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Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
In Filterworld, New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. But he does bring clarity to a particular set of vibes we’ve all been feeling for a long time.
The central premise is that the internet has homogenized culture—broadly defined—into a flat, boring sameness. Chayka first noticed the trend while traveling, and seeking out the much-maligned hipster coffee shops he admits he’s a fan of (I am, too). Whether he was in Mexico City or Tokyo, the reclaimed wood and the Edison bulbs that adorned these coffee shops gave Chayka a familiar sense of comfort (again, same).
But by embracing the “Instagram aesthetic,” these places felt untethered from the world, with no real personality. Throughout the book, Chayka explores how this homogenization came to be. Spoiler: It’s Instagram.
The phenomenon applies to much more than coffee shops, of course, and Chayka expands his thesis to Spotify and many other realms to get at why all forms of culture feel so same-y. It’s not an accident: It’s the incentives of a globalized economy powered by the internet that got us here.
Again, there’s not a ton of revelation here, but there’s something satisfying about Chayka connecting the dots. He’s at his best towards the end of the book, when he makes the costs of all this flattening evident through personal anecdotes, especially when he describes how a particular cultural artifact impacted him in a way that algorithms can never replicate.
Here’s Chayka describing his first encounter with a John Coltrane piece, heard over his car radio:
That night, a jazz track started with a series of pounding piano chords and a drum backbeat alongside percussive thunks from an upright bass. Then a single horn melody traced over the background like a shooting star or a bird whirling against a clear sky. Though structurally it was a standard jazz quartet, it was unlike anything I had ever heard before. The track kept unspooling as I drove, charging along every time I thought it might stop, moving through periods of rhythmic calm and then into discordant horn solos that only dipped occasionally into recognizable melody. It lasted more than thirteen minutes, bringing me all the way back into the driveway. When the song finally subsided, the woman’s voice on the radio explained that it was John Coltrane’s recording of “My Favorite Things.”
Not necessarily a jazz fan at that point, Chayka only heard the piece because a DJ at a radio station he knew and trusted played it. In other words, he had a chance encounter with a piece of art that moved him precisely because it wasn’t in his usual wheelhouse. Spotify could never.
As the internet ages, we’re seeing with more and more clarity what we’re losing to algorithms, to digital frictionlessness, to outsourcing our creative exploration to tech firms. There’s something comforting in naming the loss, so that we can reclaim what was once ours.
