Listening to him on the Ezra Klein show, one of my big takeaways was just, like, these people are mad about being rich? I know that the entire culture of millennial yuppies, especially the ones who work in journalism or non-profits that don't make the same kind of money as their college roommates who took jobs at banks and law firms, is to LARP working-classness, but at some point if you have personally encountered coffee shops in Mexico City, Seoul, and Milan in the last few years such that you have Considered Opinions about their aesthetics then I regret to inform you that you are world-historically rich and live like it. And the thing about being rich and traveling is that the tastes of wealthy cosmopolitans have been pretty international and homogenized for a long, long time. If you went on a Grand Tour of Europe at the turn of the century I regret to inform you that you would not find the grand hotels of London and Paris to be that different from the Waldorf that you were already well acquainted with. Wealthy business people in the 80s were eating the same nouvelle cuisine at Chez Whatever whether they were in Tokyo or Zurich. I know that yuppie millennials had a brief period when we were seeking out all the most authentic hole in the wall noodle stands that we read about in the same three ChowHound posts instead of being Lame Tourists, but that was weird! (Except for the one other group that did this: American boomers with eurail passes and a copy of the Harvard Guide in the 70s.)
Edit: Damnit, I meant to work in a snarky comment about how "Everyone" (some of my friends) went to San Sebastien five years before "Everyone" went to Iceland / we had Insta.
This is really good! I think there's a realm of thought that sort of refuses to even admit the possibility that Capitalism writ large creates trendlines that lead everything down the path of dull homogeneity, and there's a sort of mental and linguistic gymnastics that people go through to understand why things are the way they are, and it leads to this kind of tortured logic.
As a high school teacher I get really frustrated with the way we talk about technology and the harm it's doing to kids - the talk is always about "Social Media" as a sort of wraparound phrase to describe the things that are doing harm, because we can't admit that the technology itself is the thing that's doing harm, because of our collective faith in that technology and its ability to engender human progress. Because of that we can never just say that it's the fucking phones that are the problem! Almost every 14 year-old has a little slot machine in their pockets at all times, and that is an insane thing to give to someone whose brain is still developing! That's literally it! But instead of saying this simple thing we talk about "social media" and "algorithms" as some vague and unsolvable issue. Very frustrating.
I was similarly not sold on chayka's big theory although he's obviously thoughtful. strikes me more like people are realizing THEY are boring and want to blame someone else for it. Which of course means they lack Inner Resources
Having not read the book and only this review I am tempted to make a baseless assertion which is that Chayka is feeling anxious about becoming a boring old person, or has friends who are becoming boring old people, and wants to find a reason for it. But though we (millenial yuppies) may struggle against becoming old and boring, one day we too will be looking to the NY Times for the 100 best places to travel in 2043, just like our parents once did, algorithm or no.
I really enjoyed your review of a book that's been staring at me for two weeks. I would have agreed even more a week ago had I not had TSwift conspiracy theory coverage poured all over me - including in pubs/by writers I greatly respect and oft read (including Chayka). I think his views and theory works well within the walls of digital media and online but agree with your view that too many factors influence real-world.
On the rush to cover the same thing from the same angles to chase some high of traffic that is gone, I do think there's something that's happened in the last months that has changed. Swift seems to have be the center (Elon, too) but man it is sad that it has almost become useless to open more than one website b/c they're all chasing the same angles on the same stories. Yes, the right is weird and bad for have conspiracy theories about Swift and what she does/who she does it with. No, everyone doesn't need to write about it.
Am I connecting something that's been bugging me all week with a tenuous connection to what you just wrote? Yes, but this is an internet comment section.
I was recently in India and experienced many fancy cafes with drip coffee and "Insta walls", none of which made me or my wife as excited as the trip to McDonalds in Delhi that had Kebab Rolls (basically a Indian version of the Snack Wrap) and a Pizza shoved into the McD's hand held pie crust.
Even though I think Chayka's observations are typically kind of empty, I bought this book in a moment of weakness out of some sort of dutiful obligation to the culture and haven't been able to muster the energy to crack it. This essay makes me feel like maybe I don't need to.
I also don't think there's much of a difference between how the algorithm leads you and how the broader media and retail industry led consumers for decades before the internet. Things like payola, the historical decisions of what to cover by legacy monolithic media, and bulk retail purchasing discounts have always tilted the scales towards industry. The imperative to look outside those structures has always been on the consumer; if anything, you could make the case that the internet makes it _easier_ to do so than ever.
Loved this review (& the links - the Cortés piece in particular crystallized some stuff for me as a person often drawn to internet culture writing but often left with a lingering sense of “okay, but like, really?”) - the ending made me think of this great Shannon Palus review from a few years ago, which gestures similarly to the idea that actually even if it “feels like” “everyone” “is,” we do in fact sometimes retain the power to simply not: https://slate.com/culture/2020/09/anne-helen-petersen-burnout-book-reviewed.html
Great piece. I'm glad you wrote it because I didn't get a chance to mention that Chayka invokes Bourdieu only once, and skates by without seeming to have internalized or maybe even understood anything about the central argument in 'Distinction':
"Taste is inescapable; it involves 'the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing, or decoration,' the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. These choices can be symbolic of a range of things beyond just our aesthetic preferences, such as economic class, political ideology, and social identity. 'Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,' Bourdieu wrote. No wonder that we worry about what to like, and sometimes find it simpler to export that responsibility to machines."
Besides a brief parenthetical later in the book, this half-paragraph is the fullest extent to which he engages with Bourdieu, which seems like a real failure for a book about taste—and, worse, he seems to miss the point entirely. As you write, Bourdieu's argument isn't that taste is "symbolic" of class (and therefore somewhat independent of it); it's that it's *structured* by class. Chayka's unwillingness to think rigorously about how closely tied taste and class position are is, I think, a big part of the reason the book is so muddled.
It seems awfully naïve to fret about everyone taking the same photo of the same things in Iceland if one has ever been to literally any other popular tourist destination. I'm looking back at a decidedly-pre-Instagram 2009 trip to Pisa, where I took many photos of people taking photos of their friends and families "holding up" the leaning tower. Somehow everyone had the same idea even when Instagram didn't exist. The horror! Tourism is a trend-driven industry by nature, and if anything, I suspect Instagram has actually helped expand most people's range of possibilities, even if it has also helped accelerate any individual trend's appeal.
That said, it's that acceleration that gives me pause. I really don't worry that we're all going to become the same, even millennial yuppies (or xennial "ouppies" in my case!), but I do find the pace at which we churn through trends to reach the all-cafes-look-same equilibrium disquieting, in the same way we rush through news cycles and information more broadly now. The algorithms also almost certainly make us _feel_ as if everyone and everything is the same because of the social bubble effect where we only hear about the things that people like us care about, because the universe's vaster range of possibilities is filtered out of the feed. To your point, the answer mostly seems to be, "stop staring at your phone so much!" But given the opiate-level of addictiveness of our devices and feeds, I do worry nonetheless, particularly with the ongoing evaporation of mainstream news and culture.
I gave up on reading Chayka’s NYer articles because I found them totally content-free. Truly just deploying the word “algorithm” and expecting it to carry the argument. I’m happy for him he got to do the same thing at book length
It seems to me that digitization and abundance if media (and the ease for which the end user can sample it for themselves) has lead a lot of people who fancy themselves as "critics" or "curators" into a crisis of identity and this book seems mostly like a man struggling with how to deal with that reality without copping to it's existence directly. "Algorithms, yeah...that's what I'll blame! People love to blame algorithms these days don't they?"
"began to observe the effects of Filterworld in coffee shops around 2015"
Filterworld sounds like a more serious, boring, book version of The World's End, which came out a full two years before Chayka noticed the coffee shop trend. The movie coined the term "Starbucking" to describe that sameness, and deals rather poignantly with the matter of aging and "coolness"
Great review. Having not read the book, grains of salt and all, but sounds like the author is conflating two different things.
(1) Globalization created the conditions for a lot of folks to share the same trends. To the extent that affluent folks in one part of the world didn't regularly interact with each other, there just wasn't a way for consumer trends to emerge at the scale we see today. And, yeah, some people find it bland or something, but whatever.
(2) The way web 2 platforms have homogenized content by creating the incentives for engagement. It's real (eg the kids saying "unalive"). It's probably not good by many objective metrics (people on twitter act like people on twitter because of the structure of twitter).
Where there's something worth exploring and critiquing further is how (2) refracts back into the real world. The Amazon book store is an example. More concerning, though, are the ways that platforms like youtube or twitter allegedly* radicalize people who then go out and do terrible things in the world.
That's a different concern than "we're all just boring now because when I go on vacation my barista still uses beard oil and my drink comes with latte art"....but it does follow the "platforms < incentives < certain types of content < impacts in the real world" train of thought.
I think you're right that these two different complaints—the first one being as old as travel itself and the second being manifestly new—are being conflated by Chayka, but even once they've been separated out I'm a bit suspicious of the main claim being made in (2)... like, *are* platforms homogenizing content on the production level? Is there less diversity in what's being created out there? Or are "algorithms" just homogenizing our own personal feeds, and causing us to consume a narrower range of "content"? These seem like two separate problems (the former, to me, much more concerning than the latter.) Maybe both! But I'd like to see a little more critical rigor.
I think it’s safe to say that algorithmically generated feeds have reshaped the meta characteristics of content (SEO optimization, YouTube videos are all at least 10 minutes, the way Twitter or LI posts get written for vitality). And I’d posit that there’s a lot of content that’s playing to the test; ie it’s designed to drive engagement and the substance of the content is secondary to that.
But maybe the real question is, given the set of content where the substance is the primary concern (ie where someone actually has something to say and engagement optimization is secondary), is there more/less homogeneity by some measure relative to…the old blogosphere or whatever.
And then, I suppose, if the set of content being created was 1:1 in those terms, we’d have to ask if the algos just change the distribution of consumption (niche blog post gets read by as many - but different - people) or whether certain substantive forms of content don’t get as wide distribution as before because they don’t lend themselves to engagement optimization (and get drowned out by pieces that do). sounds like a thesis opportunity for an aspiring PhD.
Anyway, love the newsletter, keep doin whatcha doin. And thx for the reply.
Listening to him on the Ezra Klein show, one of my big takeaways was just, like, these people are mad about being rich? I know that the entire culture of millennial yuppies, especially the ones who work in journalism or non-profits that don't make the same kind of money as their college roommates who took jobs at banks and law firms, is to LARP working-classness, but at some point if you have personally encountered coffee shops in Mexico City, Seoul, and Milan in the last few years such that you have Considered Opinions about their aesthetics then I regret to inform you that you are world-historically rich and live like it. And the thing about being rich and traveling is that the tastes of wealthy cosmopolitans have been pretty international and homogenized for a long, long time. If you went on a Grand Tour of Europe at the turn of the century I regret to inform you that you would not find the grand hotels of London and Paris to be that different from the Waldorf that you were already well acquainted with. Wealthy business people in the 80s were eating the same nouvelle cuisine at Chez Whatever whether they were in Tokyo or Zurich. I know that yuppie millennials had a brief period when we were seeking out all the most authentic hole in the wall noodle stands that we read about in the same three ChowHound posts instead of being Lame Tourists, but that was weird! (Except for the one other group that did this: American boomers with eurail passes and a copy of the Harvard Guide in the 70s.)
Edit: Damnit, I meant to work in a snarky comment about how "Everyone" (some of my friends) went to San Sebastien five years before "Everyone" went to Iceland / we had Insta.
This is really good! I think there's a realm of thought that sort of refuses to even admit the possibility that Capitalism writ large creates trendlines that lead everything down the path of dull homogeneity, and there's a sort of mental and linguistic gymnastics that people go through to understand why things are the way they are, and it leads to this kind of tortured logic.
As a high school teacher I get really frustrated with the way we talk about technology and the harm it's doing to kids - the talk is always about "Social Media" as a sort of wraparound phrase to describe the things that are doing harm, because we can't admit that the technology itself is the thing that's doing harm, because of our collective faith in that technology and its ability to engender human progress. Because of that we can never just say that it's the fucking phones that are the problem! Almost every 14 year-old has a little slot machine in their pockets at all times, and that is an insane thing to give to someone whose brain is still developing! That's literally it! But instead of saying this simple thing we talk about "social media" and "algorithms" as some vague and unsolvable issue. Very frustrating.
💯
I was similarly not sold on chayka's big theory although he's obviously thoughtful. strikes me more like people are realizing THEY are boring and want to blame someone else for it. Which of course means they lack Inner Resources
Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Algorithmic Anxiety Real Hahahaha Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Close Your Eyes
Ya, it’s making THEM boring.
Having not read the book and only this review I am tempted to make a baseless assertion which is that Chayka is feeling anxious about becoming a boring old person, or has friends who are becoming boring old people, and wants to find a reason for it. But though we (millenial yuppies) may struggle against becoming old and boring, one day we too will be looking to the NY Times for the 100 best places to travel in 2043, just like our parents once did, algorithm or no.
I really enjoyed your review of a book that's been staring at me for two weeks. I would have agreed even more a week ago had I not had TSwift conspiracy theory coverage poured all over me - including in pubs/by writers I greatly respect and oft read (including Chayka). I think his views and theory works well within the walls of digital media and online but agree with your view that too many factors influence real-world.
On the rush to cover the same thing from the same angles to chase some high of traffic that is gone, I do think there's something that's happened in the last months that has changed. Swift seems to have be the center (Elon, too) but man it is sad that it has almost become useless to open more than one website b/c they're all chasing the same angles on the same stories. Yes, the right is weird and bad for have conspiracy theories about Swift and what she does/who she does it with. No, everyone doesn't need to write about it.
Am I connecting something that's been bugging me all week with a tenuous connection to what you just wrote? Yes, but this is an internet comment section.
I was recently in India and experienced many fancy cafes with drip coffee and "Insta walls", none of which made me or my wife as excited as the trip to McDonalds in Delhi that had Kebab Rolls (basically a Indian version of the Snack Wrap) and a Pizza shoved into the McD's hand held pie crust.
Even though I think Chayka's observations are typically kind of empty, I bought this book in a moment of weakness out of some sort of dutiful obligation to the culture and haven't been able to muster the energy to crack it. This essay makes me feel like maybe I don't need to.
I also don't think there's much of a difference between how the algorithm leads you and how the broader media and retail industry led consumers for decades before the internet. Things like payola, the historical decisions of what to cover by legacy monolithic media, and bulk retail purchasing discounts have always tilted the scales towards industry. The imperative to look outside those structures has always been on the consumer; if anything, you could make the case that the internet makes it _easier_ to do so than ever.
Loved this review (& the links - the Cortés piece in particular crystallized some stuff for me as a person often drawn to internet culture writing but often left with a lingering sense of “okay, but like, really?”) - the ending made me think of this great Shannon Palus review from a few years ago, which gestures similarly to the idea that actually even if it “feels like” “everyone” “is,” we do in fact sometimes retain the power to simply not: https://slate.com/culture/2020/09/anne-helen-petersen-burnout-book-reviewed.html
I’m always surprised that people find music from Spotify recommendations and not just shazaming at the hipster bar, like god intended.
RETVRN
This is great! Appreciate the nuance and attention to how we use platforms and have learned to live with algorithms, to various degrees. I haven't read the book but wrote abt his appearance on the Ezra Klein podcast and the missing consideration of class and SES. https://open.substack.com/pub/karamary/p/taste-isnt-personal?r=5g06&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Great piece. I'm glad you wrote it because I didn't get a chance to mention that Chayka invokes Bourdieu only once, and skates by without seeming to have internalized or maybe even understood anything about the central argument in 'Distinction':
"Taste is inescapable; it involves 'the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing, or decoration,' the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. These choices can be symbolic of a range of things beyond just our aesthetic preferences, such as economic class, political ideology, and social identity. 'Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,' Bourdieu wrote. No wonder that we worry about what to like, and sometimes find it simpler to export that responsibility to machines."
Besides a brief parenthetical later in the book, this half-paragraph is the fullest extent to which he engages with Bourdieu, which seems like a real failure for a book about taste—and, worse, he seems to miss the point entirely. As you write, Bourdieu's argument isn't that taste is "symbolic" of class (and therefore somewhat independent of it); it's that it's *structured* by class. Chayka's unwillingness to think rigorously about how closely tied taste and class position are is, I think, a big part of the reason the book is so muddled.
yeah, wow what a blindspot. thanks for sharing this.
Very Basic Post but I just wanted to say I really enjoyed this freebie essay and decided to subscribe. Thanks Max!
It seems awfully naïve to fret about everyone taking the same photo of the same things in Iceland if one has ever been to literally any other popular tourist destination. I'm looking back at a decidedly-pre-Instagram 2009 trip to Pisa, where I took many photos of people taking photos of their friends and families "holding up" the leaning tower. Somehow everyone had the same idea even when Instagram didn't exist. The horror! Tourism is a trend-driven industry by nature, and if anything, I suspect Instagram has actually helped expand most people's range of possibilities, even if it has also helped accelerate any individual trend's appeal.
That said, it's that acceleration that gives me pause. I really don't worry that we're all going to become the same, even millennial yuppies (or xennial "ouppies" in my case!), but I do find the pace at which we churn through trends to reach the all-cafes-look-same equilibrium disquieting, in the same way we rush through news cycles and information more broadly now. The algorithms also almost certainly make us _feel_ as if everyone and everything is the same because of the social bubble effect where we only hear about the things that people like us care about, because the universe's vaster range of possibilities is filtered out of the feed. To your point, the answer mostly seems to be, "stop staring at your phone so much!" But given the opiate-level of addictiveness of our devices and feeds, I do worry nonetheless, particularly with the ongoing evaporation of mainstream news and culture.
I gave up on reading Chayka’s NYer articles because I found them totally content-free. Truly just deploying the word “algorithm” and expecting it to carry the argument. I’m happy for him he got to do the same thing at book length
Your take was spot on.
All I have to say about the piece is, i'm growing pretty tired of both academics and journalists trying to "brand" their half-baked Big Ideas©️ with catchy / "cool" sounding buzzwords (Filter World *insert "cool" hand gesture*) which they then attempt to manufacture an elite consent of adoption for while on a quick hit podcast interview tour...
It seems to me that digitization and abundance if media (and the ease for which the end user can sample it for themselves) has lead a lot of people who fancy themselves as "critics" or "curators" into a crisis of identity and this book seems mostly like a man struggling with how to deal with that reality without copping to it's existence directly. "Algorithms, yeah...that's what I'll blame! People love to blame algorithms these days don't they?"
"began to observe the effects of Filterworld in coffee shops around 2015"
Filterworld sounds like a more serious, boring, book version of The World's End, which came out a full two years before Chayka noticed the coffee shop trend. The movie coined the term "Starbucking" to describe that sameness, and deals rather poignantly with the matter of aging and "coolness"
I think this book might have been better pitched as a self-deprecating comedy, tbh
Great review. Having not read the book, grains of salt and all, but sounds like the author is conflating two different things.
(1) Globalization created the conditions for a lot of folks to share the same trends. To the extent that affluent folks in one part of the world didn't regularly interact with each other, there just wasn't a way for consumer trends to emerge at the scale we see today. And, yeah, some people find it bland or something, but whatever.
(2) The way web 2 platforms have homogenized content by creating the incentives for engagement. It's real (eg the kids saying "unalive"). It's probably not good by many objective metrics (people on twitter act like people on twitter because of the structure of twitter).
Where there's something worth exploring and critiquing further is how (2) refracts back into the real world. The Amazon book store is an example. More concerning, though, are the ways that platforms like youtube or twitter allegedly* radicalize people who then go out and do terrible things in the world.
That's a different concern than "we're all just boring now because when I go on vacation my barista still uses beard oil and my drink comes with latte art"....but it does follow the "platforms < incentives < certain types of content < impacts in the real world" train of thought.
*plausible deniability is a warm blanket.
I think you're right that these two different complaints—the first one being as old as travel itself and the second being manifestly new—are being conflated by Chayka, but even once they've been separated out I'm a bit suspicious of the main claim being made in (2)... like, *are* platforms homogenizing content on the production level? Is there less diversity in what's being created out there? Or are "algorithms" just homogenizing our own personal feeds, and causing us to consume a narrower range of "content"? These seem like two separate problems (the former, to me, much more concerning than the latter.) Maybe both! But I'd like to see a little more critical rigor.
interesting distinction.
I think it’s safe to say that algorithmically generated feeds have reshaped the meta characteristics of content (SEO optimization, YouTube videos are all at least 10 minutes, the way Twitter or LI posts get written for vitality). And I’d posit that there’s a lot of content that’s playing to the test; ie it’s designed to drive engagement and the substance of the content is secondary to that.
But maybe the real question is, given the set of content where the substance is the primary concern (ie where someone actually has something to say and engagement optimization is secondary), is there more/less homogeneity by some measure relative to…the old blogosphere or whatever.
And then, I suppose, if the set of content being created was 1:1 in those terms, we’d have to ask if the algos just change the distribution of consumption (niche blog post gets read by as many - but different - people) or whether certain substantive forms of content don’t get as wide distribution as before because they don’t lend themselves to engagement optimization (and get drowned out by pieces that do). sounds like a thesis opportunity for an aspiring PhD.
Anyway, love the newsletter, keep doin whatcha doin. And thx for the reply.