be your own algorithm

0:00 Hold on. Let me get in a costume real quick. That's more like it. Society. One thing I want to make immediately clear from the jump. If you take nothing else away from this video, let it be this. I hate with every cell in my body the completely unregulated and basically unoptoutable blight that is blackbox big tech algorithmic social feeds. As an independent creator, I deeply resent that I can pour months of blood, sweat, and tears into a video that the people who have already elected to follow me might not see if a computer opaquely determines the vibes are ever so slightly off. Or even worse, a computer might just as opaquely decide to pipe my video directly into the feeds of bored, disaffected people who are actively antagonistic to me and my ideas. It's been known to happen. But more than anything, I hate the reason this is

0:46 happening. Do you know what Netflix's CEO said? The app's biggest competitor is sleep. Tech oligarchs see our collective attention as their manifest destiny. And I'm making that comparison very deliberately. Much like the American white nationalists of the 19th century who believe that they were more entitled to the entire west side of the continent and the people who already lived there. That's how tech executives see the space between your ears is techro exceptionalism. They're at the top already and the only way they can interpret their own positionality without imploding their worldview is by telling themselves that they are the most deserving. They're so much further up the ladder than everybody else. So that must mean that the rest of us aren't even the same kind of human as them. My day job is actually in tech. And it's with over a decade of experience that I tell you the people who run these companies think you're dirt. They would pipe slop into your

1:32 feed if that's what captured your attention most effectively. And indeed they are. And they formed a symbiotic relationship with the sort of grifters and bad actors who don't mind gaming the system to manufacture slop crowding legitimate creators off the stage. Working together, there's nothing they won't do to capture your attention because your complete and undivided attention is their final frontier. And what's worse is that nobody's quite on the hook for it. Because daytoday, hour to hour, minute to minute, it's not a person deciding what will most effectively capture your attention. It's an algorithm. And not just one algorithm, but a different custom algorithm for every person with an internet connection. An algorithm has no soul, no conscience, no compassion, no sense of duty, no taste. It cannot be moved by art. It cannot be emboldened to action. It cannot love. An algorithm does not feel. An algorithm cannot be held accountable for its decisions. You can find the programmer who wrote it,

2:17 but they're not in charge of it anymore. It is an entity designed to work independently of its creator, and that's exactly what it's doing. This is called an accountability sync, and it's a feature, not a bug. I think this is all quite bad. I believe we should live in a world where human beings are responsible for the things that happen in it. That way, uh, when something goes wrong, we can walk up to a guy and say, "Hey, what gives?" You know, in theory. Another thing that working in tech has taught me is that the tech industry as it currently exists, uh, must be destroyed. and I believe it will be perhaps by the weight of its own hubris. I decided over a year ago I wanted to make a video about all of this. Uh I was angry about what the internet had become and the ways it was making me feel. So I picked up Filter World: How Algorithms Flatten Culture by Kelchica thinking I'd be using it to back up my own points for this project that I'd already laid out in my own mind. But that's not what

3:02 ended up happening. Reading is funny that way. You go in expecting to have your pre-existing beliefs confirmed and then you're challenged in them, if not always in ways you or the author expected. Here's my good readads review of Filter World by Cal Jagga. Look, no one hates big tech's relentless appetite for our collective attention more than me. But beyond the first few chapters, which are by far the strongest, that's not even what the book's about. Filter World is a cynical and often contradictory book that occasionally veers into downright misanthropy. The latter half undergarded by Chica's thinly veiled contempt for creators who work outside of institutions that he personally approves of. Criterion good, bedroom pop bad. And God help you if he sees you taking a photo of a beautiful waterfall on your once in a-lifetime international vacation. and you clout chasing rube. The thing I'm going to keep bringing up in this video is that I agree with Kyle Chica about a lot of things. I do think we're being fed slop,

3:48 but at the same time, I I don't think you have to look that hard to find stuff that's not slop everywhere. That non-slop is actually more plentiful and more accessible than it's ever been if you take the initiative to look for it. If you take one thing from this video, let it be that I hate what algorithmic social feeds have done to the internet. But if you take two things from this video, let the second be that the human creative spirit is indomitable. This video is not really a review of Filter World. Uh, it's an essay structured around the existential spiral it triggered in me, even though, and perhaps because I did not like it very much. The ways I intellectually disagreed with its conclusions, my emotional reaction to it, uh, to talk about those things responsibly and persuasively and with emotional honesty. Here, I had to stare into the mirror for a long time. Uh, and this video, this essay is about what I saw staring back,

4:35 part one, story time. So, if you don't already know me, hi. Hello. I'm glad you're here. My name is Mel. In 2020, I started making short form videos about books, mostly doing analysis and reviews and posting them onto Tik Tok. I became a book talker, if you will. And I had kind of a knack for it and I enjoyed doing it. And so, my ambitions grew into what you now see before you. Impressive. No. These days, I make content about other stuff too, obviously. But bookworld remains my primary social ecosystem online because I love to read and talk about books. It's kind of my thing. So, that's why I was live tweeting Filter World when I first read it back in March. Not with any goal or broader point in mind necessarily, but because it's what I do online. I had a Filter World thread going on with three or four posts over on threads, and I capped the thread off with a screenshot of my Goodreads

5:21 review, which was pretty negative, as you heard, because I didn't like the book very much. It's author Kyle Chica and I do not follow each other. I did not tag him or even include his name or the name of the book in my post because I didn't want him to be able to search for it. In no way did I deliberately invite Kyle Chica into my world or into my thread about his book. And I honestly wasn't even worried about it because not many people follow me on threads. But maybe you can see where this is going because sure enough that same day Kalcha replied directly to my review of his book with a succinct ouch. I'm not sure what was going through Kalcha's head when he decided to do this. If you're not in book review world, this is considered to be a breach of etiquette. Authors directly interacting with critical reviews of their work is generally frowned upon. I want to give Chica the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wasn't trollling his feeds for mentions of his book specifically, that he just happened upon

6:08 my review accidentally while he was scrolling, which probably felt bad. And in that moment, I'm guessing he probably wanted to let me know that I'd made him feel bad. So, the ouch reads to me as a kind of like, "Hey, I'm walking here." type exclamation. I I think he wanted to make me feel guilty for hurting him, and it worked. I do try very hard to avoid hurting people unless absolutely necessary and it brings me no pleasure to know that I've done it in this case even though it wasn't my intention. I'm not sorry for my actions. I stand by my review and my right to post it. But I am legitimately sorry that Kyle Chica saw it when he wasn't deliberately seeking it out and I certainly wasn't trying to show it to him. The reason I bring this up at all, the reason it's relevant, Kyle Chica and I were both manipulated by the algorithm here. Kcho very likely did not want to see my review of his book. I didn't want him to see my review of his book. But that didn't matter. The

6:54 algorithm decided through its myriad deliberately obfuscated calculations that plopping my post into Kalcha's feed was likely to result in engagement regardless of what he or I, the most invested parties, the creators of the content wanted. And you know what's messed up? The algorithm was right. Part two. What is filter world? There was a video that went viral on fashion talk earlier this year by a creator called Wanders [ __ ] The video begins with a stitch of a room full of women, mostly in their 20s and 30s, presumably in New York or LA, who are all wearing variations of the same outfit, beige coats, white pants, white shoes. Wanders leads off her commentary with this. We are genuinely in the end time. She goes on to argue that influencer culture perpetuates homogeneity and conformity, and she connects those values in fashion

7:39 to the resurgence of the fascist far right, both politically and culturally. I'm sympathetic to this argument to be clear and I think she makes some good points, but what I'm really fixated on is that hook. We are genuinely in the end time. So, this is a sales pitch. Not only is it a sales pitch, it's an anti- tech spin on a classic tech sales pitch. This is how JAI is being sold right now. In 2023, CNN ran an article called Sam Alman Warns AI could kill us all. He still wants us to use it. Sam Alman, if you didn't know, is the CEO of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGBT. The creator Wonders [ __ ] and and Sam Alman are selling very different things. Wonderslut, just like me, really just wants to sell you on sticking around till the end of the video. Maybe hit subscribe if you're feeling generous. Sam Alman is selling you on confessing

8:24 your darkest desires to an imaginary friend in the hopes that one day it'll learn enough to take your job. But also selling you, the person watching this video, it's his secondary aim. A tech CEO's primary aim is always not to sell it to consumers, but to investors who don't really care if AI takes your job and probably actually see it as a lucrative possibility. But in both cases, the fear-mongering is the marketing. Get on board or get left behind. It's just that the trains are headed in in different directions. I've been seeing a lot of videos criticizing algorithmically served culture lately, and I'm seeing them ironically after they go viral via my algorithmically generated recommendations. Tik Tok is ruining reading. Why is social media no fun anymore? Social media is making us dumb, depressed, poor, antisocial, fill in the blank. It's not that I necessarily disagree with all of that. It's just like again and again, there's

9:11 this framing that insists on treating a given contemporary cultural phenomenon as a harbinger of humanity's ultimate doom that I think is entertainingly hyperbolic and perhaps provides the viewer with a bit of delicious shooid. A comfortable perch from which to sit and judge the unwashed masses. algorithmically served anti-algorithm content has become its own content niche. That might even be why you clicked on this video. I think this kind of content is gaining traction, of course, in part because it's reacting to something real. It has concerns that are rooted in reality and that are shared by the audience it's finding. But I also think this content is appealing because there's something seductive about relaxing and how terrible everything feels. There can be relief in relinquishing control in that way. If you're unhappy with your digital life, if art isn't resonating with you, if

9:57 you're not finding joy in anything you're engaging with, I think it can be a relief to conclude that art must just be uniquely bad. Now, I get it. I do. I also think it's kind of a copout. Filter World is the crown jewel of algorithm friendly, anti-algorithm content. I actually first heard about Filter World via algorithmic feed, and it's actually pretty easy for me to reverse engineer why. I'm interested in technology, and I also like to read books. And I have a mutual, Nathan, who mostly talks about non-fiction books. And so his video about filter world was predictably piped directly into my feed. The premise of the book Chica's thesis is that culture is uniquely suffering in this moment. It's becoming flatter, more anodine, less challenging, less interesting as a direct consequence of algorithmic feeds being the primary medium through which most of us are exposed to new culture. The word filter itself is sha's coinage

10:42 to describe the quote vast interlocking and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed. Chica assumes that the goal of every serious content creator is to accumulate as many likes as possible on each consecutive post. And so we're in the midst of a great cultural flattening because creators are engineering their content and an attempt to appeal to the broadest possible demographic by making their content, their art as deliberately unchallenging and uncontroversial as possible. And that's a big problem if you value good art, which is necessarily challenging and often controversial. Jacob argues we're absorbing more culture than ever, but it's not enriching or meaningful or resonant. He repeatedly compares the culture served to us on algorithmic feeds to junk food. There are no nutrients in it. we consume it and then

11:28 immediately forget about it. He begins the book with a crash course in computer history from Ada Love Lace to Alan Turing uh up through our contemporary hellscape. In my favorite section of the book, he pins the beginning of the end of the bright promises of the early internet onto Facebook. Believe it or not, there was a time in the not too distant past where you'd be scrolling and you'd reach the end of your feed. But then came Facebook's news feed, which endlessly pulled in more content whenever you reached the bottom of your screen, guessing at what you'd most like to see next based on your previous behavior, which Facebook tracked not only in the app, but across the entire internet via its notoriously hard to shake spyware. So instead of showing you content based on who you've already elected to follow, with the advent of Facebook's newsfeed, you've now got an algorithm analyzing your behavior and making those decisions for you. And that's a monumental shift, right? From

12:13 totally proactive to totally reactive almost overnight. And now years later, Chica argues that the cumulative effect of algorithmic ubiquity is that the dopamine rush has become inadequate and the noise and speed of the feeds overwhelming. Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises. Part three. Dear Kyle, this is as good a time as any to address Kylega directly. Hi Kyle, may I call you Kyle for the duration of this segment? I hope you're not here. And if you are, I I urge you to turn back, but if you're still here, hello. Perhaps I've appeared on your radar once again because an algorithm with no concern for your mental and emotional well-being shoved my work in front of your face predicting that you were once again likely to engage with it. Relatable and I'm sorry about that. Back when I posted about your book on threads, a buddy of yours, I presume, also replied to me and and said

13:00 something really interesting. They said, "I couldn't be more wrong about you." What I want to make so crystal clear here is I don't know you and I don't claim to. Can we get spiritual for a second? I do not believe that writing, even non-fiction writing or memoir writing, is some like pure distillation of one's soul. I believe that writing is work and the product of that work, a completed book, is a one-time conversation between you and the universe that you have generously invited the public to witness. I'm glad you wrote this book. I'm glad I read it. If you're puzzled by my strongly worded Goodreads review, it boils down to this. I found your book repeatedly conflates this substance of mine and my peers work with its method of distribution. And frankly, I don't appreciate being lumped in with a boot that's stomping me into the ground. In that way, I think your book is actually perpetuating the most

13:46 dangerous aspect of algorithmic culture, which is its tendency to divorce the content from the human being who created it. I don't think of my work as junk food. I actually take it quite seriously. I will have spent hundreds of hours researching and scripting and editing this video by the time I release it. And the thing about being a creator in this ecosystem, if I want anyone to see my work, I have to take a huge gamble. When I hit publish, if the first few people who see this video don't engage with it in quite the right way, it's dead on arrival and no one will see it. Not even the people who have already elected to follow me who I am most interested in seeing it. So, it's not about me feeling entitled to algorithmic amplification as you argue in your book. It's about feeling entitled to compensation for my labor. And it doesn't have to be a lot. I'm already doing this mostly for free. Even factoring in my Patreon, I'm not making anywhere close to a living off of this stuff. But the companies that host my

14:31 content and my peers content are certainly making money off of it. And yet, nobody would be here if it weren't for us. In your book, you refer to influencing as a viable career path. But how viable is it really for the 99% of us who aren't Charlie D'Amelio? So, I started out on TikTok, right? And my account over there is monetized. So, I'm technically one of the fortunate few. But, Bite Dance does not have an HR department. They sure don't offer benefits. You can't negotiate wages. You can't even reliably get in touch with a human being. Believe me, I've tried. You take what they give you or you take nothing at all. In this way, as an independent creator, I have a lot more in common with Uber drivers and other app-based gig workers than I do with Charlie De'milio. Uber has a strike system just like Tik Tok. And just like Tik Tok, your account and by extension your livelihood can and often is terminated with no warning and no recourse. And that switch is not being

15:17 flipped by a human. And that's part of it, right? Like the lack of human accountability is the point. And I think one of the things you and I agree on is that that is very bad. Part four, the medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan was a prominent Canadian philosopher and communications theorist working in the 60s and 70s. You probably heard his very famous theory, the medium is the message. Despite the prevalence of that phrase, what it actually means is deceptively complex. Basically, McLuhan argues in the first chapter of his 1964 book, Understanding Media, that the medium that a society uses for its communication will itself, more than the content of the messages contained within that medium, shape how society functions, how it creates infrastructure, how it progresses, and how it collapses. The ideas that a society is able to even conceive of are informed more by the medium than the

16:03 content that that medium relays. Movies, not any one particular movie, but the medium of moving pictures viewed in a theater changed how people spent their days off of work, how they dated, how they socialized. Radios changed how people structured their evenings and leisure time with their families. TVs changed how people arranged their furniture in their houses. Think about it this way. What's had a greater impact on society? The stories in every book ever written or or the existence of of books themselves? After invoking McLuhan and filter world, Shaker writes, "In our case, the medium is the algorithmic feed. It has scaled and sped up humanity's interconnection across the world to an unimaginable degree. Its message is that on some level our collective consumption habits translated into data run together into sameness. Jacob is invoking the medium is the message to essentially cast a value

16:49 judgment here saying that the medium in this case algorithmic social feeds is making the message qualitatively worse than it might otherwise be in I don't know a reality that doesn't exist. And yeah, I just don't think that arguing that a broad swath of culture is bad is an appropriate or anthropologically useful observation. I also just don't think it's true. It is observable reality that people that artists have and will always find remarkable ways to create and innovate within constraints, including from within an algorithmic distribution system. There's just no sense denying that. I've been doing this for 5 years and I am like overwhelmed by the talent and creativity of my peers in this space. And yeah, there's a lot of content out there that I think is really bad, too. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water here. Imagine making the same argument about movies.

17:36 Saying that the advent and proliferation of movies was an indicator of some fundamental worsening of humanity. And I'm not a historian, but like I'm sure people did argue that. There's a lot of evidence to work with. Some movies are very bad. And when I say bad, I mean across an entire spectrum of badness, with one end containing ultimately harmless movies that are poor examples of their craft and the other end containing movies that have actually mobilized people to violence. And those are just individual movies. If we zoom out, we can see systematic harm that only exists because movies exist. The Haze Code, NBAA, a long, long lineage of abused and exploited actors. All of these real harms only made possible by movies existing in the first place. The medium is the message. Movies have killed people literally by nature of the medium of real people needing to simulate actions as opposed to

18:21 symbolizing actions with words on a page. Nobody's ever died from a character in a book using a gun. But many people have died due to malfunctions related to real human actors using guns as a direct consequence of the medium. So there's a lot of bad stuff happening there. But also, you know, it's movies. this exponential advancement in human expression and storytelling, one that synthesizes and narrativizes all the art forms we hold most dear. Does anyone really think we'd be better off without movies? Like, what's even the use of that question? And part of what's allowing me to say all that so confidently is hindsight. Movies have been around for a while now, and there's a lot to look back on. Do you think historians and anthropologists will look back on short form video content in 300 years and say, "Well, that all sucked." You know, probably not, just cuz that's not really how anthropologists talk. But

19:07 to paint with such a broad brush seems to willfully ignore not just the boundlessness of human creativity adapted to this new medium but also the democracy of it. When we say the medium is the message applied to filter world, we can't just look at the algorithm in isolation. In understanding media, Marshall McLuhan writes that the content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech just as the written word is the content of print. Algorithmic social feeds do not exist in a vacuum. We medium is the messaged our way into this. How do you browse algorithmic social feeds? With your pocket supercomputer, of course, your pocket supercomputer that's cheap enough to be ubiquitous. Everybody has one. And what makes everybody's pocket computers different than the pawn pilots that preceded them? Well, they can send and receive data to and from a globally distributed network incredibly fast and

19:53 reliably. Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyerspace? And when your pocket computer connects to that network, when you're looking at your phone's web browser, how does your phone know what to display? It interprets text, human written text, called hypertext markup language. And you might not have thought about it since your MySpace days, but HTML is still the foundation of the web. And HTML uses human language to create metaphors that that enables efficient communication between other humans because computers can read zeros and ones. HTML uses semantic tags. They're called things like header and main and footer and section because they're metaphors that humans can read and understand. The medium is the message and the message of every medium is another medium. To use the web, you need to be able to read and write. The reason so many people are

20:39 creating so much noise online is that more people are reading and writing every day than ever before in human history. Maybe that's the core of my issue with filter world. Like I I don't feel like art is uniquely bad right now. I just think there is a lot a lot a lot more of it than there ever has been. And it's all screaming at us for attention and it's incredibly overwhelming. Kyle Chica is afraid that art is bad right now and getting worse. You want to know what I'm afraid of? I'm afraid that mass human literacy is a fluke, a blip on the radar, a candle flickering precariously through a stormy night soon to be snuffed out, plunging us into another dark ages. So, it's not that I think Kalcha's fears are invalid. It's just that the noise is a price that I'm willing to pay. Jaca and I agree about the great media challenge of our age, though, which is to figure out ways to sort through this huge volume of media

21:25 and create meaning from it. because right now that's something we've completely outsourced to for-profit tech companies and that is a problem. And yeah, I do think there might be some overall degradation of mainstream art happening because of or in relation to that. But also, I have to acknowledge that there are still more books, more records, more movies, more essays, more interesting YouTube videos, more scripted podcasts, more weird indie websites, more video games, more board games than I could ever possibly hope to experience in my lifetime. And how cool is that? Do I think we're in a uniquely bad moment right now? Well, yeah. But I also think that every moment in history has been a uniquely bad moment. That's the thing about people. We always think we're living in especially awful times and we're almost always right. But isn't this a serious danger that you foresee? This lack of identity, loss of identity.

22:12 Danger is of the very element that we live in in the in the 20th century and extinction is the immediate possibility every hour of the day. Part five, hipster coffee shop. It's getting pretty heavy with all this descent into the new dark ages talk. Let's rein it in a bit. Let's talk about a loadbearing pillar of Chica's argument that algorithms are flattening culture. The hipster coffee shop. Filter world is not limited to digital experiences on our screens. It is a pervasive force that shapes the physical world, too. Chica goes on to describe how when visiting a new city for work in the houseion days of Yelp, he would often search for cafes to work in using the phrase hipster coffee shop. Inevitably, I could quickly identify a cafe among the search results that had the requisite qualities. plentiful daylight through large storefront windows, industrialsized wood tables for accessible seating, a bright interior

22:58 with walls painted white or covered in subway tiles. The most committed among the cafes would offer a flat white and avocado toast. These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn't been forced to do so by a corporate parent. He goes on to argue that hipster coffee shops are a physical manifestation of algorithm culture. To court the large demographic of customers molded by the internet, more cafes needed to adopt the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn't just following fashion, but making a business decision, one that consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram, in turn, as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. So, I don't think this is wrong. But I do think Instagram was acting as an accelerant here, not the root cause, because I don't think this phenomenon is

23:44 unique or new. I think it's just kind of how creation and commodification of culture works within capitalism. Here, let's let's break things up with some fiction real quick. The franchise and the virus work on the same principle. What thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virilent business plan, condense it into a three- ring binder, its DNA, xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a welltraveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of Joe, and you'd feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look and stare at you when you came in the door. And the blue plate special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Debuke, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one

24:31 will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is home condensed into a three- ring binder in Xerox. So, this is a spiritually identical sentiment to what Chica is expressing, except it's from Snow Crash, which is a cyberpunk novel by Neil Stevenson, published in 1992, 18 years before Instagram was founded. The difference is that, you know, McDonald's is a corporation. Its sameness is mandated from the top down. And Chica doesn't understand why a coffee shop would be so generic if it weren't forced to be by a corporate overlord. And it's because it doesn't need to be forced. The sameness is precisely what is generating business. Flat whites good lighting and free Wi-Fi is indeed a sufficiently virilent business plan. I'm also interested in Shaker's use of the word hipster because he uses it both to describe coffee shops of a decade ago

25:16 when he was doing his Yelp thing and contemporary coffee shops interchangeably. I'm interested in it cuz hipsters don't exist anymore. Or if they do, everyone's a hipster. Hipster is not some generic word for with it youth. Hipster used to be an alternative subculture starting in the early as going up through the early 2010s referring to a shared set of aesthetics, sensibilities, and ideals. Go analog, baby. You're so the kids who were too young to live through it are are now retroactively calling it indie sleas, which I actually think is a more intellectually honest name because you can track the sanding down of the sleas and the grit and the nastiness of early hipster culture with its complete sublimation into the mainstream. Hipsterism was a thing in New York and LA and then it spread to smaller cities and by 2006 I knew what a hipster was

26:02 and was trying to be one in the suburbs of nowhere. Then a few years after that, Zoe Desanel took network television by storm. I like the new girl. I think it's a funny show. Jess day is a network TV executive's idea of what a hipster is. The new hipsters, by which I mean the creatives on the bleeding edge of culture, they weren't looking to just day for their inspiration. Right? by the time she makes it onto TV that she represents the past. The new hipsters, whatever they're called, they've already moved on to the next thing. Mike Pearl lays out this cycle in his essay about chintz called the original slop, how capitalism be great at art 400 years before AI. We associate the word chintzy with lowquality tac, but chintz was once a highly intricate and detailed handicraft that was not chintzy at all. The word chintzy has less to do with chintz than what western Europeans did

26:48 to chints when they started importing it from India in huge quantities. And while it surprised me at first to learn that I had completely slept on what chintz actually was. The road from there to the adjective chintzy followed a very familiar course. Humans make something beautiful. It's popular for a reason. Capital profits from selling it. But then capital wants to bypass the original creators to make more money. Such efforts at reproduction are thwarted which makes capitalists resent crafts people. Eventually, capital can sort of reproduce this thing well enough to remove human creativity from the picture anyway. But what they really succeed in doing is creating crap. The original is at last mistaken for crap. This is how culture operates within capitalism. Rentseeking vampires suck it dry until there's no soul left. Sometimes until we've forgotten the thing was sold in the first place. What looks like a trend to a white business executive is often actually, you know,

27:34 culture created within a context that those executives and investors and shareholders are anywhere between ambivalent about or outright hostile to. Coffee is old. Really, really old, right? It has roots in Ethiopia and Yemen. But in the scope of history, coffee is considerably newer to white westerners, and American coffee culture only became widely associated with urbane youth in the '90s. To some people that might have looked like the beginning of a trend, but it's really the mass saturation point of a very, very, very, very old cultural practice. So, like, of course, every coffee shop looks the same. Now, the coffee has been gentrified to hell. This is the end of the road. This is where culture goes to die. There's no direction but down. Part six. Loi beats to relax/study to. Okay, let's talk about the two genders. I'm referring, of course, to Brian Eno and

28:20 Loi Hip Hop. On one hand, we have Brian Eno's Music for Airports released in 1978. It's credited as the birth of the ambient music genre. Eno intentionally composed the music to be pleasant, unobtrusive, to be simultaneously easy to ignore and possible to focus deeply on. To me, you know, it sounds like elevator music took a Valium. Crucially, and I listened to the whole album to make sure there are no drums. Then, on the other hand, we have the relatively naent genre of lowfi hip-hop. You might be familiar via studying and relaxing to it on YouTube. It's mellow downo instrumental hip-hop. The lowfi descriptor refers both to sonic and production qualities. These tracks are often composed on DIY setups and overlaid with additional texture and distortion, usually for added warmth. Think the gentle chatter of an upscale

29:05 bar, a needle gently scratching vinyl, rain pattering against a window pane, that sort of thing. And unlike music for airports, it does feature a lot of drum sounds. They're sort of the most important part. It's right there in the name. beats. In a section of filter world called ambient culture, Chica argues that cultural innovation is indeed happening, but only in the direction of the feed. He writes that there is nothing to alienate personal taste, but also nothing to deeply compel it. The successor to Brian Ena's music for airports is the YouTube stream Lofi Hip Hop Radio beats to relax/study to which was created by a DJ named Dmitri going by the username ChilledCow in 2015. The music is utterly forgettable. The songs are almost indistinguishable from one another. As Ena suggested, it can be

29:50 ignored or actively listened to, but it mostly gets ignored. Am I really about to do this? I fear I must. I I don't see an alternative here. So, join me as I explain what hip-hop is. Brian Eno put out music for airports in 1978. Yes. Okay. While that was happening, there was a lot of other stuff happening in music, too. In the 70s, there was this new and controversial idea that a DJ uh could also be a musician in their own right. At house parties, DJs began to use turntables to target and rapidly transition between funk and soul songs in order to isolate the breakdowns of those songs because those were the most densable parts. That way, the dancing never had to stop. DJs continued to build on this idea and began to actually modify the music even more by playing with speed, repetition, dynamics,

30:36 creating live collages of multiple songs spliced together, making the breaks last forever. And that's where we get break dancing. DJs were getting really busy behind their turntables. So, the master of ceremonies, the MC, became the person to work the crowd on the DJ's behalf. And of course, that also became an art in itself. That's rap. 1989. The number another summer sound of the funky drummer. Public enemy is not just talking about any drummer. They're talking about Clyde Stubblefield. They're referencing one of the most famous and ubiquitous breaks in all of hip-hop. Sampled from Funky Drummer by James Brown. Funk is not some arbitrary adjective there. Just like lowfi hip-hop is not some arbitrary descriptor of ambient music. Funky is referring to funk music. Music with a strong downbeat that emphasizes rhythmic bass grooves. When we're talking about hip-hop, the beats

31:22 are very important. I've been trying to be reasonable. I'm actually getting kind of mad right now. It's not that Brian Eno has nothing to do with it. Brian Eno's made a lot of contributions to music and culture generally. Did you know he composed the Windows Startup Chime? and all signs point to him being based as hell. It's just that Lofi hip-hop is a much more direct successor to artists like D'Angelo and Common alongside beat makers and producers like Jay Dilla and also instrumental and alternative hip-hop and neo soul and acid jazz. Hip hop and funk and soul and R&B and jazz and blues and ragtime are black music. Music descended from African polyw rhythms intentionally bugging and pushing the boundaries of European meter. Music specifically designed in a community context foregrounding live performance. Then how dare you pluck fruit from that tree's youngest branch, credit a white guy with

32:07 it and use it to bolster your argument that mainstream contemporary culture is shallow and lacking in context. The medium is the message, right? And the message of every medium is another medium. The medium that fostered hiphop was this culture of house parties where everybody would get together and dance in the same room. So, if hip-hop is changing, if it's becoming quieter, more contemplative, more introverted, more focused on digital tools and bedroom setups, if artists are deliberately layering in the sorts of sounds that mimic physical reality, like vinyl crackles and people talking, things that recording artists specifically avoided in the past, I think we can guess at some reasons for that that go beyond beatmakers seeking to appeal to the lowest common denominator by making deliberately unchallenging music. because Jacob argues. [Music]

32:54 Hello there. I'd like to interrupt myself for a moment to let you know that this video is sponsored by viewers like you. This is where the ad would go if I had an official sponsor, which I don't. But I do have a Patreon. It's only $3 a month and a vibrant community of patrons whose names you will see at the end of this video. And this is your official invitation to join our ranks. And you get something out of it, too. Once a month, I release a Patreon exclusive long form video. Usually between 20 and 40 minutes. They're like more casual versions of this, basically. So, if you've made it this far, I really think you'd enjoy watching them. I talk about books and other media and fanfiction and internet culture and politics and the dreaded discourse. I've even been known to pay wall a hottake or two. My goal is for this to be my full-time job one day because I'm I'm better at it than anything else I've ever tried, I fear. And each new patron gets me closer to that goal. In summation, I'd love it if

33:41 you considered supporting me on Patreon for the low low price of $3 a month. And if you can't do that right now, I totally understand. You can also follow me on Patreon for free and never miss an update because I post public announcements and links to my new public videos there too. Back to you, Weather Mel. [Music] Part seven, who curates the curators? The idea of lowbrow, low barrier to entry art being a corrosive cultural force is the emotional core of filter world. Frequently, Chega uses the phrase lowest common denominator or similar to describe what he feels culture is being flattened into. The according to whom goes more or less unexamined. I'm sensitive to this because I come from book talk and there's been no shortage of breathless speculation in the form of self-righteous video essays on whether book talk is ruining reading. The

34:26 argument usually being that the loudest dennisens of book talk demand formulaic trope forward unchallenging material and that the publishing industry is happily capitulating to those demands thereby destroying literature as we know it. I remain skeptical of these claims. Jaca actually talks about book talk a bit. He writes about book influencers as a marketing force as opposed to a critical one who who use books as fashion accessories to sell an image. Quote, "The algorithmic feed alienates the superficial symbol of the book from its actual value as literature." On the platform, books are popularized less as text to read than as purchasable lifestyle accessories, visual symbols of an identity. Oh, and and incidentally, on the previous page, he also writes, "The kinds of books that become famous via social media were often romances and fantasy novels, like Casey McQuiston's Red, White, and Royal Blue, a gay love

35:12 story about an American and the Prince of Wales, and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addy Laroo about time travel and a curse of immortality." In the interest of deflattening culture, as Jacob purports to want to do, I I fear I must interject yet again. That is maybe how you'd describe Red, White, and Royal Blue after three drunken rounds of telephone. So, the American in the book is not just any American. He is the son of the first woman president of the United States. Also, I know this might sound pedantic, but bear with me. I don't really like the way gay is hitting my ear here. When we're talking about romance novels, we typically call a romance between two men mm because calling it gay just like is not always the most accurate descriptor. Like in Red, White, and Royal Blue for example. Red, White, and Royal Blue is a romance between two men and one of them is gay, but the main character, the sole point

35:58 of view character is bisexual. And the book is in no small part about exactly that. In the broader context of queer culture, this is an important distinction. It's a really common experience for by men to be informed by other people that they're gay the moment they enter into a relationship with a man, throwing the legitimacy of relationships they may have had or will have with women into question. Kind of like how how by women are often told they're actually straight when they're in a relationship with a man. And notice how it always comes back to men being the center of the universe. This is bif phobia. So, if we want to talk about the importance of putting culture into context, there you go. Also, this one's a little easier. There is no time travel in The Invisible Life of Addy Laroo. I'm not sure what happened there. I mean, a lot of time passes in it when you think about it. Every novel is a time travel

36:44 novel. Something that comes up over and over again in Filter World. this idea that if a cultural work doesn't meet Shica's arbitrary standard of highbrow, then the only reason a creator could possibly be authentically interested in it is to make money off of selling it to you. You want people to see you a certain way. Okay, here's the book you should buy and be seen with. Engagement with the text is literature. Be damned. But Chica is doing the same thing he's accusing influencers of here. It could not possibly be more obvious that he didn't read the books that he chose to site as influencer books. He did not engage with these texts. And yet he's using them to paint a portrait of a certain kind of creator. Hoompst is bad. Hoompst is making culture worse. The fear that books are becoming fashion accessories and that that's a new phenomenon stems from a much broader

37:29 fear of chakas that I sympathize with which is that we're losing context. We're depprioritizing curators. We're losing institutional knowledge. And that is very bad because only at the institutional level can we be thinking about long-term stewardship, about preserving and contextualizing art for future generations. But we've got a big problem, and it's not just algorithm culture. The problem with outsourcing your cultural diet to institutions is that at the current moment, a lot of our most esteemed cultural institutions are rapidly capitulating to and corroborating with fascism. Very early in the book, Chica quotes cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer, who in his 1968 book, Management Science, wrote, "We enshrine and steal, glass, and semiconductors those very limitations of hand, eye, and brain that the computer was invented precisely to transcend."

38:14 This isn't just true for computers. Pierre Bordeaux talks about this too. He was a French sociologist who was born the son of a farmer and never felt totally comfortable mingling among the bgeoisi. He argued that class is unconsciously reproduced by the enforcement of among other things good taste. Cultural institutions are incredibly useful for fostering communities of learning that extend through generations for safeguarding and distributing resources in order to advance human knowledge beyond what any individual could accomplish on their own. all things that are hugely missing from algorithmic culture. But at the same time, institutions can never be an unquestioned good because they will inevitably replicate the injustices of the larger societies they were created in. If we fail to interrogate them, if we outsource our cultural consumption to them instead of an algorithm, we still

39:00 lose. There's a section in filter world I found inadvertently quite chilling. In an attempt to illustrate the curatorial importance of cultural institutions like museums, Chica shadows the senior curator of the department of architecture at MoMA, Pa Anteneelli. Here's what he writes. As she swept authoritatively through the galleries, Antelli noticed slight flaws in various displays. In one room, the wall labels looked too worn and dogeared. In another, a projector wasn't beaming as it should on an exhibition title to complete its lettering. Then she observed that a gallery was missing guards who were particularly important given that the pieces were interactive video games. That to me, you know, guards being so obviously required in a video game exhibit, you know, that's a conclusion you come to if your art gallery is

39:45 already a miniature police state. After reading Pierre Bord's work, David Osa Madison, a British black man, decided to undertake an experimental project designed to understand and break down the barriers separating working-class kids of color and their parents from the cultural institutions that white middle and upper class kids are exposed to, like art galleries. And black people don't go to art galleries. He discusses taking his own daughter to a Tracy Eman exhibit at the Hayward. And when they were walking over to the museum from the parking lot and his daughter saw the building, she had a freeze reaction. She told him she wasn't going to go in the museum because, quote, "It's not me, Dad. It's not me." I was speechless. The daughter, who I seen hold her own in a rough schooling area, was visibly affected by a building. I was so upset that I nearly swore at her. I wasn't upset or disappointed with her. It was

40:31 because in that brief moment, I felt my family's vulnerability to the mundane violence of cultural value. As a parent, I felt powerless, unable to protect her. David Osa Madison is not anti-gallery. Literally the opposite. He's made a career out of interrogating the boundaries between high and low art precisely because he understands how important access to these institution is for social mobility. How they're designed literally from the studs up to keep certain people out. Part 8 plus state. One trait that virtually every piece of anti-algorithm algorithm friendly content has in common is an extremely liberal use or really misuse of the word addiction. It feels unfair to pin this on Chica because he's far from the first to do it. But he is a professional journalist. So it does surprise me when he writes things like,

41:17 "Or perhaps social media belongs in the category of vice industries with tightly regulated limits meant for the safety of individuals who might otherwise abuse it. After all, so many users are addicted without bothering to site a source for that claim." At the time of my writing the script, I couldn't find any scientific evidence that shows that people are addicted to scrolling algorithmic social feeds or addicted to smartphones generally. In fact, I found some evidence that suggests the opposite. And I could be missing something. I'm not a journalist. I'm certainly not a behavioral psychologist. But then again, neither are most of the people I hear throwing this word around. I don't want to come off as obtuse. I'm not saying there's not a problem. And I understand why people are attached to the word addiction to describe their relationship to scrolling, which is often maladaptive. And there is evidence that too much scrolling leads to mental health issues, especially in young

42:02 people. And I want to be clear that for the purposes of this video, I am focusing on adults who are able to self-regulate. You, an adult, might keep coming back to scrolling even though you try to stop. But just because something's a bad habit doesn't make it an addiction. One of the reasons I don't think addiction is quite the right word is, and if you've ever been addicted to drugs or alcohol or gambling or shopping, you'd know. It is sort of infamously hard to admit out loud to other people or or even to yourself. In part because of the incredible stigma the actual addicts face. And also because just personally, when you're in the throws of addiction, it's terrifying to admit how out of control you actually feel. It's terrifying to acknowledge just how much you'd sacrifice, how much of your dearly held values you'd compromise to get your next fix. And so, yeah, I I think the way we're using the

42:49 word addiction to describe smartphone usage is pretty cavalier. When I think of addicts I've known in my life and the behaviors they've resorted to, that just does not describe my relationship with scrolling. I'm not saying no one's truly addicted. I'm saying there isn't a lot of evidence yet to prove that most people are. And I'll say it again just cuz I think it bears repeating. Just because something is a maladaptive habit does not make it an addiction. I think maybe one of the reasons we all describe ourselves as being addicted to our phones is that it lets us off the hook a little bit. Like it's not you in control. It's this third party, your addiction. This other alien part of you that isn't the real you. I think admitting that scrolling too much is just a truly bad habit encouraged at every opportunity by corporations with something to sell you. a bad habit that you could break but would have to work

43:34 hard at and and would have to actively build alternative habits to. I think that feels harder for people than just throwing up their hands. It requires reclaiming and consistently exerting control over your digital life when that control is often so much easier to outsource. So, what's happening to you when you're scrolling and losing hours of your day without meaning to it's the result of flow state design, which is a dark design philosophy that aims to maximize your time spent in the app. And that means frictionlessness, that means passivity, that means instant feedback, minimizing hesitation, suppressing any stimuli that might encourage you to leave the app or make any kind of active decision at all. If you design software products for the consumer market, and you want your company to survive so that you can continue to have a job, how do you do that? Virtually the only way to

44:20 make money and free to use B2C software is advertising. And advertisers only want to buy ad space from you if there's eyeballs in your app to look at them. More eyeballs equals more time equals more money. That's it. But every design decision you make is motivated by that. To me, scrolling feels a lot like eating Pringles. I am not addicted to Pringles. I go years without even thinking about them, but I will finish a tube in one sitting if someone hands one to me. When I eat Pringles, I enter into a near frictionless loop of reaching for a chip, putting it in my mouth, feeling pleasure as the flavor bursts on my tongue, and then I'm already anticipating the next hit of pleasure as I reach for another chip. And before I know it, the entire tube is gone. With a normal food, my stomach would be telling me I'm getting full, introducing friction. But Pringles are deliberately

45:06 designed not to be filling, specifically in order to eliminate that friction, so people eat more of them. But eventually, I do reach the end of the tube. I I run up against the limits of physical reality. Here, a point of friction is finally introduced. I use this moment to collect myself. I was reaching for another Pringle, but the tube is empty. Do I want to drive to the store to buy more Pringles right now? Probably not, cuz I just ate an entire tube. And so there's my exit ramp from the feedback loop. For digital products where the limitations of physical reality need not intervene, the design goal is to eliminate that exit ramp. When you're scrolling on Tik Tok's for you page, you'll never reach the end of the tube. Maybe the language of addiction feels so applicable because scrolling, since there's no need for friction at all, can feel a lot like playing a slot machine, which people can and do become truly addicted to. Natasha Schul's landmark

45:51 study famously found that gamblers are less addicted to the money and more addicted to the translike state that Schul calls the machine zone. The longer gamblers can stay in the machine zone, the more money the casino makes. And so everything about the slot machine and the casino housing it is designed to maximize time spent on device. From the windowless rooms to the cocooning feel of the seats to the cartoonish animations on the screen. The appeal of the machine zone is that it's disassociative. When you're in it, you're not thinking about your job or your bank account or your obligations. You're in the zone. And that's why seemingly counterintuitively, Shul found that the slot machine players she interviewed were sometimes upset when they won, saying things like, "It's so weird, but sometimes when I win a big jackpot, I feel angry and frustrated

46:37 because even though they won, it introduced friction to this frictionless state, which was where they wanted to be, and it forced them to make an active decision. Should they keep playing or should they walk away? When destiny has a sense of humor, you call it. Part nine, serendipity. After writing about the importance of curation, how it's missing from algorithmic culture and why that matters, Shaker writes, now that we've seen the flattening effects of the dominance of algorithmic feeds and culture during the latter half of the 2010s, entrepreneurs and designers are building new digital platforms that put curation first and deemphasize automated recommendations. Well, thank God entrepreneurs are on the case. Jacob goes on to describe some of these apps that are putting more emphasis on curation that encourage curiosity and discovery by empowering users to explore the broader context surrounding the

47:23 media they're consuming. This is an alternative design methodology called serendipitous design. One of the apps Shica mentions is Criterion, but Criterion works as both an app, but especially as a brand precisely because it's positioned itself as a thoughtful, intentional, cerebral alternative to mainstream flow state giants like Netflix. Netflix wants you to watch forever, inoculating you to content that degrades in quality over time, with all roads eventually leading to AI slop. A lot of what makes Criterion special is not like in the experience design of the app itself, but it's marketing which is extremely effective to a much smaller but more loyal demographic of people because they're people who respect movies as art and speak about and relate to movies as art objects, which is unfortunately an alternative position. Criterion works as an app and as a brand

48:09 precisely because as Sha explains, it does not pursue scale at all costs. I agree that's a preferable model. The problem is big tech doesn't work that way because big tech investors are exclusively interested in products that will scale at whatever cost. And so knowing that that's how big tech works, that that's not likely to change without some serious legislative intervention or outright industry collapse, what happens when the alternative becomes mainstream? What if everybody decided today to cancel Netflix and move over to Criterion? Or maybe not everybody, but enough people to create a network effect, enough people so that other tech companies take notice and start pivoting to the Criterion model, focusing on curation, focusing on quality and on smaller selection pools. What if big tech abandoned the flow state interaction model and instead pursued serendipitous design? Would our digital

48:55 lives improve? In their essay, Against the Paved Web, UX designer Lou Miller writes about artificial serendipity. So, picture this scene. It's 2030. You're exploring a new city. As you go along, your phone pings with a recommendation for a cute local restaurant. You head along and have a lovely meal, thinking nothing of it. But what you don't know is that the restaurant pays Google to show up more in recommendations. And who Google recommends the restaurant to is based off data that they buy from Meta, so they can increase how successful their recommendations are, then charge local venues increasingly high prices. This creates artificial serendipity. It replicates the emotions that create serendipity to enable the data economy to keep chugging along. The most dangerous aspect of this is that it's harder to spot. If you're doom scrolling for ages, it's pretty easy to recognize that you're being manipulated. But if this data collection and advertising can fit into your life without much friction, you won't recognize it when

49:40 it's happening. Right now, the way for tech companies to make the most money off of you is to keep you in their apps for as long as possible. And in some ways, that's easy to combat. You just have to make the first move, close out of the app, and reclaim your attention. But if that changes, if keeping you in the app for as long as possible is no longer the goal, then these companies will find ways to commodify your navigating the larger web, too. and it'll be easier to trick yourself into thinking you're in control when you're actually not. SFFF author Kinloo wrote a short story about this way back in 2012. It's called The Perfect Match. Instead of AI cluttering our feeds with useless slop, Lou imagines an artificially serendipitous AI in the form of an assistant persona called Tilly. In the story, Tilly exists to make your life less overstimulating, not more. And you get the most out of her by proactively choosing to offload menial and repetitive tasks to her. Things like

50:26 making restaurant reservations and running database queries. freeing you up to think about the things you want to be thinking about like art. This is exactly the kind of AI we used to imagine making our lives easier way before Mid Journey and Chat GBT entered the picture. The problem is the longer you use Tilly, the harder it becomes to disentangle her ideas from yours. Tilly is not benevolent and she's not unbiased. She's the product of a for-profit tech company who wants to sell you stuff and wants to sell your stuff, your data. But by the time the main character of this story realizes the extent of the problem, she's become the scaffolding of his entire life. He's a cyborg. How about you tell me what happened in the world yesterday? What book did you buy and enjoy 3 years ago? When did you start dating your last girlfriend? What's your mother's phone number? The people in

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