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From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why the internet isn’t fun anymore. And one of the hypotheses I’ve come to believe is that we moved, at some point, from this period where the internet was about curation, it was about finding these individuals who would welcome you into these worlds they had created and found and put together for you, to this internet of algorithms.
And one of the quiet things that happened when that happened is that it became harder to feel like you were finding individual experiences on the internet, and it became harder to be an individual on the internet. And because we live a lot of our lives on the internet, that means it also became harder to be an individual.
And as this yearning for this digital life that I feel like I once had, and no longer do, has grown, I’ve noticed myself in my own life seeking out people who are individuals and people, more than that, who seem to have their own sense of aesthetics of style, of taste.
These weren’t things that were that important to me a decade ago. But they’ve become more important to me now. I’ve come to see them almost as a kind of superpower, both because just living a beautiful life or living a life in which beauty has a central role feels more important to me as I get older, but also because it feels increasingly like a kind of superpower, like a kind of act of resistance against what these algorithms and what this age online is doing to us.
It feels like being able to be attuned enough inside yourself to know what you really like, not just what you’re being fed, being attentive enough to the world around you to see things that are really yours, not just everybody else’s — it feels like an important way to live.
And so I’ve been wanting to talk about this on the show, but it’s a bit of a fuzzy thing to talk about. But Kyle Chayka, who is a staff writer at “The New Yorker” and got a lot of attention a couple of months back for this article “Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore,” he’s got a book coming out on Jan. 16 called “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.” And luckily for me, it’s very much about this.
It’s about how algorithms changed culture, changed what people who make culture are rewarded for making, but also about this question of what is taste? What is a sense of aesthetics? And what happens to it when it collides with the homogenizing digital reality in which we now live.
As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
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Kyle Chayka, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Let me just begin here: What’s taste?
Style or taste is knowing who you are and knowing what you like, and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you, that makes you feel like you are who you are or that you can incorporate into your mindset and worldview.
I mean, it’s a process of collection, almost. Like you’re grabbing on to the little voices and artists and touchstones that make you who you are and give you your sense of self. You’re drawn to something without knowing why.
I often find myself a little turned off in books when we end up in a Voltaire quote too early on.
It’s just a kind of cliché. But I really liked the one here that you have. And he writes, “In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it.”
Tell me what you take from that, why that quote spoke to you.
I think when we talk about taste today it’s often a very superficial idea. We think that it just rests in what band you like, what books you read, what clothes you wear.
But I liked going back to some of those philosophers. They really thought of taste as a more fundamental human experience, like a moral capacity, a way of judging what’s around you and evaluating what’s good and what’s meaningful for you and for your life.
I like to think about taste as something that’s not just about consuming a thing or enjoying something superficially on a day-to-day basis, but instead almost making it part of yourself.
I actually wish somebody had told me this long ago. I think I used to understand taste as very external. It was about knowing what other people think is good. What does it mean to have good taste? You have the same taste as people who have good taste. It has a sort of turtles all the way down quality.
Yeah.
I thought I could have good taste or bad taste, and I mostly thought I had bad taste. And I didn’t really understand that there was my taste. And that’s a weird thing to say as a 39-year-old. But it’s relatively recent for me that I began to realize the first question is, what do I actually like and why?
And one of the experiences that kicked this off for me actually happened a little bit across the show in the past couple of years where I really wanted to develop an appreciation for classical music. And I really threw myself at it. And I talked to people, and I read books, and I listened to the music. And it took a long time — it was like 10 months of really pushing at this.
But what worked for me was when I tripped almost accidentally into more kind of modern post-classical, Steve Reich and Philip Glass and now Carolyn Shaw and Nico Muhly, and a bunch of people like that, and some of the more modern experimental electronic work. And all of a sudden I found something that I liked, that nobody had given me, that I just found through work.
And it wasn’t that the other stuff was bad and this was good. It’s just that, for a variety of reasons related to me, this created a reaction. It created a very strong sense. It was a piece of work by Peter Gregson and some co-musicians, these set of quartets. And one of them — it’s like “II: Warmth” is I think the most beautiful piece of music I’ve virtually ever heard. And it’s strange. And not everybody who hears it feels what I do, but I feel what I do.
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And I trust that feeling. And truly, nobody had told me that was important.
Yeah, I think taste almost can move in two directions. There is that internal sense of what am I feeling when I experience a work of art? What is happening in my own brain, in my soul when I listen to this music?
And then there’s this external idea of it, which is being super self-conscious about what other people are consuming, how they’re consuming it, how they might judge you for your tastes. We don’t want to be seen as having bad taste. And that consciousness of how other people’s taste works occludes our own experience of that internal pleasure or aesthetic joy.
I was talking to my editor Claire about this, and she was making the point that it’s very hard to tell the difference between those two experiences, right? When I am listening to something, how do I know that the reaction I’m having internally is not the internalized reaction that I understand the world to have externally?
Right. I mean, even as a teenager or something, you start to think about your own taste. You start to be aware of what you like and don’t like that’s different from other people. But there’s also this huge pressure to conform.
And I think people really get pushed into that. They either think they have to conform to having good taste or they kind of go the opposite direction and say, this is not worth my time. I don’t want to worry about taste. I don’t want to think too much about what I like or don’t like because that’s frivolous or pretentious.
And I think that kind of barricades us from having those beautiful experiences like that you described where a work of art that appears to you in this zone of silence can surprise you, and shock you, and move you, and make you feel something that you haven’t felt before or didn’t expect to feel.
You have a quote from Montesquieu who says, quote, “Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge. It’s a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know.”
I love it. I love that quote so much because it’s — you don’t know. You don’t know the thing that’s going to hit for you. There’s a system that you can sense. There’s a framework that exists for you. And yet, you can still have that total sense of surprise. And that’s the ineffability of taste. That’s fundamentally what’s not data-driven about it. It’s not just about what the most people engage with and how similar this person is to you. It’s purely just about existing with something and feeling it.
So as I’ve been trying to shift my own style, in ways that I think is entirely possible I will look back on in photos and be like, that was an embarrassing period for me. [LAUGHS] But one thing that weirdly I just react very strongly to are certain kinds of brightly patterned Sherpa jackets.
This is not necessarily what I think looks good on other people.
It is not what I imagine myself in when I imagine myself as a centerfold of my own life. I don’t think this is the most stylish in the sense of other people will be like, that guy looks great. [LAUGHS] And yet, somehow I have a strong internal reaction to them. There’s something about the texture or the softness, the brightness. It’s more how I want to feel inside than reflected outside.
It inspires you.
And it has been a complete surprise. In that way, it makes myself feel less knowable to me.
Actually trying to listen to what moves me when I’m walking through a store, or a shop, or, for that matter, a museum, or — it’s often a surprise. I think that I have typically had an outside view on myself, like how would I look to someone else, and tried to attach to that. And then trying to actually see what moves me, it’s like, well, who the hell is that?
Taste isn’t a code that you can solve, I think. It’s not like manners maybe, like a book of rules that you can follow and conform to. But instead it is that listening to yourself and knowing when something strikes you, and being aware to feel that and allow yourself to feel it.
Like in a museum, rather than looking at the names, I try to just look at the painting. And be like, oh, what is interesting in this bucolic landscape? It’s not about who made it or what the date was. But instead just about what is coming out, what is reaching from the artist to you and really hitting that note.
One of the motivations for this conversation for me is I just did an “Ask Me Anything.” And I think at every one of these I’ve done in the last year, I get this constant question, which is, OK, I’m in college. It’s a world of A.I., or you have kids and they’re going to be growing up in the world of A.I. What do you think is more important now than it was?
And I have this intuition that in a world where everybody has access to these models and what they’re going to do is create a lowest common denominator of aggregated taste, having a very specific sense of taste, having a very specific sense of discernment becomes more important. And it becomes a real mark of distinction because it’s going to be so easy for people to skip that step in becoming their own human being.
It creates a higher premium on being a human, on being an individual, on offering to the people in your life, offering in your work, offering in your contributions something specific. And in many ways, one reason I think AI is so threatening is that we have asked people for so long to not be very human, to actually be very generic, to act themselves like a machine, to do something very rote, to do things that are noncreative.
And I’m curious how you think about that. How you think about the returns to this, not just monetary, but also kind of psychic, as we move into this world where anybody can call up any piece of culture and create it instantly as long as it is highly derivative.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the generic human is like the ideal consumer in capitalism.
Right.
It’s the ideal worker in industrialization. It’s the person who has no desires that are not the desires of everyone else. And I feel like — I mean, that’s dystopian, for one thing. That is a very poor motivation for living [LAUGHS] maybe.
I mean, I think having taste seems more important than ever, or cultivating your own taste, because you are surrounded by so many options and because it’s so easy to be passively fed whatever you’re looking for. Taste is always a way of carving out a distinction for yourself and figuring out who you are. And I think that’s more important when algorithmic feeds try to tell you who you are all the time.
So I think in order to have independent opinions, in order to exercise that ability to make a judgment or evaluate a piece of culture, you’re going to have to develop a sense of taste. And you’re going to have to get out of some of these very passive routes of consumption. I mean, if you want to think about politics or art or anything for yourself, you can’t just ask ChatGPT to tell you what to think.
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Tell me about the coffee shops.
The generic coffee shop I think has become kind of like my Moby Dick. [LAUGHS] It’s this aesthetic puzzle or problem that I kind of became aware of in the mid-2010s, maybe circa 2014, 2015.
And it was just this strange, uncanny experience I was having that as I traveled around the world as a journalist, doing these freelance magazine assignments, I would land in a particular city, whether that was Tokyo or LA or Berlin or Beijing, and I always managed to find a particular style of coffee shop. It was this minimalist box of a cafe with white subway tiles on the walls and midcentury Scandinavian furniture and handmade ceramic mugs with nice cappuccinos in them.
And the weird part of it was, to me, that this was not the work of a parent company. It wasn’t a Starbucks. It wasn’t a global chain. Instead it was all of these completely independent coffee shops, baristas, entrepreneurs, whatever, who had decided to mold themselves into the same aesthetic and the same format of space, independently of each other.
So as I was experiencing these coffee shops and finding them in whatever city I was in, I started wondering why they were so generic or what connected them all together. And my conclusion was that the kind of nascent digital platforms that I was using — whether Instagram or Yelp or Google Maps — were feeding this series of cafes to me as a recommendation. My taste was being evaluated. And then I was getting recommended the same minimalist cafe over and over again. And I was kind of being driven to these places by the platforms themselves.
I buy that. But also, it was being fed back to the people creating the coffee shops. You have, I think, a very provocative line in that section of your book where you talk about — and I’ve been to these coffee shops. I was just in a bunch of these coffee shops in Tokyo. I was in them in Mexico City not too long before that. And I love them. I seek them out.
But it’s also — they’re there for me to seek out.
Yeah.
Right? They exist. And often, they sell themselves as very local. And I think they are self-understood by their creators as very local. And there’s one way of thinking about that as a sham. They’re not local. These are generic international coffee shops. But you write that they are, quote, “authentically connected to the new network of digital geography,” which I thought was a really interesting way to put that. Can you unpack that for me?
They were locally — they were authentically connected to something, but it wasn’t to the geography of the place. It wasn’t to the realities of Mexico City or the aesthetics of Chinese culture in Beijing. What they were really connected to was our culture that we’ve developed on the internet.
So we feel this authentic connection. We feel they’re connected to our identities and our preferences. But I think the preferences that they connect to are the ones that we have developed online that come through platforms like Instagram or Yelp or Google Maps.
This was a very eerie experience for me in Mexico City. And I love Mexico City. I absolutely love that place. And I was there about a year and some change ago. And in this part of the trip — I was in Roma and Condesa, which are pretty internationally-heavy areas of that city. And I couldn’t get over how attuned to me the aesthetics were.
I came from San Francisco at that point, and it had distilled the aesthetic of the best things in San Francisco to me. And it was this weird disorienting situation where, in a way, what was so appealing to me about Mexico City was how unbelievably familiar it was. It was a little bit different, and obviously there are many places I went that were quite different. But in the places I was staying, it was like the soul of Instagram had come to life — the soul of my part of Instagram. And I began noticing that then when I did other travels. And that ability to have much more familiarity actually as a traveler going around the world can be kind of wonderful. But to go back to this question of how do you even figure out what you like, it takes away that capacity or it makes it much more difficult to find that different, that contrast, that confrontation with new experience and aesthetic that helps you discover new things that you like.
Right. I mean, I think the problem with this ecosystem that we’ve developed — being surrounded by algorithmic recommendations — is that it prevents us from being challenged and surprised a lot of the time. Everything is molded to our preferences that we’ve already expressed.
The Spotify recommendations kind of follow all the bands and genres that you already — that they know you like, that you engage with. Where we’re herded and shepherded toward experiences that were going to find comfortable enough, familiar enough, with just enough of the local flavor to make them not utterly boring and generic. I don’t want to argue that this is a completely new experience. Sameness has existed for millennia.
This is why chains are popular.
Yes. Comfort is a product that people like to consume. It’s scalable. Consumers enjoy it. In the book, I reference this 19th century commentator in France, I think, who was complaining about how train travel suddenly meant that all cities were becoming more similar than different.
So I think it’s a common complaint. But we live in such an accelerated version of that, that I think we can see our tastes reflected in so many more places and at such a granular level, like the coffee shops in Mexico City where you love to see — I don’t know — they serve tacos or there’s some local braided textiles on the wall. But there’s still that fundamental homogeneity where you have the subway tile and the furniture and the menu is familiar to you.
And I’ll say, this goes in all directions. A coffee shop I typically go to here in Brooklyn also serves me tacos.
And also, it looks a lot like the coffee shops in Mexico City. I mean, it —
Yeah.
— it does go in both ways. Blue Bottle is heavily inspired by Tokyo coffee shop, then goes back to Tokyo and becomes a popular coffee shop at the beginning.
And they’re succeeding there.
Yes. It’s very recursive in that way.
It’s self-reinforcing. It’s a kind of vicious cycle. And I think — I mean, digital platforms have connected so many people around the world. Billions of people circulate through the same ecosystems online. And I kind of think there’s this vast generic agglomeration of stuff that we’re just cherry-picking from each place that we like and molding it into a great blob of generic culture.
I want to dig into different ways that algorithms are changing tastes, which is the central concern of the book. And one of the ways is in a preference for quantified mass appeal as opposed to particularistic appeal.
And what I mean by that is that the way I knew about movies when I was younger is the L.A. Times had a movie critic, and that person had their taste, right? Presumably good taste, but their taste. And they liked some things and didn’t like other things. And over time, I began to learn about critics who I liked and critics who I didn’t. But now I’m much more likely to just go and look at the summary judgment of Rotten Tomatoes —
Yeah.
— of Metacritic, when algorithms are feeding me things or doing something kind of like that, where they are looking at people a little bit more personalized, looking at people like me who seem to do things like what I do and then telling me if other people like me liked the thing.
But we’ve moved away from this attaching to a curator who has an individual taste and kind of guides you through the world in that specific way and moved towards the averaging out of curators. Like it’s a poll, right? We treat —
Everything is a poll.
We treat everything as a poll and not as criticism. And that felt very efficient to me for a while. And now it feels very weird.
[LAUGHS] I think we all did get bored of it. Over the 2010s, culture became more datafied or driven by this engagement information that was only possible through digital platforms. So suddenly Twitter could count how many people were interacting with a tweet. Netflix could surveil how many people in real time were watching what movie, what TV show. Spotify very visibly can tell what song is becoming popular off of an album and promote that above all else.
There have always been metrics, like the Nielsen ratings or box office numbers or whatever. But there’s never before been that kind of tyranny of real-time data, which kind of outweighs the opinion of the critic and of the individual human who might tell you what you might like.
So I think there was a shift from human tastemakers and human gatekeepers to this very data-driven system in which only what is popular gets more popular, and what does not get that engagement, get that immediate attention, is pushed into the shadows, pushed into silence, and cannot become mainstream, cannot reach more people.
So one thing you argue in the book is that the algorithmic world privileges sameness, that it pushes everything in the direction of what people already like, in the direction of the algorithm, in the direction of mass engagement but low disruption.
And I couldn’t figure out if I actually thought that was true. Because at the same time, when I compare now to the ‘90s, which is when I grew up, when I first became aware of a lot of culture, I think the ability to find niches of everything — anime, weird anime, every kind of music you could possibly imagine, hyperpop, all kinds of hip-hop, every subgenre of electronica — you get really into jungle now, that was hard then.
That when I even think of politics, there’s this incredible fracturing of ideologies. What has worked in politics online — the algorithm doesn’t want sameness. It wants high engagement. And you get that from, in many ways, disruptive ideologies. The rise of Black Lives Matter. The rise of Red Rose Twitter. On the right, the alt right. On the right, Donald Trump. On the right, neoreactionaries.
So there is this way in which it doesn’t feel to me that the algorithms have created more monoculture. It does push you in a direction. But there are more directions now than ever. I mean, I don’t know how I would find a bunch of the music I find now if I couldn’t start playing radio from any random thing that I get served up.
So I’m curious about that tension for you. Because the idea that we’re moving towards sameness is a big theme of the book. But I look around and I see, in many ways, more difference and more fracturing in the culture than ever.
Yeah, I think there is a tension to it. And I think algorithms kind of go in two directions to me. Either they’re seeking engagement — so in one direction to provoke a very strong reaction is one form of engagement, and that might be the political triggering of one movement or another. The different form of engagement is this kind of mass passive engagement where people are funneled toward an aesthetic or a mode that works for the most people at once. So I think both of those things happen at the same time.
And I think the internet makes everything available. And I think that’s completely amazing. I remember finding those obscure anime shows or whatever on BitTorrent in the early 2000s and that completely changed my life as a cultural consumer, helped me build my own taste. But I think experiences like that are not the default now.
I think we have so many possibilities. We can find whatever we’re looking for. But the overall ecosystem of streaming and of algorithmic recommendations does have a way of funneling us just toward particular areas of that body of culture if we’re not very actively fighting it.
What kinds of art does that end up promoting within culture and what kinds does it push to the margins? I mean, what’s the example of a movie that was really helped by the critical space and is hurt by the Rotten Tomatoes system? And vice versa, what’s something that really works in the Rotten Tomatoes world but maybe wouldn’t work as well in the world of individual critics?
Yeah, I mean, my sense is that what functions well in that Rotten Tomatoes ecosystem where when the most people approve something is when it’s the best is a kind of like Marvel end game where a piece of culture is ruthlessly optimized to appeal to the largest number of people, whether it’s to the committed hardcore fan who wants to check every box and figure out every element of the canon that’s being constructed, to the totally ambient, distracted viewer who will just sit there and marvel at the explosions and the C.G.I.
The kind of culture that the algorithmic ecosystem ends up promoting is that widest possible average. It’s the stuff that avoids alienating people, keeps you engaged as much as possible, even if that engagement is very shallow. It’s fundamentally scalable, to use the horrible Silicon Valley word.
Whereas, I think, historically, the culture that we prize the most is usually not that. It’s usually the stuff that is not popular but grows in popularity over time. It’s the stuff you have to be patient with, to let grow within you.
I mean, it’s easy to think this didn’t happen now, but “Moby Dick” barely sold in Herman Melville’s lifetime and only became this iconic work of literature over a century.
That work of art was not determined by popularity or engagement metrics. It was determined by slow word of mouth over decades and decades and generations.
I’m always surprised when I look back on the books that mean a lot to me, because that’s the space where I consume the most, how much the books that I am thinking about a year later are often not ones I really liked. They’re often not even ones I would really recommend.
Yeah.
They’re ones I had to struggle with, and something in that struggle meant something to me, or helped me with something, or just has continued setting off a struggle in me. But if you ask me to give it a 1 to 10, I wouldn’t even really know where to put it.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s maybe not a great book but it has one really great idea, or I actually think this book is wrong but it forced a useful conflict in me. And it does seem to me like that is harder and harder to find. And this is, I think, one of the points of the filters and the algorithms, that the more it’s harder to find, the less of it will actually be made.
You said a word a minute ago — ambient. And one of the points you make in the book is that you feel the culture in general is becoming more ambient, that one thing that is being selected for is culture that can be consumed ambiently. What do you mean by that?
Yeah, I mean, I really take it from the musician, Brian Eno. And I think his core meaning of ambient was any kind of art that’s — I think I can quote him — “as ignorable as it is interesting.” It’s like a thing that you can either choose to engage with or let play in the background, and it works equally in both circumstances.
And I really like the story of how he came up with that. He had been in a car accident, I think, or got hit by a taxi. And he was laid up in bed at home. And a friend came and visited him, gave him an album I think of harp compositions or something on vinyl. And the friend was like, oh, Brian, I’ll put it on the record player. Don’t get up. Don’t hurt yourself. But the friend didn’t turn the volume up.
And so Brian Eno is sitting there, laying in bed, trapped while the record player was just playing very quietly. But he had this epiphany that, oh, the music can function just as well even if I can barely hear it. And I think he used that insight to make great music, like “Music for Airports,” that intentionally did that.
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But now we have so much content that’s not the intentional aesthetic choice. It’s kind of how everything has to be in order to move through these systems where engagement is the primary metric.
“Music for Airports” is amazing. If people haven’t heard that, they should listen to that album. It holds up. I got really into it again two years ago. I love that album. But I feel like a lot of the work that comes under this moniker now does not benefit from being paid attention to.
Or maybe now we’ll have earbuds or AirPod Maxes or whatever in our ears. There’s speakers everywhere we go. You have televisions in your home. You have televisions at the bar. There’s the capacity for culture to be always on, the capacity to be always listening. It would have been very expensive for every store to play music 75 years ago. You’d need a person with a piano at all times.
But now you have speakers all the time. That’s interesting to me. That changes the kinds of things we need. I find I use a lot of music not to listen to music but to regulate my own mood. That’s what it’s really doing. It is settling my nervous system at the end of the day. It is amping it up before a workout. The music is not the point.
Yeah, yeah.
My heart rate is the point.
It’s just functional art, basically.
Yeah, it’s functional art. But I couldn’t do that before. I just would have had to be — I don’t know — whatever was going on around me was going around me. And now you have these personalized culture scapes at almost all times.
Personalized culture scape is a great — yeah, that should be the new thing. But it is like — I think a lot about how we live in this very opt-in reality — I mean, you can think about noise canceling headphones that you see on every airplane and train all the time, or you can think about looking at your phone as you’re walking around, or playing a podcast or whatever.
And I think that necessitates ambience almost because there’s always a background against which you can experience something else. And you want to be able to constantly toggle between paying attention to something and not paying attention to it.
When you’re thinking about the ability to attune to what these experiences are really doing to you, there’s just a tremendous amount of distraction, of noise. I notice that I’m much more able to discern my own reactions to writing when I’m reading on paper just because there’s nothing really or it is more difficult to distract myself from what is happening inside of me.
To the extent taste is a kind of attunement to yourself, then developing taste in a space where it is harder to attune to yourself, where your self is more drowned out and it’s easier to jump away from that internal experience, that is also going to degrade, it seems to me at least, the fundamental ground on which that facility is developed.
Yeah. So I think these ecosystems and platforms prevent us from experiencing difficult content in a healthy way. We don’t have to fight through something. We don’t have to be patient. We don’t have to think so much about what something is doing to us or consider our own opinion as it develops because we always have that possibility of clicking away, like flipping to the next video on TikTok. It’s almost like boredom doesn’t exist, like difficulty doesn’t exist, scarcity doesn’t exist.
And I think a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier or more to your liking, you’re never going to sit with the thing that’s in front of you. You’re never going to be forced to have the patience, or the fortitude maybe, or the kind of willpower to fight through something and figure out if you truly like it or not.
Whereas, I think fighting that generic quality and figuring out at least one thing that brings you joy and you’re passionate about and that makes that change happen in your brain makes you have this encounter that you never expected. That’s the only thing that’s worth doing in life, kind of. Or at least in the field of culture, why would you want to have the generic experience? Why would you want the lowest common denominator result of recommendation?
A couple of years ago, there was a lot of discourse coverage about what the purpose of movie theaters was. I feel like this got to a kind of fever pitch in the pandemic. Because now you can buy, and most people of means have bought, these very big TVs. They hang in your house. You have the streaming platforms.
So you have, functionally, the entire library of human video content up until six months ago at your fingertips. And what did you need a movie theater for anymore? And there was real evidence that people were going to movies less. And I have found, personally, that I need it much more.
So I went over the weekend by myself, which is my favorite way to go to the movies because I’m not then in the field of anybody else’s experience of it. And I went and saw the new Studio Ghibli movie, “The Boy and the Heron,” which is amazing and beautiful, but also strange and dreamlike and has periods where how one thing is connecting to the other are not entirely clear.
And if I were watching that at home, it would be very hard not to pull out to my phone at that moment and either look up what’s going on, or just as my attention is being repelled a little bit, kind of lose attention, go wander off and do something else, go focus on something else.
And the experience of being in the theater is an experience of forcing a concentrated attention, which every time I do it — and I don’t get to do it as often as I would like — but every time I do it, it’s just a dramatically different experience. It’s not really about the size of the screen. It’s about the darkness of the room and the absence of anything else in it.
The sensory deprivation.
Yeah. I go to the movies for sensory deprivation so I can have that experience with the art. And that feels to me like a big question right now. So again, it’s the thing — I’ve said this before on the show, but I always worry about for my kids. It’s — what kinds of attention are furnished online and what kinds are not? What kinds of experiences can you have with culture in such an intentionally degraded space and which kinds can you not?
I mean, most of the encounters we have with culture online are pretty bad, I think. We do have much more choice in what we consume and all of these other possibilities surround us. But what we lack is that kind of museum-like experience or movie theater-like experience where you do have to sit with something and think about it and puzzle your way through it without flipping to get an answer.
We have so little patience for difficulty and incomprehension that artists and other creators, too, don’t offer it to us. They want to give us the answers right away. They want to beat you to looking at Wikipedia by just telling you what’s going to happen and what to think about it. And I just find that a poorer version of culture than other examples we’ve had before.
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The writer Cory Doctorow, sci-fi writer, technology critic, has this concept of “enshitification,” where platforms begin by adding a lot of value to you, the user. Early Google was magic. Early Spotify was a kind of magic. And over time, as they need to pay back their VCs — that was not as big a deal for Google, but is a deal for others — as they just need to make more money, as they need to increase their share price, they begin extracting value from the user. That value is usually your attention. Sometimes it’s what you actually buy.
And you can feel that happening in a lot of these places. And I think that’s one reason the internet feels so crappy to a lot of us now. I mean, you’ve written a lot about this. But the enshitification process has simply advanced sufficiently in enough of the major platforms that when I do a Google search, it is so clear that that search is for the advertisers, right? They are giving me so much advertising, and so much of it is SEO crap, that it no longer feels like it is working for me.
I have really felt this in the past two years on Spotify, which is a complicated platform in a lot of ways because I’m such an obsessive listener and listen so much and so weirdly. It’s not that it’s perfect, but it takes me in new directions and unusual directions all the time. It has learned enough about me that it is better at recommending music to me than any friend I have really is. And so I really appreciate the Spotify algorithm. It’s done me a lot of good. I felt like — that beautiful music I mentioned earlier, “Warmth,” I got it through Spotify. Nobody handed me that on vinyl.
Totally.
But man, the degree to which it is now endlessly serving me audiobooks that I don’t listen to there and podcasts that I don’t want, and just trying to get me to do things on the platform that I don’t want to do is really degrading my experience. And I wonder how long I’ll end up on Spotify at this point.
And I do think there is this way in which I would love the thing where I can kind of pay for the algorithm I want. And it does feel like we’ve backed into an internet now that is corroding. And I wonder how long that is actually sustainable for. It’s hard and it’s frustrating. And you’re a little bit locked in because you’ve built a million playlists and you’re used to it. But I can’t remember a time when it feels like everybody on the internet wants alternatives as much as they currently do.
Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve hit this breaking point with how these platforms work and with how the internet functions. I mean, in part, I think it’s overoptimization to algorithms. We’ve lived with these algorithmic recommendations for a long time now. We’ve lived with Google Search. And so people who want to game that system are gaming the system.
And there’s a tipping point at which too much optimization destroys the system where we no longer get the kind of authentic results that we’re looking for in Google, or we can’t work through Spotify to find what we want. That is bad as a user of technology. It’s also really bad as a consumer of culture. I want to know where to find the 18 jazz albums I’ve saved.
It’s funny, I think so much of the best of crypto culture was responsive or trying to imagine a response to the set of problems. Things you would truly own. Things that were truly portable and interoperable. And it ended up embedded in, I think, a very corrupt moneymaking culture, right? You were trying to solve the problems of capitalism with a technology built to create hyper-capitalism, the problems of financialization with hyper-financialization. And I don’t think it was able, and still has not been able yet, to resolve that core contradiction.
But one reason the culture resonated for a lot of people in an authentic sincere way was that this has gone bad. And there’s a bit of a parlor game, I find, in when did the internet go bad, like when did this all go wrong. But you identify something that has been on my mind because you have a whole chapter on curation. And in the internet that I came up in, the internet of blogs, a very early social media, curation was such an important word.
I mean, that’s what early bloggers and particularly the nodes of the blogasphere, like Atrios and Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan, were. They were curators of interesting links. There were other places, too. Kottke, Drudge is a curator, right? These were all curation operations done by human beings or sets of human beings. And early social media — you would attach to people websites, right? Just people had these weird websites where they put up things they liked on them. Tumblr was very curatorial.
Yeah.
And that all got eaten by algorithms. And I do think there’s something there in — I miss curators. There are a couple newsletters that have a curatorial function now for me. But it’s hard to find a human being exposing you to their taste. And it’s something I really appreciate now when I find it. What I like about the internet is connecting with actual human beings. And the inability to find them now and hold to them, it feels like a real wrong turn.
That was the promise of the internet for so long was that you could find someone really interesting who you wouldn’t have found in the traditional ecosystem of, like, Hollywood or newspapers. You could find a person like you personally who would be a voice that you could listen to and follow and develop and grow alongside.
And I feel like how algorithmic feeds have ruined that is we don’t know who we’re going to see so much anymore. We can’t be sure that we’re listening to the same set of people or hearing the same niche voice that we really wanted to follow.
Prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition, Twitter was one of the less algorithmic platforms still around in social media. And I felt like I still had that ability to follow cool curators. Even if they were tiny accounts with 1,000 followers, I knew they would pop up in my feed when they found something cool. And now I just feel like that’s been kind of erased in the flood of “for you” feeds where I can’t really tell who I’m getting or why anymore.
But they won’t pop up — this is the thing that frustrates me — for a while — this is now going back a couple of years. I’ve been off Twitter or X for a long time. But I used to read it or try to read it like I read blogs. I bookmarked a bunch of people’s individual pages, and I would just read in reverse chronological order.
Because the frustrating thing in this was that when I found somebody I liked, what I wanted was not simply the things they said or pointed to that everybody else liked too. I wanted their weirder taste. And their weirder taste was the thing I can never be assured of getting. You said a second ago that it’ll pop up when they find something cool. It will if they find something other people think is cool.
Yes.
But if they found something that was huh, if they found something that was like, I’m not so sure about that, I don’t know what I think of that, if they found something complicated, I wouldn’t see it, unless I sought it out. Which blogging had that quality. Websites had that quality.
I think a lot about the difference between what in my head is the push internet and the pull internet, which is not perfect language. But the internet where things are pushed at you and the internet where you have to do some work, day after day, go in and visit a home page or whatever, you have to pull it towards you.
And the problem with the push internet is it’s not really under your control, right? It’s about what the force pushing is doing. But as that became bigger, people stopped doing the things that allowed the pull internet to exist. There aren’t so many blogs anymore. Not none, but there are fewer. People put their effort — because it’s the easier way to find audience and eventually to make a living — into the algorithmic spaces. And so there’s simply less of this other thing there to explore.
Yeah, there’s less incentive. I think the incentives have changed. The monetization strategies have changed. I miss that pull internet. I miss the incentive of finding weird or complicated things. I mean, we had RSS feeds. Now I think we have newsletters, which is a relatively unmediated form of consuming someone’s stuff. And I feel like that’s right now, at least, where I follow the weirdest voices or get the complicated ideas to the point that sometimes they’re too complicated. I’m not reading your 8,000-word Substack on why you’re moving to Portugal or whatever.
I wonder about this underlying idea of curation. You talk in the book about curation as a more complex and valuable practice than what it became, which is simply some person or force has chosen things. Tell me a bit about what curation means to you.
The term itself has become very devalued. I think everything on Earth is curated at this point. But in the book, I liked going back through that term’s history. But the idea of a curator was not just someone who selected things. Going back to ancient Rome, it was a kind of civic leader who took responsibility for things like the aqueducts or public games. And then it became a kind of religious function where the curate of a church was someone who took responsibility for the souls of the parishioners.
And there’s that nice idea of responsibility and trust and an ongoing relationship in the idea of a curator that I think gets lost. I think in the 20th century, it became a word for people who run museums and stage exhibitions. And even in that role, there’s this way in which the curator, their job is to develop a coherent body of objects. Their job is to make people understand things in a deeper complicated way that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
And when we say curator right now on Instagram, for example, I just don’t think it has that same connotation of caretaking and responsibility. So I think when I think about the value of curation, it’s not just telling you what to consume. It’s giving you this holistic education and insight into how things work, into the context of objects or ideas. It involves vast amounts of labor and time and work to present objects or ideas or songs or whatever in the context that they deserve. And I feel like that’s been lost on the contemporary internet.
I think you can be on Instagram, you can be on TikTok, you can use ChatGPT. But what you have to do is go to the next deeper level of whatever you’re looking at. If you are getting into E.D.M. on Spotify, fantastic. Write down the albums you like. Google the artists who you like. Read about their biographies. Maybe follow them on Instagram. Maybe see what else they’re thinking about and reading and who they’re listening to. Or if you like an author, read who they are reading and follow the web of connections that they build.
And I feel like one connection that I felt in that way was with this anime that I pirated when I was a teenager called “Haibane Renmei,” which was by Yoshitoshi Abe, who’s this brilliant writer and artist. But this was a very strange anime that I found completely inexplicable when I was a kid about these winged angels and this strange bucolic walled city. It was just this very melancholic, eerie television series.
And much later, like a decade or more later when I was in my late 20s, instead of 13 years old, I discovered that that anime was based on a Haruki Murakami novel called “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” And I had read the novel, and I liked Murakami, and I liked the anime, but I had never put the two together.
And it made me realize how these things are interconnected, but it also made me realize something about my own taste because I found the same thing compelling. I found the anime compelling as a teenager and I found the novel compelling as an adult. And they stemmed from the same aesthetic choices and the same mood. And something about this elegiac, mysterious, surreal mood is part of my taste as a consumer.
The moment that I realized that, I think it was a kind of epiphany about how culture works. This is how culture works. One novel or a piece of art or a piece of music creates more. And there’s this flowing web of inspiration and influence. And that human to human connection is how great stuff gets made.
I had a funny experience over the past couple of years where — now he’s huge, but I discovered this electronic music producer, Fred again.., on the early side. And really, really liked it, these looping samples over dance music.
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And then really liked a bunch of his sets, and then really liked his piano work, and then his N.P.R. Tiny Desk, which came out over the last year, was absolutely amazing.
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But the thing that was interesting — because he blew up huge, I’m like, oh, I just like this big mainstream dance producer — was it turns out he’s a protégé of Brian Eno. Eno, in turn, is super influenced by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who are the minimalist pioneers — and there are others, too. They’re not the only ones, of course — who I really love.
And so it actually turned out the reason I like Fred again.. is that it’s actually a dance version of the minimalist composers that I had fallen in love with two or three years ago, or maybe a little bit more than that now. And that was just very surprising to me. I hadn’t heard it until a friend I’d sent the NPR Tiny Desk to was like, oh, this just sounds like Steve Reich.
[LAUGHS] Contemporary Steve Reich.
Contemporary Steve Reich. It’s like, oh, you’re completely right. And then when I looked into it, sure enough, there were all the influences. And that made the whole thing a lot richer to me.
Yeah, it tells you something about yourself. It gives you a deeper appreciation of the influences and understanding of where the music comes from. And I think that’s how artists work, too. They riff on people’s work who they find inspiring. They take parts of it and use it in new ways. And that continuity — there’s a way in which you could be like, oh, Fred again.. is just minimalist composition but with dance music. It’s like, no, that’s cool.
It’s good that that one element of something in the past has been recontextualized and remade into something that hits us in a new way today. That’s cool. That’s fun to understand.
There’s a satisfaction in discovering your own taste and the things you like and the things that connect. I mean, it’s fun. It’s one of the few adventures left on the internet.
[LAUGHS] Yes. And as a cultural consumer, to get off the beaten path and find something different, gives you an experience that you can’t otherwise have. I mean, my gut instinct is that the pretentiousness of taste is in part because it was a leisure activity. In the 18th, 19th century, knowing your own taste was something you could do if you were an aristocrat, essentially.
But I think it’s great that we all have that opportunity. We can all access so much more culture. So we have the privilege and the ability to hunt these things down and become connoisseurs, which that word “connoisseur” comes from early art history and was about amateur art collectors who looked so deeply at objects and sculptures that they came to understand them in a different way than people had in the past.
I think that’s such an interesting point that possibly some of the relationship between snobbishness and taste and class and taste is that culture was very expensive to consume. To see a lot of music meant going to the symphony a lot. To see a lot of art meant traveling to museums or being able to own it. I mean, there’s a time when books were very expensive. Movies were not a cheap thing. You couldn’t watch an unlimited number of them at home.
I mean, that is something that democratized the ability to experience it. I find this to be a kind of anxiety of algorithms for me, which I find both useful and unpleasant, which is the sense when I know I am watching or listening to something that’s kind of crummy that the best of the work humanity has ever produced is at my fingertips.
I shouldn’t be wasting time.
And on the other hand, that sometimes makes it hard to just focus on the thing I’m with and let that wash over me because is it crummy or do I just not — have I just not given it a chance?
Yeah, like, why am I not consuming the best of what humanity has to offer at every moment?
But it’s also not a competition to always consume the best stuff. I feel like there’s a way in which algorithmic feeds have created a culture of optimization, where we think we always need to be consuming the best or most effective or most powerful stuff, when, really, I think as long as we’re encountering something authentically or thinking about it, everything is valuable to consume.
And the random niche weird ambient track might give you something that the best Steve Reich composition or whatever doesn’t. You’re always finding something new hopefully.
So then always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?
So for these books, I kind of thought about books that have changed my taste and are books about aesthetics and consumption that stick with you and help you think about the world in a different way.
So the first one is this Japanese novelist, Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay, “In Praise of Shadows.” And this is a very small book, or a very long essay, in which Tanizaki kind of muses on his own taste, and why he designed his house in a certain way, and why he chooses food in a certain way or installs lamps in a certain way. And the point at which he was writing was just as Tokyo was industrializing. And it was when neon lights were being installed and trains were running through the city.
In the essay, he offers this puzzle of what if modernity or industrialization had been invented by Japanese people instead of the West. How could the world be different? And I just find it so powerful because it’s looking at the world from the opposite direction. He’s like, what if you prized shadows as much as sunlight? What if you thought about dimness as much as you think about illumination, or soft decaying textures as much as you think about perfectly clean bright porcelain? And I’ve thought about it every day since I read it.
The next book was “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” by Lawrence Weschler. And this is a biography or almost a memoir of being with the artist Robert Irwin, who is a light and space artist from California — kind of like a minimalist but in a atmospheric environmental installation way. And Weschler really records how Robert Irwin became an artist, how he thinks about his practice of art. Everyone who reads this book wants to become a conceptual installation artist.
And then the last book was “The Mushroom at the End of the World: The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,” which is by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. And this is an academic book, but it’s almost like first-person sociology of mushroom foraging, particularly matsutake mushrooms.
And these mushrooms cannot be domesticated. They have to be found and collected. And then they’re sold and dispersed across the world through these very strange human to human chains of economic and social value that Anna records.
And I love the book because it was such a niche world that she observed so closely. And I think to me that book is fundamentally about how scarcity creates meaning and how webs of human to human connection create meaning around whatever it is we consume, whether it’s a piece of art or an actual mushroom.
Kyle Chayka, thank you very much.
It was great to be here. Thank you.
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This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Carole Sabouraud.
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