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The Danger of Algorithms

Why we’re giving up cultural responsibility

by Kyle Chayka

September 20, 2024

Kyle Chayka / Illustration: Joel Kimmel

App interfaces that present the appearance of recommendations can be as important as actual recommendations in determining what culture we consume and how we feel about it. Interface design falls under the tech industry label of “user experience”: the micro-interactions that happen as a user navigates, searches and clicks. The user experience of today’s platforms tends to be overwhelmingly passive. You’re not supposed to look under the hood too much, just consume what’s already in front of you—theoretically, the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself, though that’s patently untrue. If we can always rely on the Netflix home page, Instagram Explore page or TikTok For You feed to show us something that we’re interested in, then we have less impetus to decide for ourselves what to look for, follow and, perhaps most important, save. We often build our sense of personal taste by saving pieces of culture, a monument to our preferences, like a bird constructing a nest.

But the more automated the algorithm feed is, the more passive it makes us as consumers, and the less need we feel to build a collection, to preserve what matters to us. We give up the responsibility of collecting. Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture—whether films on DVD, albums on vinyl, or books on a shelf—has shifted from being a necessity to appearing as an indulgent luxury. Why would I bother worrying about what I have access to at hand when digital platforms advertise their ability to provide access to everything, forever? The problem is that there is no guarantee of permanence in what digital platforms offer—the appearance of totality is a facade, buttressed by recommendations—and their interfaces are constantly changing. The confusion induced by a suddenly changed interface is a common experience.

One morning in late 2021, I opened Spotify on my laptop and found myself suddenly lost. I was used to performing a specific set of clicks to access the music I like—in this instance, a 1961 jazz album by Yusef Lateef called Eastern Sounds. Many weekday mornings working from home during the pandemic I would put the album on first thing. But that day I couldn’t find the album or the full list of albums that I had saved with the Spotify Like button, which was the software’s principal way of keeping them in one place. My muscle memory didn’t work. The collection had been rearranged without giving me any notice or choice in the matter. It felt like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room overnight and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. A new Your Library tab in Spotify’s moody black-and-green interface hinted at everything I was trying to find, but instead it opened a window of automatically generated playlists that I didn’t recognize. The next tab over offered podcasts, which I never listened to on the app. Nothing made sense.

As all forms of media have moved into streaming, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we can also have physical, nonalgorithmic relationships with the pieces of culture we consume in our personal time. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we want to experience something, we seek it out, finding a book by its spine or pulling an album from its case. The way we interact with something, and where we store it, also change the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update
forcibly reminded me. The same thing happened with Twitter when it added its own algorithmic For You feed and Instagram when it moved the button to post a photo, at one point replacing it with the button to watch TikTok-style videos. All these changes make me crave the opposite: a fixed, stable, reliable way of accessing whatever culture you want.

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers digital technology and the impact of the Internet and social media on culture. This is an extract from Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Kyle Chayka.