‘Go viral or die’: how the algorithm took over culture

If the medium is the message, then today’s medium is the algorithm. Today’s internet is defined by an all-pervasive sense of sameness, algorithmically optimised for mass appeal through social media feeds that push the lowest common denominator on a search engine-optimised plate, while anything that goes against it is sent spiralling to the pits of the eternal scroll. I’ve previously referred to this phenomenon as the Mid, others say ‘flatmaxxing’. For New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka, it’s all part of an interlocking network that he terms Filterworld, also the title of his latest book. 

Tracing the history of the algorithm back to its cybernetic roots, Chayka explores the way data is distributed and consumed across culture – “the sameness feels inescapable, alienating even as it is marketed as desirable”, he writes. It’s true, the algorithm is unavoidable, it shapes nearly every aspect of our lives, from the tracks we stream on Spotify to the emoji-pilled language we speak online to the literal arrangement of our faces on the feed. While this has been going on for a while now – Chayka points to the change from chronological to algorithmic timelines as a crucial turning point – what seems most apparent now is just how aware we all are of it, especially post-pandemic as micro-trends churn out endlessly and posting a selfie with the caption ‘algo break’ is a regular thing. 

It’s no secret that socials manipulate users’ behaviour for profit, though what Filterworld also outlines is just how much algorithms push us into not thinking for ourselves. Clearly this is deeply concerning when you think about the rise of hate speech and misogyny across platforms such as Elon Musk’s X, or the virality of incel-speak on TikTok. There’s also the pressure to stay relevant on these platforms, to make it big and appease the algorithmic gatekeepers or risk disappearing completely. As Chayka writes, “The rule of culture in Filterworld is: Go viral or die.”

Congrats on Filterworld! The book has dropped at a time when the discourse surrounding the algorithm – and its role within culture – is at an all-time high. Was that intentional?

Kyle Chayka: The timing was amazing and I could not have planned it. I think I’ve been writing about this stuff since 2015 and 2016, theorising and hypothesising that digital platforms and algorithmic feeds were homogenising everything, and it’s just become increasingly apparent that it’s happening. I started writing this book in earnest in 2021 but it builds on a lot of work I had already done, so I feel like the discourse has kind of caught up.

Do you think there’s a relationship between people becoming more aware of the role the algorithm plays in our everyday lives and the arrival of the ‘creator economy’ as coined by Big Tech in 2021? Like, after years of pandemic, even those unfamiliar with digital culture were forced to partake in it. Especially for young people trying to get a foot up in the world, interacting with social media is practically unavoidable.

Kyle Chayka: I feel like there are two things going on. The pandemic and lockdown made a lot of people experience life solely online. That turbocharged online environments, and made everyone realise just how bad they’ve got. It made everyone think more about the dangerous consequences of being too online. There was this movement from the user-generated social media of the Instagram, Twitter or Facebook era, to this creator economy era which I think we’re still figuring out. We’re moving from just consuming the content that other users post in a kind of free-for-all, to everyone gravitating towards these much larger accounts of influencers and ‘creators’. I think those creators – like YouTube channel operators or TikTokkers – are much more directly confronting how the algorithmic feed puts pressure on them. And so, because those people are more able to make a living and put themselves out there, they’re also being more public about how these systems are not necessarily working for them. 

It really reminds me of Benjamin Bratton’s inverse uncanny valley, which describes the idea that we’re beginning to see ourselves through the eyes of the algorithm and getting freaked out by it. You can see this all across culture, from the absurd language we use online to the literal arrangement of our faces via TikTok and Instagram. 

Kyle Chayka: I opened the internet today and it’s Zendaya in a robot suit for the Dune 2 movie and it’s like we’re really valorising the machines’ representation of humanity, I think.

There’s been lots of talk about the flattening of culture, how everything is now mid (we even did a podcast episode about it). When culture is structured to appeal to the lowest common denominator, what are some of the implications? I’m thinking about how journalists are being fired all over and being replaced by reality stars, for example.

Kyle Chayka: It’s like the ecosystem got destroyed. I’m sure you could trace it back forever, but as digital platforms took over the internet, Google became basically all-powerful. We’ve had to subjugate all of our decision-making and all of our creativity and communication to these platforms that don’t care about the user experience at all – like Spotify and Facebook don’t care about culture, they just care about trading content through distribution channels and selling advertising. I don’t know the consequences for culture. I think on one level, you have a real flattening or homogenisation of the mainstream, like everything is Taylor Swift – you have the concentration of everyone’s attention on a very small set of subjects.

You can’t stop humans being creative and getting bored and making something new, but I think it is harder and harder to get that stuff seen or to find an audience for it. It’s particularly hard to make it a sustainable way to be alive in the world, so I think the niches always exist. They’re not going to go away and people will always be doing interesting things, but what worries me is there are two forces in opposition, where the niche cultural force is trying to find the new interesting thing. It’s trying to push in a different direction, just trying to express a new human feeling, and then there’s the algorithmic mainstream force, which is trying to co-opt any new innovation and make it into the flat, homogenised version of culture. So you to stay niche, [you have to] make your work in secret.

Is there any room for niche cultural expression online nowadays? 

Kyle Chayka: Algorithmic feeds evaluate everything based on that data. Traffic and engagement are the biggest values in this ecosystem, but there’s always that need for people like us, or scouts. We’re trying to find the next thing that people will be interested in but I think our role, the role of discovery, is so quickly subjugated to the next thing to go viral in the feed. I’m not sure how you separate finding the new thing, creating the new thing, from trying to go viral, because virality is the opposite of niche cultural expression.

”Everything is there for you, and yet nothing matters. You can pay attention to anything, but nothing sustains your attention” – Kyle Chayka

There’s this meme that says, ‘you either die young or grow old enough to become mid’. You could say that about trends, but also just the general lifespan of anyone’s creativity.

Kyle Chayka: The smallest thing can become so globalised. Any visibility opens you up to going viral, or to becoming distributed throughout the rhythmic mainstream. So if you want to stay indie, you just have to be offline. Saying that, the internet sustains the niches very well. I really like the Socks House Meeting meme account, and it’s incomprehensibly niche. 

How much do you think parasociality plays into all of this? I feel like there’s so much insanely niche content online that it feels almost voyeuristic. 

Kyle Chayka: Maybe sociality has been replaced with parasociality. I’ve thought a lot about how cultural movements have happened in the past: if you think about a music scene, it's a real-life thing. It’s people hanging out in person and talking to each other and having actual social interaction, and now that’s been replaced with the parasocial relationship of following an influencer in their day-to-day life or listening to a podcast that comes out three times a week. I think we’ve developed social relationships with and through content, rather than just with other people. I saw some random statistics online, which say that human beings spend more time alone now than they ever have, because society is not structured for social interaction, particularly post-pandemic. I think that physical social interaction has been replaced with content-based social interaction.

A shift I’ve observed in the past couple of years is how on TikTok, for instance, we’re given the illusion of choice or individuality with memes such as ‘what pretty are you?’ But then you take a look and it’s all the same face. What do you think?

Kyle Chayka: It’s also paradoxical. The internet promises to make everything visible and we feel we can’t see anything, in a metaphorical sense. Everything is there for you, and yet nothing matters. You can pay attention to anything, but nothing sustains your attention. Now, the basis of identity, at least performed online, is a series of ever-changing trends, that are like one meme per three weeks. Last summer, there were the tomato girl makeup trends, and everyone had to go to the French Riviera. That was the identity for a few months and then there’s another one, and then there’s another one. It just feels like identity has been replaced by consumerism – just whatever you’re consuming that month. And it’s most often stupid things that you’re consuming. 

There’s this almost magical association to the algorithm, because we don’t understand how it works. It can also predict our behaviour, sometimes better than we can. On one hand, you could say that the algorithm is there to make the platform money by keeping users on the site. But I can’t help but think about all the radicalisation happening online, and how that’s also hooked to the algorithm.

Kyle Chayka: There are vicious cycles. I think like in the case of radicalisation it’s forcing people down into a particular niche or a particular idea. I think a lot of it comes from platforms that need to keep people paying attention, like a YouTube recommendation. Engines will keep suggesting more extreme stuff, more aggressive material, because it’s an incentive. It keeps your attention and sustains it. There’s always another video. There’s always another more shocking thing out there. I think maybe it’s better to imagine the alternative, like if we were all consuming things via Patreon, or a Subsack newsletter or something, we’re all paying the people we wanted to follow, then that is a totally different ecosystem. That’s not about going down the spiral of extremism or theatres acting increasingly radical to get more attention – instead, it’s about building a stable relationship with an individual voice. 

OK so I want to get your take on the mainstreaming of AI in the past year with chatbots and text-to-image generators. There’s obviously a lot of talk about disinformation and post-truth etc., but what are some of the most urgent ways you see AI shaping our online experience? 

Kyle Chayka: What I see in generative AI is this incredible delusion on the part of a lot of users of it that they are making. The banality of it is what worries me the most. My theory has always been that algorithmic feeds pressured creators, and they’ve created all these flattened styles on Instagram, TikTok, Spotify. But AI will spit out the common denominator instantly. The most passive and fastest route through the AI machine is to get a cliché: what AI produces is fundamentally kitsch. It’s not interesting, inherently. And so I worry that people mistake that kitsch output for actual culture. That’s totally different from an artist actively using AI tools in their process, but I worry more about the consumer. Plugging some words into a generator and then being like, I have now completed a cultural circuit. That feels so masturbatory to me. 

Finally, are there any particular accounts you’ve been into recently? 

Kyle Chayka: @havermelkelite and @thierrylechanteur.

Filterworld is out now