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Highlights
Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed
Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day, the technology is both constructed by us and dominates us, manipulating our perceptions and attention
The culture that thrives in Filterworld tends to be accessible, replicable, participatory, and ambient
Through algorithmic digital platforms like Instagram, Yelp, and Foursquare, more people around the world are learning to enjoy and seek out similar products and experiences in their physical lives. Through their feeds, they are consuming similar kinds of digital content, no matter where they live, and so their preferences are shaped in that image
Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises, as powerful artwork is meant to do. Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted.
We’re encouraged to forget the presence of algorithms.
In our case, the medium is the algorithmic feed; it has scaled and sped up humanity’s interconnection across the world to an unimaginable degree. Its message is that on some level, our collective consumption habits, translated into data, run together into sameness.
The technology is not at issue—one can no more blame an algorithm itself for bad recommendations than blame a bridge for its engineering flaws
Algorithms, after all, are inextricable from the data they run on, which has been created and is constantly refreshed by humans
Corrupt personalization is the process by which your attention is drawn to interests that are not your own
Algorithms are limiting the future to the past,” the futurist Jarod Lanier said
wasn’t surprising myself with the unfamiliar during traveling, just reaffirming the superiority of my own sense of taste by finding it in a new place
The more tourists who were routed through these channels, the more their pathways through the nation became homogenized, like Waze routing cars through downtown Westport. An optimized version of Iceland emerged for consumption.
The ever-shifting nature of Instagram’s design means it is almost impossible to experience Janelle’s work in the context in which it originally existed. You can’t rewind time and see how the account was presented in 2015, for example, on the grid or in the timeline. Digital platforms lack the kind of stability that is vital for the longevity of culture, the way you might see a photographer’s decades-old film negatives displayed in a museum. Context is swept away as the companies change priorities
Established by the scholar Kate Eichhorn in her 2022 monograph Content, it describes the Internet-era state in which “one’s ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one’s content capital; that is, on one’s ability to produce content not about one’s work but about one’s status as an artist, writer, or performer.” In other words, the emphasis is not on the thing itself but the aura that surrounds it, the ancillary material that one produces because of living the lifestyle of a creator
Nor did anyone else, no matter their level of expertise, have the authority to judge whatever you made as artistically unworthy. (The opposite of the Internet, where everyone feels entitled to critique or comment
Algorithmic recommendations are addictive because they are always subtly confirming your own cultural, political, and social biases, warping your surroundings into a mirror image of yourself while doing the same for everyone else
It’s hard to overstate just how smoothly the feeds infiltrated my life
All the media and text that reached me was mediated through digital platforms in processes I had little control over. My phone was glued to my hand as a tool to soak up any spare second of nonstimulation
We should talk even more about the things we like, experience them together, and build up our own careful collections of likes and dislikes. Not for the sake of fine-tuning an algorithm, but for our collective satisfaction.
We turn to art to seek connection, yet algorithmic feeds give us pure consumption