Kyle Chayka, 35 years old and born in Maine (USA), is a journalist for the magazine New Yorker, where he writes a column about technology and culture on the internet. He is concerned about the dissemination of art on the Internet and has just published his second book, Mundofilter. How algorithms have flattened culture (Gatopardo), about the difficulty of finding new artistic experiences in a world driven by data. His first book was on a similar topic: the decline of the minimalist movement in the age of Instagram.
Ask. What is mundofiltro?
Answer. It was difficult to find the title. I wanted to describe how we are surrounded by algorithmic recommendations. No phrase could capture it. We say that we are online or glued to the phone, but they do not describe what always surrounds us. “Mundofiltro” came to me to show that we live in algorithms. Everything around us is filtered through digital platforms.
P. Does it make our life worse?
R. I think so. It makes our lives more boring, less interesting. Algorithmic recommendations always offer things that reinforce our point of view. We are no longer as surprised, we are no longer challenged. The way we have become habituated to these algorithmic flows and platforms has made us more passive as cultural consumers. We accept what comes to us and are less likely to look for something different.
P. In the book it says that nothing new is coming out anymore. How does he know?
R. It is difficult to give data, because new things are always created. There’s always a new musician, a new book, or a new influencer account on Instagram. I talked to a lot of people who sensed this boredom or boredom that nothing felt new. Things were new, freshly made, but not innovative. But it is difficult to prove. Many have complained over the last two thousand years that culture is boring and I don’t want to fall into that trap, but how we consume culture has changed. 10 or 20 years ago, we did not consume through data-driven digital platforms. There were many human decisions before putting something on TV, releasing an album or promoting a book. That sense of boredom comes from how much of culture is now dictated by data in a more explicit and aggressive way.
P. He quotes Martin Scorsese to say that today everything is content. How is content distinguished from art?
R. “Content” is a very convenient word because we consume everything through the same channels. It doesn’t matter if it’s a song, an article or a screenshot of a poem, everything travels through Instagram and TikTok. Meanwhile, art is something that moves us, that challenges our preconceived notions. My background is in art criticism and history and the definition of art has always been that when someone tries to create art, then that is art. I don’t think those who create for digital platforms try to create art. The video of a influencer Touring a villa in Bali is not a work of art because there is no intention to make art. There is only the intention to make content, to attract interactions and attract attention.
P. Is that why you are worried that every artist has to start as influencer?
R. In any industry what matters is not what you are doing, but how many followers you have. Do you want to do something, do you want to make an album, publish a book? Okay, but who is your audience? That’s pretty bad, it severely limits who enters the cultural industry. It forces people to build their profile, to act like a famous person before they are famous, to focus not on the thing itself, not on the music or the art, but on their online personality, like the selfies they post, the clothes they wear. They carry.
P. Years ago control was human, not algorithmic. It was better?
R. The question of whether it is good or bad is always complicated because we live the reality that we have. Before everything revolved around human gatekeepers who decided what to promote and they had their biases and problems. Now, the dominant mode is algorithmic control. You don’t have the access problem, anyone can publish something, but you are judged only by your metrics. Whether someone really likes what you do isn’t going to make much difference if you don’t get likes and followers. If the algorithm doesn’t see you, for some reason you are failing. We need a balance.
P. Before, if you came from a rich family it was easier to get to a great institution. Now too, but if you have fewer resources you can try to have a large account on TikTok or YouTube.
R. It’s the question of access. Now anyone can release their song or video. It is a way to raise many voices that were not heard before. The Internet has been good for many, including me, but success on the Internet often comes in very predefined ways. What is successful is often more similar than different. So you can reach an audience, but you’re only going to reach a huge audience if you play within the system and adapt to the algorithmic flow. There is a clash between organic creativity and algorithmic adaptation. I talk to painter friends who need to promote themselves on Instagram to reach curators and gallery owners. But to be successful his paintings need to look a certain way, they have to look good, flat, brightly colored images. That distribution puts aesthetic pressures on people.
P. An advantage of the internet is that everything is there.
R. And it is really beneficial. It’s good for us consumers because you can access anything on YouTube, like a weird video from 1978. It’s inspiring. But the production of content can become a distraction from the production of art. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to market yourself to be an artist, you wouldn’t have to worry about what you wear or where you go on vacation. It turns everyone into personalities instead of just artists.
P. Why is collecting important in the digital age?
R. We overvalue digital content as something permanent. The thing about actually collecting things is that you can keep them forever. It may not work, maybe the Blu-Ray technology is outdated or you have to buy something old to make it work, but at least it’s there and it’s the same way. Meanwhile, Spotify is always changing how it presents music. You’re really just renting access to your music. That changes my relationship with music. When Spotify changes it makes you more likely to listen to one thing instead of another. It’s important to have that collection so you can preserve how you experience it. In the same way that an art museum provides a great experience of a painting, you want to have a great experience of a piece of music that isn’t constantly trying to make you listen to something else.
P. What is algorithmic anxiety?
R. It’s an academic term coined by a sociologist who was at Airbnb as a data analyst. He talked to Airbnb hosts about how they were feeling and found that they were very anxious. They didn’t understand why their property went wrong after a search or why people weren’t booking their house. And they resorted to all kinds of comedic tricks to try to get the algorithm’s attention, like changing the dates on their calendar or rearranging their photos. They resorted to those superstitious actions because they had no agency, they couldn’t control how the algorithm works. There is no one to complain to, you can’t call Airbnb and ask why my house isn’t rented. He identified that as a form of anxiety, but I think we all have it, like Airbnb hosts. We are all forced to negotiate with an algorithm that we do not understand. So we have algorithmic anxiety about who views our stories on Instagram, what shows Netflix recommends to us.
P. Mundofiltro It will be translated into 10 languages. It is a success. You are managing algorithmic anxiety well.
R. It’s curious. From the earliest stages of my book I was very aware that to be successful, I would have to adapt to the algorithm. I had to design the book to make it work. If I had to guess why it was successful it’s because we all have these feelings and reactions on the internet. I’m not the only one going crazy here.
P. The book seems pessimistic, but the conclusion is that, as in other times, culture requires effort.
R. Algorithms changed cultural discovery because suddenly everything became personalized and we lost the sense of effort. But the effort makes the experience meaningful. If a 15-year-old watched 100 Bergman clips on TikTok, that director wouldn’t change his life in the same way as if he had to look him up, figure out how to access his work, and then work to understand him. The effort of finding that culture, the effort of sitting down and trying to understand it, has unfortunately been lost and if we recover it we will have a better experience of the culture. Things will mean more to us if we are not bombarded by a thousand different pieces of music, art and images a day.
P. Is it bad that we can easily make new cultural discoveries?
R. Yes. It’s almost like Tinder. Why settle when there are always 100 other options around the corner? You look at the Netflix homepage and there are two dozen different options that look good and are all in your interests. It’s hard to stick with something. You choose to try and see how you feel afterwards. When you have all of those options, you’re more likely to move on to something else right away.
P. And surely a human filter like before is more convincing to you?
R. You can never trust completely. There is always the feeling that something is being hidden or that your attention is being directed. What I want to encourage people to do, or what I hope happens now on the internet, is that we have a wide variety of curators instead of gatekeepers. We have many voices to which we can pay attention. And I hope that we can find those individual voices. The first step is to find them, like the DJ you like on TikTok or the writer you like on a newsletter. And the second step, which is even more important, is to support them, to do something to make this healing work sustainable. I think we outsource that curation to algorithms that don’t need money. Now we can choose our own curators, we can choose the control system we want, but we have to be aware of how it works and how to keep it going.
P. Anyway, ¿Mundofiltro is it running out?
R. When I finished the book I realized that it was about the 2010s, about a period in history that is in decline. The last decade we experienced the popularization of enormous digital platforms. Now we see that those systems are not good for us, they do not provide good experiences and they exploit many people. The globalization of platforms is not necessarily a good thing. So I think it’s ending. Users’ feelings have changed. Regulation is also changing, as in the EU. I don’t think it’s ending completely, but it is decomposing, disintegrating. In 2017 Facebook seemed like the inevitable endpoint of the internet, now we know it is not.
P. And where do we go?
R. More interesting things happen in smaller spaces, not on TikTok. It’s not about getting millions of views on TikTok or YouTube. They occur in a closed Discord or in a newsletter niche. They are specific spaces in which people can be freer to express themselves, try ideas and be experimental. I haven’t talked much about the tense atmosphere of public discourse online: You don’t want to give the wrong opinion, you’re likely to be attacked for almost anything and that limits how you express yourself. In a smaller space, particularly in a cultural sense, people are freer to experiment and create new things.