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Filterworld

How Algorithms Make Everything the Same
By Kyle Chayka
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Brief Description
One of the BBC's most anticipated books for 2024 An i-D non-fiction book of 2024 A Stylist non-fiction book of 2024 'An essential book' i-D What happens when our cultural and artistic lives are dictated to us by an algorithm? What does it mean when shareability... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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From the New Yorker's most exciting young writers: a brilliant breakdown of how algorithms have shaped our physical and artistic worlds.

From the New Yorker's most exciting young writers: a brilliant breakdown of how algorithms have shaped our physical and artistic worlds.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

One of the BBC's most anticipated books for 2024

An i-D non-fiction book of 2024

A Stylist non-fiction book of 2024

'An essential book' i-D

What happens when our cultural and artistic lives are dictated to us by an algorithm? What does it mean when shareability supersedes innovation? How can we make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us?

From coffee shops to city grids to TikTok feeds and Netflix homepages the world over, algorithmic recommendations prescribe our experiences. This network of mathematically determined choices - the 'Filterworld' - has taken over, almost unnoticed, as we've grown accustomed to an insipid new normal. But to have our tastes, behaviours, and emotions governed by computers calls the very notion of free will into question.

Internationally recognized journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka journeys through this ever-tightening web woven by algorithms. He explores how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption. How the lowest common denominator is promoted at the expense of the complex, diverse or challenging. How users of technology contend with data-driven equations that promise to anticipate their desires but often get them wrong. How the Filterworld is determining the very shape of culture itself.

Chayka skilfully and compellingly traces this creeping, machine-guided curation that influences not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced. In doing so, he attempts to answer the most urgent question currently facing us: is personal freedom ever again possible on the Internet?

Filterworld is a fascinating history of the rise of the algorithm and an important investigation into where it could take us next - if we let it.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781788708548

Publisher: Bonnier Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 23 January 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Heligo Books

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 20.0mm

Width: 130.0mm

Height: 197.0mm

Weight: 216g

Pages: 304

Collections

Business & Entrepreneurship Education & Reference Kyle Chayka Non-Fiction Politics & Current Affairs Science & Nature

About the Author

Kyle Chayka is a contributing writer for The New Yorker covering technology and culture on the Internet. His work has also appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper's, among other publications.

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    The early promise of a free Internet is long gone. Now, rather than allowing us a meaningful relationship with a range of content of our choosing, algorithms have not only removed genuine choice but de-textured the world around us: smoothed its edges, planed down friction, and flattened differences. So coffee shops from Brooklyn to Beijing are inflected with a similar,...
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    'The story told here is instrumental to your own' - Jared Lanier 'Timely, erudite, important' - Ayad Akhtar What happens when our cultural and artistic lives are dictated to us by an algorithm? What does it mean when shareability supersedes innovation? How can we make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? From coffee shops...
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