Fluxblog 462: The Empty Snobbery of FILTERWORLD

You can't blame everything on The Algorithm.

A few years ago I wrote about “cultural cartography,” an idea that floated through BuzzFeed during its peak era that boils down to the notion that all forms of content have utility, though a lot of the time the audience decides what that utility will be when and how they share it or make it part of their identity. The New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka’s new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture has a clear and specific utility, which is to reassure people who identify as having an interest in culture that the reason they feel disconnected from or disappointed by contemporary culture is that recommendation algorithms have compromised everything. It’s a book that exists to give people who have minimal active engagement in culture – but still perceive themselves to be tasteful – an easy way to write off contemporary culture completely. Ah, it’s all ruined by The Algorithm! It’s all bland and bad now! It’s a book that gives its readers permission to give up on the arts. 

The thing I find galling about Filterworld is Chayka’s consistent surface-level critique, and obstinate refusal to push back against any of his many facile assumptions. I’ll get to his commentary on The Algorithm’s impact on the arts in a bit, but I’d like to start with his section about the homogenization of hipster coffee shops around the world. This is the part of the book much of the mainstream media has jumped on in interviews with him, and it’s the part that best conveys the shallowness of his thinking. 

Chayka makes a case that a particular recognizable coffee shop aesthetic has propagated around the world, and this is a direct result of years of algorithmic feeds creating an expectation of a particular vibe and experience, which cafes must conform to in order to optimize for the market. He extrapolates from there to other spaces connected to algorithms and apps, like how people decorate Airbnbs. I think Chayka is essentially correct to come to this conclusion, and I don’t think he’s wrong to resent the sameness even though he admits he seeks out this sort of coffee shop because it’s very much his vibe. But here’s a list of relevant questions he simply does not ask or engage with in any way when writing about this topic: 

1. But what about all the other forms of restaurants, bars, and cafes that conform to particular aesthetics? Dive bars, pubs, fern bars, funky 90s coffee shops, the classic Vienna coffee house, the New York-style pizzeria, the French bistro, and so on? All of these emerged long before algorithms, but are an aesthetic template that have existed for a long time and can be found all over the world.

2. And what of chain stores and chain restaurants? Isn’t decades of acclimation to the practices of corporate chains something that laid the groundwork for globalized sameness? 

3. Chayka talks about his dawning realization that all these coffee shops around the world were becoming essentially the same because he observed it firsthand thanks to the privilege of traveling the globe as a journalist. But what about people who don’t or can’t travel often? Why can’t they enjoy a similar experience Chayka has with a series of Bushwick coffee shops in their neck of the woods without him getting pissy about it? 

4. Has he considered that the actual impetus for coffee shop owners embracing this aesthetic is that it has proven very successful attracting Millennial yuppies like Chayka at home and abroad? He admits he is the target market for this, but he never interrogates why shop owners would be financially incentivized to cater to his upscale (yet normie) taste. 

5. Why is it so offensive to Chayka that people find and take ideas from Instagram, but there’s no mention of people in the past doing the same thing with television, movies, magazines, and newspapers? Why would you pretend none of that ever happened? We’ve had mass media for a long time now. 

Chayka never addresses similar cultural mechanisms from the past because it would puncture his thesis. His rhetoric is relentlessly on-message and never for a moment considers alternate possibilities. His ideas are mostly flimsy and easily countered, so he takes up a lot of space in the book vamping on Wikipedia-level history lessons about the history of algorithms, referencing or regurgitating articles from the recent past you’ve probably already read if you’re inclined to buy this book, and in the case of the coffee shop chapter, describing these spaces in detail with a tone not far off from Patrick Bateman showing you his CD collection. 

The bulk of Chayka’s book is spent fretting over the eradication of “personal taste” as a result of The Algorithm, especially those created by Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon. I have no desire to defend these companies, and agree with the general notion that they have impacted how art is consumed and created in this era. But it should be noted that the history of the arts is a history of how a succession of technological advancements and shifts in modes of consumption has shaped what art is made and how it is experienced. Chayka does not acknowledge this at all. You can discern from what he writes that he romanticizes certain methods of recommendations – the staff picks at the fancy bookstore McNally Jackson – and that he generally favors a top-down media model in which experts tell us what’s good and what’s bad, not exactly a surprising point of view for a writer employed by Condé Nast. But the peculiar thing is that while Chayka is white knighting the very concept of having taste, his own taste as he expresses it in the book is rather ordinary and his relationship with the arts comes across as remarkably passive. 

I think this book would work a lot better if it was written by a real crate-digger type, someone who spends a lot of time and energy exploring culture. The snobbery at the core of the book’s argument would come across as earned. But from my own experience being exactly that sort of person, I recognize how lazy Chayka is in engaging with the arts in general and the arts as they are presented on these platforms in particular. What’s worse, his whole book insists that everyone else is just as passive as he is, and that’s why culture is being destroyed by The Algorithm. There were probably around 100 times through this book I wanted to scream “SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, KYLE!” 

One of the anxieties Chayka returns to a few times over in the book is the question of “is my taste actually my own?” It’s a mix of paranoia and insecurity that tips over into low-stakes existential dread. He wants to be this cool, cultured guy but he doesn’t want to put in the work. He spends the entire book in anguish thinking that so many people have been forced to be exactly the same by sinister math equations, but I think he’s mostly upset that he’s the kind of person who only really wants to get handed things to consume. He’s blaming these outside forces for his own somewhat typical attrition of interest as he ages. He’s ultimately just mad that the robots aren’t better at telling him what to do. 

Because Chayka only engages with platforms on a surface level and is seemingly unwilling to dig deeper into any assumption he makes, he writes a lot of easily refutable statements, especially about Spotify.  There are millions of musicians he could have talked to for this book, but he only really talks to Damon Krukowski, the former drummer of Galaxie 500 who’s carved out a niche for himself as The Indie Musician Guy Who’s Always Writing About Hating Streaming. Krukowski’s critiques aren’t off-base, but he’s something of a broken record and you’d only interview him at this point if you just need him to say the same old things and not say anything that complicates the messaging of your book. 

Krukowski’s main role in this book is to bring up how Galaxie 500’s “Strange” has become their most popular song on Spotify due to algorithmic recommendations, which Krukowski finds annoying because he thinks it’s an outlier in the band’s catalog. Fair enough, a lot of people don’t like their most popular song for whatever reason. But the thing that’s mind-blowing here is that Chayka presents the notion of an artist’s most popular song being somewhat unrepresentative of their catalog to be something unique to streaming platforms. “With modern-day algorithmic recommendations, artists have much less choice in what becomes popular and even less control over the context their work appears in,” Chayka writes, seemingly oblivious to the long-standing concept of a One-Hit Wonder, or really, devoid of any knowledge of the history of the music industry. As with the cafes, history is simply not a factor in Chayka’s rhetoric. He never sees continuity with previous events and paradigms, or considers that while technology shifts, a lot of basic things about audience consumption and the culture industry stay more or less the same. 

He also never brings up the possibility that many artists have benefited enormously from algorithmic recommendations, and that some artists may have the reverse experience of Galaxie 500 on the same platform. One example of the latter is The Kills, whose top song on Spotify by a large margin is “Future Starts Slow,” which I think is a perfect encapsulation of their distinct aesthetic and lyrical perspective. As for the former, there’s no shortage of artists who basically won lotteries and have successful careers because algorithms effectively brought them to people who’d want to hear them. I think of the independent psychedelic band Crumb, who owe a lot of their career to YouTube’s algorithm, or the dreamy slowcore act Cigarettes After Sex, who’ve had enough long term traction on Spotify to make them an arena act without becoming famous. And then there’s entire genres like reggaeton, K-pop, and Afrobeats which are now massively popular in the United States in large part thanks to streaming flattening the world and building up superstars like Bad Bunny, BTS, and Burna Boy who are simply too big to leave out of the mainstream, with several other artists in the same lanes also blowing up in large part because they belong to the same “taste clusters.” I don’t think things would’ve worked out that way at all if left to the old biases of the record industry.

I think besides his own nostalgia for previous personal experiences that gave him the impression he was on some self-directed cultural adventure, Chayka is largely chafing against the notion that according to how algorithms are built, all art has been assigned some sort of utility. Songs for particular moods, movies for specific vibes, tv shows for vegging out, etc. I agree that thinking of art in this way is extremely unromantic, but there’s no getting around that this is and always has been a significant part of how audiences engage with art and how art is made and marketed. The difference is really just that we’ve developed elaborate taxonomies for sorting art, and are using math to help people find what they’re looking for.

Have algorithmic platforms accelerated certain things in culture? Yes, obviously. Has it made some aspects of culture more corny? Of course it has. Has it changed what art is made, and how it’s optimized for a platform? Yes, but the same is true of the transistor radio and the black and white television. People who mostly just take the culture an algorithm tosses at them are not substantially different from people who mostly just absorb whatever happens to be on the radio or on television, except for that the algorithmic model is more personalized and the mechanism of recommendation is essentially democratic.

Ultimately, we’re just reinventing the wheel over and over. There are some genuinely new dynamics created by the technology that drives what Chayka calls Filterworld, but leaving out all the ways it results in behavior that rhymes with previous behavior is intellectually dishonest. But it is effective in telling some people exactly what they want to hear.