‘Filterworld’ is Kyle Chayka’s term for the systems of algorithmic recommendations that make up an ever greater part of contemporary life. In this collection of determining feeds we find Google, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and many more. Taken together, they make up a high-powered and hugely influential complex of dynamic softwares, subtly and unsubtly shaping the behaviours and preferences of their billions of users. Building on a decade of writing about internet-driven phenomena and trends, most recently in a monthly column in The New Yorker, Filterworld is Chayka’s attempt to understand how modern life is regulated, distributed and determined by these feeds. It is a book about the consequences of this development, especially in the area he calls ‘culture’ – a broad term that here encompasses music, visual art, literature, film, architecture, landscapes, tourism, commerce, you name it. Finally, the book attempts to examine some alternatives to the status quo, on the personal level, as well as on the regulatory stage.
The format of the book is simple. Each of the six chapters features a combination of personal anecdote, basic theoretical research, a little reporting, and a restatement of the book’s core thesis. The writing is casual, unfussy, and often repetitive. It sometimes throws in references to things that have only faint connections to the current point, perhaps because they are popular or merely part of a broader internet discourse. (A glib two-paragraph overview of Sally Rooney’s novels, mysteriously linked to ‘the rise of the influencer’, may be the most egregious case of this.) Chayka has the magazine writer’s tendency to bolster his thoughts with shallow references to weighty theorists: Spivak, Bourdieu, Agamben, McLuhan, Augé – all are dropped into the text with a couple of short quotes before quickly being left behind. Interviews with relevant or representative people are scattered throughout the book too: musicians, influencers, curators, CEOs. A profusion of personal anecdote then builds on top of this vague and at times creaky foundation, relying on Chayka’s gormless accounts of world travel and Netflix binges to supply the book with some personality. The resulting stories are often comic, and occasionally pathetic, though that may not always be their aim. For instance, travelling to Iceland for work in 2019, he is disappointed by the nondescript accommodation he finds:
I stayed in an Airbnb rather than a hotel, selecting an apartment in the small stretch of downtown Reykjavík. Through the Airbnb search function I made sure the apartment was close to an industrial-chic coffee shop called Reykjavík Roasters, which I had identified in advance on Google Maps. The Airbnb was modelled on an industrial loft, with floor-to-ceiling windows opening to a view out over the miniature skyline. For decor, the identity-less apartment had a huge print of a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge, which made me feel like I hadn’t gone anywhere after leaving New York. Even though I had selected for that kind of aesthetic, the standardisation seemed excessive for one of the more physically isolated places in the world.
It is genuinely difficult to know what to make of a story like this. No one forced him to book an Airbnb, much less one close to the hipster coffee shop in a European capital. I can only assume he saw some photos of the place before he booked it. What exactly were his expectations? He made no attempt, as far as the reader can tell, to secure any other kind of outcome. (I recall a famous line from The Simpsons, now a well-circulated meme: ‘We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.’) As an insight into the claimed scourge of platform-driven, globalised tourism, it does little to endear Chayka to the reader; instead, his entitlement makes him seem part of the problem. Lengthy rumination on the ‘generic coffee shop’ (white tiled walls, industrial chic furniture, many laptops on tables – a global phenomenon central to Chayka’s last attempt at a neologism, ‘Airspace’) only heightens this sense of someone who cannot help but conform to the dominant mode because the dominant mode is actually designed to suit him and people like him. He gets everything he asks for; his disappointment is only that of realising his tastes are generic in the first place:
When I found one of these coffee shops, whether to grab a quick dose of caffeine or work for a prolonged period, I felt comforted and paradoxically at home. I was certain that I could do my best writing there because I was free of distractions and I could rely on having everything I liked, which may not have been true of a less generic, more chaotically designed café. It was also a form of pretension: I felt that I fit in in these outposts. They reflected my tastes and aspirations, as someone who traveled a lot and took a cosmopolitan pride in working everywhere. But identifying with a literally empty symbol also struck me as weird.
Chayka’s attempts to examine that weirdness don’t extend very far, on a personal level at least. That said, Filterworld does go to some lengths to show how the effects of the algorithms are felt IRL (in real life). Patterns of movement within towns and cities, as well as flows of people across borders, are increasingly directed by online recommendations of one sort or another – Chayka’s examples cover the globe from Tokyo, to Budapest and Reykjavík, to New York (upstate and Brooklyn) and his current home of Washington DC. Coffee shops, bars, restaurants; musical trends, hot springs, film production – the current state of each can be meaningfully understood through the algorithmic lens that Chayka applies. The trip to Iceland is perhaps the book’s best example. On the island, Chayka discovers how the prevalence of cheap flights, the actions of the local tourist board, the appearance of AirBnb, and the ruggedly beautiful aesthetics of the island (‘an organic Instagram trap’, as he describes it) combined to reshape the experiences of both those coming as tourists and those who call the island home. That last factor ultimately becomes the dominant one – the tourists are herded from experience to preset experience, ticking boxes on the itinerary, making sure they can answer affirmatively when they get home and someone asks them, did you see X? The generic reproduction of the island’s landmarks on digital feeds entices more people to visit, who are shepherded in turn, and in turn take their own photos. The cycle continues. Chayka does make note of how AirBnb has contributed too, including some comments from an interview with the company’s CEO, Brian Chesky, conducted in 2021:
Users tend to stick to predetermined paths, as Chesky explained: “We have one hundred thousand cities and towns on Airbnb. People don’t keep one hundred thousand destinations in their head; they keep about ten, and the ten are the ones that they see Netflix shows about. Everyone wants to go to Paris because of Emily in Paris.”
Here the connection between the platforms – Netflix and Airbnb – is foregrounded, illuminating the all-encompassing surround of the algorithm that Chayka is aiming to portray.
In an effort to drive home his book’s central argument – that the algorithms are ‘flattening’ human life through their tendency to promote safe, predictable, categorisable experiences – Chayka repeatedly states how iron-clad the ‘rules of Filterworld’ are, how direct the relationship is between causes and effects: ‘The culture of Filterworld is the culture of presets, established patterns that get repeated again and again’; or, ‘The rule of culture in Filterworld is: Go viral or die.’ This lack of flexibility leads to moments of incoherence, not least when Chayka points to examples that somehow buck the Filterworld trend.
“Montesquieu described the slow burn of a powerful artwork, whose elegance might emerge unexpectedly from initial subtlety,” he writes, citing the Frenchman’s An Essay Upon Taste, in Subjects of Nature, and of Art. “For me, it brings to mind Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde.” As Chayka admits, Blonde was probably one of the most highly anticipated and well-received albums of its time, made by an artist with huge critical and popular appeal – a major popular masterpiece of the early twenty-first century, a bestseller.’ Chayka suggests that, because the album is somewhat abstract, not merely a collection of straightforward pop bangers, its success was achieved in spite of the platforms so hell-bent on promoting mediocrity and instant gratification: ‘the album and the musician alike,’ we’re told, ‘didn’t play by the rules of algorithmic feeds.’ Soon after, Chayka sings the praises of a certain novel, the kind of thing that in his view stands little chance of finding an audience in the age of Instagram and Goodreads: ‘There are plenty of experiences I love a plotless novel like Rachel Cusk’s Outline, for example – that others would doubtless give a bad grade. But those are the rules that Filterworld enforces for everything.’ It is baffling that Chayka would choose as his rule-breaking (and auto-affirming) models a hugely successful album that received immediate acclaim across both the traditional and social media and a bestselling book that was for a time a ubiquitous presence on Twitter and Instagram, boasting a clean, minimalist cover that practically begged to be photographed.
If both apparently difficult or subtle or inscrutable works succeeded within the algorithmic ecosystem – and they certainly did – what, exactly, about them suggests that Filterworld’s rules are clearly defined or effectively enforced? Does it not suggest exactly the opposite of Chayka’s point – that the algorithms are primed to exploit difference and novelty, to latch onto any hint of potential appeal determined by an unseen and unknowable ocean of statistics, and that this appeal is founded on a reactive, two-way relationship between the user and the platform? I don’t mean to defend the algorithms here – I am just saying that they (and ‘we’) are a lot more flexible, multi-determined, and complex than Chayka’s argument admits. They are harder to analyse or control precisely for that reason, even for those who design and operate them. (I don’t buy Chayka’s assertion that ‘a company like Facebook is wholly in control of their algorithmic systems’.) And in his readiness to offer up examples of his own refined taste, evidently superior to whatever the algorithm provides, he only shows what little difference such individualised cultivation actually makes. This results in some laughable self-owns: McNally Jackson, a large independent New York bookstore, becomes ‘the pinnacle of human tastemakers’, while a journey to MoMA is likened to ‘a medieval peasant traveling to a cathedral’. Or take the favourable comparison of Sex and the City to Emily in Paris: “Bradshaw’s role as a writer made her a productive part of culture: she was constructing a particular personal philosophy of life and love. Emily, by contrast, is simply a professional consumer.” I couldn’t help but wonder, is getting $4 a word at Vogue really more noble than doing sponsored posts on Instagram?
Joking aside, Filterworld’s concern with algorithmic recommendation systems is well-founded. The frustrating thing is just how obvious such a concern is – there is practically no internet user who doesn’t share it. Complaints about ‘the algorithm’ have been a mainstay of all social media since ‘the algorithm’ became a thing. The increasing presence of algorithmic recommendation systems in everyday life has been studied and discussed intensively by a vast cohort of technologists, critics, industry analysts, artists and academics, particularly since the appearance of Facebook’s News Feed in 2006. Facebook itself has been publicly researching the effects of that feed – the filter bubble phenomenon – since at least 2010. There have been numerous popular, and even best-selling, books about the subject in the last twenty-five years. In short, there is a well-established and comprehensive literature available on the subject; Filterworld concentrates some of that thinking with the aim of making it accessible for a general reader but adds little enough to it. Instead, the additional, more personal element with which the book attempts to elevate this common set of concerns is taste. And, as we’ve glimpsed already, this is where the author really gets into trouble.
One of Chayka’s tics as a writer is an untroubled reliance on a ‘we’ that seeks to genially collectivise his limp critical observations: ‘The recommendations, such as they are, don’t work for us anymore; rather, we are increasingly alienated by them.’ Who is this ‘us’? It is never exactly stated. This is tiresome for stylistic reasons – as a reader, I don’t want to be so smoothly absorbed into the author’s worldview – but also worrying as an indication of Chayka’s somewhat blinkered and partial vision of what it is to participate in cultural life of any kind. ‘The advent of Filterworld has seen a breakdown in monoculture,’ he writes. ‘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.’ It may be unfair to pick a fairly innocuous passage out of context like this, but it contains a couple of tropes that make it representative of patterns found throughout the book.
First, as above, it is taken for granted that there is a ‘we’, and that our desire is to ‘consume culture’. These two words – consume and culture – appear together countless times in Filterworld, a dichotomous repetition that implies a conception of ‘culture’ as something that is produced in one place and time, by one group of people, and ‘consumed’ by another group, in another place and time. There is an impoverishment here not just of the language used to discuss what it is people do when engaging with works of art (or entertainment, landscape, coffee, or any of the other ‘culture’ to which Chayka refers), but also the nature of how that ‘culture’ is created. To the first point, it would be just as accurate to say that I am consumed by culture, as in: overtaken, unmanned, remade; or to say that I live with it, that at any time I am surrounded and accompanied by the ghosts of its artefacts and the promises of its future; that I am shaped by both the submission to and rejection of its practices; that I rejoice in it; am disciplined, mirrored, freed by it. And so on. In any case, ‘consume’ cannot do the heavy lifting Chayka asks of it here, and the way the phrase crumbles under that pressure is revealing of a diminished sense of both linguistic ambition and aesthetic possibility – a disintegration that mirrors the technology-driven reduction of all creative work to ‘content’, a process that Chayka references without ever reflecting on how it might affect his own use of language.
To the second point, how ‘culture’ is created: today, what counts as culture is produced by a broader and more diverse group of people than ever before, working across a more diverse range of fields and forms; people who are always both ‘creators’ and ‘consumers’, mostly working within niche communities of shared concerns and references, who may or may not have any expectation of, or interest in, being recognised outside of that niche. (This is as true of the kind of ‘highbrow’ art that Chayka valorises – modern art or architecture, say – as it is of Instagram users, YouTubers, or the meme-slinging forum-dwellers of Reddit, Discord, and 4Chan.)
This diversity of both production and reception speaks to the other major problem in the passage above: the trite assertion that ‘culture is meant to be communal and requires a certain degree of consistency across audiences’. With the slight exception of a passage on influencers, how these cultural communities are formed is a question dishearteningly beyond the reach of this book, as is the character of their relationships to the ‘culture’ and to each other. Such a question would seem to be among the most pertinent in any discussion of how technological forces are distorting the cultural field, and consequential too for articulating any potential forms of resistance to that influence. This is a failure of vision that echoes throughout Filterworld.
Take another particularly enlightening paragraph:
Today, it is difficult to think of creating a piece of culture that is separate from algorithmic feeds, because those feeds control how it will be exposed to billions of consumers in the international digital audience. Without the feeds, there is no audience – the creation would exist only for its creator and their direct connections. And it is even more difficult to think of consuming something outside of algorithmic feeds, because their recommendations inevitably influence what is shown on television, played on the radio, and published in books, even if those experiences are not contained within feeds.
It is unnecessary to unpack again the linguistic sterility of a phrase like ‘creating a piece of culture,’ but we can look instead at how that formulation is connected to the idea that ‘without the feeds, there is no audience’. What does the apparent difficulty of either ‘creating’ or ‘consuming’ culture outside of those feeds actually imply? I don’t doubt the pull of the feed – there is of course a powerful incentive to distribute one’s work that way, and to use the various feeds to encounter unfamiliar work. But it seems a leap to suggest that such work is therefore made to be ‘exposed to billions of consumers in the international digital audience’. It is a fallacy to suggest that such an undifferentiated audience exists and is reachable, a fallacy propagated first and foremost by the platforms whose algorithms Filterworld is criticising. (This is not the only time Chayka implicitly accepts the platform’s framing and fails to offer an alternative perspective.) Equally, it is absurd to suggest that most, or even much, art is created for such an audience: in fact, from where I’m standing, segmentation is becoming more and more the order of the day. The mainstream – those at the level of Christopher Nolan or Taylor Swift – may aim to reach and please as large an audience as possible (and even then, in a very deliberate and strategic fashion), but for the most part work is created for specific audiences, with specific tastes and specific understandings of what ‘culture’ is and does and can be. This can manifest as anything from canny triangulation to wilful ignorance of whatever is outside one’s personal obsessions; wherever they are on that spectrum, relatively few artists or ‘creators’ seek out the ‘billions of consumers’ notionally waiting to consume their work.
Finally on this point, to suggest that it is nowadays even slightly difficult to consume something outside of the feeds is ridiculous. Only the most incurious consumer could possibly think so when the amount of available information regarding the long history of art and cultural production has never been so high. It is as if Chayka has forgotten that one piece of work leads on to many others, and that no artist has ever been an island. It takes little more than opening Wikipedia or Discogs, or even just thumbing through the bibliography of a book (to mention only the options that don’t require you to put down your phone), to discover new connections, new avenues of exploration and research, a wealth of forms, movements, and shared concerns. This active process of discovery seems quite alien to the lifestyle depicted by Chayka in this book, something he makes out to be unconquerably difficult to pursue:
It’s tiring to interrogate your preferences all the time: researching which new cultural products are available to you; reading magazines or requesting book suggestions from friends; and making decisions about what and where to eat. It’s a luxury form of labor that eighteenth-century French philosophers may have had plenty of time for, but in the much faster-paced contemporary world, most of us cannot afford.
Between the many questionable statements in this particular paragraph (‘luxury form of labour’ – really?), one notices a strange current of passivity that runs throughout the book. It manifests most overtly in Chayka’s proposed solution to algorithmic dominance: human curation. The ‘central dilemma of culture’, he suggests, boils down to a simple question: ‘Should the human fashion editor tell you what to like or should it be the algorithmic machine, in the form of the Amazon bookstore, Spotify feed, or Netflix home page?’ Chayka comes down hard on the side of the fashion editor – and with them, the major museum curator, the radio DJ, the local tour guide, etc, etc. He is at least able to acknowledge the fact that, historically, such reliance on ‘elite gatekeepers’, as he calls them, has led to the development of powerful and exclusionary institutions, ‘riddled with their own blind spots and biases including those of gender and race’. Still though, he’ll take that over the algorithms any day. Most people would surely agree – it is preferable to have more humane ways of circulating information than black-box algorithms. Where one might differ is in what exactly the humans in the loop are doing, or who those humans ought to be. I’m not sure that the fashion editor’s role is to ‘tell you what to like’ – nor is it my desire as a reader that they would. All I’m after is an opinion, an offering: here is what I think, what do you think? Chayka’s writing often collapses this conversational relationship into the one-dimensional ‘consuming culture’ lens outlined above. Relatedly, the identity of the humans in the loop is, for Chayka, a distantly assured meritocracy: those who display the most knowledge, who boast the right qualifications, who have done the work. They will be hired by the cultural institutions – from magazines to publishers to museums to radio stations – to continue telling us what to like. Only the most careful hands should touch the precious treasure that is culture.
This gets us to the nub of Chayka’s argument: ‘the act of putting one thing next to another is an incredibly important one and should be left to people with deep knowledge about or passion for the subject at hand – people who care about the significance of proximity’. Rather than something that is created organically through distributed communities of work-making and meaning-making, something which emerges through an ongoing historical and social practice and is only ever partially captured or understood by those outside of that practice, Chayka’s vision of ‘good culture’ is one that is always-already confirmed by the authoritative institutions he relies on to support and form his own judgement. His investigation into taste does not extend much into the history of how such institutions are formed and supported, much less how they accrue the ‘authority’ he venerates. There is no participatory bent to Chayka’s thought – there is barely even a conversational one – and the need for external validation is a kind of structural weakness in his argument that he cannot seem to overcome. This is what makes it all the more distressing when he extends the remit of taste beyond the realm of the personal.
‘Taste’s moral capacity, the idea that it generally leads an individual toward a better society as well as better culture, is being lost,’ he writes. ‘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.’ The idea that taste has a moral capacity is one that could form a book by itself. (Of course, it has – countless times – but the references to such work are scant in Filterworld.) Here, it is quite difficult to know what exactly Chayka means when he says it. I think it can be understood as a form of consolation: if having better taste leads to a better society, then this self-conscious pursuit of aesthetic correctness is inherently valid, even admirable.
To be forthright, I could not disagree more. Not only because some of the worst people I’ve ever come across have good taste in music, or because some of the best couldn’t tell their Stan Brakhage from their Micheal Bay, but because all of Chayka’s concern about taste still doesn’t stop him from describing Airbnb hosts as being the same as ‘any worker’ – where hosts worry about Airbnb’s search algorithm, artists similarly fret about Instagram’s and musicians about Spotify’s’. Or because, when speaking of the ‘ghost kitchens’set up to service the home-delivery market centred on Uber Eats and Deliver, he says: ‘The food existed as digital content first and traveled through the same channels.’ The neat sentence erases the actual labour – dangerous, precarious, and done largely by immigrants – involved in making the digital food ‘travel’. Clearly, beyond the occasional whispery reference to ‘blind spots and biases including those of gender and race’ (sincere, no doubt, but obligatory and under-examined throughout), there is no political or moral follow-through. ‘Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism,’ he writes – but what then is consumption with taste? (A more ‘authentic’ Deliveroo?) How is it any different? How does it move us beyond capitalism, a goal Filterworld half-heartedly suggests we ought to pursue? What would I personally be willing to do – to give up, to change, to sacrifice – to live outside of Filterworld? None of this is really examined here, much less answered.
In 2017, another neologism-loving online-native writer, Venkatesh Rao, coined the phrase ‘premium mediocre’, to mean a kind of product or encounter that is designed to be both special (as in: standout, cultivated, refined) and normal (as in: average, ordinary, common) at the same time. In his post about the phenomenon, Rao gives many examples – my favourite of which is probably ‘anything branded as signature’, such as the McDonald’s Signature Collection. The term is an attempt to put a name on a practically ubiquitous experience whereby none of the options to hand are actually ‘good’ (because unavailable, or unaffordable), so the best and perhaps ultimately most satisfying compromise is to be found in slight refinement, or rebranding, of what is already familiar. In this way, what one already knows to be not good can be tastefully dressed up to make one feel good, or at least less bad, about consuming such industrially produced schlock in the first place. This lens can be instantly applied to food and drink – brunch and coffee being the most obvious targets – but it works across basically any pattern of consumption. (Another example: the Booker Prize.)
Of course, there is a basic financial incentive to effective differentiation: better margins through branding. If you can produce essentially the same thing and charge more for it, you’re onto a winner. (A lesson Chayka’s ‘generic coffee shops’ learned long ago.) But that only explains the business case for premium mediocre; in attempting to define the attraction for the consumer, who is now paying more money for identical or even inferior commodities, Rao roots his construction of the term in some broad-strokes demography and economic analysis. ‘The very heart of the phenomenon, the sine qua non of premium mediocrity,’ Rao writes, ‘is the young, gentrifier class of Blue Bicoastal Millennials. The rent-over-own, everything-as-a-service class of precarious young professionals auditioning for a shot at the neourban American dream’. For Rao, premium mediocre is a necessary fiction, told by precarious millennial workers to themselves, in order to make bearable their existence. Caught between the all-conquering march of Silicon Valley and Wall Street – the places where modern fortunes are made, in increasingly inscrutable lotteries most people can’t even get close to entering – and the ladder-pulling rentier class who actually own everything, the ‘precarious young professionals’ are essentially faking it until they make it.
Premium mediocre is for those without the means to reliably access the more established forms of luxury, attempting to make their tiny window of opportunity to ascend to financial comfort really pay-off. ‘Premium mediocrity is dressing for the lifestyle you’re supposed to want,’ Rao writes, ‘in order to hold on to the lifestyle you can actually afford – for now – while trying to engineer a stroke of luck.’ Premium mediocre is a front: an evolution of the traditional bourgeois sensibility – a new kind of ‘keeping up appearances’ – driven by the erosion of the economic and social foundations that once supported that class and allowed it to thrive. In an ever more stratified urban environment – when even expensive education and reliable, reasonably remunerative employment is unlikely to be enough to procure more than temporary stability – it becomes important to look like the kind of person money has trickled down to, in order that it might someday do so.
And taste is a key aspect of this. Within this environment, as within bourgeois culture of old, taste is in large part the ability to signal to others that you understand where the line is between what is too highbrow or obscure to circulate as the grounds for an accessible discourse and what is too naff to be taken seriously (even ironically). Good taste then, the kind of taste that a late-era hipster like Chayka (or I) might wish to project, is about striking a balance between up-to-the-minute knowledge about what is cool right now, with an appreciation for the more timeless artefacts of cultural production, the tradition of the liberal arts, the history of the humanities, whatever you want to call it. After all, ‘we’ are not children – we are full-grown adults, approaching forty or beyond it, perhaps with kids of our own. Lacking the energy or the access to persist with the raw trend-chasing of our youth, we wish to move into a more sophisticated, learned stage of our lives. Starved of stable community and meaningful work, we long to find in ‘culture’ (was any word ever so overused?) the authentic, the substantial, the true – all, in short, that we cannot find in daily life. Surrounded by an endless barrage of entertainment, distraction, and discourse – the ‘rivers of shit’, as a friend of mine calls it – certain among us feel a need to show that we recognise and appreciate what is really good.
Filterworld is more revealing as a product of this mindset and culture than it is convincing as a critique of algorithmic influence. So desperate is he to appear tasteful, to be someone in the know and above the algorithm, Chayka becomes unable or unwilling to tease out the connection between his desire for ‘authentic experience’ and the successful commoditisation of that same experience by the platforms he rails against. He brushes right up against it when he notes how ‘identifying with a literally empty symbol’ made him feel ‘weird’, but the insight is never developed – the book never becomes the self-examination it really needed to become. Because it is too easy to criticise the platforms, it is too easy to point out the distorting influence of the algorithms, it is too easy to talk about how movies are bad now – without, at least, being able to examine the contradictions of the inevitable concluding thought: ‘but we watch them anyway’. And here the ‘we’ could be useful, if only Chayka was able to fully – vulnerably, self-reflectively – inhabit his ‘I’. (Instead, the closest we get is a pitiable attempt at quitting social media apps for a few weeks – the miserable and ineffective cold turkey of an addict who doesn’t really want to quit.)
‘There are two forces forming our tastes,’ Chayka writes. ‘The first is our independent pursuit of what we individually enjoy, while the second is our awareness of what it appears that most other people like, the dominant mainstream.’ It seems obvious to me that this kind of binary is unsustainable nonsense, a gross simplification of what it is to be a person in the world. There is surely a large spectrum of experience to be found between what I, as some notionally independent agent, think of as good, and what most other people like. What about the things my friends like? Or my family, or workmates? What about the things I like in certain contexts and not in others? What about things I only enjoy when I’m drunk? What about things I used to like but no longer do, or just like less? What about things I think I will like in the future, but haven’t come to terms with yet? Why are ‘enjoy’ and ‘like’ so central to this idea of taste? Do I have a taste for certain foods in the same way I have a taste for certain painters? How does any of this relate to morality or politics? These questions go unanswered in Filterworld, where the mode of argument is repeating the central point over and over again, rather than reflecting on it, complicating it, or deepening it. Chayka is caught between two poles: wanting, on one hand, the comfort of fitting in and having one’s tastes reflected in the world (one wants to stay in a well-decorated Airbnb next to a Generic Coffee Shop, one wants to listen to the Best New Music), and on the other wanting to be considered remarkable and authoritative because of one’s cultivated sense of taste. In the grand old American tradition, he wants to have his cake and eat it too.
As I read this book, and in the weeks afterwards, I kept circling back to this thought, which comes across as cruel when applied individually but which I mean to use more generally: Filterworld exposes what it is like to exist without a social life. I don’t mean that Chayka has no friends; I mean that, in the contemporary urban American society that he inhabits, there appear to be few bonds or activities which are not mediated by and interpreted through the presence of social technology, with the attendant awareness of being rated or categorised in some way; there is this underlying feeling, all the time, that to live is to be judged. How strange it must be to feel like one’s choices are always up for debate; as if every single thing you do is intended to say something about you, a statement which is open to – and even invites – public discussion. As if, like one giant Generic Coffee Shop, the entire world was nothing more than ‘spaces of consumption, in which members of a certain demographic, who were also very active on the Internet, expressed their personal aspirations by spending money’. In these choppy waters, taste is a stand-in for the ballast of culture – there is no inheritance, no history, no social formation outside of institutions of education and work (which are themselves open to judgement and ranking); there is only the arbitrary self-fashioning of the individual. Do it well, and you might survive; if you’re really good, maybe people will begin to cling to you. Best case scenario, you’ll eventually be plucked to social and financial safety by someone already high and dry. Chayka understands his taste as a way of getting there, of moving beyond ‘premium mediocre’ and into the promised land of ‘tastemaker’. Crucially though, the man is a moralist: he wants what he likes to be what the right kind of people like. The right kind of people are people with authority, the kind of people he’s learned from as he seeks to become that kind of authority himself. After all, as any demagogue knows, culture is a serious business – it should be left to those who really get it.
In the face of algorithmic domination, Filterworld suggests, we must return to the dominations of old – better the devil you know, I guess. But the would-be gatekeepers are themselves influenced and governed by the same mindset that infects the technology they’re meant to oppose. ‘The possibilities that we perceive for ourselves – our modes of expression and creation – now exist within the structures of digital platforms,’ Chayka insists, once again using ‘we’ where he should use ‘I’. Filterworld is a book that skims the surface of a serious problem, but lacks the historical awareness, the depth of research, the political insight and the reflective thinking required to actually shed meaningful light on its subject. Instead, by coming to focus on the question of taste, it inadvertently serves to expose a way of living that epitomises the difficulty of breaking free from the transactional, individualist ideology characterised by the algorithms in the first place. The trap is summed up in a throwaway comment Chayka makes half-way through the book: ‘we ultimately like what is most similar to us’. Now that is something an algorithm would say.
1/6/2024
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture is published by Heligo Books.
