We’re Living in ‘Filterworld,’ a Cookie Cutter Culture Created by Algorithms

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Millennial writer Kyle Chayka longs for the good old days of the Internet, when online forums and MP3 piracy helped him define his own personal sense of style and taste. You had to work at it: Wake up early to catch that anime you wanted to watch and record on a VHS tape, find the MySpace page devoted to your favorite show, search out the music magazine featuring cool bands. But today, he observes, the algorithm has flattened culture by constantly feeding us media that it thinks we will like because a lot of other people like it too. According to Chayka, we’re now living in “Filterworld,” which is the title of his new book. We talk to Chayka about how we can reclaim our technological and cultural autonomy and find ourselves. Guests: Kyle Chayka, author, "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture"; staff writer, The New Yorker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:35.0	From KQED.
0:47.9	Music From KQED. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:51.5	It can be easy to look at the state of culture and make both a sweeping critique and diagnosis.
0:57.4	Everything is terrible, and it was the internet that made it this way.
1:00.6	I bounce equally off shambolic Netflix shows, repetitive superhero movies, and Instagram
1:06.0	poetry.
1:07.0	There's so much not to love.
1:08.9	But, of course, this is not a complete theory of the case.
1:12.6	For that, we have Kyle Chaka's Filterworld.
1:14.6	This new book by the New Yorker staff writer
1:16.6	explores the particular dynamics guiding what he calls the flattening of our culture.
	...

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