Offline with Jon Favreau - Are Algorithms Making You Boring?

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

Kyle Chayka, New Yorker staff writer and author of “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” joins Offline to expose how online feeds push us into the mainstream and away from each other. He and Jon examine how machine-guided curation changes not only what we consume, but the quality of what gets made in the first place. But first! Max and Jon talk about how introverts have taken over the economy, the moment solo scrolling surpassed socializing, and how algorithm-driven streamers are recreating a worse version of cable. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

When I go to an art museum, I do not want to see the paintings that have the most likes clicked on them. Like, I don't want to see the, like, algorithmic feed version of that. I want one person who has studied Impressionism for decades of their life to arrange a show of these beautiful paintings for me and kind of guide me through that experience. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. That was today's guest, New York staff writer Kyle Chayka. I invited Kyle on this week to talk about his new book, Filter World. In it, he makes the terribly bleak argument that algorithms haven't just reshaped our online world, but also our real

offline world. You can think about the way Spotify has reshaped our online world, but also our real offline world. You can think about the way Spotify has reshaped the way music is heard and created, or the way Yelp has reshaped the coffee shops we go to. Kyle argues that machine-guided curation has infiltrated the furthest reaches of culture, changing not just what we consume, but also what gets made in the first place. It's, of course, a very offline book, and we had a great conversation. But first, some breaking news from Bloomberg. Here's the headline. Introverts have taken over the U.S. economy.

Sorry, Max. Your weekend plans have been canceled. We're all staying home to watch Netflix. Oh, my God. You are singing the song of my people. Can we have dinner at 6 o'clock too? Look, I like the early dinner. That's one of the trends in the piece. This is a piece for Bloomberg by Alison Schrager.

She argues, she's an economist, she argues that the pandemic has permanently changed consumer habits with all kinds of data showing that Americans, especially young people, are socializing less on weekends, drinking less at bars, going out to dinner less, and if they do, going out earlier. And we're also watching more TV and playing more video games. I've been here for years.

Everybody's catching up to my wavelength. She dubbed this trend the introvert's economy and says that while less drinking will obviously lead to improved physical health, less socializing could result in a decline in mental health and social cohesion. Yeah. Look around.

Look around. What do you think? What do you think? What's going on here? You pioneered the introverts economy pre-pandemic? That's right. As the creator of the introverts economy, I'm so sorry. So I found this argument really persuasive, really crystallized a lot for me.

My understanding of it is the argument is these kind of trends have been building for a long time where we have been spending less and less time with other people, more and more time by ourselves looking at our screens. People are spending more time with streamers because it's so easy to watch stuff at home now. People are spending more time playing video games. We're socializing less. We're socializing earlier, which is a significant indicator because it means we're not going out after dinner. We're going home to be alone with our screens again. And that has been building for, you know, like a decade. But her argument, as I understand it, is that the pandemic was this kind of shock where because it pushed so many of our social norms and how we behave towards the extreme

end of the introversion spectrum, because that was just how lockdown was, that that has kind of made a lot of these shifts more permanent and pushed us over this tipping point. We're now the kind of the norm for how our world works is that it is kind of the introverts world. When we talked about this piece for the first time in our production meeting, I told all you guys that I had like a physical reaction to it because I am the opposite of this. Actually, it makes me really curious what this feels like to you as kind of an extrovert. When did you kind of first start to like... I mean, I had a really, I've talked about this before, I had a really tough time during the pandemic.

I was just feeling like social isolation. But afterwards... And I'm in like an interesting part of life, right? Because in the pandemic, became a parent. That's a little isolating anyway. You do more stuff. But then, you know, I think it was 22 and then into 23. And you're like, are people not going out?

And I also, I live in Los Angeles. I used to live in D.C. And that was much more like walk to a bar. Right. So all of the trends, you know, I can't tell which trend it is. But I do think the pandemic sort of supercharged these trends that have been, that have, I think, started with technology, which we've talked about a bunch on the show. A few things I wonder. One is like, it could take more than a year or two for everyone to fully return to their pre-pandemic habits and behaviors, especially since it was a,

you know, once in a century global collective trauma that spanned multiple years. That is true. But one point that she makes in the piece that I thought was really compelling is that socializing went way up in 2022 as kind of a reaction to the pandemic and has since dipped then. Since after. Yeah, which does suggest to me, I think you're right, and it'll be years before we know for sure, but does suggest to me maybe the mean we're reverting to now. Yeah.

I mean, I unsurprisingly blame the fucking phones. I think you're right too i mean i think that there is a difference between not going out and sitting home and uh not connecting with anyone right like if you're just home by yourself you'll feel the loneliness right you'll feel the need for connection or i've also if you are home and you're reading a book, right? There's very few times where I've like been reading a book and thought like, oh, I really need social connection because you're sort of lost in the book. I think that, again, there's an illusion of connection with that our phones and social media feeds give us. And so you think, okay, I'm not going out. I can sit on the couch and maybe I'm watching something on TV,

but I'm also like looking at my phone, texting friends here and there. I'm like watching the conversation on Twitter, looking at Instagram. And there is an illusion of connection, but I think it leaves you feeling a little emptier. And it is very much of a, like, people might think that they want this. And obviously people exist on the spectrum of introverts and extroverts. So, like, for some people, it's easier than others. But I think overall, it's a sort of, like, careful what you wish for kind of thing. Yeah. Because you think, oh, I just don't want to go out, and it's great, and it's easier to stay home.

It's frictionless. It's, like, less friction, right? Any given evening, it's the nicer choice to make. But then you look around, and you're depressed. Yep. Do you feel bad i mean i keep thinking about in you know the 50s and 60s our literature and our movies were dominated by this idea that we've all moved out to the suburbs and now we're all atomized and isolated and depressed and we feel this sense of terrible and we and like is this sounding familiar to anyone i was just listening

uh the daily did an episode yesterday on hybrid work and sort of like what's going on with the hybrid works. And it's another like you get what you thought you wanted. And so there's all these surveys now where the people at hybrid workplaces are unhappier in their jobs and more stressed. And they're feeling like they're not getting enough feedback from managers because managers aren't giving feedback over Slack or email as much

because people are more comfortable giving it in person. And they're not developing social bonds with colleagues. And they're missing a sense of connection and tone over Slack and email is notoriously difficult to ascertain, right? And so again, it's all these people thinking like, well, I have all this freedom and so I'm getting a lot back, right? There's a lot of benefits to hybrid work,

but there's also this sort of like malaise that the researchers are calling it. And I think what's challenging about it is it's difficult to pinpoint what it is. Because when you just feel sort of, eh, you don't know, oh, it's because I'm missing. It's hard to identify. Right. Because you don't, like you're saying, you don't feel it in the moment, but it builds up.

And I have been thinking a lot about the like late 2000s, early 2010s internet. One of the most popular forms of content on the web at that time was anything unlike HuffPost or BuzzFeed that would speak to introverts. Like, do you remember all these quizzes where it would be like, you know, 10 things that only introverts understand or like 20 things that introverts wish like their co-workers got about them or like the introvert's secret to success, whatever. And all of these things like spoke to this sense that as an introvert, I can say, all of us kind of felt that like the world was designed by and for extroverts. And so it felt like there's all these norms that are telling us to go out all the time.

And so it feels kind of like hard to be an introvert and because we're always like trying to carve out space for like the way that we want to live. And then what has happened in the 15 years since is that the introverts won and like we have the introverts world now and it sucks it's not good well i was gonna say like how do you being an introvert how do you feel about this terrible because it indulges my worst habits i mean this is like a whole premise of this show is that exactly like you're saying, like I know left to my own devices. I will, you know, I'll sit at home and watch movies.

I'll like, you know, I'll look at my phone or like sit at home and read. And I love that. And I do need that to some extent, I think more than someone like you needs. But I think that I was happier and healthier when our social norms were designed for extroverts. And when I think that I was happier and healthier when our social norms were designed for extroverts and when I felt that constant tug of pressure to be more extroverted, go out maybe a little more than I wanted to, socialize more at work than I wanted to. It was better for me. And I think now that people like me are getting indulged, it's bad for people like me because we take it too far. And it's bad for people like you because, you know, you need the level of socialization. And look, in my family and circle of friends, I'm definitely the one who's like always wanting to go out. But even my more introverted friends and people in my life, when I've had this experience where we'll go out and then after it's like, you know, it's always a good reminder that even though you think it's easier to stay home and get some sleep and do whatever, that was really fun.

Yeah. That was really fun. And I'm not the type of extrovert who, like, I don't love to go to some big party where I don't know anyone and just like go around and meet people. Like that's not, I'm not that kind of person. But for, I don't know if I believe you good for no like people that I enjoy hanging out with people in my life I'd like to see them in person right I like to go out and do that and every time even more introverted people go do that I get a sense from them that they enjoy it oh absolutely

and I think that one important thing that we are all drawing from the fact that we're kind of like we're pushing very hard into the introverts world now and then all realizing that we're miserable in it is we're all kind of coming to understand something that I think we just didn't understand 20 or 30 years ago, which is that socializing just a lot of in-person interaction with other people, it's something like exercise or eating healthy, where it's like it's really a basic fundamental. If you talk to psychologists, they will all say this. It's a fundamental human need that if you're not fulfilling it, which left to my own devices day to day, I won't, then you're just not going to be as happy and fulfilled. And then when you kind of, you know, going to the gym isn't always fun, but you're gonna be much happier and healthier if you do it

and then you make a habit of it and you get better at it. And I think we're kind of learning that we have to reinstitute those kinds of like norms and standards for ourselves. But I think your point that it's the phones is a good one. There's this- Well, because there's an addictive quality there that is taking us away from what we might know is good for us. And so it's just, again, it's all about the friction, right? If there were no phones and no algorithms and no social media feeds, even the most introverted among us might say, oh, you know what? I haven't gone out like three weekends in a row and I'm feeling pretty like I should do some socializing. But the phone is just like, well,

I can just keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I'm fine. I think a lot about this statistic that I looked up at one point where Facebook used to publish every year, they would say how many minutes per day the average American spent across all of their services, like how much time the average American spent just on Facebook apps, not on all social media, just on Facebook apps per day. And they stopped publishing it because the number got really scary. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics

would also publish based on surveys the number of minutes per day that the average American spent socializing with other people. Oh, God. And there was a point at which the amount of time people spent on Facebook per day eclipsed, surpassed the amount of time they spent socializing in person. Would you like to guess what year that was?

2014? 15? Yes. 2014. Wow. Yes. But 10 years ago. Yeah.

And since then, we know that people spend way more time on social media. So, it really has, it's kind of like crept in. And I think we're now hitting this point where it's like, oh, this is actually kind of scary. Yeah. Introverts economy. Bad. Speaking of staying home and watching Netflix, this week the streaming giant announced that they'll begin broadcasting live sports. Kind of.

Netflix reached a 10-year multi-billion dollar deal with the WWE to broadcast their flagship wrestling show Raw. The deal marks Netflix's latest jab in the ongoing streaming war as streamers like Peacock and Prime Video have the NFL and Apple TV has MLB and MLS over more live content. Is it safe to say that the streaming platforms have officially recreated cable television i think all that's left is news yeah right that's the only thing they don't have right and they're you see them kind of edging in this direction where you get you know the like newsy talk shows which i guess have always existed on like hbo are starting to come in but yeah the only time i ever turn on anything that's not a streamer anymore is if there's like a news, if there's like a Republican primary debate and if there's breaking news, like sometimes, sometimes, but like really not then. I'm not too sad about the loss

of cable news, but it is wild how much like, you know, I was so excited about cutting the cord and we're going to get rid of cable and like millennials are killing cable and like it's back whether you wanted it or not it's fucking back and it's back but it's like worse yeah because now there's at least when you had a cable package there was like a lot of channels and you had to like figure out what to watch just like that now there's like five or six different streaming services. And you're like, the challenge of watching shit every night is like, all right. And I talk about this with Kyle in the interview a bit. But like, all right, you go on Netflix. And then you search forever on Netflix.

And the curation is kind of terrible. And you're either getting your algorithm. And then you go to Hulu. And then you go to, you know, Disney+, Paramount, whatever it is now, whatever the streaming service is. And there's just so, there is infinite choice, and yet it is still so difficult to find something. I think that you might be a little overly sentimental about the cable. That was what the cable era was like. I know.

By the end, there were like 800 channels. Yeah, which I hated. And they all sucked, and they were all full of ads, which we are, that's the other direction that we're moving in now is now we're starting to get more and more ads on our streamers.

But I agree with that. We are kind of, we've ended up back in this morass where it used to feel like very curated and you have your favorite streamers that you really liked. And there's, I think there is still some of that.

Like I, you know, shout out the Criterion channel. I absolutely love, but it is starting to feel more and more like that kind of like blah, open up your streamers that have these giant huge content libraries that you're not excited about watching. Here's why I think it's worse now than cable was. And you're right. Cable was like a mess by the end, too. It was like way too many channels.

But because it was live television, or a lot of it was live television, or there were schedules, scheduled programming. You remember those little books you would get with the HBO schedules? Those little paper books? Love that. Remember TV Guide? No one remembers TV Guide. I do. I remember it, yeah.

At my grandparents' house. Right. Yeah, exactly. So there was way too many channels, but you knew what was on every night. There was something on at 7 p.m. on five different channels or a hundred different channels. Now the infinite choice is like literally it's just you. You're sitting there at the remote and you can go to anything and watch it at any time. And one thing I'm always trying to do is like, what's new on TV this week?

Is there something new on TV? Is there a new show? And like finding that across all these different platforms is next to impossible. Well, we're in a weird point where everyone knows the consolidation is going to come. Everyone knows that this is a huge bubble in the number, the proliferation of streaming services. And there's going to be a consolidation. There's going to be a winnowing. So we kind of have like the worst of both worlds right now

where there's way too many services, but none of them is, other than maybe Netflix, none of them is consolidated enough to like put out really good content. Although like a lot of them have tried, like Amazon put a bazillion dollars into their Lord of the Rings series. And was it Max that did their big Game of Thrones spinoff series?

They're really trying to do the big water cooler appointment viewing. And they're just not quite able to pull it off. But I think we're all just waiting for that to happen where we go from like 12 of these down to three or four what i worried about though is that the like the golden era of prestige television i think a lot of these places are realizing that it's very expensive right to do and it's not as um it's not as popular like it's popular with a certain subset of uh coastal elites like us, but they can do programming that's much cheaper and easier and like easier to watch and just have on. And so that's why, I mean,

the fucking Max and HBO thing drives me so, you go on the Max app now and it's just like, just junk everywhere. And I'm like, where's all my good HBO shit? I know. Well, I think they're going to, and Netflix to some extent maybe has, stumble their way back to the old model, which is that you have the like two and a half men or three men and a baby. I don't even know what the name of the show was because I didn't, I'm so sorry. I sound so snobby right now. I feel terrible about

it. But these shows that would have that were like How I Met Your Mother. Yeah, which I loved. I loved How I Met Your Mother. A bazillion viewers that would then subsidize the like Mad Men's and the Breaking Bad's. They would have like smaller viewerships that were kind of like cultural tastemaker drivers. And it does feel like they're kind of groping their way back to that. And like Netflix, you see some of the like reality TV trash that they have. And I think that what they are trying to do,

and I don't always love their output, but I think what they want to do is they want to have those subsidized, you know, maestro. Bradley Cooper makes another like auteurish movie so that they can kind of have like the two of these parts of the entertainment ecosystem supporting each other. Yeah, I think that's at least been the play for the last couple of years. they can kind of have like the two of these parts of the entertainment ecosystem supporting

each other. Yeah, I think that's that's at least been the play for the last couple years. I wonder how long they're like, we need to subsidize, you know, like, what is the value of having the critically acclaimed Oscar winning whatever? I mean, it's clearly it's clearly worth something now. Right. I wonder about the trend. I think I think it's always been valuable to them.

I mean, these people who work in the entertainment industry, part of it is just they want to impress their friends who work in the industry. And it's the same in journalism. Yeah. Where it's like, I can't tell you how many people I knew who spent months working on big press, what we'd call the equivalent of prestige journalism pieces. They knew nobody was going to read because it mattered to them and their values. And I think that entertainment people are the same way. Yeah, I hope so. I hope it sticks around.

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After the break, my conversation with Kyle Chayka about the ways algorithms have bled into and reshaped our offline world. Kyle Chika, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. So one of the themes we've touched on but haven't really explored on the show is how the Internet and social media have changed culture. And you have written an excellent book on the topic. It's called Filter World, How Algorithms Flatten Culture.

What is the filter world? Filter world, the title of the book, I kind of came up with because I needed a word for this thing that I was observing. Like there was no word for this, I think. So Filter World to me is this kind of ecosystem and environment that we live in online that's just in which we're surrounded by algorithmic feeds. So much of what we experience online is through one recommendation or one feed or another, whether it's YouTube, which we're on now,

or Netflix or TikTok or Twitter, or even your email sometimes. So I wanted a term to evoke just like how much these algorithmic recommendations surround us and how we kind of can't escape them sometimes. When and where did you first start noticing that living in this world of algorithms was having an effect on culture and sort of in our offline world as well. Yeah, I mean, I had been on social media through the late 2000s into the 2010s, like a lot of people. But I think the moment that I really saw the impact of these feeds outside of the internet, like when I wasn't just looking at my laptop or my phone, was around 2015, 2016. And in that moment, I was traveling a lot as a journalist. I was going to various international cities. And I was constantly using Yelp and Google Maps and Instagram to triangulate myself and find my way through these cities. And I ended up finding all of these coffee

shops that looked the same. They all kind of had this homogenous, clean, minimalist aesthetic, whatever country you're in. And to me, that was a sign that these places, rather than being so locally specific, so geographically specific, you were kind of connecting to them via the internet. They were like spaces of the internet. In the book, you make the point that um you know concern about the homogenizing effect of globalization isn't new people in the 1800s worried that trains were making all the large european cities look like each other how is what's happening today different yeah i love that quote from the french philosopher or whatever who was complaining that trains ruined europe in the 1800s it's like yeah

the more people move across these cities the more things travel the more different places come to resemble each other and that's not a new phenomenon like it goes back to the roman empire even um but i think now so much of our consumption is routed through these feeds. We're really, like the polarity has flipped in a way, at least for people who are very online. We're consuming things digitally first and physically second. Like the apps we use are really routing our real world attention, changing how we move through the physical world.

And I think that immersiveness and that like digital influence, even on everything we see around us, is very new. You write about, at one point, how streaming services differentiate between what they call lean-in moments, when people are choosing what to watch and then paying attention to it, and lean-back moments, when people are just letting content play in the background, which is incredibly depressing to me, especially since there are way too many nights when my wife and I are so tired from parenting that we put on a TV show we don't have to pay attention to just so we can look at our phones. And we say, you know what, we can watch something good

or we can just watch something where we need to be on our phones because we've just been paying attention to our toddler the whole time. And you're saying these streaming services intentionally create that content and the algorithms push us towards it? For sure. I mean, this is this started with Spotify, I think. I think Spotify was early on to codify the lean in, lean back dichotomy. And when you're leaning in, you're actually paying attention to the thing that you're listening to, like a song. You're thinking about what you want to listen to, what's next. But lean back is just like, you're very susceptible to the feed. You're thinking about what you want to listen to, what's next. But Lean Back is just like, you're very susceptible to the feed.

You're susceptible to whatever the next song comes on, whatever the next episode on Netflix plays. The infinite scroll just keeps on going, and you appreciate that because you don't have to think about it. And I think that platforms are creating that kind of content intentionally, in part because it works for our consumption habits. Like we do want to look at our phones, unfortunately, while we're watching TV. We do want to have like multiple screens going at once. But I think that kind of lean back content

or like ambient content, as I talk about it in the book, really works for algorithmic feeds because all these feeds care is that you're continuing to engage. You're continuing to have your eyeballs on that screen or on the feed sometimes, maybe not all the time, but your attention is still there. And that means they can still target you with advertising. They can still maintain your subscription on Spotify. So intuitively, it feels like this is bad, right? But I want to sort of dig into why it's bad because, and I'll just use myself as an example, when you were talking about the coffee shops, you know, in the 2010s, I ended up in Amsterdam a lot for business stuff. And every time I went to Amsterdam, when I found one of the coffee shops that felt familiar, I gravitated towards those coffee shops.

And there was a certain comfort there. And there are, like when I was just talking about sitting in bed, falling asleep, watching The Office. There is like a comfort to that, you know? It's like, oh, The Office is on. This is great. I don't have to think about anything so what are we what are we missing um when we are just sort of following the uh cultural preferences of the algorithm which are but the algorithm ostensibly is our own preferences right like it's supposed to reflect what our taste is but so often it ends up settling into

this mode of familiarity and comfort and like non-stimulation or hypnosis or something like the office sits alongside emily in paris or like lo-fi chill hip hop beats to study slash relax to on youtube uh all of these things are about lean back consumption and they just wash over you i think the and familiarity can be good like sometimes we want familiarity in the case of the coffee shops it fulfills a good function because you're comfortable and they just wash over you. I think the, and familiarity can be good. Like sometimes we want familiarity. In the case of the coffee shops, it fulfills a good function because you're comfortable in that space.

Maybe you can get your writing done or whatever as I did. But what I have a problem with is that there's this pressure for all things to fit into that mode. Like familiarity can't be the only mode of our culture. Like otherwise, I think when you say that out loud, it's obvious. We don't want everything to just be a reflection

of what we've already experienced. We don't want a thousand seasons of The Office forever. But that is the kind of culture that these platforms prioritize, unfortunately. I mean, I guess there's two different things here. One is familiarity and comfort. The other is sort of the creation of like, you know, popular culture, right? And what's popular among most people. And I would, I'll admit that even before algorithms, I'm someone who's

always gravitated to the most popular music, television, movies, chain restaurants. And I think, you know, terrible taste. but one reason in my defense that i've always been drawn to what what everyone's watching or listening to is because it's usually what everyone's talking about and i like participating in those conversations i like monoculture uh for some reason this algorithm driven sameness hasn't really led to more connection or shared experiences. Why do you think that is? It's such a strange feeling because we feel like we're consuming the same things as everyone else. Like we're all watching The Office. We all know what the trending topic is on X or like the latest TikTok trend is. But I think especially like as I've

gone on tour for this book, a lot of people have expressed their anxiety to me about that they're like I don't know how to connect with another person who's really consuming the same thing that I am and I think that's because the feeds really silo us into our own experience and it tells you that it's unique it tells you that it's adjusted for your taste and so with a TikTok for you feed for for example, I know that mine is not the same as yours. Like I know that I might be seeing stuff that you aren't. I might be down rabbit holes that you aren't. And I think that has a tendency to isolate us in a way because we don't have a shared vocabulary. We don't have a shared context for that body of art. Yeah. I mean,

you point out that a big factor here is, you just mentioned it, the way social media has changed over the last few years and how there are now fewer people creating and posting content and more people just passively consuming it. This is why I've always thought like TikTok, it seems antisocial.

Like I know there are a lot of conversations happening in the replies, but that's mostly it's an algorithm force feeding you endless videos. But then I always wonder, are we just like old millennials who don't get it or what? I've talked to younger people too. I mean, I think as an internet columnist, like I do try out all of these new platforms. I kind of use myself as the test subject. And even when I talk to younger people on TikTok, there's this fear of posting. Like when I think about my own use of Twitter, which was kind of my home social platform until the past year or two, I got really into Twitter.

And as you consume more Twitter, you kind of want to post. You want to join in that conversation. You want to try your hand at doing your own banal observations that go viral. And it was kind of easy to post. There was lower thresholds. You were just a semi-anonymous account. You could post into the feed and see what happens. On TikTok, there's this pressure to have your face in front of everything. People are judging your face for sure. They're judging your voice. They're judging the furniture in your house, in the background of your video. And that just seems so much harder to get over. I think it discourages younger people or people

who don't have a following or don't fit into that influencer mold away from posting. Yeah. And I think, I think the general vitriol on social media contributes as well. Um, like I would, I go on Tik TOK and my primary use now is when friends of mine see a funny Tik TOK or I do, we like text each other the TikTok and then we talk about it. Right. And that is like the connection that I was looking for from social media. But I don't want to post in the replies. I on Twitter where I used to like have arguments, get in debates all the time. I don't do any of that. I post on Twitter. I like shut the comments. I like don't look at comments from people who don't follow me anymore. And but then I realized like, oh, that kind of sucks, right? Because you're there looking for

some kind of a conversation, some kind of a connection. And instead, it's all becoming very one way. And I wonder how you think that affects sort of cultural trends as well. Yeah, I mean, I think social media has become increasingly broadcast. Like, before, early on in Facebook, early on in Twitter, even on Instagram, it was about connecting to a coherent group of your friends and family and like people who are around you or people who only knew online, but it was like a small community of, of your people in a way. And now, and you're all posting to each other and having this like group conversation. Now it's much more about a few influencers, a few creators beaming out this content that we all then consume that's fed to us by recommendations. And then we use it to have conversations.

Like I also love sending and receiving TikToks, like little telegrams saying, you know, I thought of you with this. But that conversation isn't happening on the platform. It's happening like in a group chat with text messages that you know who's going to see them. It's like you take it, you take the content out of the broadcast medium and bring it into like an intimate space that you actually have control over. And that's where you talk. So I do, I think it's too bad. Like the internet, social media over the 2010s was an amazing place to have conversations,

like connecting with new people. Well, and just my behavior on it, it has changed with regard to cultural like moments and events and content. Because there was a time in like, I think the early 2010s, even the mid 2010s, where you'd watch a show and it's a show that everyone was talking about. It was Game of Thrones, whatever.

And you'd see something and then you'd tweet about it because and then see what people thought about it. Now, when I watch something, I'm like, oh, before I post anything about this, I have to like look at where the conversation is on various social platforms because I don't want to get crosswalks. And it's like sort of a sad thing, right? Like you can't just like throw your opinion out about some kind of piece of content because you don't

know if there's like a whole discourse around it. Yes. And I think that is a big fault of algorithmic feeds. Like in that moment of the mid 2010s, like 2015, 2016, a lot of these feeds shifted from linear, which is just chronological, you know, most recent to oldest to being more algorithmic. So more recommendations, not in time order, like essentially less coherent. You have no sense of a logic to that entire feed and that means that you have much less access to a real-time conversation like i i do miss the liveness of tweeting about a game of thrones episode as it's happening and just seeing how people yeah like consume that yeah like threads threads doesn't do that either like threads i think people believe at least that it won't even

show your post to many people immediately. It'll like delay it five or ten minutes and it slowly trickles out. And that totally doesn't work for that kind of conversation we want to have.

I've noticed that with Instagram especially too because Instagram started and it was like, okay, this is a space for my friends and I.

We can chat on Instagram. We can go back and forth with pictures. And now it's like I'm scrolling through the feed. I'm like, I don't follow half these people. It's all recommendations of shit that I don't want to see. It's just like much less useful and much less social. Yeah, it's less social.

It's almost not about people anymore, I find. It's much more about brand accounts and meme pages and genre stuff. I love art and design, obviously, from all of my work. My feed is so overtaken by photos of art collectors' homes and architecture stuff that I can't escape it. And I enjoy this stuff, but I don't want to see 80% that. Or sometimes your TikTok For You feed or mine just becomes all food content. It's like, oh, you like food videos?

Let me give you 100 of them. But I know. No, that's disgusting. No one wants to see 100 different food videos in a row. That's gross. Yeah, they really overdo it. So you attempted an algorithm cleanse. We did something similar on my co-host and I on this show.

We did, we called it the offline challenge, and we sort of did various challenges to sort of stop, reduce our phone use over several months, including like, put it in a box or do gray screen, you know, gray screen and all that kind of stuff. What was your algorithm cleanse like? And how did it go? Yeah, so my version of that was to get off all algorithmic feeds. So rather than like changing my phone, or like, it wasn't just about all technology in a way or all of the internet, it was it was about these feeds, which I had come to feel totally overwhelmed by in the way of this Instagram complaint, like I'm not controlling this anymore. So I just logged off

all the sites, deleted all the apps from my phone, kind of stopped consuming anything that I didn't actively seek out and decide to consume. And I had found that, I mean, I relied on these feeds to basically tell me what was interesting at any given moment of any given day. And so I was a bit bereft at first because I missed that sense of, oh, here's the next interesting article. Here's the news of the day. Here's a post from your friend. But it did make me more able to seek out my own stuff offline.

It made me more intentional in that consumption. And I think that was really healthy. How did you go about seeking out your own stuff? Like when you don't have the algorithms to decide for you? Yeah, they did make a lot of decisions for me. So suddenly, I was like, hmm, what section of the New York Times do I want to read? Like I would use the Times app a lot for sure. Though even that has an algorithmic recommendation function um i started using this music streaming service called adagio which is just classical music so

it's essentially all classical music that has ever been recorded and it's not algorithmic it's catalogued in a much more detailed and granular way than spotify is and i didn't know anything about classical music, but that platform helped me explore it on my own terms in a way. And just like figure out what I was interested in by myself without that constant second guessing of the machine. And I just found myself doing more things in real life. Like when I didn didn't have instagram i was more motivated to go to an art museum and like see art because i wasn't just passively consuming this ambient aesthetic garbage on my feed do you have any lasting effects from the cleanse uh or are you fully plugged back into the it was a good reset i mean I've never done a juice cleanse,

but I imagine it's similar. Like you think you need all of this food, but then you go without it for a while and you find you survive without it. It kind of, it reset my relationship to this stuff. I mean, I think I accorded way too much importance to what was going on on Twitter. I let Instagram dictate my attention way too much. And so by separating myself from those feeds, I was able to just understand that reality went on, that these were not the be-all, end-all. These were not the limit of your experience.

You could go outside of them and be fine. You wrote about FOMO when you were on the algorithm cleanse, which I really identify with because that's like a driving force in my life and always has been. And that's probably the primary reason why I wouldn't be able to do it because it's like, all right, if I can't figure out what everyone else is reading, thinking about, watching, like, what am I doing? I mean, it is our jobs, too, as journalists and commentators, to be like, okay, what's the conversation? Like, how do I stay plugged in?

But I mean, lately, with X increasingly falling apart and this kind of panoply of platforms that we're on right now, it's kind of hard to find the conversation anyway. I think we're reconstructing where conversation happens, where our ideas come from. And I think increasingly you can be in spaces that aren't just massive algorithmic feeds of a billion people.

You can be in like a Discord chat, which I think you guys have. You can be in a newsletter comment section. You can text your friends. There's other ways of doing that, but those are less public. There's no public register of attention in the way that Twitter used to be. You write about the need for human curation to help us rediscover our own taste. That made me realize that I actually have no idea what I like outside of what the algorithm is doing.

How do you discover your own taste? I mean, I've also just, even in the last several years, I've had this experience. I don't know if you have, but I know a lot of friends have had the same where you're just like, what is everyone watching these days? Do you guys have any good shows for me? Any good books? Any good movies? And it just seems much more splintered than it ever has been before and sort of more difficult to find something good because there's the algorithms giving you more

what you like and then there's a bunch of garbage out there and it becomes it becomes tricky to actually figure this out right like i think algorithms fulfill this very important purpose online like they do filter a lot of that garbage like the stuff that is just either totally meaningless or not relevant to you or you know not interesting and it gives you a set of good stuff like it gives you something that might be applicable to your interests um but then that doesn't mean the thing is meaningful like i think meaning is like a thing that we're missing a lot of online, and it's behind that sense of,

oh, I can recommend a new Netflix show, but it's not moving me deeply, or it's not important to my sense of identity. It's just another piece of ambient entertainment. So I find in the book, curation is kind of the word for selecting culture and seeking things out in a way that's not just about a preference or a desire for one thing versus another in a moment, but instead about the wider context of culture, the history of a thing, artist influences like curation curators at their best i think build this whole beautiful context around a thing and help you understand it and move your taste to a different

level and bring you into a new sphere and i think feeds just have a tendency to not do that keep you where you're comfortable and also decontextualize everything. So it's almost discouraging you from having that information, having that deeper context. I was sort of reading your book wondering why there hasn't been a movement towards or demand for more human curation. I do wonder if this, and this is a very internet age phenomenon,

but the idea of gatekeepers and we don't want a couple critics or a couple people uh telling us what we should watch or consume or do this kind of stuff and so we want the we want everyone to decide right and so there's this which is obviously there's plenty of reasons why having a few people gatekeeping is bad but also it does feel like we've gone too far in the other direction and I don't know there's there's sort of an illusion that the algorithm is not a person gatekeeping and telling us what to do but I don't know if that's really true totally I mean there's different models of cultural distribution. Like in pre-internet, a record label executive, a gallery curator, you know, a public librarian chose what you were able to see,

a newspaper editor. Those were human beings who selected the thing based on what they cared about and what they were trying to achieve and then put it in front of you. And I think a good thing about that was that that human gatekeeper or curator could move you into a new space and introduce you to a surprising thing that maybe no one else knew about.

Like a record label executive picks out this one new band and is like, this band is something that everyone needs to hear. I don't care if they're not popular yet. I'll make them popular. The algorithmic feed is the opposite. So rather than top down

it's really from the bottom up and the way it's democratic or like uh everyone has access to the public sphere everyone can publish but then the algorithm itself is the gatekeeper like what what can't achieve some popularity is never going to achieve more popularity you need more and more and more and more attention. Otherwise, your thing is seen as a failure. Like, I think there's this demand to scale up to as wide and as broad an audience as possible because attention is the commodity

and you're not allowed in a way to stay small, to focus on the community that's coherent. You have to be as like generic and average as possible to net the widest possible audience well i also think that curation requires a belief that some people have certain expertise you know and they have like worked at something um so that they have that expertise and what the internet prioritizes is oh no like everyone's opinion is value is valuable and everyone should have an opinion everyone should have a voice and it's like yeah everyone should have a voice but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's voice

is value is as valuable on every single topic because some people are experts on certain things and others are experts on other things you know yes this is like the tyranny of the amateur in a way. Like, when I go to MoMA, when I go to an art museum, I do not want to see the paintings that have the most likes clicked on them. Like, I don't want to see the, like, algorithmic feed version of that. I want one person who has studied impressionism for decades of their life to arrange a show of these beautiful paintings for me and kind of guide me through that experience and it's i i get the gatekeeping critique and i think it can seem scary but in what way is that not a good thing like

we i would love that human vision like a great i think Tumblr did this in a way. It allowed one person to curate goofy medieval manuscript illuminations, and that was their expertise. And that was really fascinating. But I think because distribution has become so wide and because there's so much pressure to go viral in a way, that value of specific curation is lost a bit this might sound like an odd question but what do you think makes a piece of art whether it's music art popular and because we're talking about like mass like the the painting that gets the most likes as maybe that's bad you know but clearly there's something that if so many people find that enjoyable is there a value in that like what what are your thoughts on what actually makes something popular and why that's not necessarily a good thing yeah it's a really good question actually like what makes a piece of culture popular i mean it it says something to a lot of people like clearly a lot of people are moved by the mona lisa or van gogh's starry night or something um but i think in painting terms, that popularity has been established over centuries or more by human curators, by various

tastemakers. I mean, popularity is not a bad thing. I don't want to seem so elitist as to say everything that's popular is bad. but what i think algorithmic feeds have pushed on us is that popularity is the only metric of value like only what is popular is good and i think that's completely wrong like i don't think we should aspire to like what the most other humans like um i think we have some individuality left and we can and should pursue that sense of self and sense of the individual and know that we might not like what someone else likes. Though the internet also encourages you to have fights over your tastes and be like, no, you should like what I like. If you don't like what I like, it's a problem. Yeah, that's not great. At the end of Filter World, you write, something new is on the horizon, whether it is a flood of even more artificial content generated by artificial intelligence machines or a art or like deep fake nudes, which are incredibly horrible. Um, we see the AI generated text that's like meaningless, but seems coherent. So I think that's, that's hit us. Like we, we almost can't hold ourselves back.

It's like if you can push a button to have something right for you, a lot of people are going to do it for better or worse. But I also think there's a lot of ennui with how the internet works right now. A lot of people I talk to are bored and unsatisfied and not finding that sense of deeper meaning that they really want to find

and that just seems unsustainable like if this many people are so unhappy i think we do there's a pressure to find a new solution to create something new and i think there are alternatives like alternative ecosystems like a discord or a subscription newsletter or a podcast community. But we're still so reliant on these feeds for distribution that it's hard to see how those fade away. Yeah, and I do think the first step in that kind of renaissance is recognizing that the reason we are so bored and frustrated and annoyed and feeling like the internet is empty is because

of these algorithms and that what we think we want might not necessarily be exactly what we want all the time what we subconsciously click fave on or like what we pause on tick tock is not the only arbiter of of what we like or like yeah and And I think that's leading to that sense of dissatisfaction. The book is filter world, how algorithms flatten culture. It's an excellent book. Everyone pick it up. Kyle Chayka.

Thank you so much for joining offline. This was great. Yeah, this was really fun. Thank you. Take care. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher.

It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reid Cherlin, and Andy Taft for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.