Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers.
page 9, Filterworld
The world and the culture at large as Kyle Chayka paints it is one defined by algorithms. By algorithms he means the various recommendation algorithms that define our social media feeds; Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram etc. This is the titular Filterworld that this book is concerned with.
Large sections of Filterworld paint an increasingly bleak picture of what contemporary culture in the era of social media platforms governed by large multi-national corporations look like. It is a cultural milieu where the whims of the black box algorithms shift over night creating and destroying trends overnight. This creates a sense of algorithmic anxiety which Chayka describes as such:
Algorithmic anxiety describes the burgeoning awareness that we must constantly contend with automated technological processes beyond our understanding and control, whether in our Facebook feeds, Google Maps driving directions, or Amazon product promotions.
page 38, Filterworld
You could be forgiven for thinking this book is a work of capitalist realism. I certainly did. However, the last quarter of the book Chayka proposes a couple solutions – government regulation and human curation. I am fully a believer in the power of human curation already but Chayka’s section on government regulation leaves things in the vagaries of what-ifs.
The book concludes that if we are to break out of the vise grip of the Filterworld we must start by thinking about and envisioning the better world we want to create. So the solutions are not really solutions as much as paths out of the Filterworld. Chayka argues that we cannot escape the realities of culture being molded by the technologies we use daily but we are not helpless waifs to be swept along with its currents.
So to conclude, this thankfully did not turn out to be a depressing book about the realities of living in capitalism but a tool to incite thought about the computerized systems we live within and to envision a path out of the mess we are in. Which is good because if it was I don’t think I would have liked this book.
Personally, a lot of Filterworld was about things I already knew and were thinking about so it wasn’t that much of a revelation. But if you are new to thinking about social networks and technology in this way, I think you will find this book enlightening. I’ll leave y’all with this quote from David Graeber that Kyle puts in this book’s conclusion.
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
David Graeber
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