So many of us have ceded our decision-making abilities to machines, but fear not: 'Filterworld' author Kyle Chayka explains how to rediscover your personal taste.
Something’s off, but you can’t quite name it. It’s the moment you get home after staying with friends, and an influencer using their exact coffeemaker pops up on your Instagram feed. It’s the split-second after an actor delivers a quippy line on a streaming series, and you try to parse whether this scene has already become a meme, or if it’s just written to court them. It’s the new song you’ve been hearing everywhere, only to discover it’s an ‘80s deep cut, inexplicably trending on TikTok.
TikTok is maybe the worst offender because it’s constantly trying to engage your attention in a shallow way, but it’s absolutely not pushing you to find out anything more about something. There’s no depth there, there’s no context. It actively erases context, actually. It makes it even harder to find. But we know curators can have their own agendas.