I'm Christopher Leighton. This is open source. The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain.

Or as Kyle Jacob puts it in a brave new book that I've been waiting for,

filter world, how algorithms flattened culture.

What is the chance that devices that know your likes and dislikes better than you do are ever going to surprise you or teach you?

More important, Kyle, I think, what's the tilt over time of an information system that's tuned to the smiley face?

The joke version is that the algorithm walks into the bar and the bartender asks,

what would you like? And of course the algorithm answers without thinking, I'll have what like and of course the algorithm answers without thinking I'll have what everyone else is having.

You seem to have answered the question why Tik-Toc voices and Instagram faces are so uniform.

Why Airbnb is showing what looks like the same room for rent all over the planet.

Why pop music is down to one super singer who can fill stadiums all over the earth for an era's tour

that could go on forever. We're talking about algorithmic culture in a new world, and let's not forget to talk about Aldous Huxley's

Brave New World from 1932, crazed, dystopia, scandalous fiction, and we seem to be living in something very like it.

Sample the sound of it, what people should hear as algorithmic music, your brain on algorithm culture.

What are your favorite examples?

What comes to mind when I think of algorithmic culture,

maybe first is this YouTube channel

called Lofai Chill Hip Hop Beats to Study slash Relax Too.

And you can kind of hear it's like chill drum beats and drum loops,

some soft scint music, maybe a few drum brushes or like acoustic sounds but overall it's just this like totally

lowing soothing music that you don't need to think about at all and that's playing

24 hours a day seven days a week on YouTube.

And I also think of the kind of cliche

...