Factually! with Adam Conover - How the Algorithm Warps Our Culture with Kyle Chayka

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

The internet once felt novel and exciting, with new mysteries waiting to be discovered around every corner. These days there's a different mystery: who is actually deciding everything that you end up seeing? Journalist Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, has studied how platform algorithms have been invisibly guiding culture, as well as how they're been failing us. In this episode, Adam and Kyle discuss what algorithms get wrong about what people want, how that warps our culture, and how creative people have started making content to serve the mathematical needs of platforms instead of actual human beings. Find Kyle's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself. Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today direct from Bokksu. And look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie.

We've got a dolce. I don't I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh, my gosh. This one is I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope. It's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the

month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door. So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Boxu.com. I don't know the truth.

I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, we don't often think about this because it feels so normal to us now,

but in the past couple decades, we have gone through a shocking revolution in how we see, experience, and disseminate music, film, video, art, and just about any other form of media or culture. And I can see this transformation in my own career. You know, back in 2004, back when I got started, if I made a funny video and it went viral on the internet, that was because people liked it. People had to email it to their friends or post it to a message board or just tell their friend about it.

Years later, when I got a TV show on basic cable, we got that show because me and the people I worked with convinced a human executive to produce it, that it was a good idea and that people would like it. However imperfect that process was, and it was very imperfect, humans decided what would hit and thus would get seen. But those days are long gone. Today, when I post work on YouTube or social media or even make a show for Netflix, my success is not based on human decision making, but on the opaque, capricious, and confusing whims of an algorithm. I mean, it's pretty weird

that now entertainers, musicians, artists of all kinds now have to think about how our work will interact with a totally impersonal, ever-changing series of computer programs just to reach an audience or, God forbid, make a living. I mean, supposedly we're making art for humans, not for computers, but that is not really what the job feels like anymore. And here's the weirdest part of all. We now talk as a population about the algorithm as though it's some sort of mystical force because in many ways it is. I mean, we have so little power or recourse over the algorithm.

We know that it manipulates us and that the manipulation benefits the companies that own the algorithm and yet there's nothing we can do about it. I mean, have you ever been on TikTok and there's some random video with millions of views and then all the comments are people baffled about why it was suggested to them?

We know that we're being screwed with and we're all freaking out about it. And yet here we are. I mean, it is just buck wild that we have outsourced who gets to see what to these multi-billion dollar platforms that do not have our best interests at heart. It has shifted our entire cultural landscape to what our guest today calls filter world. And that has been a transformational change and not for the better. To talk about this today, we have

an incredible guest. But before we get to it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every one of these episodes ad free and help keeps the podcast free for everyone else to enjoy. And if you want to come see me do stand up comedy, avoid the algorithm entirely and watch me with your two human eyes. Soon I'm going to be in San Jose, California, La Jolla, California, Indianapolis, a lot of other great cities.

Head to Adam Conover dot net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's welcome today's guest. La Jolla, California, Indianapolis, a lot of other great cities, head to adamcouniver.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's welcome today's guest. His name is Kyle Chayka. He's the author of a wildly smart and insightful new book called Filter World, How the Algorithms Flatten Culture. Please welcome Kyle Chayka. Kyle, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you for having me. So let's jump right into it. How pervasive are these algorithms? And actually, that's a word that has a mathematical meaning, but we now use it in this very general way. What are we talking about when we talk about the algorithm? We're kind of talking about everything. of the algorithm when really what we're dealing with is a series of different algorithmic recommendation systems that work differently on all of these platforms that we use. And I think we're kind of surrounded by algorithms right now, like everything from your Netflix

homepage to your TikTok feed to your email inbox to whose Instagram stories do you see first? All of these things are dictated by these equations that are trying to guess what you're going to be interested in. And, you know, the first thing that jumps out at me is that it really depersonalizes it to call it an algorithm. Because, you know, when you used to watch

in the golden age of TV, when that was the only sort of moving image you had available to you, you knew that what you saw was being dictated by somebody at NBC, CBS, or ABC. The same is true of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, all of these services. But we say the algorithm, which really depersonalizes it when actually it's, I mean, it's Mark Zuckerberg and the people who work for him that are determining what we see, right? They have the same level of media control. Right. So when we blame the algorithm,

I think we think of some robot or like a machine, black box, like incomprehensible system. But really all of these equations are controlled by the CEOs of tech companies. They're designed by engineers. There's a bunch of human people sitting in offices who are deciding

how these feeds work. Even though we think of them as so abstract, it's actually this very commercial, you know, corporate decision. Yeah. And so what is the effect of these algorithms on us on our culture that you argue in your book? In my book, I mean, I was struck by the sense that culture overall was becoming more homogenous and kind of a little more boring, a little less compelling. And we're all just becoming more passive consumers of the culture around us. And I think the responsibility for that

lays with these algorithms and the digital platforms that use algorithmic feeds. Like they're just feeding stuff to us that is supposed to fit with our tastes, that's supposed to give us what we want to see but i think in reality we're having a much more shallow experience well there's a place for shallow experiences sometimes right for sure like i listen to certain you know uh playlists on the streaming services sometimes because i just want some pleasant background music i don't want to be surprised and delighted uh by something interesting i just want fucking rain sounds because i'm going

to sleep right there there is a place for that kind of thing but what do we lose overall when all of our culture becomes that way yeah like i think of the youtube channel lo-fi chill hip-hop beats to study slash relax to like i totally use that to do work and do writing and that's the kind of like passive ambient background music that we appreciate from an algorithmic feed but i do worry although i think lo-fi beats is actually at least originally was curated by a human yes it is curating it yeah uh 24 hours a day yep but now it's been ripped off by dozens and dozens of algorithmic feeds on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. Totally. So I think we lose culture that doesn't fit into that box.

Like everything is becoming more ambient, more ignorable. A lot of these things exist for you to look at your phone at the same time. Like Netflix shows are kind of more ambient. I think a lot of music is more ambient. And I just worry that that kind of quality is taking over too much. I agree with you in a lot of ways, but I will say, I just want to push on it a little bit, that there are some times that I feel that algorithms do give me a bit of surprise and delight. And the main example I have is when I first installed TikTok,

TikTok gave me the sense of surprise, delight, and serendipity that I felt like I used to get on the internet. You know, I'm a child of the internet from the nineties, from the early two thousands. And every time you went on the internet, you would see something weird and crazy that you didn't get anywhere else. That was the whole appeal of it was like, holy fuck, look at this. Right. And that sort of novelty sort of felt like it bled out of the internet. I wasn't getting that from, you know, Twitter and Instagram. I was seeing the same old shit. And then suddenly when I went on TikTok, I was like, hold on a second. It's showing me the weirdest video I've

ever seen. Why am I looking at this? Why does this, the best feeling on TikTok is why does this have a hundred thousand likes? I got to keep watching. And then you'll see some, you know, the craziest video you've ever seen. Someone recorded the most bizarre thing ever. Or, you know, someone has a completely strange opinion or some teen has made some bizarre song, you know, that goes viral for weird reasons. And so I did get some of that strangeness.

And I remember going, oh, I like this algorithm. This algorithm is better than other ones I've experienced in the past because it's giving me a little bit. And it felt like it was driving culture in an interesting way, at least for the first maybe year and a half of TikToks going mainstream. I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah, I think, I mean, the internet did kind of calcify, I think, and TikTok shook it up a lot, in part by embracing the algorithmic recommendation. Your For You feed is not about who you choose to follow. It's not about what you know is out there. It's just about bringing you stuff that's interesting and compelling that you would never have even known to look for. that same experience like this is so cool this is so surprising and new and different i never would have found this stuff but i feel like i mean one problem i think is that the tiktok algorithm has changed over time like we can't rely on these to stay the same and at least now three out of every four videos it shows me is somebody trying to sell me some plastic crap like shopping tiktok

shopping has utterly taken over i think it's become less surprising and delightful as TikTok, the company tries to further monetize your attention and make more money out of that feed. So I think we can't rely on it staying the same. Like I wish there was a dial I could turn up and down. Like I want to get more surprise. I want like, I remember,

I just have to tell you, this is one of the first TikTok videos I ever saw. Okay. I was scrolling and I come across an account. The name of the account is Big Fat David. OK, it's a it's like a 13 year old kid in Fresno, California. He's on an almond farm in Fresno, California. And he's saying, OK, you guys, today I'm going to dig a hole.

And then he starts digging a deep hole and then he builds a fire in the hole. He says, now the fire is getting really big. And then at the end, he turns the camera and goes tomorrow i'm gonna make denny's here's what i'm making tomorrow and he shows a picture of a denny's grand slam breakfast and he says he's gonna make it and everyone in the comments is like what the fuck is going on in this video but it was so compelling and then i followed him and i've literally tracked now big fat david's life for the last like four years I'm a fan of Big Fat David and he has he sells

t-shirts now he's living his best life in Fresno California digging holes on an almond farm and that was a wonder but I don't get that as much as I used to from TikTok I'm not seeing that I feel like we've lived through that same era of the internet that started in the

mid to late 90s and I feel like the internet lived through that same, like the era of the internet that started in the mid to late nineties. And I feel like the internet always starts in the weirdest possible place. Like you have the crazy internet humor forums, you have, you know, the weirdest memes possible. And like, there's these life cycles where you start in a really weird place and then you get to a really boring and like corporatized and monotonous place and i feel like we've seen that happen with tiktok over the past few years um you know like i think there are

life cycles of the internet where we wanted to change and we wanted to move on and we need a kind of fresh wave of stuff and i feel like part of my motivation for writing this book was just i think there is an era that's ending. I think the era of the giant social network, the kind of era that started in the 2010s and peaked around, you know, 2020, 2021, that's kind of over and we're starting to be hungry for the next thing. Yeah. And it's funny how long it took me to figure out that things were going to change on the internet. I thought it was going to be the way that it started forever. And then after 15 years, I was like, wait, why does the internet suck now?

And then I started to learn about the work of, for instance, the writer Tim Wu, who's written a lot about how the same thing happened on the internet as happened to radio. When radio started out, it was supposed to be, everyone would broadcast and receive. People would talk to each other. No one had any idea what it was for. There was huge experimentation. And then 20 years later, it's three giant companies just broadcasting the same three shows. And no one talking to each other except on very narrow bands, like the sort of corporate takeover of the medium.

And I had never realized, oh, I was living through the halcyon early days where it's hobbyists and weirdos and no one knows what this thing is going to be. And the powerful have not yet been able to exert their power over the platform to make to bring it under their control, as they eventually did. The people with money won as they as they always do. Do you sort of agree with that story? The very broad strokes? There's a monopolization of the internet that happened. Like if we think back to the 90s or early 2000s, you know, up to the era of Facebook, like websites were a different kind of thing. Like websites were things that people made of their own volition, often very creatively

or weirdly. They were very niche. There were certain destinations to be social online, but they weren't so corporate. We weren't all stuffing ourselves into the same modules that we are in now on Facebook or Instagram. Part of my problem is that the containers of the internet have become so restrictive that if we want to express ourselves, we have to cram it into the Twitter or xbox or we have to show it through our instagram feeds and we have no agency over how those things work and no way to like talk back to it or express ourselves differently and that's really frustrating i think of early internet culture you know media properties i don't know what else to call them. Like, for instance, Dinosaur Comics.

If you remember Dinosaur Comics, where this guy used the exact same frame of two dinosaurs talking to each other every single day and changed the word bubbles. An insane thing to do, extremely popular, or Ali Broch's comics, where she would write long essays and illustrate them in this crazy way

that eventually like gave birth to, you know, the rage comic meme format. Those are people just saying, Hey, I've got a blank canvas. What the hell do I want to put on it? And struck upon something people like those same people today would be like, how do I make a real, you know, I need to make a real, because that's what, and that's what I'm trying to do now is just like make the thing that Instagram likes. Yeah. I mean, the production values have gotten so much higher, right? That's why we're on video. That's why you're in a stage set. It's like, we have to not just produce text or audio. We need to do this kind of TV show because that's what the platform is prioritizing. Instagram is obsessed

with Reels because it was trying to compete with TikTok. And so what kind of post will get you the most algorithmic promotion? A video. You can't do still photos anymore and gain an audience. So we're all kind of molding what we make, us digital creators of whatever. We're all tailoring our creativity, tailoring our content to what works for the platforms. Yeah. And I mean, the fundamental reason I'm doing this podcast video is I started doing that about a year ago after doing the first three years or so of the podcast audio only.

And it's because so many eyeballs became centralized on the video platforms that if you weren't doing something on video, it essentially didn't exist. You know, it was like invisible to the internet. Like there's a podcast somewhere, if you know to go search on Apple podcasts or Spotify for it, but no one has a way to share it. There's no way to broadcast it out to more people than are already seeing it.

So, all right, we must do video because that's where most of the eyeballs are. And look, I'm a broadcaster by nature. I'm happy to go where the eyeballs are. That's sort of my job as an entertainer. If people are watching reels, I got to make them. But I can accept that about my own career and know that if that's the only form of media making that is successful is whatever serves Zuckerberg or ByteDance's interest, we've

lost something. Right. I mean, it's not about your own creative vision necessarily. It's not that you definitely want to make a video. It's not that you definitely want to cut your clips up into 10 second bits and then put them on TikTok so that people will engage with them. I think there's like the incentives for cultural distribution are more about what works for the tech company than what works for either the end consumer or the creator of the content. And so these platforms are not oriented around the best kind of cultural

consumption. They're not oriented around highlighting great voices. They're oriented on selling advertising. They are tracking your data, surveilling what you do, and then targeting you with ads that brands pay for to reach you. And the whole structure is oriented toward that goal. And I hope that we could do a lot better than that for our cultural projects. Yeah. I mean, I would hope so too. And yet, it seems so dangerously naive that I ever thought that this wouldn't happen. that I ever thought that this wouldn't happen. That, you know, the forces of capital who have all the money, right,

would figure out how to turn the internet into a, you know, money and eyeball source for them. Like, of course, that's what they did, right? The people who have power have power and they use it to get more power. Of course, the Wild West wasn't going to stay the way it was forever. Eventually, people start putting up fences

and the railroad comes through, you know, like, right. Cause we live with the money. Yeah. The wild west is a good metaphor for it. I think where it was like, not so commodified,

it was very open. And I think we, we lived through an era of the internet that was floating on a lot of venture capital, a lot of crazy startup valuations. And ultimately that was not what was going to be permanent. I really think of the rise and fall of Tumblr as a case in point. I spent a ton of time on Tumblr. I thought it was an amazing place for sharing culture and weird niche accounts like

medieval manuscript illuminations. And you really like dig into something and curate an account and it wasn't too fast like it wasn't overwhelming necessarily but that company got sold to yahoo i think and then just basically left for dead like like that it couldn't survive in its non-commodified state and And so we lost that creative space online. And I think we're like users, like myself included, creators are struggling to get that kind of more intimate, slower, more direct space back. It's funny though,

because even when we try to create that space, it's hard for us to use it. Does that make sense? Like, you know, Mastodon for example, is a wonderful, I've talked about it on this YouTube channel before. It's God, the idealism of it is wonderful. I think the technology is quite good. It's exactly what I want people to be building. And yet I do not find myself using it. Right. I go check it every once in a while. And then I go, man,

everything on this platform is everyone's very serious. I can't find people. I, you know, it's like, okay, I'll fucking go back to Twitter. I reload Twitter because,

you know, there's action there. And also because I know how to use the algorithm on those services. Sometimes I need to post something that I need to get 10,000 hits or 10,000 retweets, that is. And I know that I can do it because I know how to take advantage of the algorithm to broadcast shit really wide. And I can't necessarily do that on Mastodon.

So I do find sometimes that we're fighting with ourselves, that we want this smaller experience, and yet we don't. Yeah, we've missed the distribution. On one level, we want to go't. Yeah, we've missed the distribution. On one level, we want to go viral. We want the broadcast. We want to reach a bunch of internet randos because that's kind of fun and exciting. And that was the promise of the internet for a long time. You can reach the invisible audience that's out there. And on the smaller platforms like a Mastodon or starting a newsletter or something, you don't know that there are so many people out there. Like you don't know that you're reaching

those randos of the internet and it just feels less fun. Like when you're not getting that feedback loop of engagement and commenting and conversation, it's not fun enough to sustain itself. And so I think we're like looking for more spaces to have fun in and to start like sparking the, that kind of internet chaos. That's so compelling. When I think about the promise of Tik TOK, I saw an ad for a Tik TO TikTok competitor. I forget the name of it, but it was a similar app. And their ad campaign was your 15 minutes of fame or your 15 seconds of fame.

They were explicitly promising, which TikTok more implicitly promises. If you use this service, you will experience going viral. That is one of the underrated things that TikTok offers people. If you record a TikTok every day for a year, eventually one of your TikToks is going to get 15,000 views or something. And you're going to go, oh my God, people are looking at me

and it's going to be exciting. And a lot of people want that. And that is something that, you know, you can say that maybe we shouldn't want it and they're taking advantage of a weird dark desire we have, but they are in fact doing it effectively, but they're doing it in such a way that is sort of stifling the creativity of the internet. Like the incentive of TikTok is that you can reach that audience and you can go viral. And on TikTok, you can go like

more viral than any other platform. Even the Twitter main character of the day did not... It paled in comparison to people getting 10 million TikTok views in 48 hours. The scale of it is unbelievable. And there's always that thirst for some kind of internet fame. I see these accounts on TikTok all the time where the person has had one or two big viral videos for no particular reason. Maybe it like a funny high school moment or something and then they try to drum that up into a bigger influencer career and you find them suddenly doing all the memes and the trends and like trying to hustle their way into more sustained attention and it's it feels kind of sad for one thing because it doesn't often work. And it's just like, this, is this the best use of our time?

Like, like maybe there's a better ecosystem in which we could pursue the things that we're interested in than just the, like throwing darts at a board, hoping to hit the viral, you know, bullseye or whatever. And speaking of throwing darts at a board, I mean, you look at what people do on TikTok to try to go viral, like the people who do the trick shots, right? So-called trick shots. And what they're actually doing is sitting in front of a

bunch of pots and pans, tossing. So the goal is to toss a little ping pong ball, for people who haven't seen this, and it bounces off pan one, pan two, pan three, into a little cup, right? And so it's hard to do. And if they can get it to happen once, then they've got an incredible five seconds that maybe will go viral, but they have to do it a hundred thousand times. They just sit there and like, try to do it over

and over again until they get the one lucky one. And you're looking at this going, this is drudgery. This is like, it's like one of those horrible scenes. It's like almost like watching one of those videos of like kids dismantling scrapped airplanes in africa or something where you're like what a horrible occupation that capitalism has forced people into humanity was not meant to live like this yes that's the way i feel when i watch people doing that on tiktok in order to try to catch the algorithm right it's i think it's like a thing that i observed throughout the book and kind of what sparked it in my mind to begin with actually was like the weirdness of particular things that are designed to for the algorithm that they're following algorithmic incentives

rather than human incentives so that's a great example because you're like it's the the labor of creating this piece of content is so bizarre. The process of it is so bizarre. And yet that end result, the 20-second clip where the ping pong ball goes in at the end is like a slam dunk for the feed because you can pay attention to it for a short amount of time. There's an easy payoff. And then you never think about it again. It has no meaning. It has no cultural weight or anything.

It's just content that attracts your attention and then passes by once more. And I feel the same way about those videos where it's like, uh, one clip is of, you know, the maze running game on your phone or whatever. And then there's a funny tweet and then there's a weird texture video in the background. It's like, right, that is not a human creation. No one asked for this. Like, no one thinks that this is like, has an inherent value. It's just like pure, meaningless stimuli all at once. And I worry that that's like how we're producing culture for these digital platforms. We're like, making it more for the platform than for ourselves or for a viewer. I agree that that's a real risk, but I have to say, look, still as someone who has thrived on these platforms to a certain degree,

you know, during last year, I, uh, I posted so much about the writers and SAG after strike, right. Um, that, that I was posting multiple videos a week about it. And the reason I did so was the first one I posted got like 3 million, 5 million views. And so did the second one. And so did the third one. And people were genuinely interested in the subject matter and the videos I was making were genuinely explaining it to people. And so they were genuinely watching it, right? Like they would, the video would start and they would keep watching all the way to the end. And a lot of people did that.

So it sent it to a lot of people. And, you know, what I tell people, you know, people say, oh, thank you for spreading the word about the strike. I say, well, I was doing it. Yes, because I was a member of the unions and I was trying to make the strike work well, but also the audience loved it. People wanted to see it, right? And so it was sort of the best version of these algorithms. And it was a message that would have been hard to get out there in a different context. Right. We talked

a lot about during the strike, how important social media was to getting the word out there and to demonstrating the goodwill of the public towards us. And that's been repeated many times since. So as much as I'm like, oh my God, yes, we're just making stuff for the algorithm. Sometimes I look at it and go, sometimes it seems like a good form of meritocracy where things that people are interested in watching are the things that are distributed most widely for people to watch. I don't always feel that way, but tell me what you feel is right or wrong about that. Yeah. There's, I mean, there's so many good potentials for it, right? Like the barrier to publishing has been lowered so much by the internet and by these platforms, like TikTok is a great tool for creating video and then broadcasting it out there and just seeing

what works. And for your videos, like it hit people and they wanted that and they liked it. And so they consume more of it and it got more recommended by the algorithm. Um, and like, you know, it's hard to argue. You can't say the algorithm is all good or all bad. There are different qualities to it. It's like a complex issue. I think in, in this example, you're trying to communicate something to people. You're trying to inform them about a topic and it really works for that. It works as this broadcast mechanism. I think it works less well when you're trying to do something that is more about personal creativity or self-expression. You can evaluate news or information based on

how much engagement it gets. Like people are watching these informative videos all the way through. What I worry about is like judging music the same way or judging image the same way where it's just about how much engagement does this thing get? Like most, most culture, historically, the things that we put in the canon of Western culture are not the things that got the most engagement when they came out. The most famous example is Moby Dick sold 10 copies or whatever in Herman Melville's lifetime, and now it's a cornerstone of our literary culture. Van Gogh never sold a painting. He didn't get likes on instagram it's the equivalent it's the equivalent thing and so i worry when like i don't know i think i think beethoven like that would have done

really well on tiktok yes right away the hook was so good that he would have really everyone would have used that sound um but you know it's like i feel like when you're creating stuff for the internet you feel that pressure that like the thing that doesn't get likes is a failure yeah and that sucks like you know i don't think that should be the defining factor of of what we put out there even though it's so hard to ignore that impulse to just try to get the most engagement and get the most likes all the time. And it's true that if that is the only media that we prioritize, that's going to impoverish our culture.

Like we don't want the music, for instance, the progress of, even just looking at pop music, we don't want pop music to purely be driven by what got the most engagement or what the algorithm decided to put on a playlist. And yet sometimes it is, there's so many artists who suddenly their most popular song,

they're like, that song is popular because for some reason the algorithm liked it. And now we have to play this song at concerts. We think this song sucks. It misrepresents their artistic identity. Like it takes away your artistic intention. It's like, Oh,

I don't care about what you meant by this. I just care what people hear in it. If the algorithm... The algorithm is not caring about your artistic intention. It doesn't care that you ironically made something normal or were sarcastically doing a thing. It just cares about how people are engaging with it. And I think that's...

It's not good for us as consumers either, because these feeds interpret all engagement in the same way. Like, right. You know, there's, the feed doesn't separate hate listening or hate reading or, you know, making fun of something from sincerely appreciating it or finding meaning in it. It's like the, the ecosystem is, it's not subtle. It's not very subtle period. I mean, and it would be better if it were more subtle and were more, you know, uh, detailed in its, in its sense of what we were doing, but that would require more surveillance. So I don't know if I want that. And this comes down to, you know, if you look at Twitter, uh, what, what causes me to engage with something the most on Twitter when two people are

having an argument and I'm trying to figure out who the asshole is, right? You know what I mean? You're like, okay, hold on a second. Two people are mad. Which one was the dick? Okay. I need to go back through this whole thing. I need to read all the replies. And then you get to the end and you're like, why did I care about this? I feel dirty. I just spent 10 minutes trying to like litigate an argument between two people I don't know. But since that's what I spent the most time on, it's going to show more of that to other people. It's going to show more stuff like that to me in the future.

Like that is literally, you know, Twitter is optimized for dunks in the QTs, you know? Yeah, exactly. I think it comes down to like dunks and like prompt tweets, the things that are like, like quote, tweet this with your five favorite breakfast foods or whatever. And it's like,

no one needs this content. Like, like this is solely to boost engagement, which then gets boosted even more because of the algorithmic feed. It's like the tweet equivalent of those, you know, multi channel videos with the you know video game and a tweet and a weird texture like it's just optimizing for the

incentive of the feed not for what's actually informing you as a viewer so how did we get in this situation where we've talked a lot about the ills of the current internet and the glory days of the early internet when it was ruled by serendipity and you know people would just email funny videos to each other or whatever right i think all the time about the numa numa guy remember the numa numa guy um the guy who went like this yeah and sang the numa numa song that was pre-youtube people were just emailing around an avi file um which was incredible fast forward to dog face 420 whatever the guy's name is who was drinking the sunny d on the skateboard while listening to fleetwood mac yeah very similar people one is all algorithmic one was completely

organic um how did we leave that earlier internet and end up where we are today? What was the first step? That's such a good question. I mean, when people were emailing around like an AVI file, that's like there are no distribution channels, right? That's just like one person to one person or one person to a few people. And there was no centralized feed of everyone's emails on earth like that would have been a complete nightmare um but i think we grabbed basically what twitter became right it's like everyone's private conversation yeah yeah uh insane but we moved from this like diy more

decentralized internet of many web pages that were all kind of separate, gradually into these more and more siloed feeds. So I think you can trace it to the 2000s era that saw the emergence of social networks, like first MySpace and Friendster, and then Facebook and Twitter. And the content of the internet started consolidating into these platforms because that was where audiences were. It's that like, that's where you could reach people. You could find the distribution and find the audience. And I think that centralization has just continued and continued to the point

that now we're like, okay, if you want to post on the internet, you have how many options, a video on Tik TOK, a video on Instagram, a post on the rapidly decomposing x or threads i'm like what else is there yeah you can put it on youtube but no one is out there just putting up a website because yeah who's gonna find that like you need you need to fit it into

the distribution channels uh and i mean those those companies have profited hugely from consolidating the internet because as they consolidated all of the attention, they could sell advertising on it. And that's kind of kept them going and kept them able to sustain their monopolies. And the shame of it is, is that they did it by providing something that was needed. Like, to a certain extent, we needed those distribution channels. I remember trying to, I was in a sketch comedy group in college in, you know, 2003, and we were making videos on Final Cut Pro with our DVX cameras. It was this sort of technological singularity. All these things came together to suddenly make it possible for a bunch of 19 year olds to make like high quality comedy. We were doing that. We were going viral, but I was encoding the videos myself using QuickTime.

And then we were trying to find a server to put them on. And servers kept going down. We kept getting kicked off of web hosts because, you know, even a 20 megabyte QuickTime file, if 10,000 people downloaded it, it would hose the whole server. It wrecks the internet. Like you could shut down a server so easily back then. Yeah. And so YouTube comes along and says, we will host any video for free and let anybody play it infinitely.

And eventually started adding money, some form of revenue sharing to that. Okay, great. Suddenly there's an explosion. Now everyone can post video. sharing to that. Okay, great. Suddenly there's an explosion. Now everyone can post video. But I remember this being the first time it felt like the internet was truly getting centralized to me because suddenly there was only one site where you can post video and no other competitor emerged. I mean, there's a daily motion in Vimeo and shit that nobody actually used. Today there's like rumble for right-wingers or whatever, but you know, 99.99% of videos in

that format being watched on YouTube. And that began in 2006 or seven. Um, and that was, that was like a huge canary in the coal mine for what was about to happen. And yet, I mean, what was there to do about it? Because no one else was providing infinite bandwidth and, uh, storage space for anyone to host their own video. Right. Right. It was this huge gamble. Like if we pay for all the hosting that anyone could ever need and like let people put stuff out there for free, then they will like devote their efforts to our platform.

And everyone who uploaded a video to YouTube helped promote that platform, helped like bring more attention to it and bring more users into that into that realm um but i think youtube is an interesting example because like it actually did do revenue sharing like it yeah it sustains creators in a way that many other platforms did not and still haven't in incoherent ways. I'd argue it could sustain them a lot more than it does, but it is doing the best out of any of them just in terms of paying people. The revenue share is a 50-50 split as opposed to on TikTok, you get a million views,

they pay you $40. Right, and you can see how that incentivizes different behaviors. On YouTube, you are incentivized to create a following and give them what they want and sustain a good viewership. And you'll make a good amount of money from that. Whereas TikTok, you're constantly gambling with the algorithmic feed. Like, when am I going to go super viral? When might I just be totally ignored?

You have to keep catching up with what's trendy rather than just building your own devoted audience. There are people who I'm fans of them on TikTok. I like watching their videos, but the feed just takes them away from me. I'm not in control of when and how I see them because the platform is so powerful and it feels very manipulative. But YouTube does that to a similar

extent you know that uh i i do have to i mean everything i'm doing here is in order to try to build a business on on youtube right um but at the same time i have to grapple with the algorithm and the you know this long form podcast that we're doing is not going to get as many hits as as other types of content that i put here and you know if i look at the number of people who are, if I go look right now at the analytics for my last video I posted, you know, 5% of the views come from my subscribers, even though I have 600, I have 600 and something thousand subscribers, but such a vanishingly small portion of my views come from those subscribers. Everybody else is coming from the suggested videos, right? So it's the same deal where if I'm not pleasing YouTube's put me in the right hand sign bar algorithm and making the thumbnail fit, uh, people aren't going to see

it. It can disappear in exactly the same way. It's so capricious in a way. It's like, yeah, even though you have built this big community, even though you've attracted your following on a platform, the algorithmic feed and the dominance of it means that you can't even rely on getting to those followers. I think media companies all experienced this in the 2010s when everyone was focused on building up Facebook groups. The Times had Facebook groups that they posted articles to in an effort to reach people on Facebook. had Facebook groups that they posted articles to in an effort to reach people on Facebook. And Facebook totally dismantled that. And suddenly groups were pointless and no one who was in your group was seeing your content anyway, because they decided that articles were not the points of Facebook. So it's like, you don't own any of this stuff. And at this point, email newsletters or like RSS feeds are one of the only neutral spaces left where you actually do have a grip on that. But that could change to like Gmail could make its filtering stronger and, you know, we'd be screwed.

And podcasts are one of the last sort of decentralized parts of the Internet as well. We've been talking about this show being on YouTube, but it's also in podcast form. And, you know, those folks are subscribed to an RSS feed that I control. It's filtered through iTunes podcast app or Spotify or whatever, but those people are fundamentally going to my RSS feed in the same way that if I create a sub stack, I own those email addresses and I can take them to my new email provider if I want to. And that's one of the reasons those platforms have been successful. So it's been nice to see, you know, some platforms grow because they allow people to keep their audiences because they empower the publishers or the, the, the creators a little bit more. I'm curious, you write about how you feel the algorithmic revolution is affecting our

personal taste. Do you really think it's changing our personal taste that much? I think so. I mean, anecdotally and through my own experience, I think we identify a lot with what the algorithmic feed serves to us. Particularly with TikTok, I spoke to a young woman for the book who was just so bombarded with influencers wearing leg warmers at some point that she was almost hypnotized into buying leg warmers. And this was not an ad. It wasn't sponsored content. It was just a lot of people participating in the same trend. And she just felt like totally compelled and pulled to do that same thing. So I think it's, it's very tempting and easy to be like, okay, the algorithm is serving me what my tastes are, like what my desires are. But actually, it's, it's the other way around almost. It's like we are identifying ourselves with what is served to us.

And I think that's what's confusing. It's like, because we don't have to go hunt down what we like, because it all comes to us, we exert less agency in deciding what we identify with and figuring out our personal tastes. There's a labor of figuring out your own taste and thinking about how something makes you feel that gets lost when you're just consuming a feed of stuff. It's easier to be told who you are than it is to figure it out. And one of the things people like about the algorithm and they like about content generally is people like content that tells them

who they are. I think a lot about ADD content or mental health content on TikTok is extraordinarily popular. It's like a viral category unto itself that it seems separate from the actual rate of diagnoses of these conditions. Plenty of people actually have them and want coping strategies and whatnot, but people also love to be labeled. and want coping strategies and whatnot, but people also love to be labeled. And people used to say to me stuff like, oh, I think I have ADD. TikTok diagnosed me with ADD.

I'm like, I think TikTok gave you ADD is I think what happened. Yeah, it's chicken or the egg thing in that case. I mean, saying TikTok diagnosed you with ADD is like saying Chipotle diagnosed you with E. coli. It's a, you know, yeah, there's a cause and effect problem. But my point being, a lot of people give the algorithm so much credit that they say the algorithm was serving me ADD content. It figured out that I have ADD.

It literally diagnosed me because of what I was watching. It knows me so well. It spears into my very soul. I'm like this thing, like the amount of power you're giving something that you are literally describing as an algorithm, a mathematical function is, is very strange to me. And yet we really fall for it. And all the signal that you're giving to TikTok is like what you watch and what you click the like button on and what you comment on. It's like, it's such a shallow signal that to then believe that that signal can communicate the depths of your soul is like, I mean, I hope that's not true. I hope that there's more to us than just what videos we passively consume on our phones.

Yeah. And I think it's worth reminding people of that or just being like, let's think twice. TikTok cannot diagnose you like a doctor can. It's not looking at you. It is just measuring what you're paying attention to and you know extrapolating from that and that's all i can do it cannot talk to you you cannot talk to it like there is such a one-way street that i just it is hard it's so convincing and it's so easy to believe that it knows who we are what we want but it really can't like yeah cannot do that. It cannot do that in the way

that a human curator can do that or a radio DJ or your friend who knows what you like. Those are all more complicated relationships than an algorithm. Yeah. And so let's talk about what we lose when we prioritize that way of discovering new things. As you say, it takes work to figure out who you are and what you like. It's labor. And, you know, we have used for decades up until the algorithmic era, the labor of other people to help us figure that out. Like if you want to know what music you like or to listen to, you might go to a music journalist or a DJ. And so many of these people have been put out of work. I mean, I look at, you know, Pitch music journalist or a DJ. Um, and so many of these people have been put out

of work. I mean, I look at, you know, pitchfork, which I've been reading for 20 years. Uh, and I often thought about like, Oh my God, thank God this website still exists because they're, it's such a great store of knowledge. They just, you know, the entire company was just gutted and the amount of loss of knowledge there. You know, I think about the new Andre 3000 album that came out late last year. The flute album, right? And a lot of people were like, oh, crazy flute album. Andre 3000 put out a flute album. Neat.

Kind of weird. Why'd he do it? Pitchfork wrote, you know, I don't know how many thousand word review where they said, well, the reason he put out this album is because he had been spending a lot of time with a particular collective of jazz musicians in Los Angeles made above this guy and this guy and this guy, one of them used to play with Alice Coltrane and you can see the influence that, and here's why he made this music and what else it connects to.

And that is work. Like somebody had to know all that shit because they devoted their life to understanding this one little weird corner of jazz so that you could understand it too yeah so i'm able to read that review and and it opens me up to a whole world of music and guess what nobody on spotify is doing that shit no no right what kills me is that spotify actively discourages you from knowing anything about the music that you're listening to you can barely tell when an album came out like you can barely see the year that you're listening to. You can barely tell when an album came out.

You can barely see the year that something came out, much less which musicians played on a particular track. Spotify is so shallow that it just erases the context of music itself, which is really horrifying. And so you turn to a place like Pitchfork to restore that context, to educate you, to bring your attention to particular details or make you aware of this greater body of culture.

And I think that makes our experience of the music better. What is better? Just casually seeing a weird flute album on Spotify or actually understanding where it came from and why you're listening to it and like why it was made by the artists. Like knowing, I think I have to argue that knowing more about the culture you're consuming is better. Like it'll, it'll make you,

it'll make you know more. It'll give you a better experience of that thing. And it's just, it's better for everyone. Like the artist gets more energy from you understanding them than you just being like, oh yes, like button, like button. Like that's, there's nothing there. I completely agree with that.

But the problem is that, look, we don't always have time to go get that deeper understanding. Not everybody has the time or ability or wherewithal to do so. It's a little bit of a niche thing for me to want to go read that, right? But what supported that work was the general need that people had to say, I want to hear some new music. What new albums came out and which ones are good? And they would just go to Pitchfork just to go,

oh, that one got an eight. Okay, I'll buy it. And now just the work a day, hey, what do I listen to today? And now people don't really need that service because the algorithm is serving it up for them. And so the, the, that sort of work a day work has gone out the window and now, and the more rarefied thing on top of it that was able to be built upon it, you know, no longer

has the supporting structure similar to people aren't reading the classified section in the newspaper anymore because they have Craigslist. Right. And that was the thing that made the money so they could do the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative article about the corruption of the local city council person in your city. Right. Yes. And so the bot like the algorithm stole the 90 percent that was keeping that really valuable 10% of flow. Does that sound right to you? I think so. I mean, recommendations were a thing that the media was really good at.

Like, like you could figure out what movies to watch and what music to listen to. And movie critics used to be stars. Yeah. Like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were like national stars. And what's more like there were many of them and they lived in different cities. It was not just, oh, I'm going to read what one person in New York writes. It was like, wherever you lived, you could read what someone near you who understood

your life thought about a lot of movies or a lot of music. And that ecosystem, I think, was really healthy. And so now when we give that recommendation process over to a Spotify playlist or to a TikTok feed, we're losing that human connection that surrounded the culture. We're losing the context and specificity. And it's a nostalgic argument in some ways you're like we should have all been reading roger ebert or whatever or we should only listen to indie radio djs but i think people crave that and now like there are things coming to replace it like people on tiktok who recommend niche albums or who you know play a video of one vinyl record going around and tell you about it like i think that's yeah that's just as as valid an act of criticism and recommendation as a newspaper review.

But still, how do those people get paid? Like we, we need a more sustainable ecosystem. They're living under the algorithm. Yeah. Like, you know, I think about like Anthony Fantano, who's a music guy on YouTube and he does music reviews and he does them very well. He gets millions of views. He's well-respected. People care about his taste and he directs people to different artists. But when Pitchfork went under, he was like, I'm just one guy on YouTube.

Like, I don't have the infrastructure. You know, I'm not paying freelancers to go, you know, you know, go to a festival or, you know, survey a whole scene or whatever, like, you know, individual influencers are not a replacement for this sort of more general cultural infrastructure that helped, you know, that brought humanity into the picture. Um, I, I also think about, uh, uh, just this general giving over of creative power to the algorithm. You know, when I was making my Netflix show, we said, uh, Hey, here's the show we're pitching. It's going to cost this many dollars to make. And Netflix said, uh, well, we think that this show is only worth like, you know, 60% of that in terms of the budget. That's how much we can. And we said, like, you know, 60% of that in terms of the budget.

That's how much we can, when we said, well, this is going to be worth more than that because this show is going to be good. Like we're going to spend more, a little more money to make it. And we're going to make a show that's much better. So more people will watch it and be worth, it'll be more valuable to you. And they said, ah, the algorithm says

it's only worth this much, right? That was basically the answer we got back. Like the humans had been cut out of the decision-making process. That's's not completely true there are people who have power you know still in the entertainment industry but the degree to which they're driven by this is what the computer said is i mean you can see it and in terms of what gets made and what what is on on these channels on the streamers everybody has had the experience of the content seeming more and more flattened and samey, you know?

When people say, this looks like a Netflix show, that's not a compliment. They're saying it looks like dreck. It looks like chum. It looks like, you know, generic. Yeah, right? Yeah, right. looking at a lot of data that's like solipsistic in a way like one way that book deals get made is by looking at how many followers an author has on social media because that theoretically

shows how many sales that they'll be likely to get but that you know it's like a vicious cycle like you need followers to make the stuff but you need the stuff to get the followers. And so it's like, there's no way to break into that cycle or to discourage those metrics. Like if you don't have those metrics, then you can feel pretty screwed. The same thing is true of standup comedians. Standup comedians are constantly complaining now that all that's important is, uh,

you know, performance on social media. And to a certain extent, I say, Hey, look, this is the media form of the time. You got to do well on it. Like just get with the program. You know, it's like, yeah, 30 years ago,

you had to do well on late night television. Today you have to do well on Instagram. Like, that's our job. Right. But on the other hand, it is true that followers matter so much. And yet the followers are useless for actually getting anybody to come out to the shows. Like I have one point five million followers on TikTok, but if I post, Hey guys, I'm going to Buffalo next week, that'll get 5,000 views unless I make it really good for the algorithm and do some sort of crazy stunt about being in Buffalo, which is so much work. I might as well just make some other kind of fucking video. Right. So, so you like the numbers don't translate and being able to turn people out. But to the other decision makers, they look at that numbers, where before, I think in decades past,

there was some room for an executive somewhere, for a producer, for whoever, to just pick something out and say, okay, this is worth highlighting. My gut instinct is that this is going to be cool and surprising, and the world needs this right now, so we're going to do it. And I think due to how much data we have and due to the influence of algorithmic feeds, we like don't have that as much. And when humans pick stuff like that, when people decided, I think they made more creative decisions. It was less conservative sometimes, or at least had the potential to bring something totally new, to create a new voice, to, you know, show off a musician's's creativity it was just totally outside of your your frame of reference so i think we've lost some of that like potential for radical cultural innovation and that's why things feel boring because we're not getting enough new fresh ideas like fresh blood we need people to to just make decisions and be like this is what's going to happen and it's cool and new and surprising. And I don't care that there aren't a hundred thousand, a million people

behind it already. Yeah. And I'm craving that so much of the time in when I'm looking for what movie to watch or television show or a book to read, I'm just looking for, just give me something weird, man. Give me something lumpy and human that I didn't expect to get. And things like that are successful. Sometimes I think about the movie poor things, right? Which is such a weird fucking movie. And people are so drawn to it. At least a certain segment of the population is obsessed with this movie

because of how, you know, it's like, I've never seen anything like this before. It's so off putting and confusing and gross and sexual and dirty in, in all these fun ways. I understand that, that you, uh, I want to talk about how we can resist the algorithm. I understand that you managed or attempted to live relatively algorithm free for a little while. Can you tell me about that?

Yeah. So circa like September, 2022 or so I was finishing up my book. I had been so online for so long, like immersed in this subject that it was just like, I literally have to get out of this. Like I have to cut off my brain in a way from the internet. And so I did an algorithm cleanse as I called it and just logged out of all the apps, deleted everything from my phone, like decided that I would not take any recommendations from feeds. I would just find stuff myself and consume it in a more lo-fi way. And so I really turned to more traditional ways of human curation or distribution, like reading the newspaper, looking at magazines, going to libraries,

going to art museums and galleries, just like trying to have a more direct connection to what I was consuming than just letting the feed deliver it to me. And I found it really refreshing, actually. It took a few weeks for me to get over it, for sure. My brain was missing the constant stimulus. I didn't have like dopamine of likes coming at me but i i found myself calmer and like more engaged in what i was consuming than i was before and more purposeful i imagine more oh i'm choosing to be involved in this uh but kyle how long did this last for you are you still on it no so i think the the initial bad period the like you know getting over the tremors or whatever was like three weeks uh so after three weeks i felt pretty good about

it and then it lasted for about three months total at which point i kind of felt like to do my job as a journalist i kind of had to get back online. But by the end, I was not worried about it. If I didn't have a job as an internet columnist, so I have to do this stuff, I think I would maybe have used it even less. But it was really good for renegotiating my relationship to the internet and kind of doing this mental reset in a way and just figuring out what I was interested in without it just getting shoved in my face all the time. I think maybe I need to do that myself because, you know, as I said, in my line of work, I don't have the option of not grappling with the algorithm. I need to be posting on it. And I honestly also need to be viewing it because I

need to understand how it's working. Um, I, I'm very jealous of friends who are just like, yeah, I'm not on Instagram anymore. Like that must be nice. Like I, I, I can't, it's my career. Um, but I think maybe a little bit of a targeted, a targeted break would be helpful. Um, or at least trying to find pieces of media outside of that. Like the, the book that I'm reading right now, I'm reading, uh, Dan Charnas has booked Dilla time, which is a wonderful book about the hip hop producer, Jay Dilla. And I found it because I wandered by a record shop and they had it on the shelf and I pulled it off and I was like, I kind of want to read this book. And I bought it and then I brought it home and I started reading.

I just happened across it. Um, and that entire book is about, you know, this, this man who came up with this wonderful new way of making music and people who discovered that organically and they were moved by it and it spread in an organic way in the way that we hoped that music would. And I'm listening to it on audio book. I'm reading it. I'm listening to the music. I'm sort of moving through it at my own pace. And I'm listening to the related albums. I'm searching on Apple Music for them rather than just like, you know, my normal algorithmic music pattern. And it feels purposeful. And I'm like expanding my

horizons by doing so in, I guess, an old fashioned way. I don't know. Ideally, it's not old fashioned. Like ideally, we can do that anytime and we should be doing it. We don't have to do it with everything, right? Like not everything has to be this deep dive, like research process, but there should be those things that inspire you and like get inside your head and make you want to go down that path and like do the work and have this like immersion in a cultural moment that maybe you didn't understand before like that's what makes culture satisfy i think yes it's how funny is it though that i that I'm saying, like, I'm doing such an old-fashioned weird thing. I bought a book in a store, and I'm reading it. Like, I wandered by a

shop and bought something. Holy shit, revolutionary. Well, like, decisions that are not influenced by the internet are increasingly rare, I feel like. Yeah. Like, we don't, when I go to a restaurant, I'm often looking it up first on the internet. I'm judging their Instagram feed. I feel like, like we don't, when I go to a restaurant, I'm often looking it up first on the internet. I'm judging their Instagram feed. I'm looking at how much, how many stars they have on Google maps. Like the number of times I've stood in front of a restaurant scrolling down through Yelp to get to the reviews is so humiliating to think about the minutes I've spent doing that. Yeah. And it's like, we could just walk in, we could just try it and see what happens and be surprised. But I think on one level, we're afraid of the mediocrity. We're afraid of being

disappointed. And we just have a human desire to know what to expect and not be surprised. But it takes something away when you can't just be like, walk into a restaurant without having to look at how they present themselves on social media. Like it sounds absurd when you say it. Yeah. You could just like look in the window and like, look at the fucking food. Does it look tasty? Are people smiling in the restaurant? You know, like the old fashioned ways that we, that we had, um, it's man, so how do you suggest that people sort of break out of this a little bit? I mean, is it a matter of taking a cleanse or do you have any calls to action at the end?

Oh, actually, no, I'm sorry. I want to talk about this. You talk about regulating algorithms. Do you think that's possible and something that we should talk about? I think it is possible. I mean, so right now in the European Union, there are these very real laws being passed

that give users more rights to their data. They give users the right to opt out of algorithmic recommendations. And so these, as they go into effect over the next few years, will totally change how social media operates. And you can see Facebook already kind of adjusting what it does

to accommodate the European laws, even in America. So I think that's happening slowly. I also think anti-monopoly measures would be really helpful here. Like if Meta did not own Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, like three major channels through which we all consume content. Or if YouTube was its own company and not part of Google, for example, if the 99% most used search engine was not also the 99% most used video utility. Right. These things should be competing against each other to give us better products. And it's pretty clear that there is no incentive to compete right now and give us a better

experience because they have such a grip like Google has a monopoly on these platforms and really how you find stuff. ABC, it was that they were using the public airwaves, but also that media was in the national interest. And that since these companies control all of the media airwaves, they need to, you know, do justice to the national interest to some degree. So they need to have news programming. They need to have some educational programming for kids in the mornings, stuff like that. We put those regulations on them. You could make the case because there's only one website that is basically used for every single video that look, if, if Google decided to shut down YouTube tomorrow, we'd all be fucked. Right.

Because it is so, we are so reliant on it, even just as an archive, as an infinite library of video. It is so valuable that, you know, we, the public has an interest in it. We should, you know, we could put a few regulations on it to make sure it serves the public interest. Right. And we're not doing that. Like America is not, the U S government is not passing these laws. They are really slow to move on any of this stuff when they've been like faster moving and more aggressive with media companies, like media, like you're saying with cable television is more regulated than the internet platforms

that have now soaked up all of our attention and destroyed the media companies. But I think, to your question too, ultimately you can just log off. No one is forcing you to be on Instagram unless you are trying to make it as a stand-up comedian. You don't have to consume music on Spotify. You can still go to a store and buy a vinyl album and listen to it a hundred

times. Or go to band camp and buy some MP3s. Exactly. Like it doesn't have to be non-digital. You can totally be online. There's alternative streaming services like Adagio for classical music or the Criterion channel for art films. There are ways to consume more specific things, things that are less mediated by recommendations, even on the internet. And I think we just need to be reminded that there are other options

out there. You don't have to just be on these same few websites that have become so omnipresent. And you can go look for other people, right? Who, who, you know, if you want to know what movie to watch, well, you could go on Letterboxd and look at what it recommends you look at what your friends say, but you could also, you know, find some movie critic with a sub stack somewhere, or let's not even say sub stack with a newsletter somewhere. Um, and you know,

like read what they have to say. And, you know, because hopefully they are out there trying to put interesting things in front of you because they're a person who professionally finds interesting things for you. Right. Right.

This is another conclusion that I've come to. Like machines don't get bored. The algorithm doesn't get bored of stuff. People get bored. Like the, the movie critic is going to get bored of bad, dumb movies faster than the algorithm. The algorithm will never get tired of bad, dumb stuff. It will serve up an infinity of shallow, superficial, meaningless content to you. Whereas a human guide do that stuff is not going to serve you the same thing over and over again. They're, they're restless. They're interested. They want to find inspiring stuff. And that's what we should be looking for. I love that. See, this is why I love the newsletter today and tab so much, which I think is my friend Rusty. And I believe you know him as well. There's a wonderful newsletter, very popular where basically he summarizes Twitter

for you. He says, these are all the articles that came out yesterday. This one's good. This one's boring. This one, oh my God, can you believe this? And he editorializes. And great, he has an opinion, so I don't have to. And I get a quick summary of the day and I can click on, if one seems really good, I'll read it. And the rest, I get to know what's going on from a fucking other person who's moving around in the world and has opinions and thoughts and feelings. And that's more valuable. He has knowledge. He has experience.

And he's using all of that human identity to filter what's out there for you. And that's what's so valuable. And that's what the algorithms lack. And this is what I try to remind people all the time. It's humans all the way down, even on the other end of the algorithm. Zuckerberg is still somewhere there on the other end. Elon Musk is on the other end. There's people designing these things.

It's still people making things for people. And if we just return to the people of it all, that's like the solution. I think so. Yeah. I would love to return to the people. That's a good commandment for the future internet. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Kyle. It's been incredible talking to you. This is one of my favorite topics.

And I feel like, I hope the algorithm blesses this conversation. So a lot of people hear it. We're praying, praying to the algorithm that it promotes my anti-algorithm book, you know? Well, the name of that book here is Filter World. Take it from a human like me. You can pick it up at our bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books,

where every book is hand-selected by me and our producers based on the guests that we choose with our human brains to have on this show, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people get it? Where can they find you on the algorithm mediated internet? So you can get the book wherever you want,

though I definitely recommend calling up your local indie bookstore and requesting it. They'll be happy. It's a better human connection or getting it from an indie source on the internet is great too. And I do have a newsletter,

which is kylecheka.substack.com and I really like it's better than Twitter. I like talking to my audience there. I like writing funky weird stuff in that space. Until the algorithm creeps into Substack which it is slowly doing.

Five years from now you'll be running for the hills but until then folks find him there. Thank you so much for coming on the show Kyle. Thank you. This was fun. Well thank find him there. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Kyle. Thank you. This was fun. Well, thank you once again to Kyle Chayka for coming on the show.

If you loved that conversation as much as I did, once again, you can pick up a copy of his book at factuallypod.com slash books. If you want to support

this podcast directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. You can also join our online

community. And coming up soon, we have for Patreon members exclusively a live book club over Zoom. We are going to be reading and discussing the book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with Caitlin Doty. And Caitlin will be joining us for the Zoom. So excited about that. If you want to come chat with Caitlin, head to Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. If you chip in 15 bucks a month, I will read your name at the end of this podcast and put it at the end of every one of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank ACK193, great username, ACK193, Stuart Pim and Jasmine Andrade. Thank you so much for your support of the show. Of course, I want to thank Sam Rodman, Tony Wilson, my producers, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible.

You can find me online once again at adamconover.net, where all my tickets and tour dates are at. See you out there on the road. And in the meantime, I'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast.