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Before the year was out, I finished the book Filterworld by Kyle Chayka, which is about the flattening of culture at the hands of (the people who develop) algorithms.

And now that I've read the book, I can't unsee this process -- the dull sameness with which much of what we (are expected to) consume falls into -- and that wasn't always the case. Of course, some of that is due to (Western) cultural colonialism, but Chayka would probably agree that algorithms are a type of cultural colonialism, too.

Chayka isn't the only one who's noticed. A couple of weeks ago, I read an article that lamented Baryshnikov as one of the last adherents to "high art."

Chayka cites an essay by Scorsese, talking about his own influences [I have no opinion on Scorsese here, just being illustrative]: "The paranoia that I hear in Scorsese’s essay is that the art of the twenty-first century no longer holds up to such scrutiny. Instead, it’s cheap and ephemeral, wafting through your life without leaving any discernible mark. (The passion of his writing shows just how much Scorsese was marked by Fellini, an impact that he was still processing six decades later.) That may be because to fit into digital feeds, in order to attract those pernicious likes and further promote itself as much as possible, culture has to be content first and art second—if at all. "

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#Books #Reading #Algorithm #Culture #Art #Content