August 1, 2023
From city grids to music playlists to the ads we see, our lives are ruled by algorithms, a network of mathematically determined choices that lend a decided homogeneity to our surroundings and challenge the notion that we are making choices for ourselves. Chayka, who writes about digital technology and its cultural impact for The New Yorker, limns the history of algorithms and questions the value of shareability over the messiness of creativity. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from November 1, 2023
An important book about how to get out of the algorithmic box and make your own decisions. Algorithms have become the secret drivers of Google, Instagram, TikTok, and all the other digital platforms, and they are having an insidious impact on how we think, consume, and produce, writes New Yorker staff writer Chayka, author of The Longing for Less. They continually collect data, feeding our past choices--and the preferences of other people--back to us. This process makes endless browsing easy, but it locks us in an echo chamber, slowly degrading our capacity for original thinking. It also affects the physical world, and Chayka offers an intriguing--and distressing--explanation of how all the coffee shops in the world came to look the same, thanks to Instagram and Snapchat. Our world has become filtered and machine-managed, with success measured in engagement metrics. As a remedy, the author offers interesting ideas for regulation, mostly focused on greater transparency. He admits that this would be hard to do, so he offers a more personal path. Undertaking an "algorithmic cleanse," Chayka jumped off the social media sites that had taken over his life. For a while, he suffered from "fear of missing out," but eventually, he felt his creativity returning. When he rejoined the online world, he ignored the constant flow of recommendations and looked only for the niches that interested him. During this time, the author discovered that guidance from algorithms is completely unnecessary. "Regaining control isn't so hard," writes the author. "You make a personal choice and begin to intentionally seek out your own cultural rabbit hole, which leads you in new directions, to yet more independent decisions...and, ultimately, a sense of self." Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity.
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Starred review from January 1, 2024
Filterworld, as charted by New Yorker writer Chayka, is, simply, our everyday world. From the songs Spotify autoplays to the items Amazon encourages a shopper to add to their cart, the evolution of algorithms has completely changed how users interact with online platforms. As Chayka shows, these endorsements are based not around creating a better user experience but on producing advertising clicks and longer session times, all leading to bigger revenues and market shares. Chayka delineates how our most used social feeds have abandoned chronological browsing in favor of showing just what the algorithm has chosen. While Filterworld is not written as a self-help program, Chayka's frank discussion of his own digital detox, full of anxiety before arriving at an algorithmic homeostasis, will inspire readers to believe there is a way out, returning to human tastemakers. He makes it clear that this is increasingly a decision which bumps directly against how our digitally reliant lives are set up. 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.
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