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Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
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About This Book
A history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself. From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we've grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal. This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called "Filterworld." Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question. In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet? To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.
Reviews
"Chayka's basic thesis is hard to dispute ..."
"What's less convincing is the underlying assumption powering Chayka's argument: that mass culture is inherently more varied when it is mediated primarily through human tastemakers...While he makes obligatory references to the Whiteness and the maleness of the elite that used to have the strongest hand in determining artistic merit, he still venerates many of its representatives, even as he handwaves away their blind spots ..."
"Here, his prescriptions are much less satisfying."
"Chayka's valid analysis of how algorithmic curation dulls our creative agency overlaps messily with the centuries-old anxiety of the aesthete within modernity, where all subjective opinions are ultimately equal, never more-so than in the marketplace."
"The simplest way to think of them is as machines designed to be very good at guessing the order of things based on the libraries of information they've been trained on ..."
"It makes algorithms, those uncanniest of influencers, legible."
"Near the end of the book, when Chayka narrates his temporary break from social media and Spotify, his reflections feel trite, not revelatory: Yet another extremely online Twitter user has discovered the value (and limits) of logging off ..."
"Fans of the burgeoning genre of Big Tech ethnography will appreciate Chayka's astute historical analysis and philosophical rumination on the subject, all 'filtered' expertly with his own biography as a millennial who grew up amid the explosion of the socially fixated web."
"An important book about how to get out of the algorithmic box and make your own decisions ..."
"But it also made me feel old."
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