Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture (2024)

I read this book for my book club. I came to it with high hopes - the topic is an important one, Chayka writes for the New Yorker about social media, and I had enjoyed one of his pieces I'd read. Alas, the book was something of a disappointment. Chayka almost never delves deeply into a question, his reading and thinking seem suprisingly shallow. For example, he talks about the importance of cultivating "taste," but then has little to say about what this means, about the presumably extensive discussions of it. Next he laments that elite critics and curators no longer point us in the right direction - but he doesn't stop to weigh the losses and gains of elite guidance, or to say how that guidance and one's own cultivation of taste coexist. Compared to other journalists writing about our present digital moment - Chris Hayes, Nicholas Carr, Jenny Odell - Chayka seems dull and insipid.