Are "algorithms" making us boring?

Kyle Chayka's 'Filterworld'

Lord knows that I will always lend a sympathetic ear to complaints that culture sucks now, and am generally of the opinion that phone is bad for kids, teens, and adults. But I found myself extremely unconvinced by the versions of these arguments I encountered in Kyle Chayka’s new book, Filterworld, which holds that the “vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today” has created a “homogenous” culture that “perpetuates itself to the point of boredom.”

Chayka’s argument is one that I think many people already implicitly believe, or are at least sympathetic to: Algorithms, or social media, are making us all very samey and boring. “[D]igital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have accumulated and spread their data, in the form of user activity, and their capital, in the form of server farms and algorithmic technology, around the world, capturing billions of users,” he writes, and I can’t argue with that. “The homogenous culture is the inevitable reaction to the damage of that spread, a way of coping with or adapting to it… As digital platforms have expanded, the homogeneity they cause has spread, too.”

This second part, the homogeneity part, I am less clear on. Chayka says he first “began to observe the effects of Filterworld in coffee shops around 2015,” when he noticed that a consistent style of interior design seemed to have spread to cafés across the globe:

The Generic Coffee Shop, as I came to think of it, had white subway tiles lining the walls, broad industrial tables made of reclaimed wood, mid-century modern chairs with spindly legs, and hanging pendant lamps fitted with Edison bulbs. (An “Instagrammy” aesthetic.) And no matter the city, no matter the time of day, the café was reliably filled with a group of people similar to me: freelancers tapping at their laptops, often surfing social media. Why did the interiors look and function the same across such geographical distances? The strict sameness surpassed the usual indicators of globalization. I wanted to find its root cause.

You may find yourself nodding your head in recognition here. It’s true: I know exactly the kind of coffee shop he’s talking about! There’s one not too far from my apartment.¹ But at the risk of missing the point: is the idea of “trends” really such a mystery? It hardly seems like a revelation to learn, as we do later in the book, that Instagram is “the major network through which distribution” of the Generic Coffee Shop look takes place.² It can be fun, in a stand-up comedy routine kind of way, to notice that there is a particular and uniform interior-design aesthetic that accompanies “international third-wave coffee hipsterdom.” But I’m not sure that mere noticing qualifies as revelatory in 2015, let alone in 2024.

In general while reading this book I had trouble understanding precisely where stuff like globalization, paid marketing, cultural exchange, and vicissitudes of style--all of which seem like important phenomena in accounting for cultural “homogenization”--ended, and where the pernicious effects of “algorithms”--understood throughout the book and here as a metonym for the handful of platform conglomerates that mediate internet commerce and sociality³--began. In a section on travel,⁴ Chayka points out that after 2010, the number of tourists visiting Iceland grew “exponential[ly], like the spreading of a meme.” One factor was the eruption of the the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which delayed flights around the world, drawing eyes to Iceland--but “the other cause of the tourism boom, according to some Icelanders, was Instagram.” Tourists flooded Iceland to “attempt to re-create… idyllic Icelandic landscape photos for their own accounts.”⁵

Some Icelanders blame Instagram, but presumably others disagree. They might point out that 2010 also marked the creation of a public-private marketing body called “Promote Iceland,” which launched with an astroturfed social-media campaign designed to “rapidly increase tourism,” a necessity for a country whose economy had been badly damaged by the 2008 financial crisis. Was the flood of Instagram-happy tourists to Iceland "algorithmic homogenization” or simply the fruits of a successful marketing push? Chayka is careful to point out that Iceland’s tourism boom was “intentionally cultivated,” and he acknowledges that its causes were complex and multiple:

Again, it wasn’t that Instagram created the tourism, but it gave the tourism industry an enormous opportunity. Icelandair offered cheap flights and layover deals designed to help travelers stop by. New, modernized hotels were built around Reykjavik. Bars popped up themed for the visitors, with names like American Bar Reykjavik.

But I think this gets it backwards. (For starters, Icelandair has been offering its signature cheap-stopover deals since the 1960s.) Instagram didn’t give Iceland an opportunity so much as the Icelandic government and tourist industry, by deciding to make the country more visible, cheaper to visit, and easier to travel within, gave Instagram an opportunity: hundreds of thousands of hours of free labor in the form of users taking captivating photos. I found myself wondering (as I often did reading Filterworld) about the implicit, algorithmless alternate universe against which ours is held in Chayka’s writing--a world where taste is (more) personal and choices (more) authentic. In this control-group world, if Iceland still shifted policy to encourage tourism and still put significant resources behind marketing--but Instagram didn’t exist--would fewer people have gone?

Maybe I’m quibbling here, but the other thing is, we’re talking about something like 2 million international tourists a year. Compared to the population of Iceland, that’s enormous, but compared to any other European country it’s negligible. (90 million tourists visited France in 2019.) As with the Generic Coffee Shops, the thought of ubiquitous Instagram shots of Iceland vacations in the 2010s likely generates a nod of recognition--perhaps even a wry chuckle--in members of the social class to which Chayka and I and (I presume) most Read Max readers belong. But “going to Iceland and taking Instagram photos” is, like “working on your laptop in the third-wave coffee shop with Edison bulbs” and many other of the examples of Filterworld Chayka details, decidedly not a mass phenomenon, and it’s hard to tell exactly how much to care that millennial yuppies like us all do basically the same stuff, whether or not we’re compelled to by the algorithm. If me and all my friends show up to the natural wine bar (no, not that one--the one down the block from that one) wearing identical Sambas, 15 years after we all showed up to the speakeasy cocktail bar wearing identical desert boots, is that a problem for anyone but us? Is it even really a problem for us?

Early in the book, Chayka visits the Amazon Books store in Georgetown, one instance of the ecommerce giant’s short-lived experiment in physical stores where “books were not organized by author, their author’s nationality, nor even consistently by genre, but rather by how successful they proved online… Signs posted around the store explained why certain books were shown off: they were ‘top sellers,’ or they were rated ‘4.5 Stars & Above,’ or even ‘4.8 Stars & Above.’” The Amazon Books store, Chayka writes, “was the opposite of independent bookstores, which have a well-deserved reputation for charm and personal quirkiness. Their shelf labels are unique or offbeat, presenting specialties: New Age, art monographs, local history.”

Again, I expect a number of readers’ heads will be nodding enthusiastically here. I too prefer independent bookstores to Amazon. But in the context of the arc of Filterworld I found myself hesitating. Surely these beloved indie bookstores are as homogenous in their own way as coffee shops? And Amazon Books a dose of novelty and difference in a relatively unvaried arena?⁶

Perhaps “sameness” is not, in and of itself, a good or bad thing. There are obvious reasons to prefer independent bookstores to Amazon Books anyway, chief among them that the physical stores represented a beachhead for an evil monopoly whose spread would deskill, devalue, and exploit the work of writers and editors and booksellers. But this isn’t really Chayka’s complaint (though in fairness he does note “Amazon’s destructive practices as an employer and as a monopolistic corporation”). The big problem with Amazon Books is that “there was no coherent idea of the ideal shopper.”

“The ideal shopper”: this phrase echoed through my head for the rest of the book. I found myself comparing the arguments in Filterworld to this memorable observation about globalization made by Jeb Boniakowski in his magisterial Awl post of 2013, “We Must Build An Enormous McWorld In Times Square, A Xanadu Representing A McDonald’s From Every Nation”:

Everyone talks about how globalization “McDonalds-izes” the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is that you can get basically every kind of food *except* whatever they serve at the foreign outposts of our proud American chains. I would say I know more people who have had a lamb face salad from the Xi’an Famous Foods in the Golden Mall in Flushing than have had the poutine from the Montreal McDonalds, never mind something you really have to travel for, like a Chicken Maharaja Mac. Frequently, when I travel outside of the USA, my trips to the local McDonald’s are the most genuinely foreign-feeling and disorienting part of the trip. I went to Paris last year. There are probably ten restaurants within walking distance of my old Williamsburg apartment that are varyingly obsessive imitations of Parisian bistros, Parisian bars, Parisian brasseries. If they were hung in museums, the wall texts next to them would say “School of Keith McNally.” But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque McDo.

I think about Jeb’s riff often, both because I agree there should be an international McDonald’s in Times Square and also because I think it wonderfully captures the genuinely contradictory movement of globalization: Not a second-law-of-thermodynamics-style constant and unvaried overall increase in homogeneity, but an unpredictable and spiky process in which difference emerges from uniformity and uniformity from difference. Chayka is extremely attentive to the narrow and often class-bound domains in which “algorithms” hasten and expand homogenization. But he is less interested in the ways in which they complicate and redirect it, or even retard and reverse it.

That’s the case because the book is not really an argument about globalization or its attendant cultural homogenization, so much as it is the articulation of anxiety about taste on the part of a relatively small demographic cohort. Am I boring now? Are we all boring? Do I even know what boring is? “On the consumer side, the bombardment of recommendations can induce a kind of hypnosis that makes listening to, watching, or buying a product all but inevitable--whether it aligns with your taste or not,” Chayka writes. The danger of the algorithm is that it makes us imperfect shoppers.

Much of Filterworld is taken up with describing the uncanny and upsetting experience of being a consumer or collector in the platform age. Chayka wakes up one morning and, finding that Spotify has redesigned its app, spirals out:

My muscle memory didn’t work. The collection had been rearranged without giving me any notice or choice in the matter. It felt like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room overnight and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. […] Spotify’s interface updates felt like… a total disruption of the pieces of art and culture that shaped me.

I am not exactly a personal-responsibility Republican, but this complaint put me in the mind of the rapper Tyler the Creator’s famous analysis of cyberbullying. If using Spotify is giving you aphasia, simply close your computer and start buying records.

But while it would be easy, if rude, to simply say “skill issue,” and move on, Chayka isn’t the only person to face these anxieties, and there’s value to articulating the fears and experiences of lives lived online. I know this because I myself have made a career out of cultivating, not always fairly, little vertigo thrills at the unfamiliarity and uncanniness of internet. Everyone likes to have their feelings recognized and validated, especially if we can pick at the scabs of our own alienation in the process.

But sometimes, uncharitably, I imagine that what’s at the bottom of the consumption of this kind of writing is a desire not to overcome one’s apparent helplessness in the face of “the algorithm” but to affirm it--a compulsion to wallow in one’s perceived estrangement from the motions of culture and commerce and politics in the 21st century, to have one’s learned helplessness excused. Articles and books in this vein (and I have written plenty of them!) tend to emphasize the power, scale, novelty, and opacity of the platform giants, and to de-emphasize user agency, statistical context, historical precedent, and even little things like “the economy” and “the world outside.”

They also tend to flatter the worldview and preconceptions of their perceived audiences. When their expected readership is boomers, books emphasize the decline of respectable centrist media institutions and the rise of “extremism.” When the expected readership is yuppie millennials, well, you get disquisitions on Instagram photos of Iceland, taxonomies of third-wave coffee shops, and nostalgic paeans to … CD binders:

As a teenager, I had a binder of music on CDs that I kept in the family car I usually drove. Some I had purchased; others were mixes that I assembled and burned myself, codifying my personal taste. I still have that binder, and looking at it now—the very nineties rubberized edges and heavy-duty fabric—gives me a sense of nostalgia and a memory of the music contained therein. With Spotify, there’s no CD binder I can take with me.

None of this is wrong, of course. Physical media is wonderful, and Spotify is evil. And yet it does nothing to deter my suspicion that the alternate, algorithm-free dimension to which “Filterland” is being compared isn’t a possible future utopia toward which we might work, but instead a hazy millennial ‘90s to which our generation of imperfect shoppers wants to return.

1. Sort of--if I’m being really rigorous here I would note that of the dozen or coffee shops in walking distance from my apartment in gentrified brownstone Brooklyn, none of them resemble The Generic Coffee Shop as described by Chayka in more than one or two ways, which suggests to me that (1) the pervasive algorithmic “homogeneity” supposedly creeping across the café landscape is creeping extremely slowly and (2) the “sameness” we’re talking about here is not so “strict” to have “surpassed the usual indicators of globalization.”

2. In the same chapter, Chayka quotes a handful of Generic Coffee Shop owners telling him that their design choices were “partly a consequence of budget,” and often inspired by the disused industrial or commercial spaces they now occupied. This intriguing thread, which suggests that the specific aesthetic of the Generic Coffee Shop might have roots in the apparently similar material circumstances of the shop owners and the often formerly working-class or industrial neighborhoods in which they opened, rather than anything particular to Instagram or its mode of presenting images, is quickly abandoned.

3. Chayka uses the Mechanical Turk--the infamous 18th-century chess-playing “automaton” that was revealed to have a person inside--early on as a metaphor for algorithms in an attempt to call attention to “the human lurking behind the facade of seemingly advanced technology” and center the corporate decisions and imperatives that tend to be mystified as “algorithmic,” but as Michelle Santiago Cortés points out in her review, he seems to abandon this thread quite quickly. Throughout the book I sometimes found myself, as an exercise in demystification, replacing invocations of “algorithms” and “systems” with “the Mechanical Turk,” e.g. “Given that [the mechanical Turk] controls many facets of our lives, from socializing with our friends to building audiences for our creative projects, is it any wonder that [mechanical Turk] users feel paranoid?”

4. To his credit, Chayka acknowledges the multi-century historical precedent for travelers’ complaints of “persistent sameness” across cities.

5. Typical of my frustrations with this book is a passage where Chayka compares a horde of tourists taking photos of the famous Icelandic waterfall Gullfoss to the passage in Don DeLillo’s White Noise where Murray and Jack visit “The Most Photographed Barn in America”:

Nothing makes the barn particularly remarkable except its notoriety—a fictional pre-Internet meme. Observing the crowd of photographers around the barn, Murray says, “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.” “No one sees the barn,” he concludes. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures.” In Filterworld, it becomes hard to separate the nature of something, or its reality, from its popularity in terms of attention. Popularity alone often gets confused for meaning or significance, as in the case of DeLillo’s barn.

But of course the point of the barn in White Noise is that it’s just a barn, and there’s no reason for people to take photos of it except that it’s been photographed in the past. Gullfoss, by comparison, is immediately and obviously astonishing:

I too would find it kind of dull and alienating to watch people line up to take identical photos of a natural wonder like this. But I somehow doubt that they’re only taking photos of the huge fucking waterfall that looks like nothing you’ve never seen before because it’s a popular thing to photograph.

6. Having read a handful of reviews of the book (I linked to this excellent Anna Schechtman review in a previous newsletter; I also really liked this Michelle Santiago Cortés essay in ArtReview, which I found via a good Kevin Munger polemic on the figure of “the algorithm” in tech criticism), I knew I was not going to wholeheartedly agree with every one of its propositions. But I didn’t expect to find myself reverse-polarized into Amazon apologism!