Filterworld: algorithmic anxiety is flattening our culture

The rule of vanilla lets our unfeeling gadgets decide what’s best for us.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A podcast guest speaks in front of a mic.

What's next on the playlist?

Sebastian Pandelache on Unsplash.

Here’s another diagnosis to add to modern malaise: algorithmic anxiety. It’s described by Kyle Chayka in his excellent book Filterworld (Heligo Books, 2024) as the:

…awareness that we must constantly contend with automated technological processes beyond our understanding and control, whether in our Facebook feeds, Google Maps driving directions, or Amazon product promotions.

We don’t understand algorithms. Even if we did, we wouldn’t know how they actually work on us as every tech company keeps it a secret, lest competitors learn from them. This has led to the algorithm becoming the century’s newest bogeyman, a phantom we can reference in conversation to make us sound tech savvy and culturally knowing even while we remain in the dark.

‘Algorithmic has become a byword for anything that feels too slick, too reductive, or too optimised for attracting attention’.

Kyle Chayka

One of the oddest outcomes of the ascendency of the algorithm is the seemingly diametric effects on politics and culture. In politics it has polarised people, sorting us into opposing camps and then ensuring we hear only good things about our ‘side’ and only maddening things about the ‘opposing’ side. Instead of calmly listening to a different view, we hurl insults, as performative as Prime Minister’s Question Time and about as enlightening.

Something different is happening with culture. Here, the algorithm makes culture more homogenous; in the words of Kyle Chayka, it is ‘flattened’. The basic rule of what he calls Filterworld is that ‘the popular becomes more popular, and the obscure becomes even less visible’. It is a strange re-mix of Jesus for the digital age: ‘to all those who have, more will be given…but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

The life of an Instagram post is said to be determined in the first five minutes. If it has engagement, it can be sure of more; if it gets none, it will sink. Visibility on social media is vital for artists of all kinds, because this is where all publicity begins. Artists try and game the system, figuring out what kind of content the algorithm will promote. In the process, their creative expression is subtly compromised. People begin to write in a style that gets attention, and what gets attention is decided by the algorithm. Those who tweet will know how the short, pared back medium starts to influence their life away from X. Musicians know that art which is safe and mainstream – the public’s crowded middle where performers like Ed Sheeran have thrived – is likely to succeed.

‘Much of culture now has the hollow, vacant feeling of having been made by algorithm’ according to the cultural commentator Dean Kissick. Chayka observes that: ‘algorithmic has become a byword for anything that feels too slick, too reductive, or too optimised for attracting attention’.

It is often at the margins that breakthroughs emerge; art that makes us see this world in a new and divine light.

There is a valid counter to this development. Previously, what we read, heard and saw as cultural consumers was determined by a small set of experts who filtered content for us. These experts were often drawn from a narrow section of society who inevitably brought their own biases to bear. While this may be true, it is hardly a triumph for the public to have an unfeeling gadget decide what’s best for them, based on what we have liked before and what seems to appeal to most people. At the ice cream vendor, this is like reaching for vanilla every time.

The truth is, in necessarily surrendering to the algorithm (for what alternative is there online?) we miss huge volumes of culture that might appeal to us. It is about as effective as deciding what sea life we like based only on what pops up to the surface of the water.

The best art is not always the most popular and there is a risk that the divine spark of invention that the creator God has placed within each of us – the unlimited potential of being made in the image of God – will not be fanned into existence as often as it could be. Chasing likes is no substitute for patient inspiration. It is often at the margins that breakthroughs emerge; art that makes us see this world in a new and divine light.

‘Behold, I am making all things new’ says the one who sits on the throne in Revelation. That algorithms are making all things similar is the reality we are learning to live with.

Review

Belief

Books

Culture

Music

11 December 2024

1 min read

Belle and Sebastian's suffering singer on the struggle and the hope

On the edge of ‘Nobody's Empire’: something good will come.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A singer, wearing a hat, pulls his head back holding a note, and a mic.

Stuart Murdoch performs, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2024.

Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nobody's Empire: A Novel is the fictionalised account of how Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of indie band Belle and Sebastian, transfigured his experience of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) through faith and music.

The book has two Belle and Sebastian songs as its keystones. The first, ‘Nobody's Empire’, gives the book its title and is a description of how it feels to have ME:

‘I clung to the bed and I clung to the past

I clung to the welcome darkness

But at the end of the night there's a green green light

It's the quiet before the madness’

Murdoch has been living with ME since the 1980s and is an outspoken advocate for those who have the condition. His experience, as described in ‘Nobody’s Empire’, has been that ‘We are out of practice, we're out of sight / On the edge of nobody's empire’. That is also the experience of Stephen, the central character in Nobody’s Empire, a music loving romantic in Glasgow in the early 1990s who has just emerged from a lengthy hospital stay having been robbed by ME of any prospects of work, a social life or independent living. In Glasgow, he meets fellow ME strugglers who form their own support group and try to get by in life as cheaply and as painlessly as possible.

As the story progresses, he finds he has the ability to write songs and wakes to the possibility of a spiritual life beyond the everyday. Later, he leaves Glasgow with his friend Richard in search of a cure in the mythic warmth of California. Because Murdoch is fictionalising his own experience, Nobody’s Empire offers its readers compelling insights into the experience of ME, particularly the experience of having the condition in the early days when it was little understood. He writes, too, with an engaging ingenuous and childlike curiosity about life and his own experiences.

Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars.

The second song ‘Ever Had a Little Faith?’ is included towards the end of the novel as one of the early songs written by Stephen. This song, in which the line ‘Something good will come from nothing’ is repeated, is actually an early Belle and Sebastian song that was only recorded for a later album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. It is a song that was inspired by a sermon preached by Rev John Christie, Minister at Hyndland Parish Church in Glasgow, the church Murdoch attends. He has said of the song: "The sentiment was based on a sermon that our then minister, John Christie, preached about simply getting through a dark night, and the hope of morning."

This Easter morning sense that good will come from the nothingness of being on the edge of nobody’s empire is an experience of transfiguration. Revd Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields has preached perceptively on prayer in terms of incarnation, resurrection, and transfiguration. The prayer of incarnation is a prayer for God to be with us in our difficult circumstances. The prayer of resurrection is a prayer for God to change and fix our difficult circumstances. Then, in response to a possible situation of need, Wells says of a prayer of transfiguration:

“God in your son’s transfiguration we see a whole new reality within, beneath and beyond what we thought we understood. In their times of bewilderment and confusion show my friend and her father that they may find a deeper truth to their life than they ever knew, make firmer friends than they ever had, find reasons for living beyond what they ever imagined and be folded into your grace like never before. Peel back the beauty and strength of their true humanity, transform and transfigure from this chaos and pain something new, something good, something of life.”

This is where Stephen’s story and Murdoch’s experience takes us as there is no fix for ME, as for many other health conditions or disabilities, and Stephen/Murdoch ultimately has no desire to be fixed, as ME becomes an important part of identity for them. Instead, Nobody’s Empire takes us up the mountain through Stephen and Richard’s California experiences, as was the case for Jesus and his disciples at the Transfiguration, so we can see beyond and come to know a deeper reality. As Wells puts it, the prayer of transfiguration is to “Make this trial and tragedy, this problem and pain a glimpse of your glory, a window into your world, where I can see your face, sense the mystery in all things, and walk with angels and saints.”

Faith has featured compellingly in a significant number of relatively recent books by rock stars including, among others, Surrender by U2’s Bono, Walking Back Home by Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, and Faith, Hope, and Carnage, the record of conversations by Nick Cave and the journalist Sean O'Hagan. Murdoch’s Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars and how that is expressed through their music but offers an alternative take both as fiction and as a story in which faith and music combine to transfigure life and ME in ways that enable good to come from nothing:

“Do you spend your day?

Second guessing faith

Looking for a way

To live so divine

Drop your sad pretence

You'll be doing fine

You will flourish like a rose in June

You will flourish like a rose in June

Ever had a little faith?

Ever had a little faith?”