Breaking out of Filterworld

This is not a book report

I came across the book Filterworld while watching a video series by the youtuber Digging the Greats who stopped using streaming services for a month, instead, listening to all music on an iPod classic from the early 2010s he upgraded with more storage and a better battery. Around the time I saw the video series, I was realizing how much influence modern technology has on my life. These videos, along with others, inspired me to cancel my music streaming subscription and purchase an iPod Classic 5th generation and modify it with a new operating system, battery, and 256gb of storage.

At the time of writing, it has been about a month since I got my iPod and it has truly changed the way I listen to music. For one, it has required much more intentionality, this is mainly because I need to source my own music and transfer it from a computer to my iPod. Kendrik Lamar’s surprise GNX album was released days after I got my iPod and for the first time since I was in my early teens, I got a buildup of excitement to purchase an album. I purchased the flac files (high quality sound files think premium mp3s) and patiently waited as the songs transferred over the old 30-pin apple cable, plug in headphones, and listen to an album for the first time. The nostalgia took me back to the days of buying mp3s from iTunes and putting them on my iPod nano as a kid but I it was also extremely satisfying knowing I owned those files and I didn't need to keep a subscription to listen to them whenever and wherever I want.

This iPod journey has also led me to truly think about how I listen to music. Most of my life I have found songs that I have liked. I have been spoiled with YouTube, Spotify, and the endless number of songs all at my fingertips and if a song started off slow or unappealing, I would skip it and not even give it a chance. Since switching to my iPod, I have been listening to albums all the way through in the intended order without skipping any songs. I know to many of my music loving friends this may not be any sort of revelation, but I don’t feel like my experience of finding a Spotify playlist of a genre I want to listen to and skipping more than a few songs is too far from the norm. Through my “revolutionary” listening method of listening to albums as intended, I have discovered many of the songs I had previously skipped for not being immediately interesting, were incredible and well worth slowing down and giving them a chance.

The number of songs I listen to are also much lower but the number of albums is much higher. I have found immense satisfaction going to goodwill, savers, and especially half priced books to find CDs and ripping the songs to my iPod. The act of interacting with physical media after years of Spotify, Netflix, and Kindle gives a stronger connection to the media than you would have streaming. My most recent purchase was a 4 CD set of Latin Jazz from Half Priced Books for $6.99, I recognized a few songs from my many years in jazz band but it also gave me the opportunity to discover many new songs in a sub-genre I don’t have as much experience with. Additionally, the ability to play the physical CD, transfer the songs to my iPod, phone, or computer since I own the physical media is a feeling that is harder and harder to come by.

The literary equivalent to an iPod is Kindle, another device I recently picked up for $8 from FreeGeek, a used electronics store and recycler in Minneapolis, MN. As mentioned before, I was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 18, so reading hasn’t quite been a strength my whole life. However, when I saw a kindle for the price of a latte, I had to at least give it a shot. With my new-to-me kindle in hand I “found” some books from my “library” and transferred them over. Up until this point I still haven’t read a book since college but with a new found inspiration I loaded up my phone with an audiobook and proceeded to put my kindle on my nightstand and not touch it while I listened to the book, The Dyslexic Advantage.

Yes, that does sound pretty counterintuitive especially because I just spent a whopping $8 on a Kindle. However, I started learning way more about dyslexia than I ever had and I gained a unique perspective on my dyslexic brain as well as confidence that I could in fact read, it just might be a bit harder than it would be for non-dyslexics. That book report/story is for another time; however, I was so inspired I purchased a physical copy of the book and finished the last 100 pages there (yes still not on my new Kindle). Finishing the book was honestly novel to me, while I said I read Cooked in college, I don’t recall how much I truly read versus listening to the audiobook and follow along with the pages. Saying that, if you recall, I didn’t actually read the entire book, regardless, I cannot remember the last time I read even 100 pages of a book for school much less for fun.

Within the last few months of 2024, I have read one complete book, The Secret Lift of Groceries, and listened to four audiobooks, Supercommunicators, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Ultra Processed People, and Filterworld (yes, I’m getting around to it). While by no means am I an avid reader just yet, I am really enjoying the times I do take to slow down, put my phone down and read, whether that be for just 5min or an hour. I have been consuming audiobooks more frequently while multitasking, either driving, or at times on slow days or during non-brain intensive tasks at work. I specifically note I am consuming audiobooks since listening to books and reading books are vastly different in my mind. For me, reading requires my full uninterrupted focus, something as small as an errant thought or a conversation a few feet away leads to my eyes going through the motions of reading but my brain not comprehending a thing. Audiobooks on the other hand are more akin to extremely longform podcasts that while ideally should have the same level of focus as reading, a solid amount of information can be retained if I am doing non brain intensive tasks while listening.

You are now about 1200 words into this and you may be thinking “wow this is a cool story and all but I thought this would talk about the contents of the book, how does this relate at all?”. Ultimately the message I got from Filterworld was to lessen the grip algorithms have on your daily life by staying away from endless scrolling websites, and to view media curated by real people or through your own discovery instead of the recommendations of algorithms. In the past two months, I have not used a music streaming service and only have listened to music on my iPod or the mirror copy downloaded on my phone, and I have been reading and listening to books recommended by real people or that I have found while at bookstores/libraries curated by humans and not from a recommendation algorithm.

I bought an iPod

And a Kindle

When broken down, algorithms are just a set of steps to produce a desired outcome. Growing up I learned how to solve the Rubik's cube, spoiler alert, there is no magic sequence, it’s just a bunch of algorithms used at different points. Therefore, I was introduced to algorithms at a young age, but the difference between the algorithms for a Rubik’s cube (R U R’ U R U2 R, one of the first algorithms you learn on a Rubik’s cube) and "the algorithm", or more accurately networks of tens or thousands of algorithms that make up your TikTok feed are as similar a human is to a single cell organism. Both are made up of cells but one is infinitely more complex. Please keep in mind throughout the rest of this I will be referring to algorithms either singular or plural, there is rarely ever a single algorithm, it is almost always a large web of algorithms that make up what we interact with on social media news feeds or in our amazon suggested products.

Filterworld starts off with the story of the “Mechanical Turk” a large "mechanical" device that fooled people into thinking it was an automatic chess playing machine, however the whole time it was just a person crammed inside the device making the moves playing chess. The Mechanical Turk has been used as a metaphor for emerging advanced technology that turns out to be done by humans and the author argues “Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed”. A recent example was earlier in 2024 when the cashier-less amazon go stores were revealed to indeed not be monitored by a sophisticated computer vision system that could track what you picked up and put into your cart. Instead, it was one thousand Indian workers who were watching the camera feeds and tracking what customers were picking up and putting in their carts. Technically they weren't lying when they said it was AI but instead of Artificial Intelligence it was A (lot of) Indians.

I enjoy the reference to the Mechanical Turk because it hits on the point that at the end of the day algorithms are human created. It can be easy, especially with the recent introduction of AI, to think that algorithms are a black box that no one understands how they work. However, this isn’t true, while at times I’m sure webs of algorithms can become extremely complex, at the end of the day algorithms are designed to create a specific outcome or with a specific goal in mind. A clear example of this is Twitter (X, but I will be referring to it by its dead name). Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk in 2023 and since then he has implemented many changes, I will spare most of the details, but many users have noticed Elon’s own tweets appearing much more frequently in their "For You" feed. If we didn’t have the words from the engineers themselves, it would have been a safe assumption to conclude the outcome/goal of twitter’s algorithm was to recommend Elon’s tweets more frequently. I will make no conclusions on if this was a beneficial change as this is not about the politics of the platform or Elon, it is just to illustrate that algorithms are manipulated by humans to produce outcomes they desire. In this case, Elon Musk wanted his tweets to reach more people, and since he owns Twitter, he was able to task his engineers to change the algorithm to make that happen.

Filterworld is also a unique choice of title for this book because on the surface it may be hard to understand how that relates to algorithms. I just told you algorithms are a set of steps that produce a desired outcome. A set of steps that produce an outcome can also be how you describe filters. Let’s say you want to find an apartment, you first select what city, how many bedrooms and bathrooms, the square footage, and price range, these filters will help you reach a desired outcome. As I mentioned at the start of the article the author describes Filterworld it as his word for “the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today”, additionally he notes the significant impact on culture and it is distributed and consumed.

The other half of the title of the book Filterworld is “How Algorithms Flattened Culture”, from a glance at a bookstore this second part of the title also may not be the easiest to decipher. When talking with my family about the book they questioned what the author means by “flatness”. Kyle Chayka describes this as “homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most”. I was going to make a convoluted reference to a specific moment in late 2024 pop culture, but it may just be more impactful to relate the authors words above with some things you yourself have noticed changing over the years and becoming staler and not like they used to be. Whether that is movies, TV shows, music, books, fashion, etc. While some of the feelings can be attributed to nostalgia, the motivations for some creators have changed over time to prioritize popularity over the art itself and the algorithms have rewarded that at the cost of quality.

The Merrium Webster Dictionary defines… just kidding.

Book talk starts now

For my generation, Gen Z, likely one of the most blatant ways we have seen algorithms change things is in social media. Instagram wasn’t the first social media I had; however, I think algorithms have had the largest impact on it compared to all of the "original" social media sites. Instagram started out as a place where you would post square pictures with captions, you could see what your friends were doing or follow a photographer or artist that you liked and they would show up in your feed in the order they were posted. I can remember scrolling for so long I would go back to the previous day or on boring days the previous week. They would all be there in the same order no matter how many views or likes.

That all changed in 2016 when Instagram moved from the chronological feed to an algorithmic feed. Out of nowhere it was recommending you all sorts of things that you didn’t ask for, the algorithm may have found things you didn’t know you wanted to see, but in turn it also showed you less and less of what you initially chose to see. The year prior, the explore page was launched, and you were able to see some algorithmically suggested accounts and photos, but you had to choose that. In the years since Instagram has added stories, to compete with snapchat, reels, to compete with TikTok, and more and more has been promoting videos in the algorithm since that holds engagement and keeps people on the app.

Instagram in late 2024 would be nearly unrecognizable from the square chronological photos of its past. The push to get more engagement, more users, more views, ultimately to get people to watch more ads, has stripped all uniqueness from the application. Instagram used to be full of artistic photos, Facebook used to be about updates on what your friends and family were doing, Snapchat was a unique way of communicating with friends, and Twitter was for getting news or laughs in 140 characters or less. While again, these descriptions may be tinged with nostalgia, they have now all become nearly interchangeable. Their algorithms don’t push you the content you want, it pushes you the content they know your brain wants so they can keep you locked into their platform. And now that every platform has everything the next one has, you won’t feel the need to switch from scrolling Twitter to scroll Instagram.

How do we fix social media? Honestly, I don’t think we can, over the past 6 months I have slowly been removing social media from my daily life and I have found myself better off for it. I have hidden those apps, requiring me to consciously search them out so they no longer frictionless to open up and waste time. Additionally, I have added timers from 5-15 minutes max on various social media apps depending on how they affect my mental health and how useful I can find some of its content. Twitter and TikTok are limited to 5 minutes since Twitters content is, well unique, and TikTok's algorithm is so engaging I barely feel like one minute has passed when the timer goes off and the app closes on me. Facebook and Instagram are limited to 15min since I use Facebook mainly for Facebook marketplace, and Instagram is mainly so boring I seldom hit the 15min timer so I don’t feel like making the effort to change it. I think just realizing the effect social media, algorithms, and modern technology in general has on you is the hardest step. These platforms make it so easy to mindlessly consume for hours and days on end, however, taking a step back and seeing what it is doing to your happiness, anxiety, motivation, and attention span can be eye opening. It shocked me and while I still feel like I use my devices more than I want to, I’ve noticed huge changes just scaling back as little as I have.

Social Media loves a good algorithm

“A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What’ll you have?’ The algorithm says, ‘What’s everyone else having?’”

Chet Hasse, Google Engineer

I recently watched a video about the number of bots on Twitter. It was fascinating to learn not only about how many bots there were on twitter, but to learn that it isn’t just Russia that has troll farms that conduct misinformation campaigns around the world. Obviously, America does that as well, but how normalized it has gotten was surprising. I sent the video to my friends saying to the effect of, “I didn’t know how bad the bot problem was on twitter, it's depressing people get their news from Twitter”. As this was a couple weeks past the 2024 election that comment and video were taken as a political comment when it wasn’t intended to and the conversation devolved into Twitters hands off approach to misinformation and hate speech on their platform. At the time I took a stance where I believed that content should be better delt with. The limited times I had been on twitter I had noticed a large amount of that content. The rebuttal to that opinion was whether that would be considered censorship if that content was removed, and that gave me pause because I believe in free speech but I also know there are limits to that when it comes to hate speech.

Speech is a right; amplification of speech is not a right. These words in this order didn’t appear in the book, however this was my take away from sections of Chapter 5: Regulating Filterworld. If I were able to go back into the conversation with my friends with this knowledge, I would have loved to discuss this with them. The section in chapter 5 “Slowing Down Amplification” starts with Molly Russell, a British teenager who died by suicide after being sucked into an algorithmic rabbit hole of depression content. It can be argued whether or not such depression content (or hate speech and misinformation) should or should not be on platforms, if you ban it, that could be considered censorship, if you don’t people can be manipulated and do things they wouldn’t have thought of doing on their own. That is where amplification comes in.

Amplification, when it comes to algorithms, is where the algorithm highly prioritizes certain content over another typically until that type of content is dominant in the algorithm. As a refresher, algorithms are human made, so what it prioritizes is the human’s choice. It is also a human’s choice if they decide let the algorithm evolve and learn from itself to choose what it prioritizes, and in that scenario, humans are also responsible for whether there are effective safeguards in place. On the other hand, algorithms aren’t human, so if someone programs the algorithm to only look at engagement as it’s metric/goal, it will indiscriminately promote positive or negative material. If you see hate speech on Twitter and downvote it, the algorithm sees you engaged with that material and depending on how it is programmed you may start to see more of that content. From studies in the video about twitter bots, it shows leading up to the 2024 presidential election Twitter's algorithm was amplifying more right-wing tweets. While I won’t say any more about that specific choice, the amplification of what does or doesn’t get recommended by a site's algorithms are in the hands of the very same sites.

Chapter 5 is about “Regulating Filterworld”, some of the ideas expressed in the book were slowing down trending topics or posts until the site can review them to see if they should be amplified. In the case of Molly, the site reviewing some of its trending topics like depression content may have saved her life by not amplifying it in the algorithm. Another idea was to have “veggie breaks” or politically neutral or informative information breaking up popular or tending information on feeds. While this sounds like it could genuinely help, unless the government mandates this I don’t see social media companies voluntarily doing this. Division and polarization keep people engaged and engagement equals views and views on ads leads to profits for social media companies.

Amplification is not a right

“The capitalist growth-at-all-costs mindset is also fundamentally to blame for the flattening of culture in [our world]. Catering to every kind of user at once is an intentional decision that often comes at the cost of usability… streaming services have often attempted to provide all things for all consumers. The path of chasing something that will appeal to, or at least avoid offending, the highest number of people leads to homogeneity. And that homogeneity is inevitably cast in the mold of dominant groups: white, cisgender, heterosexual… By contrast, building smaller communities of consumption devoted to more specific subjects can lead to a much deeper sense of engagement, both with the content and among the users.” -Kyle Chayka

One of the last things I'll talk about that stuck out to me while reading this book was the author's praise of Curation. It was mid 2024 when I became a member of the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis MN, that I truly realized the power of curation. In the second half of 2024 I went to the Walker about three or four times and every time there were new exhibits, my favorite of them being a Keith Haring exhibit which gave me nostalgia from seeing some of his art growing up. Until I read this book, I took for granted the fact I was able to go and see this amazing art rotating in and out constantly. I wouldn’t consider myself a connoisseur of art, so I benefit immensely from the art curators at the Walker whenever I go, they know where to put the art to have it make sense either chronologically or stylistically. I saw many pieces by Keith Haring I had never seen before that challenged my preconceived notions of what I thought his art was when I was growing up.

I don’t think it is too controversial to say that AI art isn’t really art. The AI “art” feels soulless and empty almost like a forgery where something about it gives you a slightly off feeling. Similarly, I’d argue an algorithm would be an awful art curator, when it comes to culture and media algorithms promote dull, surface level, and the most widely accepted things. If I were to go through the same Keith Haring exhibit curated by an algorithm I would imagine there would be his few most popular works and a summary of how those made him so popular. Instead, the real-life curators took the time to set up his entire life in art, starting with doodles on napkins and notebook paper, to his subway street art, 150’ canvases, and ending with his massive canvases the size of theater screens with all of the collaborations with products that featured his art below to show how his life and legacy continues on.

“The act of putting one thing next to another is an incredibly important one and should be left to people with deep knowledge about or passion for the subject at hand—people who care about the significance of proximity”. I truly felt this at the Walker, and while many may only go to an art exhibit once a year if that, the same sentiment can be carried over into their music listening or movie watching. Why should Spotify be the one to tell you who you should listen to next? Why is the up next on Netflix deciding what you are actually watching next? Curation can be companionship, someone making you a playlist, recommending you a song, album, or movie is much more impactful on a deep personal level than the “up next" on Netflix.

Curation is key

What can you do? I can't really say it better than the author. “To resist Filterworld, we must become our own curators once more and take responsibility for what we’re consuming. Regaining that control isn’t so hard. You make a personal choice and begin to intentionally seek out your own cultural rabbit hole, which leads you in new directions, to yet more independent decisions. They compound over time into a sense of taste, and ultimately into a sense of self.”

I have already talked about some things that I have done to get myself out of "Filterworld" more often. Limiting social media, recognizing how different social media platforms affect me and how they capture my interest in different ways. Seeking out curators and friends to give me recommendations for music, books, movies etc. and as the author says, “[making] a personal choice and… [seeking] out your own cultural rabbit hole”. I love finding new rabbit holes to go down and new hobbies and interests to work on including this.

One thing that I have realized through this process of listening and reading this book and others is that I have lots of opinions and thoughts about these books and I enjoy writing about them. I realize this has become a lot longer than I expected when I started writing this. But I have truly enjoyed the five or so hours it has taken me to type this. I hope you have enjoyed reading this or at least I hope I have broken you out of an endless scrolling session to read some human made content not promoted by an algorithm.

If you made it this far, stop by my guestbook and say hi! Thanks for reading

-Joe

El Fin