This is a follow up piq. In 2022 I wrote “Why everything looks the same” here. It was about reporter Kyla Chayka’s Airspace essay, which appeared on The Verge in 2016. Chayka described how AirBnB and other platforms had slowly shaped the world – until many places looked the same (“Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet.”).
The Guardian has now published an excerpt from Chayka’s book “Filterworld”. He continues the idea and goes into more depth: Our analog culture is therefore not only shaped by the aesthetics, but also by the functionality and algorithms of social media, especially that of Instagram. The essay circles the point at which the digital spills over into the supposedly separate offline world – and at the same time involuntarily shows that this distinction has actually become obsolete.
Digitalization as an extension of globalization has an irritating effect: it standardizes an actually diverse world. Networking leads to unification, at least culturally. Chayka thinks this is bad, which he describes using café owners from Bucharest to Australia:
Pursuing Instagrammability is a trap: the fast growth that comes with adopting a recognisable template, whether for a physical space or purely digital content, gives way to the daily grind of keeping up posts and figuring out the latest twists of the algorithm – which hashtags, memes or formats need to be followed. Digital platforms take away agency from the business owners, pressuring them to follow in lockstep rather than pursue their own creative whims.
The question remains, what helps? Chayka relies on the classic antidote: offline communities.
In a way, coffee shops are physical filtering algorithms, too: they sort people based on their preferences, quietly attracting a particular crowd and repelling others by their design and menu choices. That kind of community formation might be more important in the long run than attaining perfect latte art and collecting Instagram followers
As is so often the case, the question arises as to whether such an idealistic, simple “just do something nice offline” can be enough. The tyranny of the algorithm ultimately affects those who try to evade it.