To comment briefly on the style and structure of Filterworld before delving into its content, I have just a few brief remarks. Chayka’s writing style is generally accessible. His sentence structure is often succinct and offers the necessary context for claims to help guide the audience. Even when dealing with more complex topics or making more esoteric references, Chayka helpfully invites the audience into the discussion. At a more structural level, Chayka gives a balance of theoretical discussion as well as personal anecdote to demonstrate the central claims. For instance, he has a section about going offline and what it was like learning about music curation by listening to the radio, or the way he found obscure manga and anime and music by following a particular thread in something he had experienced before. If I have a complaint about his style it’s that almost all of his chapters sound like they’re bringing the book to a close, a kind of perpetual conclusion.
In terms of his argumentation, I think there are a few premises that we could put in plain terms:
Developing culture requires time.
Developing culture requires surprise, conflict, or contradiction.
Culture progresses by a series of touchstones that can be identified and traced through the work of various artists over time.
Algorithms are designed to reduce the amount of processing time and conflict to drive engagement with content.
Algorithms are not able to replicate the human curatorial processes that inspire a sense of surprise.
If I were a better philosopher, I would point you toward one central premise that, if successfully challenged, could make Chayka’s entire argument collapse. Drawing on Montesquieu, Chayka notes that crucial to a sense of taste and culture is “surprise, which can be alienating or challenging.” He cites Montesquieu, noting that “Something can surprise us because it excites wonder or because it is new or unexpected [...] It exists outside the realm of what we already know we like.” Then, he notes that we experience pleasure when we feel something we cannot analyze. Crucial to this experience is the notion of time. Feeling surprise requires time and “taste is not necessarily instantaneous and changes as you consider and digest the experience of an artwork.” Essentially, great beauty inspires us with surprise and then continues, increases, and “finally turns into admiration.”
We see the very opposite of this at work with algorithms. Particularly when engaging with social media, “trend cycles have accelerated into microtrends that come and go in a matter of weeks” and produce “the anxiety of not keeping up with the algorithm.” Algorithms flatten time and flatten diversity. Yet, “If taste indeed must be deeply felt, requires time to engage with, and benefits from the surprise that comes from the unfamiliar, then it seems that technology could not possibly replicate it because algorithmic feeds run counter to these fundamental qualities.” Chayka’s central premise is that culture is inherently challenging and thus requires time. I think you could push back on that claim. I myself wouldn’t, because I am more inclined towards Adorno’s idea that culture that doesn’t continually challenge itself is hegemony. However, I think that people could say that culture is best when it is representative (i.e. uncontroversial). If that’s the case, then those posts and media which fail to challenge us would demand the most attention. For our purposes, I’m willing to accept the idea that challenging art holds the most power to create a deep impact.
Thus, when Chayka outlines the ways that we are exposed to content, you can start to see why there is less potential for culture to develop. He notes first the “significant drawbacks” of “content-based filtering.” Content-based filtering needs “to be translated into data that the machine can understand” and so it “lacks serendipity because it can filter only by the terms that the user inputs and it does not measure inherent quality.” Essentially, we can’t possibly account for the indelible, indefinable quality of art that touches us deeply. If you know me, you know that AI writing is the bane of my existence. Chayka notes that if there is a well-written and a badly-written article, the two articles are reduced to being of equal value and cannot be evaluated in terms of quality by artificial intelligence. He notes, “New tools like ChatGPT seem to be able to understand and generate meaningful language, but really they only repeat patterns inherent in their preexisting dating they are trained on.” Hence, AI serves to reduce the possibilities of thoughtful and meaningful expression: “Quality is subjective. Data alone, in the absence of human judgement, can go only so far in gauging it.”
The other form of curation that Chayka notes is not much better, really. When content is driven by social-based filtering, it is driven by the action of human users, “who evaluate content on their own using judgments both quantitative and qualitative.” However, what we end up seeing is items recommended to us by people who are already similar to us. Algorithms push things that are likely to be successful, so when it gets hold of social-based filtering, we really just end up restricted again.
The alternative is presented much later in the book, where Chayka presents alternatives to mass-media as it currently exists. For instance, he talks about the homogenizing force of Facebook to make everyone’s pages look the same (hey, am I about to make a defence for the chaos of Myspace?). Essentially, Facebook wants to be the internet, and Chayka offers a swansong for Geocities blogs. In addition, he praises platforms that offer more curated content. He gives the example of the music streaming platform Idagio, which is an extensive classic music collection—and nothing else. These hyperfocused and individualized services may offer a resistance to the flattening impulse of online streaming.
Besides, culture itself has “a kind of algorithm to follow, as each artist influences and inspires others, referencing and building on history.” Chayka describes a more human-organized method of curation. In fact, in reading the book it reminded me of an excellent art gallery in Montreal whose curator clearly worked in terms of juxtapositions rather than rigid boundaries of time period or style. Finding those unlikely or surprising connections was, in fact, very engaging. In talking about Igadio, Chayka notes that to maintain a culture, it isn’t simply making sure that all music is available, but “that it must be presented in a coherent fashion, in a way that allows for education beyond passive consumption.” It places a greater demand on consumers to actually explore. There’s a “tone of caring and caretaking” that Chayka found among curators that was missing from huge digital platforms, “which treat all culture like content to be funnelled indiscriminately at high volume, and which encourage consumers to stay constantly on the surface.” There are clear market forces that drive us towards passive consumption, and so the idea of engaging in a more thoughtful and active exploration becomes a kind of resistance in an attention-economy (which become one in the same). In Chayka’s words, “we turn to art to seek connection, yet algorithm feeds give us pure consumption. Truly connecting requires slowing down, too much, to the point of falling out of the feed’s grip.” I think this is well-put, especially because I’m such a slowpoke to engage with any new content and find myself perplexed by the newest trends.
Essentially, algorithms “are less capable of providing the kind of surprise that might not be immediately pleasurable that Montesquieu described” and they encourage you to not spend too much time with any one piece of content — we gotta get those clicks, get that ad money! Chayka describes the algorithmic curation as a superficial where “no sense of admiration can develop.” Even when algorithms “work” — like that of the Netflix recommendation system, “it can become limiting.” The feedback loop creates a situation where a “user’s preexisting preferences” are crucial and it is “diminishing their exposure to a diverse range of cultural offerings and denying art, aesthetics, and culture of its confrontational role.” Again, we have to accept the confrontational role as crucial to culture to make the rest of the argument work. Chayka shows concern about the lack of confrontation and states that “it’s not that great art needs to be inherently offensive. Rather, when everything conforms to established expectations, we miss out on culture that is truly progressive and uncomfortable that might subvert categories rather than fit neatly into them.”
Even when people actively try to scam algorithms into curating for them, there are flaws in the programming. Chayka gives an example of another researcher who was trying to get Spotify to make country music playlists and for the first several attempts, all of the recommendations were men. It took a lot to break into something new. Thus, when we rely on algorithmic recommendations rather than actively researching, we stand to lose ourselves to the reductive (Chayka says “predfined”) identities that algorithms set out for us—but we also lose out on diversity and find ourselves in a culture that simply reinforces biases.
Thus, we need to navigate the process of curation more actively—whether that be curating our identities “in the sense of selecting which pieces of content best represent us on a profile page” or selecting what is most important to us. Interestingly, Chayka cites the artist Jonathan Harris as saying that “Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression.” I find the phrase politically curious. It’s only one step away from the idea that our consumption makes us who we are, which I find deeply concerning, if something that I have no valid argument against. My concern, too, is that when I speak to teenagers, I’m not sure either creation or curation is happening. When I ask students for their interests, I’m often met with a shrug and “nothing really.” What shows do you watch? “I don’t really watch TV.” What books do you like? “I don’t really read.” How do you spend your free time? “I dunno. Napping. Sleeping.” If curation is the new creation, it doesn’t do much to alleviate my concerns. Chayka suggests that curation requires active engagement and when algorithmic recommendations are described as “curating a feed”, it’s a misnomer since “there is no consciousness behind it.” I’m just increasingly concerned about how to cultivate a consciousness that is curious and wants to pursue new ideas.
Even when we want to actively curate, we bump up against industry. Social media platforms, for example, decide how we present information (whether linear, time-bound, affinity-bound, etc.). Since “digital platforms lack the kind of stability that is vital for the longevity of culture,” we have less power to decide how we present ourselves. If another format seems more market-friendly, all our hard work can be erased: “context is swept away as the companies change priorities. Not only are things changing in the moment, but because all of this is digital, it could be changed retroactively because we don’t own the thing, we have no control over how it’s presented or used at all.” Again I find myself contemplating Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” — how do we speak in a language we don’t create? Even beyond creating ourselves, what we own is not our own. We pay for Netflix or pay for video games that can be removed from the library with very little notice. Our curated collections are subject to the whims of others.
Nonetheless, Chayka notes that “the slow process of curation works against the contextlessness, speed, and ephemerality that characterizes the internet.” All of the productive “curated juxtapositions” we might find (I love when I find connections between books!) are erased and it becomes “that much harder to interpret the broad swath of culture, to figure out which themes join things together, and which aspects set them apart.” Rather than experiencing things sequential, it’s all an “indistinguishable morass.” Chayka suggests how difficult it is to learn via feeds and that learning only really happens when you step away and take time to think for yourself.
This takes time, of course, and I think it’s nowhere more apparent when talking about literature. It’s compelling to me that Chayka draws on different forms of culture, but literature and music are of particular interest to me, of course. There are two literary case studies that I find particularly compelling in that respect, perhaps because Chayka is being contrarian (though this descriptor is debatable). In one example, Chayka discusses the massive success of Rupi Kaur. In describing the success of Instapoetry, Chayka discusses how poems online have to be “relatable and shareable, speaking less to an individualized experience or perspective and more to universal, recognizable themes.” He notes that Rupi Kaur has been made “somewhat unfairly [...] both the face and the scapegoat of the movement, when the platform itself may be more to blame for Instapoetry’s vapid aesthetics.” Given that I have historically been pretty harsh on Rupi Kaur and other Instapoets, it’s an important reminder that the “medium is the message” and that writing for Instagram is going to demand particular modes of production. Chayka then describes how Kaur self-published Milk and Honey and then that it got re-re-released as a professional publisher. The response from critics, “long the sole arbiters of the niche art form of poetry” is that they hated it. I’ve had this same response myself: “They liked it to greeting-card copy and bemoaned its literalness. It didn’t bear thinking about for any length of time.” Chayka describes Kaur’s poetry as “obvious, mildly interesting stream-of-consciousness shower thoughts in visually appealing ways” while another critic says her poems are “expected, obvious, and vacuous, painting an illusion of depth where there is none.” All of these descriptions ring true to me. There is thus a contradiction: critics see her work as trash and yet she is the highest grossing and wildly successful. The way that algorithms fuel poetry like Kaur’s is clearly outlined, and there may be some positive impact. Chayka notes that each of Kaur’s “poem images [...] rack up hundred of thousands of likes”, that millions engage with her work and buy her book, and then links that to the idea that poetry worldwide has sold at a higher rate following this boom of Instapoets: traffic to poets.org went up 25% from 2020-2021, poetry sales in the UK increased 12% from 2018-2019. Chayka suggests that it may be “how the internet has encouraged the consumption of fragments of text” or that it “could equally be the chaos of the last several years inciting a desire for spiritual contemplation.” Maybe there’s cause for optimism where more literary poetry will be brought into the forefront, but even Chayka notes that literary poetry consistently has lower sales figures. The easiness of Kaur’s poetry garners responses, which maximize its value to algorithms, which shows audiences more of her style, which inspires others to do it…essentially, a whole culture emerges from that which is algorithmic. We write for the algorithm, as Chayka notes for other mediums as well.
There’s a different literary angle that Chayka identifies which I actually find far more surprising and controversial. He discusses the autofiction of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Of those three, I only have experience with Rachel Cusk, but the way that Chayka characterizes her work seems contrary to my own reading. He suggests that the their work is “connected by a close but ambiguous relationship between author and narrator.” He accurately says asks, “Is the ‘I’ of Cusk’s Outline trilogy of novels [...] really Cusk herself, like a memoir? Or are the narrator and the events within pure fiction?” That’s true, that is a component of the text that drives its narrative. However, Chayka then suggests that “The appeal comes from the voyeuristic tension of guessing which is which.” I think this is somewhat of a misrepresentation. To me, the distinction is irrelevant: she exists as both fiction and not, as do her interlocutors and their philosophical discussions. He implies that “readers are intimately familiar with this dynamic from social media, where other people present their lives and selves with varying degrees of truthfulness” and posits that “Autofiction is a bit like an influencer’s Instagram account: fragmented, non-narrative, and often deceptive.” Each of those descriptors are true of Cusk’s work, but the impact is, I think, quite different. Cusk, to me, runs contrary to social media. Cusk lingers on moments and delves into the interiority of others, and so much of her work is rooted in dialogue. All of these, in my mind, resist the easy scrolling of social media. You’re forced to listen to a stranger’s story for upwards of fifteen pages, with all of the messy and contradictory emotions that go along with it. Moreover, there’s a more genuine responsiveness that emerges in the dialogue-driven format of Cusk’s work that models the opposite of the quick “click like” and move on. So, I think Chayka can at least be pushed back on this particular reading.
Chayka makes a statement on the section about Rupi Kaur that bridges these readings. He describes how readers can be “attracted to the accessibility of the figure of the artist online, the artist-as-influencer.” He also cites Kate Eichhorn’s “Content”, where she argues that “one’s ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one’s content capital, that is, on one’s ability to produce content not about one’s work, but about one’s status as an artist, writer, or performer.” I think that claim is pretty uncontroversial; years ago, I remember a wave of writers having to do Book Preview videos and things like that. Now, we can easily see people posting photos of their artworks in progress, giving over-hyped updates of partly written novels, and so on. I think there’s a difference between positioning oneself as an artist i.e. performing as an artist online and creating artwork about artists (like in the work of Rachel Cusk).
Where I agree with Chayka, and Eichhorn for that matter, is that we now have a culture where “the emphasis is not on the thing itself, but the aura that surrounds it, the ancillary material that one produces because of living the lifestyle of a creator. [...] It all builds an audience for the person, who remains a separate entity from the thing they make.” Chayka suggests that this is a reversal of Roland Barthes’ “the death of the author”, and that “the author’s personal brand is now all that matters: it’s the work itself that is dead.” It’s a controversial claim, but maybe it’s true.
We can really see this in the world of BookTok. I have my own reasons for being uninspired by BookTok and why I think it’s never going to thrive the way it should. 1) Reading takes time and to drive attention, content-creation needs to happen quickly. 2) Content-creation cannot be nuanced lest it be scrolled past. 3) Readers are, generally, thoughtful people that don’t rely on others interpreting works for them. Anyway, Filterworld highlights some of the BookTok authors that have achieved extraordinary success due to the algorithm: Colleen Hoover and Madeline Miller, whose Song of Achilles and Crice “mingle the grandeur of ancient archetypes with the very millennial sensibility of love and relationships: Ulysses as marooned fuckboy.” Chayka’s description of BookTok (and TikTok in general) is accurate: TikTok “popularity tends to be all-or-nothing and when one book or topic becomes popular, it drives copycats who want to get in on the traffic.” He notes that
The problems of homogeneity are not just that it is boring; the most or least offensive stuff rises to the top because that gets clicks [...] This is the issue about whoever is succeeding on TikTok this week: people who have never read the book are going to make a video about it because that’s the trending topic. Things start out with genuine interest, but by the thousandth video about it, it has nothing to do with the thing itself. The algorithmic feed alienates the superficial symbol of the book from its actual value as literature.
I think I find this particular example so representative of the central problem that Chayka explores because literature necessarily demands time. Certainly, music and art demand time, but literature all the more so, and it becomes pretty obvious that people are not reading the books they talk about. A pretty common form of content out there is that people are excited to read a book, not that they’ve actually read it or have anything meaningful to say about it. Alternatively, you have a thousand people reading a book that made them cry and the extent of the conversation is that the book was sad. Nuanced discussion of artistry is not on the table.
Of course, as in all things, Filterworld is intrinsically linked to politics. Information is political. Access to information and presentation of information is political. For one, algorithms change the way that we are allowed to have conversations. I think first of all of community guidelines as a way of filtering content. Recently, I was on Facebook and reported about 30 comments where people encouraged a trans woman to commit suicide. None of the comments were taken down, I suspect because of how the algorithm is not capable of understanding context. Meanwhile, language changes on TikTok to evade the algorithm (I personally don’t believe it actually does anything—how can such an effective algorithm not adapt or recognize the new terms?) so we end up saying things like, as Chayka notes, “unalive for kill, SA for sexual assault, spicy eggplant instead of vibrator.” The idea of “algospeak, speech moulded in the image of the algorithm” is pretty concerning because it limits what can be said. Thus, when journalists “optimized content for the metrics of the algorithm”, Chayka notes that it “feels manipulative and Kafkaesque.” At every turn, journalists contend with “an unseen, incomprehensible, ever-changing opponent.” Essentially, it’s a new form of censorship that becomes more and more difficult to evade to speak the truth.
And speaking of truth, Chayka discusses the political implications for news organizations and publishers more broadly. As the publication industry faces hardship and has to do more with less, traditional media companies are still responsible for every piece of content they publish. Yet, non-traditional media companies and platforms shirk responsibility by hiding under Section 230, where they can claim “they [are] not media companies at all.” If they can deflect responsibility to the creators rather than taking ownership for what is published on their platform, it facilitates a system of fake news and spreading false information and presents a very real danger, as we saw throughout Covid. Chayka offers the critique that “the algorithm’s curatorial actions are akin to a newspaper choosing which stories to put on the front page.” I find this to be a difficult position. On the one hand, the safeguards of traditional media I find very valuable. On the other hand, I can see platforms collapsing rather than trying to mediate, limiting even further what gets published. For some issues, non-traditional media can be extremely effective, but if platforms decide the risk is too great, they may simply fold rather than adjust to the realities of being a media company.
All things considered, Chayka’s book affirms a lot of my preexisting beliefs about social media, the internet, and art. I suspect that it’s not controversial in its claims, but it does provide some sound arguments and angles for discussing the issues meaningfully. Whether it be its reductive effect on identity, its homogenizing impact on art, or the dangerous contextless treatment of politics, Filterworld does seem to have an ongoing negative effect that we need to counteract. I don’t think this book has all of the answers, but it can certainly serve as a jumping off point for trying to address some of the most challenging issues of our day.
And, hopefully, this post on a blog outside of Facebook does its own little part to contribute to a culture of ideas, patient reflection, and active curation.
See you in the galleries.
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