Filterworld
The internet hasn’t killed eccentricity but it makes it harder for anyone who lives (at least partly) online to live a specific life. The internet either crushes specificity, mocks it, ignores it, assimilates and commodifies it, or all of the above. It leads to a personality type that Henry James described in The Wings of the Dove: “You're familiar... See more
Molly Young on Substack
... See moreCulture has to follow the dominant modes of perception of a given era. While a twentieth-century building might have been designed to be photographed, the twenty-first century work of art is “designed for reproducibility” through algorithmic feeds…They each contribute and conform to a generic, flattened, reproducible aesthetic. Hence the general st
Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I disagre... See more