Filterworld

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.

Filterworld and its slick sameness can induce a breathtaking, near-debilitating sense of anxiety. The sameness feels inescapable, alienating even as it is marketed as desirable.

That bracketing includes forms of culture as well as identities. It might also be accurate to describe Filterworld as dictatorial or feudal: we all reside online within spaces we have no power over, following capricious rules that we don’t approve.

The same process applies to artists, writers, and anyone online who has felt pressure to confine themselves to an arbitrary “personal brand.”

whether something provokes immediate like or dislike. Taste’s moral capacity, the idea that it generally leads an individual toward a better society as well as better culture, is being lost. Instead, taste amounts to a form of consumerism in which what you buy or watch is the…

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hollowed-out meaning of taste in the Filterworld era has something in common with the way engagement is measured by digital platforms: it’s…

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Benjamin wrote that collectors have a “feeling of responsibility” to their collections. But it’s very difficult to feel such ownership for what we collect on the Internet; we can’t be stewards of the culture we appreciate in the same way as Benjamin. We don’t actually own it and can’t guarantee accessing it in the same way each time.

For independent creators, the algorithm takes the place of bosses and performance reviews; it’s a real-time authority gauging your success at adapting to its definition of compelling content, which is always shifting.

Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimization and homogenization continued.

The Mechanical Turk is like The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain—an all-knowing, uncanny entity that is ultimately revealed as something much more mundane and comprehensible. The machine and the trick reinforce each other. With its doubled deceptions, the Turk is able, as Walter Benjamin wrote reflecting on the device in a 1940 essay, to “win