Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture Reviews

• 
  Nathan Shuherk

  This is a perfect pick for a book club. It’s a sprawling look at the impacts of algorithmic supremacy, both through technology and society, that take the reader for an introspective journey into dissecting our tastes, emotions, and inescapable presence on the internet
• 
  Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤

  "Filterworld... a black hole of normalcy.”
  
  I often wonder why it is that algorithms almost never seem to fit me. It doesn't matter what the recommendation or ad is for, I have zero interest in 99% of what is shown to me.
  
  It seems like they work very well for other people. Most people seem to love, or at the very least like, the movies and shows, music, etc that is recommended to them.
  
  I'm left wondering if it's a case of me being either too picky or too eccentric for the algorithms, or if a lot of people just assume they will like/love something because they were told they would and so they end up thinking they liked/loved it.
  
  After reading this book, I think the latter is true. As I learned, algorithms aren't really tailored to the consumer as we assume they are. They're tailored to the priorities of the corporation who owns them, and to the advertisers who are paying them.
  
  It was interesting to read about a guy who set up a bunch of Netflix accounts with each of the "users" watching solely one type of movie or show (romance, comedy, etc). He found that a lot of the same recommendations were in all accounts.
  
  Netflix simply changed the thumbnail to better reflect the user's "preferences''. For instance, all eight 'Fast and Furious' movies were recommended to every single account, though it's clearly not a romance, sports movie, or something a snooty obscure art-house-film-watcher would enjoy.
  
  I found a lot of interesting things in this book, especially for the first half or 2/3 of the book. After that, the somewhat redundant material bored me (for instance, 6 times the generic "instagram coffee shop" was described as having subway tiles on the wall).
  
  I agree with what the author consistently pointed out, that our algorithmically sorted lives are increasingly void of value. We are served more and more of the same - my Facebook feed, for instance. I looked at prescription lenses for Meta Quest 3 a few weeks ago and every other post on Facebook since then has something to do with Meta Quest.
  
  I spend ever less time on Facebook because I see little of interest. You would think those algorithms would learn to stop showing the same shit over and over again as though I have dementia and forget everything in 30 seconds because it's obviously not holding my attention.
  
  BBC, Reuter's, and NPR - the three news sources I use- show me basically the same article over and over and over again once I click on a certain story or topic. It's boring. It'd be like if I only read one genre of book and liked reading basically the same book over and over and over again. Some people seem to like that and that's ok, but I want variety.
  
  "Art" is increasingly dumbed down and reduced to whatever generates more content and spreads the fastest. Many authors are selling books not because they can write well but because they write a lot. It's quantity over quality in filterworld.
  
  "Filterworld culture is ultimately homogenous, marked by a pervasive sense of sameness even when its artifacts aren’t literally the same. It perpetuates itself to the point of boredom."
  
  Living by and for the algorithm is causing more and more users to feel alienated and anxious. It's difficult to find anything but what the corporations want to feed us. "The sameness feels inescapable, alienating even as it is marketed as desirable."
  
  In spite of the occasional redundancy, I thought this book was well-worth my time. I didn't agree with everything the author said but it was interesting nonetheless.
  
  If you're interested in technology and/or how we're being manipulated by corporations, you might also enjoy reading this book.
• 
  Jaylen

  Brilliantly constructed and argued. This is a fascinating and terrifying dissection of the vapidity of culture ruled by algorithms. I loved how this centered on the necessary humanness of personal choice and taste, opposing passive consumption. A book that I’ve been looking for without exactly realizing it! If you’re reading this, you should read Filterworld.
• 
  Cav

  "Algorithms dictate the websites we find in Google Search results; the stories we see on our Facebook feeds; the songs that Spotify plays in never-ending streams; the people we see as potential matches on dating apps; the movies recommended by the Netflix home page; the personalized feed of videos presented by TikTok; the order of posts on Twitter and Instagram; the folders our emails are automatically sorted into; and the ads that follow us around the Internet. Algorithmic recommendations shape the vast majority of our experiences in digital spaces by considering our previous actions and selecting the pieces of content that will most suit our patterns of behavior. They are supposed to interpret and then show us what we want to see..."
  
  Filterworld was a somewhat decent look into the topic, but I felt that the intro was the high water mark of the book. I was excited to start this one and see where the author would take the writing. Although the subject matter is an interesting one, I did not particularly enjoy the meat and potatoes of this book. More below.
  
  Author
  Kyle Chayka is a contributing writer for The New Yorker covering technology and culture on the Internet. His work has also appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper's, among other publications.
  
  Kyle Chayka:
  
  
  
  
  The author gets the writing here off on a good foot, with a very well-written intro that talks about the
  Mechanical Turk. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, I felt that this writing was the high point of the book. TBH; the rest of the book really dragged for me. It could be a subjective thing, as I am very particular about how engaging the books I read are. I felt that the book opened with a bang, and then meandered on somewhat monotonously for the rest of the duration.
  
  He drops the quote at the start of this review in the intro, and it continues below:
  

  "...Today, we are constantly contending with algorithms of all kinds, each one attempting to guess what we are thinking of, seeking, and desiring before we may even be aware of the answers. When I write an email, my Gmail app predicts which words and phrases I am trying to type and fills them in for me, as if reading my mind. Spotify stocks its screen with the musicians and albums it predicts that I am likely to listen to, which I often end up selecting simply out of habit. When I unlock my phone, photos from the past I may want to see—labeled “memories,” as if they existed in my subconscious—are preloaded, as are suggestions for apps I may want to open and friends I may want to text. Instagram offers a mood board of what its algorithm perceives as my interests: top-down photos of food, architecture snapshots, looping clips of prestige television shows. TikTok serves me an inexplicable avalanche of videos of people retiling their showers, and I inexplicably keep watching them, compelled in spite of myself. Surely there is more to my identity as a consumer of culture?"

  
  In this quote, Chayka talks about the title of the book, and its thesis:
  

  "Filterworld, the title of this book, is my word for the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed. Though Filterworld has also changed politics, education, and interpersonal relationships, among many other facets of society, my focus is on culture. Whether visual art, music, film, literature, or choreography, algorithmic recommendations and the feeds that they populate mediate our relationship to culture, guiding our attention toward the things that fit best within the structures of digital platforms. The automated recommendations are filters that both sift what gets attention from what is ignored and subtly warp the appearance of these things, like a photo filter on Instagram, exaggerating some qualities and downplaying others. The cultural successes of Filterworld are obvious. They include phenomena like the countrified TikTok dance that propelled Lil Nas X’s 2018 song “Old Town Road” to global fame; the cliché design trends that plague Instagram, like minimalist interiors and the monotonous sans serif logos that fashion brands have adopted in recent years; and the rage-triggering deluge of meaningless Twitter controversies."

  
  The all-knowing algorithm. If you have used any form of social media in the last ~5-8+ years, then the content you have been exposed to has been fed to you by an algorithm. The author drops this bit of writing:
  

  "...In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data.
  Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations."

  
  Unfortunately, and further to what I mentioned above, I felt that the writing here got more tedious and long-winded as it went. There's a huge chunk of writing in here about how the author likes to go to hipster coffee cafes, and detailed descriptions of these cafes. I was becoming frustrated.
  
  Also, for some reason, the book contains a bunch of irrelevant mindless leftist nonsense. There are derogatory mentions of "white men," "whiteness," and usage of other politically-charged leftist jargon like "marginalized groups."
  
  I'm not quite sure WTF "whiteness" has to do with computer algorithms, or even why the author felt the need to include this type of crap in a book like this in the first place. Even more ironically, we have the author, who is a white man, complaining about white men. How fucking cringey and pathetic...
  
  Sadly, this is a trend that seems to be increasing over time. You can rarely pick up a nonfiction book without reading about "smashing capitalism," the "patriarchy," "whiteness," or a litany of many other bits of tribal jargon that betray the author's ideological possession. Much like an evangelical Christian who never shuts up about Jesus, these people just can't help themselves. God, It's all so tiresome...
  
  
  ********************
  
  I had high hopes for Filterworld. Unfortunately, it did not meet my expectations. I feel like the intro of the book provides ~90+% of its value.
  The book was also way too long. The audio version I have clocks in just shy of 12 hours. At least 30% of the content here could have (or even should have) been edited out without any loss to the overall presentation.
  I would not recommend it.
  2 stars.
• 
  Otis Chandler

  This sounds very relevant to my new project, in which we are trying to curate the internet.
• 
  Bess

  I agree with other reviewers who mentioned that this book feels like multiple contradictory books in one. I think that it's tempting to agree that culture is becoming something more homogenous when drawn into the Stanley cup craze on TikTok, but the author's arguments for homogeneity are underdeveloped and confusing at times. He dwells heavily on the "coffeeshop aesthetic" that many of us associate with hipster coffeeshops and questions how coffeeshops scattered all over have the same look and feel. While I think it seems like an interesting jumping off point on the surface, the answer is probably far stupider-trends and marketing! Trends are nothing new, and they existed long before algorithms were 'telling' us what to like or do. I think the coffeeshop argument is less about algorithms leading to coffeeshops looking the same and more about stacking layers of many things (style, trends, paid marketing, etc) leading to a pervasive feeling of same-ness. The coffeeshop argument also kind of falls apart later in the book when the author talks about how much better indie bookshops are than Amazon. Aren't many of them plagued by the same homogeneity as coffeeshops? I think this book would have been far better as three different articles (or perhaps two different articles and a third opinion piece questioning if we are all becoming more boring and bemoaning how Spotify designs their app). I think the author is coming from a vulnerable place of anxiety and fear about what algorithms are doing to culture, but I really found myself internally screaming 'touch grass!' during sections like the Spotify redesign passage about 25% of the way through.
• 
  Amber

  Although I knew a lot about how algorithms shape what content we consume before reading, this book articulated a lot of the problems I'd been having with online content. It crystallized the reasons why I intensely dislike short-form video feeds, for example. It also explained for me why, say, all the gaming YouTubers play the same games, or all the BookTubers talk about the same books. The idea that we can resist A.I.-generated algorithms or change how the Internet works is rather utopian, in my opinion, but this book made me appreciate and understand things I'd done subconsciously before--like how I limit my social media use and avoid most apps. The approach was well-written and researched, providing some fascinating historical tidbits about the genesis of the way things are now. I found myself thinking a lot after reading, which is what you want after a good nonfiction read. I listened to the audiobook, which was also well narrated. Recommend, if you're at all interested in how social media & technology companies are warping our perception of reality.
• 
  cesar

  ironically the act of writing & rating this book here is both equally for and against the spirit of the book, but it's such a banger I can't help but feel compelled to recommend it to all the pals - especially if you're a regular user of IG/Twitter/Youtube/TikTok
  
  i've been off the worst of these platforms for several months now and it's vindicating to have someone articulate so thoughtfully many of the feelings i've been noticing (mainly in myself) as my brain adjusts to life without addictive algorithms
• 
  Madison ✨ (mad.lyreading)

  4.5 stars. A deep, critical examination into how algorithms have influenced culture, in a way that feels very, very real. Will have you rethinking how you interact with the internet world and how it interacts with you.
• 
  Katie O.

  A right place, right time kind of book for me - also this is the longest book review I’ve ever written but I think it’s worth a least a skim :,)
  I’d been feeling jaded about the internet and how much time I spent on it. This helped me understand why the algorithm was making me feel this way.
  Nothing on these platforms are personal - they will corner you into specific interest categories which prevent users from identifying their own individual tastes. The algorithm will do this for you and it will do it with the shortest and most attention grabbing content. This prioritizes content that doesn’t require complex thinking or allow users the time to sit with the subject. It also propels the homogeneity of culture as creators (myself included) conform to the algorithm in order to make sure their posts perform well.
  
  I found myself noticing other places the algorithm controlled my life. The spotify algorithm usually generated the music I listened to with their auto-playlists and radios. The netflix suggestions that always suggested me romcoms and reality tv. We’ve lost the ability to determine our own interests and connect with art outside of a recommendation system.
  This is an issue because these algorithms are not completely unbiased. These platforms run by large tech companies which prioritize the content most likely to get you to stay on their app. Culture is being flattened by capitalism. Not often can we partake in culture/art without a mediating third-party app to dictate how we do so.
  
  What I appreciated most about this book is that it made me realize how immersed I was in algorithm culture. I’ve been able to take a step back and truly seek content that is driven by my interests not a computer. This book does a good job of not being a complete debby downer about the algorithm, but emphasize the importance of responsible personal curation of your internet habits. The hope is that more people at least become more aware of the way algorithms rule our lives so we can make conscious decisions of where we spend our time.
  
  Things I didn’t like so much about this book:
  It was a slow start, felt more like a textbook
  Went on a bit long, and I felt like points were repeated multiple times
  The author is an op-ed journalist and at times this book felt more like a long-form article than a novel with a lot of anecdotal asides
• 
  Morgan

  *3.5
  Filterworld is an interesting look at algorithms and how they affect our online experience. I was hoping for more of a deeper dive into the political/philosophical ramifications and was a bit more disappointed on that end.
• 
  Rana Habib

  8/10
• 
  Brendan Sanok

  long-winded and underwhelming. felt like a lot of low-hanging-fruit critiques that didn’t add much of an interesting perspective on the topic.
• 
  P S

  cool book not really new information for anyone who is terminally online already but interesting anecdotes throughout to keep you engaged
• 
  britt_brooke

  Filterworld *is* our world. This comprehensive analysis of life after analog takes a minute to get going, but is ultimately an interesting read. Personal passions have been replaced by monetization. It’s consistently harder to be unique. That’s just a small glimpse, but you get the idea. Recommend to people who are reading my book reviews on social media. 😉
• 
  Marion

  A little rambley toward the end, but so full of content that sparks even more questions and conversations. Off to do a deep dive into how AI would make things better or worse…
• 
  Evan G

  The first few chapters are good, describing how recommendation algorithms have affected the production and consumption of media and physical spaces. A reoccurring example (very reoccurring) is the "hipster coffee shop" that's become common over the last decade. It has large windows, white or tile walls and minimalist decoration. Maybe the menu is written in chalk on a blackboard. Chayka describes this aesthetic being the result of an algorithm. The aesthetic was popular on Instagram, so customers heard about it. That engagement boosted prominence in apps such as Yelp and Google, which brought in more customers. Anyone that opened a café adopted that look or was shut out of that feedback loop. Engagement algorithms forced coffee shops in Seoul, Seattle and Sydney to converge, all serving the same flat white. Chayka describes similar trends in music, books, furniture, interior design and everything else that makes up a culture. The book is at it's best when he describes how these algorithms work and the history of how they were developed. I also enjoyed some tidbits about what it's like to be a producer in a market dominated by an algorithm. He describes trying to boost engagement for his own articles on Facebook by referencing non-existent weddings in order to get the timeline boost that comes with a major life event. The "algo" is a black box, so producers aren't sure what works. AirBnb hosts have a cargo cult of rituals that they believe might boost their rating, such as only having a certain number of photos, logging in to the app a specific number of times or using certain descriptors.
  
  After this explanation of how algorithms work, Chakra veers off into vague moralizing. One section details how Iceland's tourism industry grew suddenly and exponentially in the 2010s. He describes being at Gullfoss Falls as part of a tour package. He's awestruck by the beauty and judgmental of the other tourists taking photos. In his words:
  "But much of my group was looking at the view through their phone cameras. The vista that they were capturing, down to the angle, was the same one that appears over and over again on the falls' Instagram page. They were further replicating the image, ensuring its dominance as a generic symbol of Iceland."
  Or they were taking souvenir photos of a trip? Like a few weeks later they'll have someone ask about their Iceland trip, and they want to be able to pull out their phone and flip through their pictures as they describe seeing breathtaking beauty. Somehow he assumes that they're not experiencing it as authentically as him.
  
  This snootiness typifies the rest of the book. He spends a lot of time talking about high school and how his own experience of downloading music on Kazaa is so much deeper than today's kids finding music on TikTok. He points to Emily In Paris as featureless slop that can only be enjoyed by someone with an app-rotted brain, vegetating in front of a screen. But pre-filterworld, you just spend hours watching Joe Millionaire or whatever. For writing an entire book about taste, he seems oblivious to it can differ. Notably he criticizes Billie Eilish as someone who would not be recognized by discerning judges rather than algorithms But a few months after publication she won an Oscar? It often seems like he's just nostalgic for his own youth and is just frustrated that things aren't the same now.
  
  While I disliked most of the book, it does point to something. One of the issues with algorithms is that it forces us to make things legible and quantifiable. In this review, I had to decide exactly how many stars to give the book. While I have complex thoughts, ultimately they're all boiled down to a number between 1 and 5. A number can be fed into goodreads' algorithm easily, while my frustration with the author's arrogance, amusement at bizarre incentives in the modern world and sympathy for his nostalgia can't. Living in "Filterworld" means only having that number and not feeling what it represents.
• 
  Dannie Lynn Fountain

  Wow. A beautiful and thought provoking dissection of algorithms. The book opened on a high note with a conversation about the Mechanical Turk, wove through a variety of topics related to algorithms and culture (including the impact to music, the rise of the influencer, etc), and wrapped up neatly talking about curation. The conversation on curation is honestly what landed this book at 4.5 stars for me. The comparisons of digital curation to art curators, and the dialogue around art curation as a career beyond a singular institution, was a beautiful way of summarizing the ways that algorithms remove the humanity from recommendation systems. [Of course, disclaimer that many museum exhibits are stolen, etc etc etc. This dialogue was specific to "curating what is already in the museum."] In short, this book made me nostalgic for a mixtape from a friend or a "blind date with a book," instead of things recommended by my Spotify or (gasp) Goodreads accounts.
  
  I received a free advance copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
• 
  Kelley - rva_reader

  3.5 Rounded up
  
  I was one of the first on Facebook. I remember it came out when I was in college and I remember vividly one of my friends telling me about it and telling me to sign up.
  Then I remember telling lots of other friends to sign up.
  I feel like I should have had a cut of Facebook's earnings (2. Fast forward 20 years (TWENTY!!!) and I'm still on Facebook but my social network of choice would be TikTok or Twitter. For me, this book felt like I was taking a trip down memory lane. I felt like I could have written an outline for this book based on my experiences the last 20 years but the author does a great job of providing detailed, interesting stories, discussing the history of social media. I didn't quite get the point of the book, I was waiting for him to prove something but everything | read was interesting and enjoyable.
  
  Thank you to Doubleday for an advanced copy. Opinions are my own.
• 
  Kara Estelle-Powers

  This is a wide-ranging book looking at how algorithms impact many facets of our lives. It’s a good book overall, though as with any book touching on a large number of areas, some sections are stronger than others. The lack of agency to control our own social media feeds—algorithmic suggestions inevitably always creep back in—and the argument for human curators (museum curators, DJs) over algorithms stuck out most to me.
  
  Like the author, I’m a millennial, so most of the references and much of the nostalgia for the way the internet used to be were familiar.
  
  I don’t think the book offers much in the way of solutions, other than more mindfulness about our internet presence and activities. The author tries taking a break from all algorithm-based apps, including Spotify, but that’s not something a lot of users will do. I think a solution lies more in finding the community in social media again.
• 
  Hrishi

  I read this book because I heard the author speak on a podcast and found the central thesis fascinating. Unfortunately, the book doesn't feel like it needed to be a book; or at least, it needed more substance to justify its length. At around the halfway mark it started to run out of steam and I only finished the book because I happened to be traveling and had some time on my hands.
  
  The points the book does make are excellent no doubt. Filterworld as a concept, and it's examples of various algorithmic feeds populating or daily lives were interesting and eye opening. I would've been ok with a New Yorker feature length article rather than a book though
• 
  Trevor

  Gr8! I feel like all my cultural consumption, at present, revolves around anti algorithm conversation. I like that, but as someone who isn’t on social media a whole bunch, I feel it feeding into my already burgeoning resentment for modern technology.
  
  I won’t stop using Spotify or many other streaming sites but I can promise myself to be more intentional with my cultural consumption. I still believe TikTok is a scourge on mankind but that was only reinforced by this book. Had to buy my own copy and will indeed read many times <3
• 
  Andrew

  The fact that this ends with Chayka essentially saying "imagine if you made a choice about the books/movies/TV/music you consume, you may actually grow some taste and a sense of self" is just amazing, no notes.
  
  If you've ever wondered why everything sucks now, nothing inspires, and everyone seems to be watching/reading/listening to the same banal stuff, oh boyyyyy do I have a book that will make you hella depressed. Luckily, Chayka makes a compelling case for becoming our own curators, a rousing end to a book that did give me a mild panic attack.
• 
  Olivia Zarroli

  Had me running around the apartment reading passages aloud to my boyfriend with concerning vigor. Chayka def verges on “old man yelling at cloud” at some points but if you let him finish he gets there eventually. Definitely has me thinking about my relationship with ~the algorithm~ as someone who has grown up in an internet almost entirely associated with it.
  
  Also the third book I’ve read in 2024 that references Rachel cusk I fear I have a type…….
  
  And bonus points for the DC references <3 <3 <3
• 
  Amanda

  Fascinating and something everyone who uses anything based on an algorithm should read. Definitely makes me want to be more mindful of my media consumption habits.
• 
  Matti

  The internet is so evil and manipulative. We’ve lost so much to it and we don’t even realize. - she says to her friends over the internet
• 
  Markus Riemer

  If I believed in number rating I would consider five stars
• 
  Mark

  Good exposition on how algorithms work to filter what people see in social media. Chayka also discusses in detail how algorithms effectively shape culture by forcing a common denominator effect by driving people to whatever is most popular. Chayka's solution is curation--adopting a curation mind-set. My solution is simpler--avoid social media like the plague.
• 
  Mia Caliendo

  This book was brilliant, an observation and critique of the algorithms we all use, and use us. The weaving of various inspirations and sources along with well-articulated opinions and examples to support those opinions make for a compelling point.