Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

A shopper doesn’t go to Nike just because they want good running shoes; Nike casts an aura of youth and energy over everything it produces, whether sneakers or brightly screen-printed T-shirts. Zara makes dresses, among many other clothing items, and through them projects a sense of cutting-edge style without the cost of traditional luxury brands.

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. When recommendation algorithms are based only on data about what you and other platform

“Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge,” Montesquieu continued, “it’s a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know.” The latter part of that statement strikes me: Taste is an abstract, ineffable, unstable thing. A listener to music or reader of a book cannot truly tell if they will enjoy something before they experien

My favorite bookstore has long been McNally Jackson, a collection of New York City–area stores whose first location was in SoHo (in 2023, the original flagship relocated six blocks away). Though it wasn’t in any way personalized, it always felt like the store was there for me personally, like it understood what I was looking for, because its stock

as much as the feeds brought me things I never would have seen or heard otherwise, my overdependence on them was also cutting me off from a different realm of experiences that I had forgotten about over the course of the decade: the encounter with scarcity rather than infinity, the process of judging and choosing for myself what I wanted to see in

Montesquieu crucially argued that surprise, which can be alienating or challenging, like a particularly ugly wabi-sabi Japanese tea vessel, is a fundamental element of taste. “Something can surprise us because it excites wonder, or because it is new or unexpected,” he wrote—it exists outside the realm of what we already know we like. “Our soul ofte

beyond identifying something as “cool.” Taste requires experiencing the creation in its entirety and evaluating one’s own authentic emotional response to it, parsing its effect.

Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day,

No one cares when you stop tweeting; the algorithm will simply slot in the content of some more willing participant, because, in Filterworld, everyone is replaceable. The majority of your followers are unlikely to even notice your absence because, at least to the algorithm, your sleepy account is deemed no longer worthy of prioritization.

The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us, and yet we have little way of talking back to it or changing how it works. This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material. We also adapt the way we present ourselves online to its incentives. We write tweet