Books

Can You Escape the Algorithm? ‘Filterworld’ Gives It a Try.


FILTERWORLD: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle Chayka


This dispatch began from an uptown location of Dig (formerly Dig Inn), a small chain of “fast casual” restaurants headquartered in New York City. The walls are white-painted brick, the tables are marble and the cardboard bowls are packed with colorful, healthy foodstuffs. Only the insipid pop music that blares through the speakers discourages lingering.

After reading Kyle Chayka’s new book, “Filterworld,” I understood more thoroughly and ruefully why I had chosen, or thought I’d chosen, to go there — and not, say, to the more idiosyncratic, local Eli’s down the street, with its delicious if overpriced turkey chili, absence of Wi-Fi, and eccentric neighborhood dowagers rustling the cellophane.

No shade to Dig (no shade would be possible anyway given all those gold-stemmed hanging lamps) but everything about the place, including lopping the cute pun from its name, has been optimized for the phone: this device that most of us have given up trying to resist or relinquish for something less powerful and just tiredly accept as an extension of our brains and bodies. Dig’s food, our “feeds”; their appetizers, our apps — they are all of a piece.

Chayka has visited a lot of establishments with a similar aesthetic, which he has dubbed AirSpace, like a Nike sneaker, for its geographically neutral comfort. His previous book was about minimalism as a response to the world’s chaos; along with considering artists, composers and entrepreneurs, his research included visiting rock gardens in Kyoto and floating in a sensory deprivation tank for an hour.

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