663. The Quest for Authenticity in an Algorithm-Driven World with Kyle Chayka

Professors fm. You're listening to the Unsiloed podcast with Greg LeBlanc. Produced by University FM, Unsiloed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. So wherever you are, enjoy today's episode. And here's your host, Greg LeBlanc. Welcome to Unsiloed. Hello, this is Greg LeBlanc, and I'm here today with Kyle Chayka, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker and also the author of a couple of books. I think the most recent one is this one, Filter How Algorithms Flattened Culture. And this was preceded by the Longing for living with minimalism. Welcome, Kyle. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to see these hardcover copies. Yeah, well, my house is filled with hard copy books and it's becoming a bit of a problem because I don't actually use the Kindle unless absolutely necessary. And people tell me, why aren't you using the Kindle? Because when I travel, the majority of my luggage is booked. I think I can rinse my underwear in the sink, but I might not be able to get the books where I'm traveling to. But look, I really enjoy this book filter world. I have been teaching about algorithms, of course, in my data science classes. I've been teaching about recommendation engines. I've actually had some podcasts about recommendation engines. And I think the crazy thing about these filtration systems is that if we go back to Chris Anderson and you reference him in your book, if we go back to the idea of the long tail in the late 90s, I think everybody thought that the Internet was going to create a world where everybody would be able to realize they're true individual self. Right. That everybody had these preferences which were super unique. And then we could find our brethren, we could find our kindred souls, we could find our little micro communities. And there's a little bit of that right, with the polarization. But I think most of us have been surprised to see that the world has more or less gone in the other direction. It's gone towards homogenization, it's gone towards flatness. And we see a much higher percentage of media sales coming from the blockbusters and the best sellers. Okay. And it's not just media, it's other things, as you point out. Like, you seem to be obsessed with coffee shops. That's true. It's true. They're all becoming similar. So, I mean, did that surprise you? I mean, just if you think theoretically, like, wouldn't you expect that the world would become more fragmented rather than more homogeneous? Yeah. It's really interesting. That long tail theory was that the Internet would give everyone access to everything, and thus you would be able to express your full self and seek out the niche communities and the obscure content that most interested you. But there's this classic graph. The tale is like this. The content or media or entertainment over here, which is popular with tons and tons of people, and then that's moving toward more and more and more obscure stuff, and it just goes on forever. But I think what we all kind of underestimated was how much people would get stuck in that left side of the graph, which is just in the most popular content and media and information on the Internet. It did surprise me. I mean, as someone who kind of grew up on the HTML era Internet and the decentralized webpage era, I kind of witnessed the rise of these big digital platforms and the feeds that we all look at all day long now. And I think in the mid-20s, tons or so, I started to realize this wasn't actually becoming more diverse. This was actually directing more people's attention toward more similar stuff. And I think it was a slow process. It was kind of a frog boiling situation where you go from this world of niche websites and small publishers and people communing around forums of whatever niche subject they're interested in, to this world in which algorithmic feeds propel people toward the same set of topics as each other. But now, moving from the early stages of social media to today, we're firmly in the lots of people paying attention to the same stuff era, I think. But it does seem at least that things have become a bit more, I don't know, democratized. I mean, anybody could be an influencer now, it seems, right? I mean, you can emerge the curation. I mean, part of the story of the book is how curation has shifted from individual curators, tastemakers, to anonymous and algorithmic tastemakers. Does that make it easier for you to kind of get a seat at the table if you're a creative? It depends on what kind of creative you want to be and what table you want to sit at. I think the Internet has totally lowered the barrier to entry for culture, which I think is a great thing. That was the biggest accomplishment of the Internet since it became more mainstream into the 90s. Anyone can put out their song or their YouTube video or their piece of writing, or their Magnum opus of TikTok videos exploring the Amalfi coast or something. You can reach anyone with anything theoretically. But I think what happened was that you could create anything. Sure, you can Publish whatever you want. But the question of whether you can reach an audience got more complicated, because it's not enough to just put something online and hope that people come across it. You want someone to see it. And if you want a lot of people to see it, you need to participate in these funnels or filters or whatever of the digital platforms and kind of play their game so you can get more audience directed at your content. So I think my theory of this book is that algorithmic feeds and recommendations kind of encourage people to homogenize themselves. They don't just stamp the content. The digital platform doesn't dictate exactly what the content looks like, but it encourages all of us, all of the writers and creators and musicians to behave in similar ways in order to game the system and get an audience for ourselves. Yeah, but it seems that while there's this pressure towards homogenization, there's also like a much more rapid cycle time, it seems, with respect to fads and fashions. Right? I mean, things like rise and fall, you know, very, very, very quickly, daily or weekly or hourly even. I think that's another factor of algorithmic feed. I mean, these feeds just operate at such an inhuman scale and pace that it's. Take Twitter Now X, for example. The algorithmic feed is so strong that if you are participating in the meme of the moment, if you happen to post about the thing that's infamous right now, or the character of the day or the scandal of the day, then the feed will just propel your post to. It could be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. But if you don't choose to talk about what everyone else is talking about, you're not going to reach anyone at all. And you can feel like you're shouting into the void. So it really becomes this kind of. I don't know, it's a bit black or white. I think either you can participate in this algorithmic mainstream and reach a huge audience, or if you stay outside of it, you kind of are forced to exist on your own in the wilderness and keep yourself alive. You talked about how you took a sort of, I guess, digital detox for a little while, where you just checked out of all the. Anything, anything that could be algorithmic. So not just social media, but also Spotify Streaming. Yeah, Netflix. And you described that this was very uncomfortable initially. Right. I mean, is it really kind of an addiction, do you think? I think so. I think we get used to the stimulus. Like if we are looking at our phones all day, if we're online for our laptop jobs, sending emails and talking to people. There's this constant temptation to consume whatever is new and whatever's being posted at this moment. And so I think our brains and our attention spans got used to that. I don't think it's like junk food. Our bodies are engineered to go toward these things. We're kind of caving into our basest instincts here. And because it's available, we just tend to consume more and more and more. And I don't know, speaking for myself, I found my thoughts or arguments in my head or ideas on a day to day basis shaped a lot by what kinds of algorithmic feeds I was consuming. See, I think it's addicting. And when you can step off of that cycle or that treadmill, then I think you can reclaim some of your attention and reclaim some of your ability to focus on not just what's at the top of your feed. Yeah, well, look, I mean, people have been interested in fame for as long as they've been humans, right? So it's not like people woke up one day and said, oh man, I want lots of followers and lots of likes. But it seems like it's a very different type of fame that we get now. If we're famous, if we're a celebrity, is it somehow less substantial? In a way? And I guess in terms also of the things that rise to the top, it seems like the criteria for becoming famous is also in some ways shallower. Right. In other words, it's oftentimes very, very superficial characteristics that will drive you to the top or keep you at the bottom. It's true. I mean, I think algorithmic feeds reward simplicity. They reward the idea translated into the fewest words or the image that is the most basically attractive or compelling. That lights up your brain right away. So I think people tend to present themselves and mold themselves in that direction as well. I'm a big fan of. I don't remember who made the switch, but there was that Andy Warhol line that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. And I think this early blogger and musician switched that more recently to in the future everyone will be famous for 15 people. And it's like on the Internet, everyone can be famous. Everyone has their followers and their audience, and they're kind of constantly performing for that set of people who feel that they are famous. And I think it leads to more audience capture that sense that the famous person or the creator is beholden to what their audience thinks of them. And you're constantly modulating your behavior and what you put out based on the feedback that you get in the form of those likes or your views on YouTube or whatever. Yeah, it is a different kind of fame. At least not having been famous in the 80s myself, I imagine that celebrities were more aloof from the day to day discourse. They were not as beholden to their fans who might be complaining about them on the Internet. That kind of top down hierarchy of culture insulated the protagonists a little bit more than they are right now. Yeah, I mean, the feedback cycle is so much faster that you can immediately respond to any signals in the environment as to what you should be doing. Right. So it's very, I mean, it seems very consumerist. It seems like you are. I mean, I think about this from my podcast. You know, I get to see viewer numbers and I can see, oh wow, this one got more views than this one. And if I were thinking differently, if viewer numbers were important to me, I mean, I do this podcast because I want people to listen, but at the same time, if I start thinking about viewer numbers, then my curatorial approach will have to change. And I'll say, oh, this podcast got half a million views. I need to do more like that. But it's like, well, that's not how I. The whole point is my reading choices are dictated by my tastes and preferences. And the minute I start paying attention to those numbers, then I just become a servant to someone. The preferences in the market. Yeah, and the feed, in this case, the feed is the public market that you can ply or trade in and see what signals you get back. I always think of this in the context of the art world because that's kind of where I started my career and my sensibility is. And there was this huge shift in the early 2010s as Instagram became more popular. And all of a sudden every painter, you know, was posting on Instagram all the time. And they would post in progress paintings, they would post finished paintings, sketches, whatever. They would kind of perform their art in a public way and you would get feedback instantly. As you're saying, you see how many likes one painting gets versus another, even before they're finished, before they're in a show or anyone else sees them. And I think that by nature makes you change your creative process and your behavior, even if you can ignore it somewhat. Somewhere in the back of your head there's that idea that, oh, if only I did, if only I used brighter colors, if only I made a bigger painting, then I would get more attention online and that might do more for My career, in a way. Yeah. The key difference here is that someone's going to either like it or not like it after about a millisecond of exposure. Whereas a reviewer in Art News, let's say, is going to spend a couple hours with the work and then spend a couple hours sort of reviewing the work. We can hope that ecosystem is tough now too. Yeah. So, I mean, a positive review in a journal, in tls or in whatever Art News, that has a very different meaning from a thumbs up. And so if you start responding to the critics, and artists are oftentimes criticized for responding to the critics, at least you're responding to something that some measured consideration of the work as opposed to a very instinctual, spontaneous response to the work. Right. Just that one millisecond of thumbs up or thumbs down. And that's. I mean, the role of criticism is to provide that deeper reflection and that deeper engagement with the work at hand. But the critical ecosystem is pretty decrepit right now, particularly for visual art or poetry or a lot of literature. And I think, I don't know, it's. I find it hard to blame any one side of this except for the tech companies themselves. Like, if you want to write criticism, you have to play the same attention game that the artists are playing. We're all performing our tasks in front of a public audience and you want your criticism to get likes, just like the painter wants their painting to get likes. And it just drives, I think, this race to the bottom of engagement, farming and performance for an invisible spectator. And that's bad for the output of culture generally. I think that slow discussion of culture, the slow development through criticism or through communities of artists and writers, that is a healthier way to make things than putting it online and seeing what you get back in five seconds. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's democratized criticism in a way, but it seems like there's this feedback loop, right. Because if I'm only interested in experiencing an artwork for 10 seconds, then the opinions that matter are all the other people who spend 10 seconds. It's not the person who spent hours. Whereas if I'm interested in spending hours with an artwork, I'm going to be interested in the opinion of the people who spend hours with it. And so it seems like the former type of criticism dominates the latter. It's going to inherently change the nature of the work, right? I think so. And I mean, it changes the meaning of the work, it changes its reception in the public sphere. It changes its economic success or failure because it seems like there isn't that same word of mouth ecosystem that rewards slow, deep appreciation of something and rising momentum. I think things now tend to succeed or fail in a number of days or weeks, whether it's a book or a movie or a video on TikTok. So I think that engagement is overall shallower. And then as a creator or writer, since you're getting more superficial feedback, you have less of an opportunity for self reflection and for, I don't know, deep reconsideration of your work. Well, it's interesting how journalism has changed, right? Because it's super frustrating to me now because everyone buries the lead. Every headline is, you know, uninformative. It's just like a teaser. Every headline is someone said something that you're going to want to click on this to find out what the heck they said. And it's like, why are you creating these friction points for me? Yeah, yeah, it's the engagement farming. Like, like the number one task of any piece of content is to force someone to engage deeper. And thus you get so many tricks. I mean, but oftentimes it's just, you're just clicking on just to get this one little tiny piece of information. Somebody, the Golden State warriors just traded for a player and then you got to click on it and then as soon as you know the name of the player, then you're done. But it just. And that's the kind of media business problem that has led to a lot of publications declining right now too. Like chasing that kind of superficial clickbait or single answer providing didn't really work out well for a lot of people. The headline thing reminds me of this other artist trick that I have been seeing on TikTok, which is that a visual artist will show up on your screen in a video and they'll hold their painting sideways so you can't see it at all. And then you have to wait and watch as they turn the painting to face you. And that actually forces you to, if not appreciate the work itself, then at least keep watching their video for five more microseconds. And that is good for them in terms of their algorithmic success. Yeah, so it's faux deeper engagement. Right. Because you're not actually contemplating the work for the five minutes, you're just spending four minutes and 59 seconds waiting to see the work. And then as soon as you see it, you're like, I'm done. You mentioned with music that the typical song length has shrunk because a listen is 30 seconds. And so the goal is just to give you enough stuff to get you past that 32nd threshold, and then we're done with you. Where the economic function in music streaming, on Spotify, they reward you based on your streams. And a stream is a thing that they define. They control what the variables mean. And so to them, listening to a song is equivalent to listening to the first 31 seconds of a song. Therefore, all that matters to Spotify and to an artist who wants to chase what Spotify wants is that first 30 seconds. So as long as you just keep pulling someone in for the 30 seconds, then you can make more money from your listenership. And at the same time, I think songs have become shorter and albums have become longer and looser because it kind of doesn't matter if you can just release a mixtape of 30 short songs, and that might get you more of this one variable called streams. So you get paid more from Spotify or you get more views on your YouTube channel. The incentives, the creative incentives of these data points and technology platforms are just so bad for culture. It's kind of absurd when you step back and think about it. Well, you also talk about how the Instagramability of an experience has become the most important aspect of it. And you describe some of these food items that are virtually inedible, but they look great, right? Yeah. What is the. I think it was possibly Blackstrap milkshakes was one of my favorite Black Tap. I'm sorry, Blackstrap is the molasses. But there was this chain of milkshake purveyors called Black Tap, and they would make these extravagant milkshakes with cooked and candles and stuff piled on top of the milkshake to the point that you could not eat these things. Like, they would collapse if you actually tried to eat it like a milkshake. And instead it was a trophy. It was like a thing to carry in your hands and photograph. And that was kind of millennial Instagram restaurant culture. Yeah. And you talk about the Instagram wall. So I guess these establishments, they need to have a designated spot for people to take pictures of themselves. And it was immediately obvious to everyone who saw the post where it was, that you were kind of like a Santorini dome. You got to have something like everyone is, oh, yeah, Santorini, Right. An iconic image that can be reproduced online and easily shared and consumed by other people. So I think you would often see, at least in the late 2010s, you would see a neon sign of the restaurant's name embedded in a plant wall somewhere in the restaurant. And so no Matter. No matter if you were taking a selfie or if you were taking a photo of your food, you might see this neon sign and plant wall on the back of the photo, and that served as advertising. That served as a way for the restaurant to perpetuate itself online and kind of increase its digital footprint. Even though that had nothing to do with the food or even the experience of being in a restaurant, it was simply the sign of its existence on the Internet. Yeah. And of course, I mean, I've talked to some other folks about the way in which tourism has changed. Right. Where it's the recording of the experience that has become more important than the experience itself replaced the experience. It is really fascinating. I mean, there are just so many examples of this. But I experienced it quite a lot in Iceland, where people would travel to these natural wonders and even walk too close to the enormous waterfall to take a photo of themselves to the point that some people fell over the cliff and died taking selfies rather than simply experiencing the nature in front of them. Or at another point, there were these very hot geysers and I would see people kind of leaning back into the geyser to try to get the best photo. And this is a dangerous prospect. I don't know. I think travel has become so fetishized lately because it is a real life experience. It's something that you can't fully translate into a screen. And yet the way that people express their appreciation for travel is to just produce more content about it. I don't know. I'm very guilty of it myself because I love travel content and I love to see it on my TikTok feed. And I take plenty of photos when I go on vacation to produce the inevitable 20 slide Instagram post. And yet it does crowd your minds like it. It pushes your thoughts toward what will be the best content from this experience. Right. So as you're experiencing it, you're, you're, you can't help but think about how that experience would look through this lens. I think so. I mean, because so much of our lives are lived through these platforms, we kind of have that image of the platform in our minds. We have the sense of an invisible audience. The kind of like social media peanut gallery is always there with you thinking about, oh, does this Italian Vista look good or does it look too cliche? Does it look too Instagrammy? Well, my friends think it's cringe. Well, I mean, you seem to be obsessed with cafes. You know, everywhere you go, you seem to go find the cafe. And was it your experience with cafes that stimulated your initial awareness of the flattening of the world. It was. I mean, I can't take too much credit for the world being flat, as Thomas Friedman and many others have said as much. But to me, it really happened in the early to mid 2010s. I was working as a freelance journalist and traveling a lot internationally for reporting and culture related stories. And so anytime I went to a new city, I would stay in an Airbnb, which was a new digital platform of that moment. And. And I would use Yelp or Google Maps to look up hipster coffee shop in the kind of peak hipster Internet era. And the hipster coffee shop search would always lead me toward the same kind of cafe, no matter where I was, with the same set of interior design symbols, like hanging Edison bulbs or subway tiles on the walls, or little potted plants in ceramic, like succulents. And it just struck me that this kind of like cultural homogeneity wasn't like a Starbucks. It was not a top down template that was repeated, but it was instead all of these individual people across the world gravitating toward the same aesthetics. And for a while I was like, why is this happening? What's going on here? And then I kind of thought about social media and how this, the new thing that was connecting everyone were these digital platforms that bombarded us with the same kinds of images. And I think that's what started to create that homogeneity. But it seemed like you interviewed some of these cafe owners and they didn't seem to be super aware of the fact that they were just part of some broad homogeneous. I think each one of them thought, oh, this is cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. This one German consultant described the situation to me in this line that I always remember, which he described it as a harmonization of taste. And so your taste is your personal preference. It's what you really like, it's what you identify with. But if your personal taste is like many, many other people's personal tastes, then you're kind of participating in this homogeneity. And I think these symbols, the kind of design aesthetics, also became symbols of authenticity, like symbols of a unique experience, symbols of millennial consumerist desire at a high level, like an aspirational lifestyle. And so even by replicating it, you're still participating in this illusion that only you like these things or only your crowd of people likes these things. And to not blame anyone. Once more, the cafe owners also told me that they felt really forced to participate in these digital ecosystems because it mattered what their rating was. On Yelp, if they had a bad rating, they would get fewer customers. If customers weren't Instagramming their space, then they were not doing as much advertising or marketing as they could be doing. So it's both the pressure to produce this kind of homogenized content organically and the economic function that you have to do this or your business will fail that creates the overall effects. Well, I mean, you talk about algorithmic anxiety, but it seems like there's also like a authenticity anxiety where people start to wonder, well, what is my taste? What do I like? I don't know whether it was ever sensible to think that one's tastes emerged in a vacuum, but it does seem like many people experience some kind of epiphany where they realize that almost every aspect of their life is being influenced by these algorithms. Yeah, and one young woman in particular I talked to had this experience on TikTok where she just kept seeing videos of knee high fluffy socks like leggings. And she would see influencers wearing them and creators she liked wearing them. And then eventually she just found herself buying the socks, almost subconsciously hitting that Amazon button or whatever. And when they arrived at her house, she was like, I don't like this. This is not my personal style. I'm never going to wear these. Why did I do this? And this created this huge anxiety for her over her personal taste that she couldn't trust what she liked. She couldn't trust what she was attracted to, buying or consuming because it was so algorithmic and because what she saw was influenced so much by these feeds. And I don't know, I mean, taste is never totally organic. Right? Like a record label executive is going to pick what is the hot young band of the moment. In the 1990s, a museum curator will choose who to put in a gallery show and that will influence what you're actually seeing. But to me, that sense of anxiety was new. Like that fear that you had lost control of what you liked and that you couldn't identify with it because it was somehow alien to you. That was really striking to me. Yeah, I remember reading about how everybody wants to give their kids like a unique name, but then by the time the kid is like three and they go to school, they realize that every other parent had exactly the same thought. Every unique name is not unique by the time. Yeah, I mean, we have a five month old baby boy right now and we went through the same drama of thinking both what names do we think are cool. And what names will be so cool that they become too popular in the future. And we noticed that there are a lot of American couples who are naming their child Luca, which is like the Italian equivalent of Joe. Like, there are so many Lucas in Italy that you, you would never choose it if you were trying to be unique. And yet in America, this had the vibe of a unique new name. And now we know like 10 Lucas. So it's. You can't escape it. On some level, it's very hard to completely separate yourself from this kind of homogeneity. But I do think taste wise, you can get off of these rails a little bit and you can at least think more about what you're feeling inside of yourself instead of just what is most popular, what is most in front of your face right now. Some people will talk about we can't live without these algorithms, but we can kind of domesticate them, we can kind of make them our servant. And once you appreciate the fact that everything you do is influencing the algorithm, you can just be a little bit more intentional about it. I mean, this is for me, if a cat video pops up, swipe it out of the way as quickly as possible. Because I know that if I linger on it, even however tempting it might be, I'm in for a lifetime of these things. Is there a way that you can, rather than just checking out, is there a way to think about how you domesticate it and make the algorithm your servant rather than you being the servant of the algorithm? That is the algorithmic anxiety too, I think the sense that the algorithm is surveilling you and watching every action that you take. And so in order to talk back to it, you need to do that swipe really fast or you need to hit the thumbs down button or refuse to hit like on a certain kind of video so that you can signal to the algorithm that you don't want more of it? I find the hacking the algorithm or using it, it's useful to a limited degree because ultimately you don't have that much agency. I don't know if, say the algorithm is what's a good metaphor? Say there's 100% of the algorithm that's running this equation that's running in the background all the time. You can influence maybe 20% of that. The rest of it is all based on built in variables that the tech company designed. It's based on data produced by other people. It doesn't matter that. It's just that you are performing certain actions. Maybe your demographic really likes Cat videos. And so the cat videos are going to keep coming back to you. So, yeah, that influence that you can have is very shallow structurally, at least how algorithms are designed right now. Well, also, I mean, there are other objectives besides just maximizing engagement. There's also feeding you the items that have the highest margin, let's say. And, you know, I mean, I worked in restaurants and they would always say, you know, recommend the cheap food. So when you ask a waiter, like, what's good, they're not going to tell you what's good. They're going to tell you what's about to go rotten. And, you know, what has the incentives are there. Exactly. So, I mean, is there a way that. I don't know, I guess people can become more aware of. I mean, just becoming more aware of the incentives of the entity you're engaging with. Does that help you or does that just make you. I think so. It's at least better. The example of this that comes to mind is how digital platforms are always changing their incentive structures. If you cast your mind back to the early days of 2012 or whatever, Instagram was just a series of photographs. It was a chronological list of still photographs. And yet over time, Instagram and its owner, Facebook, now Meta, decided that Instagram should not just be still photographs, it should be slideshows. Oh, wait, not just slideshows. Videos. Oh, wait, not just videos. Ephemeral posts from your friends. Oh, wait, not just still photos anymore. Please put a piece of music on every still photo you post. And if you don't put a piece of music on it, we will not algorithmically promote you. They change the incentive structures all the time to push people to participate in the way that the platform benefits from. So when TikTok came along and it was this algorithmic feed of all videos, everyone else kind of moved toward these same kind of videos and pushed their users to create them and consume them. And so if you think about the incentives and the corporate structures or even the business models, you can become a little more aware of what's happening to you, particularly as a creator. Say you don't like videos, say you only want to post still images. You kind of have to know that the platform doesn't want you to do that and you have to persist regardless or move your work to a place that is sustainable. For that kind of practice, you have to be very aware. I often think of it as a farmer's market. Now, you need to know where the organization Organic produces and know what farm stands, raises its chickens humanely or Something, and I guess it's the kind of conscious shopping effort now. Well, I mean, look, a lot of the stuff you're describing is relatively recent, especially post TikTok, et cetera, but you highlight that folks like Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu, I mean, there were people long before the invention of the Internet who were in some ways predicting, I mean, Huxley. I don't think you mentioned Huxley, but they kind of had an inkling of, like, where we were headed. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you got to wonder what they would have thought if they could see this. Seriously. I mean, we think about people like Mark Fisher like they're successors to the philosophers of the earlier media age, but I feel like those ideas that Borgiu and Benjamin and everyone are just so relevant to this Internet ecosystem. I don't think they could have imagined it. Like, I don't think Adorno is imagining Spotify necessarily, but I always come back to Benjamin's idea that the scaling up of the art object, the replication of the piece of culture, has a way of both degrading and accelerating it at the same time. I mean, that was so prophetic, because in this era, now in the 21st century, the aura of the original object is almost a forgotten concept. Like everything is replicated so constantly that you can forget about the original thing until you actually experience it. And you're like, oh, yeah, the original thing is great. Being in reality and being in front of a great work of art or hearing a symphony is an amazing experience. What would they have thought of this now? I mean, in a way, it's a dream come true that we can access all forms of culture at once. Walter Benjamin would have loved Tumblr and random image curations of obscure anime from the 90s or something. I think he would have understood that as a curatorial effort, the way that you can be a flaneur of the Internet. But the noise and chaos that we experience online is totally unlike the cultural environments of decades ago. We have to be more inured to more noise than in the past, I think. But while it might be the case that all art is available at the push of a button, it does seem like some art is harder to access. I remember when Netflix used to have all the great movies, and now they don't. And so if you want to have a nice cheap stream like Netflix, you're going to have to work harder. You're going to have to go somewhere else to find a lot of the good movies. Let's say even on Spotify, you can Say you like Bach all you want, you can ask for the Bach playlist, and pretty soon a bunch of other stuff's going to creep on in and it's kind of hard to keep it out. I feel this with jazz, actually. I have lots of jazz playlists. I listen to a lot of 60s jazz. And inevitably, if you let Spotify keep playing with its algorithmic recommendations, it will slide into the most AI generated sloth jazz trio elevator music that you could possibly imagine. It's like, no, the only way that I would want this is if I was not paying any attention. They're hoping you aren't. They're hoping you aren't. And they can just continue this extrusion of banal, generic culture until it alienates you enough that you just log off forever, I guess. Well, that's a different type of flattening. So it seems like there's the flattening, the Friedman style flattening, where the world is becoming more homogeneous. But it also seems like there's a flattening of culture in that the all culture is low culture now in a way. Right. And I'm wondering, how do artists think of themselves now? I mean, have they just said, okay, mass appeal is where it's at? I mean, what does it mean to be, say, an elite in a world like the one we live in? That's a particular question. I mean, elitism has a bad rap, obviously, in many ways, and the elite has become a political target. I always want to be an advocate of cultural elitism in a way, or pretension. I think in culture right now there's this dominant idea that what is popular is good and what is good is popular. And if you look into the obscure corners, if you find something that people aren't paying attention to, there's actually a stigma on that. If a YouTube video has 300 views, it's hard to make an argument that it's important because it's obscure. So I feel like we've lost the cultural value of obscurity in a lot of ways because these digital platforms have forced us to pay so much attention to the metrics of attention. We obsess over how many views something has, even if it's not our thing. There's this mania now from movie fans about how much money a movie makes. Like they want their favorite movie to make more money than someone else's favorite movie. And I just find that to be an absurd metric of cultural success. The great art of that we appreciate canon of great culture has never been about popularity or financial Success so little. I mean, Walter Benjamin, speaking of him, published very, very little before he died. Of the philosophical writings that we know him for today, it was just people who supported him posthumously and propelled his work. Moby Dick sold, whatever it was, 40 copies. Van Gogh didn't sell a single painting. So I feel like we've lost touch with the sense that great culture can and should be obscure and takes a long time to reveal itself. Well, it seems like when people go and try to find some place that is like, I know when people travel, they're like, oh, I don't want to go to the touristy place, I want to go to the authentic place. But everybody wants to go there. And then they start going there and then ultimately they say, well, this place sucks because it doesn't have good service and blah, blah, blah, there's no wi fi. And then ultimately those places have to. They feel the pressure because, you know, they want to cater to this new flood of people. And so then they ultimately wind up ceasing to be the thing that attracted people there in the first place. It denatures them. Once you get on that route of online attention, it's easy to lose your identity. This is kind of based on a friend of mine who lives in London, but she's always been really obsessed with places that are bad, essentially, places that are authentically bad, low brow, low key, not cool on the Internet. And she will go out of her way to seek out kind of the worst places. And so looking for badness in a very ironic way becomes more interesting and unique than looking for goodness. So if you want to find an authentic shittiness, it's everywhere, you can really find it and you will be having a different experience than a lot of other people. Yeah. So I wonder if that'll be the new status. Right? New statuses, you go to the places that are not Instagrammable. I think so. I mean, there's a lot of experiences that are very meaningful and potent and do not lend themselves to Instagram. Or the status becomes doing these things and not posting, just not choosing to commodify your experience in that way. That said, one of her favorite sandwich shops in London became TikTok Famous. And so the TikTok crowd fixated on its low brow ness and appreciated it. And all of a sudden it's extremely popular, it's making more money than ever, but it's been crowded out by this unlikely bunch of audience. It's hard to win. I have this thought that any coolness in culture, any innovation, any new Interesting thing gets replicated, taken up and replicated and scaled up so quickly right now that the avant garde, the radical artist, or even the niche culture has no chance to outrun it. Success is punished, essentially. Yeah. I mean, you talk to a lot of curators at different museums. How are they thinking about this balance? How do they manage it? I mean, do you need to have a strategy for preserving a sense of quality, but also thinking about, I don't know, fundability, popularity, viability? I mean, what's that look like to somebody who's actually in the world of cultural preservation and production? It is a dilemma. I mean, as a journalist, I'm kind of on the side of the new. Like, I'm focused on the discourse of right now. And I feel like the curator's job is to look past that, cannot be distracted by the short term, to instead build these records and archives and critical examinations of things that we might overlook. So I think I see a lot of museum curators trying to do that. The work of a curator takes years. It's like writing a book. You have to put a ton of research in. You are arranging the movement of all of these pieces of art. You're developing an academic discourse around something, and then you're finally exposing it to the audience. And I feel like that time and effort creates this friction that also builds meaning into the exhibition and builds meaning into the curatorial practice. At the same time, I know that they think about how their shows exist online. You kind of need an exhibition to be Instagrammable, and you need to have something that can be reduced to a frame on a phone. I feel like art museums use wall text a lot to do that. You translate this abstract idea into the shortest possible description and curatorial statement, and then you hope that your curatorial effort, your placing of one object next to the others, communicates some deeper idea as someone walks through the space. So I just have nothing but respect for curators. And the people who do that, hard and often unrewarded, were. Well, I want to ask you about minimalism because in that book, you talk about how there's a certain beauty in stripping things down, but it also seems like a lot of the minimalism is motivated by Instagramability. Right. If you, Marie Kondo, your living quarters, the first thing you're going to do is show it to the world, take a nice photo of it. Honestly, having moved recently, I feel that as well. It's like, oh, this room is so clean and empty. It looks perfect. I should photograph it now before I bring up even More books and clutter into it. Yeah, I mean, minimalism. I wrote that book, the Longing for less, starting around 2016 and it came out in 2020. So it was a little bit of a different era. It was the era of Marie Kondo and minimalist basic clothes like Uniqlo. And I felt that minimalism. I made a distinction between lowercase and minimalism and uppercase and minimalism. And I think lowercase M. Minimalism was this commercial commodified effort to create objects and aesthetics and lifestyles that just worked in digital capitalism. Well, there was this one makeup company that I think the whole point of the makeup was to the more of it you put on, the more you look like you weren't wearing makeup. Yeah, no makeup, makeup. I was really pushing that for a while. There was this ethos of looking like you made no effort or looking like you were yourself, and there was no intervention. And yet it was this very artificial scenario. And that's an interesting form of minimalism. It's a very complex simplicity in the end. So does that mean then that authenticity requires a lot of work to maintain? Yeah, that's. I think we shouldn't separate authenticity from the labor. I don't know. To me, online now, there is no incentive to show labor. Showing effort is gauche. Acting like your influence or career is difficult is gauche. And that. But actual authenticity requires a lot of labor and is labor essentially. It's a day to day practice of making meaning and thinking about what you like and thinking about what art might mean to you and other people. And so to me, minimalist art is one of the more authentic forms just because it strips everything else away but the single artistic act. I wrote a lot about Donald Judd, who, in addition to being a great visual artist, I think was kind of like a great Martha Stewart lifestyle influencer because he kind of invented this vocabulary of beautified artist lofts and reclaimed industrial space and a few beautiful pieces of furniture and an empty factory floor. And I think he, through his entire life work, showcased that effort and showcased such intentional thought behind every single choice and action. And I think that's exactly what people don't do when they're just scrolling through their feeds. You can pick up an aesthetic, you can grab onto a piece of music with no effort whatsoever, and you might leave it once more with no relationship to it. There's no accrued meaning there. There's no accrued significance. Well, last question. I want to ask you about long form journalism. Right. So it seems like there's a ton of pressure on journalists and writers to shorten the form and to seek clicks and headlines and so forth. Are there countervailing forces in the ecosystem now that are kind of pushing back against that? And what would that look like? There's definitely countervailing forces. One is toward video and audio. One is toward putting your face on camera, explaining your work in a video like this one, probably making little clips for TikTok. And that's how you reach the most audience. The broadest possible audience is found through these videos and audio. And in the other direction, I think there is this better version of the Long Tail now with Substack and other newsletter platforms and Patreon and these approaches to crowdfunding, where if you do find your audience, if you do find the thousand people who will really support you, you can kind of do your thing for as long as you want, no matter what that thing is. And if anyone else approves of it, there are many, many newsletters that are thriving, many, many podcasts that are thriving, that only their deepest fans listen to and support. And that's great. That's the dream of the Long Tail. I think it's just that those are kind of invisible and disaggregated. There's no view across that ecosystem. So I think you have the hyper visible video, audio version of journalism and cultural creation, and then you have the niche and quite invisible. Longer tale of people doing their thing. And I mean, I have a lot of optimism and hope for that. Longer tale of people doing their thing and figuring out how to support themselves. And yet I think we're in the early stages of that. It's really hard to navigate. It takes a lot of effort still to participate in and no one has enough time. Maybe this was the Long Tail problem. We don't have enough time in our lives. We don't have enough freedom and luxury to fully explore the breadth of those possibilities and find exactly the thing that interests us the most, necessarily. So I guess the key thing is that you're going to have the algorithm that's going to be throwing all sorts of stuff at you, but you need to figure out an exit ramp so that when something is. When you do become aware of something and you want to engage it more deeply, you need to kind of get off that treadmill and find someplace where you're not going to be continuously distracted away from that deeper engagement. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Internet has been great for discovery and like lowering the barrier to entry for publishing, as we talked about. But I think what's more important for us, for like consumers, is what you do after you discover something. Like don't just favor on TikTok or add it to your Spotify collection. Like go buy a record, go to a concert, talk about it with your friends, remove your consciousness of it from the screen and from the feed and that will just be better for everyone. I mean, this is my original. I used to be a huge fan of Facebook right back when, 2012 or so, because it did allow you right to. You'd go through your newsfeed and then you would see something that looked interesting, maybe say in the New York or the Atlantic, and then you could just kind of click on it. It would take you out of the feed, the platform and into that site. But then they changed it so that you can't do that without multiple friction points. And so you kind of give up and then just go back to scrolling headlines. I think that was an intentional design decision, but it made the discovery part less valuable. Yeah. And I think tech platforms have made a lot of these decisions to keep us in the feeds and in the platforms. And the more we can, like exit from that, the better off we'll be. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for joining me. I love this book. It's called Filter World. Check it out. Super interesting. And look forward to the next material. Thanks so much. Yeah, this is a great chat. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the unsiloed podcast produced by University fm. 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