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.

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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.

Essay

Books

Culture

28 May 2024

5 min read

How C.S. Lewis used myth to supercharge storytelling

Great stories allow ideas to be experienced rather than merely thought about.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

Aslan sculpture in Belfast, Lewis' birthplace.

K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.

‘I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading’. That is how C.S. Lewis described himself to a class of Fifth Grade pupils in Maryland who wrote to him in May 1954. An exhibition this summer at Magdalen College, Oxford, entitled C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds, includes this letter along with a variety of personal objects, letters, books, manuscripts and audio materials relating to one of its most famous fellows.

As well as answering questions about plot details and forthcoming books in the series, Lewis corrects their view that everything in the Narnia books represents something in our own world. As he notes, that is indeed how Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress works – a reference which may have been lost on his ten-year-old correspondents – but that’s not what Lewis intended in the Narnia stories. Instead, Lewis explains that he set out to write a ‘supposal’ rather than an allegory. He began by asking himself the question: ‘Suppose there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, what would happen?’

For Lewis, the great value of stories is the way they allow their readers to experience ideas rather than simply think about them. In an essay called ‘Myth Became Fact’ he notes the impossibility of feeling an emotion such as pleasure and simultaneously studying it. But if you aren’t roaring with laughter, how can you genuinely understand humour? If you are suffering from toothache, you will be unable to write. But once the toothache has subsided, how could you write a book about pain? Lewis explains this paradox using the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was permitted to lead his beloved wife out of the underworld, but the moment he looks back at her, she disappears. We can draw an abstract truth from this story about the impossibility of simultaneously seeing and experiencing, but it is not the only truth that this myth can communicate. If it were, it would be an allegory.

Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible

As such, an allegory is like a puzzle that must be solved by the reader to reveal its hidden meaning. Its one-dimensional characters straightforwardly signal the qualities they represent, as in Bunyan’s Mr Despondency, held captive in Doubting Castle by a giant called Despair. Unlike allegory, myths are stories from which numerous truths may be abstracted. Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible – ‘like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place’. Lewis considered allegory to be a limited medium, since authors can only insert ideas that they already know, whereas a myth is of a higher order, since authors can fill it with ideas of which they are not yet conscious.

Lewis was fascinated by myths from his first encounter with the stories of Asgard and the Norse deities as a young man. As an atheist, one of his key objections to the Christian faith was that it was just another version of the myth of a dying god who is resurrected, similar to those he found in the stories of the Norse god Baldr, whose death was brought about by Loki, the trickster god. Following entreaties by Baldr’s mother, the goddess Frigg, Hel agrees to release him from the underworld, on the condition that everything on earth weeps for him. But Baldr’s return is ultimately blocked by one creature, a giantess, presumed to be Loki in disguise, who refuses to mourn him.

Why was Christianity different to this myth, or others, like the Egyptian account of Osiris or the Classical story of Adonis? It was a lengthy night-time conversation with his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien in the grounds of Magdalen College in September 1931 that helped him overcome this objection and embrace Christianity. What Lewis came to recognise is that, when he encountered a god dying and being revived in pagan myths, he found it profoundly moving, suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp. But, when he met a similar concept in the Christian gospels, he was unmoved. What he took from his talk with Tolkien and Dyson was an openness to accepting the Christian story as a myth, with all its mystery and suggestive implications, but with one key difference from the Norse, Egyptian and Classical myths: it really happened. But, by becoming fact, he argued, Christianity did not cease to be a myth: ‘that is the miracle’.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world.

In writing the Narnia stories Lewis was engaged in what he and Tolkien called ‘mythopoeia’ – the act of myth-making – communicating Christian truths in ways that would inspire children to grasp something of its mystical and mythical qualities. As he noted in his essay ‘On Stories’, reading about enchanted woods does not make children despise real woods, but instead makes all real woods a little bit enchanted. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the children meet Ramandu, a retired star who is being restored to his former youth so that he can rejoin the great dance in the sky. ‘In our world’, says Eustace Scrubb, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas’. ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of’, Ramandu retorts. Eustace, we are told at the beginning of the story, had wasted his time at school reading only books of information about exports and imports, so it is no surprise that he can only comprehend a purely materialist definition. If he’d only read more fairy stories, he might have been able to grasp this reality, as well as being better prepared for his adventure on Dragon Island.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world. Since God himself is mythopoeic – after all, isn’t the sky itself a myth? – shouldn’t we therefore be mythopathic, that is, receptive to myths? For Lewis, Christianity offered the marriage of Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact, which should be met not solely by love and obedience, but also by wonder and delight.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University. He is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing, 2024) and co-curator of C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds. The exhibition runs until 11 September 20024, in the Old Library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Check opening times.