As an algorithm alternative, I can offer that if you liked Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, you’ll probably be interested in Filterworld as well. Chayka distinguishes himself with his focus on the old-fashioned idea of taste, revisiting among many other works Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, the coppery-covered classic of sociology that many a college semiotician toted around ostentatiously in the ’80s and ’90s ... Unlike the cascade of content from strangers on the internet, Filterworld, as a proper book will, evokes less transient impulses than genuine, lingering feelings: depression about our big-box corporate dystopia; admiration for Chayka’s curiosity and clear writing style; dismay about the electrical engineering graduate—electrical engineering!—who can’t get astrology out of her timeline and regrets being influenced to buy a pair of leg warmers ... But it also made me feel old. Or — let’s put that another way — acutely conscious of generational divides...Boomers and Gen X, with more years logged algorithm-free, might find Filterworld unduly bleak; Zoomers, hopelessly naïve. Or, as they say on the internet, YMMV.

Chayka’s version of taste is an unreliable instrument for establishing the extent that Big Tech is achromatizing the last bit of color out of our souls ... Chayka’s valid analysis of how algorithmic curation dulls our creative agency overlaps messily with the centuries-old anxiety of the aesthete within modernity, where all subjective opinions are ultimately equal, never more-so than in the marketplace.

Chayka pines for an imaginary past where a 'traditional model of human tastemakers' prevailed, and real people determined how successful books, movies, and music were. He's right that technology has always shaped culture—but he doesn't meaningfully engage with the idea that in this 'traditional model,' what became popular was also shaped by race, gender, class, and power, just as they are in an algorithmic world ... this sort of oversimplified, easy analysis undermines his reporting in the book about influencers, who share with him nuanced reflections about their careers and their relationships to social media ... Chayka's arguments about Emily in Paris shallow celebration of consumption, the 'blatant clarity' of Instagram poets, and even the algorithmic organization of Amazon Books stores may once have seemed new, but they are now the low-hanging fruit of cultural criticism in the Internet Age. Near the end of the book, when Chayka narrates his temporary break from social media and Spotify, his reflections feel trite, not revelatory: Yet another extremely online Twitter user has discovered the value (and limits) of logging off ... Chayka is so successful in documenting this frustrating aspect of modern life that his overarching argument — that readers should depend more on word-of-mouth recommendations and cultivate their sense of personal taste through time and effort — feels unhelpful, like a band-aid on a larger problem ... This is a shame, because many large tech companies and their algorithms do wield power in insidious, often discriminatory ways. There are fruitful discourses about the future of online infrastructure and the regulatory tools available to curb harmful online data collection and break up monopoly power. But by grounding his argument in 'taste' Chayka's contribution feels more based in 'vibes and feelings' than a critical analysis.

Does the near impossible: It makes algorithms, those dull formulas of inputs and outputs, fascinating. But it also does something that is ever more valuable as new technologies make the world seem bigger, more complicated, and more difficult to understand. It makes algorithms, those uncanniest of influencers, legible.

Chayka is at his sharpest when he is describing the impact of algorithms on one of his areas of expertise: architecture and design ... Chayka’s logic is seductive. The internet of today, where Filterworld’s impact is most keenly felt, is both less weird and more corporate than anyone who lived through the GeoCities era could have possibly imagined. There’s a palpable sense of grief in Filterworld when Chayka describes the walls of the internet closing in as it consolidated onto privately owned platforms ... What’s less convincing is the underlying assumption powering Chayka’s argument: that mass culture is inherently more varied when it is mediated primarily through human tastemakers...While he makes obligatory references to the Whiteness and the maleness of the elite that used to have the strongest hand in determining artistic merit, he still venerates many of its representatives, even as he handwaves away their blind spots ... There’s a persistent ahistoricity in Filterworld, a deification of the past that ultimately weakens an otherwise persuasive argument. Chayka vividly evokes the jarring sensation of trying to maintain cultural archives on platforms whose incentives are constantly shifting, at one point evocatively describing a Spotify layout change as 'a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room overnight.' And yet he often fails to ground his argument in a past that feels authentic ... Chayka’s inability to fully contend with the past blinkers his assessment of our shared online present and thus, ultimately, our future. It is true, certainly, that algorithms now mostly control the levers of our cultural Mechanical Turks, but Chayka never convincingly shows that the humans who once hid beneath the machines were necessarily better.

Nearly vibrates when Chayka brings his background as an art critic and curator to the fore ... The simplest way to think of them is as machines designed to be very good at guessing the order of things based on the libraries of information they’ve been trained on ... Whether people can be convinced to exit their infinite scrolls is still an open question, though. Filterworld’s place in the growing bibliography of modern internet criticism sits somewhere between schematic and critique.

Chayka does provide a robust survey of many of the essential issues, in six brisk chapters that strike a readable balance between cultural theory, feature-style reporting, and hot (sometimes overheated) takes ... Sweeping statements ... Chayka treats the concept of 'taste' throughout with a preciousness I doubt he actually is unsophisticated enough to hold. He cites contradictory definitions, mobilizing Voltaire one moment to say that taste must be cultivated and effortful, and then Montesquieu and Agamben the next to say that taste works by rules we do not (cannot?) know ... The stylistic mode of Filterworld, however, seems to require Chayka to pull away quickly from such sociopolitical, structural approaches and back to a more personal perspective. Here, his prescriptions are much less satisfying.

Chayka’s basic thesis is hard to dispute ... But culture also still exists beyond social media, a point it’s easy to forget when reading Filterworld ... Even though Filterworld is careful to underscore the cultural now’s "general state of ennui and exhaustion, the sense that nothing new is forthcoming," Chayka does not exactly lead the charge for a wholesale reboot of contemporary culture. Instead, he often simply appears nostalgic for a bygone era of superior taste.

Fans of the burgeoning genre of Big Tech ethnography will appreciate Chayka’s astute historical analysis and philosophical rumination on the subject, all 'filtered' expertly with his own biography as a millennial who grew up amid the explosion of the socially fixated web.

An important book about how to get out of the algorithmic box and make your own decisions ... Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity.