond superficial observation, beyond identifying something as “cool.” Taste requires experiencing the creation in its entirety and evaluating one’s own authentic emotional response to it, parsing its effect. (Taste is not passive; it requires effort.)”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“All kinds of cultural experiences have been reduced to the homogenous category of digital content and made to obey the law of engagement, the algorithms’ primary variable. Any piece of content, whether image, video, sound, or text, must compel an immediate, albeit often superficial, response from the viewer. It must make them tap the Like or Share button, or prevent them from hitting Stop or Skip, anything that would interrupt the feed.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“What would I really miss if I didn’t see a dozen photos of a friend’s vacation, or the latest reviews of hyped-up novels, or which viral arguments were dominating Twitter at a particular moment? In the context of my day-to-day, physical life, these bits of content had almost no impact. I feared the loss of some connection, but that connection is, after all, more ambient and less direct than chatting with neighbors when I walk my dog.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“My phone was glued to my hand as a tool to soak up any spare second of nonstimulation.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Frictionlessness is always the Filterworld ideal—as soon as you slow down, you might just reconsider what you’re clicking on and giving your data away. “Friction allows people to think about their actions,” she continued, a point that applies just as well to Spotify radio or the TikTok feed. If you think too much, you might stop.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Already, when Facebook bought Instagram, it felt as though the walls of the Internet were closing in a little tighter around us users. The broad expanse of possibility, of messiness, on a network like Geocities or the personal expression of Tumblr was shut down. Digital life became increasingly templated, a set of boxes to fill in rather than a canvas to cover in your own image. (You don’t redesign how your Facebook profile looks; you just change your avatar.) I felt a certain sense of loss, but at first the trade-off of creativity for broadcast reach seemed worthwhile: You could talk to so many people at once on social media! But that exposure became enervating, too, and I missed the previous sense of intimacy, the Internet as a private place—a hideout from real life, rather than the determining force of real life. As the walls closed in, the algorithmic feeds took on more and more influence and authority.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Online, users are often insulated from views and cultures that clash with their own. 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. We users have less chance of encountering a shockingly new thing and deciding for ourselves if we like it.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Over the twentieth century, taste became less a philosophical concept concerning the quality of art than a parallel to industrial-era consumerism, a way to judge what to buy and judge others for what they buy in turn.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“When recommendation algorithms are based only on data about what you and other platform users already like, then these algorithms are less capable of providing the kind of surprise that might not be immediately pleasurable, that Montesquieu described. The feed structure also discourages users from spending too much time with any one piece of content. If you find something boring, perhaps too subtle, you just keep scrolling, and there’s no time for a greater sense of admiration to develop—one is increasingly encouraged to lean into impatience and superficiality in all things.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Algorithmic anxiety is something of a contemporary plague.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argued in his 2017 book In the Swarm, the sheer exposure of so many people to each other online without barriers—the “demediatization” of the Internet—makes “language and culture flatten out and become vulgar.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“We become aware of the presence of great beauty when something inspires us with a surprise which at first is only mild, but which continues, increases, and finally turns into admiration.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“The advent of Filterworld has seen a breakdown in monoculture. It has some advantages—more than ever before, we can all consume a wider possible range of media—but it also has negative consequences. Culture is meant to be communal and requires a certain degree of consistency across audiences; without communality, it loses some of its essential impact.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Taste’s moral capacity, the idea that it generally leads an individual toward a better society as well as better culture, is being lost. Instead, taste amounts to a form of consumerism in which what you buy or watch is the last word on your identity and dictates your future consumption as well.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Simply by trying to make a living or entertain ourselves we accelerate the flattening.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Online appearance outweighing almost all else is a law that now applies to all kinds of businesses.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Our phones and feeds absorb so much of our attention and dominate so many of our preferences that stepping out of their conveniently predetermined paths and choosing an experience not immediately engaging feels somewhat radical. This applies to fashion choices as well as food, which television shows we watch, which books we read, which furniture we buy, where we travel.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“this system was so entrenched, publication websites had dismantled their home pages to the point that they often featured only a few stories on the screen at a time, with a maximum of images and a minimum of text. When I browsed them, I felt like an unexpected visitor, someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. The sites all but shouted: Don’t you know you’re supposed to be on Facebook or Twitter!?”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“When we hesitate before swiping to skip a TikTok video, that data is considered. Like junk food or addictive substances, humans might simply need help with choosing the mixture of content they consume. As Keller told me: “We click with our monkey brains, the same ones that cause us to buy a candy bar in the checkout line at the grocery store.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“The atmosphere was such that anyone could be creative: You didn’t need to consider yourself an artist to make a drawing, play an instrument, or write a poem. Nor did anyone else, no matter their level of expertise, have the authority to judge whatever you made as artistically unworthy. (The opposite of the Internet, where everyone feels entitled to critique or comment.)”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Or perhaps social media belongs in the category of vice industries, with tightly regulated limits meant for the safety of individuals who might otherwise abuse it. After all, so many users are addicted.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“The biggest incumbent could be threatened by a tiny newcomer, simply because of a slight technological evolution—like Snapchat’s ephemeral posts or TikTok’s wholly algorithmic feed—or the unavoidable fact that people simply get bored, and technology, like fashion, must constantly change to maintain its hold over its users’ attention.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Already, when Facebook bought Instagram, it felt as though the walls of the Internet were closing in a little tighter around us users. The broad expanse of possibility, of messiness, on a network like Geocities or the personal expression of Tumblr was shut down. Digital life became increasingly templated, a set of boxes to fill in rather than a canvas to cover in your own image. (You don’t redesign how your Facebook profile looks; you just change your avatar.)”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

“Before it took over the world, social media was once a niche itself, an obscure hobby. That sense of disconnection slowly changed and dissipated as the Internet became inextricable from “real life.”
― Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture