“[The algorithms are] showing me the things that they know I will like. I like to see things that I like but what I miss when I only see things that I already like are all the things I don’t know yet if I like.”
—@elisejoy on Instagram, before she quit the Internet
‘ “We need a new term for ‘internet-based small businesses that still use global supply infrastructure,’” said my friend, the culture writer Kyle Chayka, when I told him about this story. “We know these minimalist-ish generic aesthetics are not connected to any true local origin, but we see them as indicative of some kind of authenticity. My current thought is that they don’t feel local to a place, but instead they feel local to the internet, which is, after all, where we all live.”’
—Emily Sundberg, Welcome to the Shoppy Shop (New York/Grub Street)
“Even in the book, I referenced this 19th-century commentator in France who was complaining about how train travel suddenly meant that all cities were becoming more similar than different. So I think it’s a common complaint. But we live in such an accelerated version of that. … There have always been metrics like the Nielsen ratings or box office numbers, but there’s never before been that kind of tyranny of real-time data. So I think there was a shift from human tastemakers and human gatekeepers to this very data-driven system in which only what is popular gets more popular … .”
—Kyle Chayka, see below
“To the extent taste is a kind of attunement to yourself, then developing taste in a space where it is harder to attune to yourself, where your self is more drowned out and it’s easier to jump away from that internal experience, that is also going to degrade … the fundamental ground on which that facility is developed.”
—Ezra Klein, see below
“Taste cannot exist outside of our social worlds and interactions therein. Our ‘tastes’ first and foremost betray a specific class position, a relation to the world based on wealth, experiences, education, or lack thereof. In societies that push the myth of class mobility, taste offers a quiet way to uphold class boundaries.”
—Kara V, Taste isn’t personal
The unavoidable buzz (in my personal echo sub-chamber of the Internet) the past few days has been the recent podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Kyle Chayka (whose new book is Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, I haven’t read it) about how search and social-media algorithms are breeding sameness and “dulling our ability to know what we like.” It overlaps a bit with my blog intro from a couple weeks ago, and this will be a recurring theme here, as it’s been a fixation of mine for many years now — both as a historically very online person who has consciously watched the influence sphere evolve, and as a person who used social media to build an online retail business in the early phase of that evolution. Also, obviously, as a blogger. Relevant to this particular link set is that the Kara V link above came “the old-fashioned way,” as a recommendation by one of my favorite human referral sources, Alicia Kennedy.
Venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote in a 2006 advice piece called “How to do what you love” (via The Marginalian) to be leery of prestige, meaning other people’s favorable opinion: “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” I think the ‘like’-button era version of this would be ‘Prestige — in the form of social-media currency — causes you to focus not on what you like, but what you are liked for liking.’
Collapse and Delight 