Anecdotes and Vibes
A podcast and a book review that oppose the hot fashion: whining about how the internet is destroying culture.
Cervantes knew: abundant content drives you crazy.
THE NEW YORK TIMES’S fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, recently claimed that, in the eyes of “millennials and Gen Z-ers,” the “age before smartphones” was “a halcyon time.” Those darn smartphones have played a big part, she suggested, in driving people’s “fears about the contemporary creative condition.” This seems to be the Times’s unofficial line on the subject. The “digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress,” declares Jason Farago, another Times culture critic, but they instead produced “chronological confusion” and “a digitally informed sense of placelessness.” The Times’s lead “house conservative,” Ross Douthat, sings the same tune. He says the internet has “given us a bumper crop of hackish crap” and “accelerated” the “decline of the fine arts.”
All the news that’s fit to print! The internet is bad for culture.
This brand of elite disdain is everywhere. But where’s the evidence? These polemics tend to stand almost entirely on anecdotes and vibes. Sometimes less than that, even. On both the highbrow left and the highbrow right, bashing internet culture, and, by extension, mass culture, is chic—it makes one sound sophisticated. Those who write about “cultural exhaustion”—about artists “trapped on a modernist game board where there are no more moves to make” (Farago)—sound to me like French critical theorists. They’re using nimble rhetoric to recast choice and convenience as weight and oppression.
Fortunately, Mike Masnick (grand maestro at Techdirt) and Leigh Beadon (an editor at same) would like a word. They just released a new report called “The Sky Is Rising: A Detailed Look at the State of the Entertainment Industries.” Mike and Leigh don’t offer vague philosophical proclamations about how we’re “adrift in an eddy of cultural signs, where everything just floats” (more Farago). They disregard the snobs, collect the data, and consider the big picture. What they find is “a true golden age of culture.” More content is being created. More content is being consumed. Art and entertainment take more forms, are more diverse, and are available through more outlets than ever. A wider variety of tastes is being served. Talent is everywhere. Innovation is occurring. And yes, money is being made! And the internet is a driving force behind all of it.
Last week, Mike and Leigh joined me on the Tech Policy Podcast to unpack their report. Please tune in!
ON THE PODCAST, I talk a good bit about a new book by Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture defies satire. Chayka criticizes everything—Every. Last. Thing.—with a kind of aristocratic ennui. Sample quote: “The endless array of options presented by algorithmic feeds often instills a sense of meaningless.” (This is, as they say, a “you problem.”)
Chayka conveys elitist thoughts, but couches them in progressive terms. The resulting duplicity can be confounding. Often, as I read Filterworld, I found myself thinking: “You! It’s you! You’re the problem!” Chayka is that white guy who publishes a book that says white guys shouldn’t publish so many books. If our culture has a problem, it’s not the one Chayka thinks. There’s a difference between a loss of cultural vibrancy (I don’t see it) and a crisis of cultural confidence (seems like a thing—just look at Chayka).
Filterworld has received positive treatment everywhere from NPR to National Review (patricians of the world unite!). I published a contrarian review in Reason. Life is short, so I don’t cover the book’s factual errors, its many lesser hypocrisies and inconsistences, or its faulty policy prescriptions. My primary focus is the book’s sheer inanity. (Are you beset by “algorithmic anxiety”? Fear not, you can listen to full music albums—lots of them—on Spotify or Amazon Music. It’s not hard. It’s pretty awesome. Don’t let Chayka convince you otherwise.)
I tried not to be too mean, but I’m sure my exasperation shines through. As I say by way of introduction:
Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture is engaging, refined, and well-composed. My only objections pertain to its startlingly flimsy thesis, its parodically bleak tone, and nearly every argument it makes.
Read the whole review here.
Tech Policy Podcast #365: Is the Internet Killing Culture? (No. Don’t Be Stupid.) (Feb. 2024).
Filterworld Is a Confused Critique of Algorithms. Reason (Jan. 2024).