Against the Algorithm

As revealed in his book Filterworld, New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka believes that the Internet has the capacity to play a healthy role in the development of humans. His formative years involved countless hours in front of computers, playing online games, listening to band bootlegs, and creating an identity for himself separate from the reserved teenager he felt stuck with in real life. Through the Internet, Chayka picked up things he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else. He discovered strange websites. Others treated him like a peer. His Internet experience felt like a necessity to becoming himself while growing up in the 1990s, and it served as a foundation to Chayka’s decades-long use of the web as a workplace, place to socialize, and conduit to an engaged life.

Then something happened. Sometime in the middle of the last decade, the websites Chayka had come to count on for entertainment, connection, and enlightenment—Instagram, Twitter, Netflix, among others—went to algorithmic sorting. Suddenly, it became much more difficult to find the things he was looking for, especially when he didn’t know what he was looking for. He found that an equation couldn’t sate his needs for the medium. “If one form of algorithmic anxiety … is about feeling misunderstood by algorithmic recommendations, another is feeling hijacked by them, feeling like you couldn’t escape them if you tried.” What we should do about this problem becomes the central concern of Filterworld.

 Experiencing the Internet through an algorithm removes something human from the process that Chakya finds irreplaceable. “Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted.” The biggest online businesses figured out that the way to make money through the web is to influence the user to go to certain sites, click on certain links, spend their time exploring certain topics and experiencing certain stimuli. As explored on by Chayka, if you watched any of The Fast and the Furious films over the past two decades, it might be that you’re a fan of the series. It’s at least as likely Netflix led you down that path. If ever at any point during the past decade you said, Why am I watching/reading/listening to this crap? the answer is probably that the algorithm led you there.

This aspect of contemporary online life flies in the face of our assumptions about the internet. We now have direct access to an unprecedented wealth of entertainment and perspectives, right? Technically, yes, but the companies that seek to profit from the internet have their own plans. “In 2023, Netflix was streaming fewer than four thousand films, a lower total than what one of the larger Blockbuster stores stocked before that company disappeared, often upwards of six thousand films.”

If you want it, you can probably find it from the comfort of your own home. No more trudging through the snow in January to get your hands on that coveted book, film, or album. But if we rely on a handful of companies to supply us with all the culture we experience, they’re going to come up with the easiest, most profitable way to supply it to us. That path probably leads you to more Keanu and less Kurosawa.

The control of art and entertainment by the few actually hasn’t changed as much as you might think during the digital age. A small number of companies have dominated the culture industries for decades. The difference now is that these companies used to have to rely on a series of often-independent partners—distributors, record stores, radio stations, theaters, DVD rental houses, cranky bookstore staffs. Everyone up and down the supply chain had their own ideas for how this delivery of culture should happen from big company to you.

When we lock ourselves to our digital feeds, we’re supposedly replacing these perspectives with the opinions and recommendations of our social media tribe, but as anyone who’s lately spent a little time online knows, you don’t necessarily get the posts you want to see in your news feed. You trust instead one very big company’s algorithm to supply you with content and opinions. At some point, that’s going lead to mediocre, if not the lowest common denominator.

Beyond sensible regulation—both by governments and through individual willpower—Chayka’s cure for this issue centers on getting us back to the friction of human curation. “Taste is an imaginative exercise meant to be uncomfortable.” It’s time to dial back some of the attention we grant to algorithms and give it instead to any outlet that relies on well-meaning people to make decisions about what we experience: the Criterion Collection, the DJs who build their own listening programs, book reviewers of arts and culture websites. Yes, a human like me might benefit (meagerly) from this shift in attention, but don’t we want to live in a world in which, every once in a while, a human benefits from our attention?

Whether folks bother to read book reviews or not (and if you’re this far in, thank you) is going to depend upon the reviewer’s ability to deliver the goods. I’m betting that, with Filterworld, Chayka offers something that enriches rather than takes away from your life. Don’t believe me? I’m sure there’s a site a click away that will try to peddle you The Fast and the Furious.

(Doubleday, January 16, 2024)