Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
returning home from filterworld
In at least a couple of the reviews that I looked at, Chayka’s Filterworld was paired with another recent release, Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online. (Rest assured, there’s a copy on my to-read pile already). Even a quick glance at Lorenz’s promotional materials should clue a body in to the clear overlaps between the two—while Chayka focuses on the algorithmic causes, Lorenz’s book is about the effects, the way that “social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power.” I thought Anna Shechtman’s review offered perhaps the clearest comparison of the two, and the degree to which each captures “the feeling of waning agency in the face of computation.”
My own reaction, as I think I’ve made fairly clear, is ambivalent. When I read these main-character, anecdotally driven histories (and there are many more besides these two), they make me feel old. And that’s a bit of what I wanted to talk about in this post.
Back before folks knew who Steven Johnson was, he wrote a book on Interface Culture, which I used in some of my earliest digital rhetoric courses (back in the late 1900s!). In it, he decried the metaphor of surfing, which was ubiquitous at the time (alongside the equally cringe “information superhighway”):
So it is with the verb to surf and all its variations: Web surfer, cybersurf, surfing the digital waves, silicon surfer. Not only are the iterations inane, but the concept of “surfing” does a terrible injustice to what it means to navigate around the Web.
In some ways, I wonder if that early metaphor wasn’t a figure in search of a phenomenon. The more I read of social media histories, the more the personal stories put me in mind of people who were able to get on top of a wave and ride it, at least for a certain amount of time, to wealth and success. As with lottery winners, though, who talk themselves into believing that they deserved to win, it’s hard to know exactly how much of this is just dumb luck or whether there’s something more to them that genuinely merits our attention. (Internet histories nearly always assume the latter.)
One of the stories that I like to tell about my own time as a dedicated blogger is the tale of when and why I stopped. I blogged seriously for about 5 years, writing for an audience mostly of other academics, but I was an unrepentant evangelist for what blogging had done for my ability to write and the online community that had emerged for me as a consequence of my site.
One day, I caught a wave. I don’t remember many of the particulars now, but Twitter was fairly early stage, and someone had posted an ill-advised opinion about graduate school admissions. They had said something to the effect that they appreciated seeing pictures of applicants, because it allowed them to automatically screen out those who were overweight, a clear sign of laziness that meant that they would never be successful in graduate school.
Words cannot adequately express the rage I felt, both as someone who disproved the point and at just the casual cruelty it would take not only to believe that but to say it out loud. I whipped out a heated, 3-4 page rejoinder, one that was a lot more confrontational than I’m usually willing to be in public, and I posted it to my blog, tweeted it out, etc. My site, which typically received a couple hundred visitors a day, all of a sudden was getting several thousand. While these numbers aren’t especially notable today, back in the mid 2000s, before social media had really taken hold, they were pretty astounding. Insofar as it was possible to go viral, I’d done so.
It’s a common enough occurrence on social media platforms such that we’re all familiar with what happens next—the original author returns to ask their temporary, outsized audience to like, share, subscribe, and occasionally, they’re able to flywheel that momentary exposure into an upleveled online presence. Perhaps they circulate so fast that they’re able to fly away (in case you were wondering about the title of my post). That’s the lottery ticket moment that so many would-be influencers are grinding for, after all. And it’s what all of those kids who now aspire to be influencers imagine will happen. (In no small part this is because they themselves are exposed non-stop to those lucky/privileged few who have actually succeeded at it—but then, “influencer” is a sexier “job” title than confirmation bias engineer or trendbait tryhard.)
As for me? My reaction was at first a little bemused, perhaps excited even, and then I had a literal panic attack whose effects would last a few days. I couldn’t bear to check my email or my site itself for fear of more comments—even being in the same room as my computer caused me anxiety. Plenty of those comments were laudatory and/or supportive, but others were critical, misread me, or simply seized upon my post as a means of generating their own traffic. I’m not especially thick-skinned, so the volume and variety of the feedback was soul-crushing. Going viral was the worst experience of my blogging life; it made me hyper-conscious of what I was saying, and basically wrecked my ability to write there. I never recovered fully. I tried to recapture some of my enthusiasm on the Book and the Bird over the years, with middling success, but it really wasn’t until I opened up shop here (more than a decade later) that I was able to write publicly again without the anxiety of that episode.
All of which is to say that histories like Chayka’s (and Lorenz’s, I’m guessing) that unproblematically cast the viral lottery winners as heroes and protagonists are stories that I can process intellectually, but I don’t feel like they ever quite capture the full range of what’s happened to our culture. Not everyone who’s posed the choice of living like a machine chooses to do so.
Late in my first post on Filterworld, I mentioned what I called the “‘This is Water’ problem,” by which I meant to reference that David Foster Wallace passage:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
There’s a real difference, I find, in reading books about technology and culture written by my own generation as opposed to the generations that follow. For a while, my digital writing students had at least a passing familiarity with a pre-internet world. But now? I can just as easily imagine a group of students, born and raised with the ideology of “content,” reading Chayka’s book and asking me, “What the hell is culture?”
I thought “This is Water” made for a nice figural association too with the surfing metaphor, given how eager we still are to plunge ourselves (and our children) into the sink-or-surf world of the Apparatus. The most pernicious part of that world is that we’re also teaching them that those are one’s only options, that if you’re not surfing, you’re sinking. As though the Apparatus is the only way that we can grow as human beings; otherwise, we’re dying. It’s a bit unfair for me to associate this attitude with these internet histories—not every book needs to be read as an allegory for life itself. At the same time, that bit of pettiness pales in comparison to, say, when platforms bury research that draws a direct line between social media usage and mental health struggles. That’s a whole other level of injustice than the one that Johnson was writing about.
And that’s really all I want to say about Filterworld. It’s almost certainly a better book than I’m letting on—I’ve been more selective about my responses than I would have for a formal review. Even this post is more a loose collection of impressions than a coherent essay. But I’ve got an inbox whose neglect this week is about to haunt my weekend, so I think I’m finished for now. Talk to you later.
Great read. The description of "going viral" in a era when that wasn't quite possible yet was thought-provoking.