Are TikTok and Instagram dulling your taste?
Partway through Kyle Chayka's new book, "Filterworld," about how digital algorithms transform culture, a quote from one of his subjects stopped me cold.
Valerie Peter, a younger woman interviewed for the book, had never liked legwarmers. But in late 2021, legwarmers became a pervasive fashion trend on Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest. She felt compelled to buy a pair. The decision felt almost subconscious, disturbingly so. It were as if clout-chasing influencers and surveillance-based digital advertising had somehow corrupted her self-identity.
"I just want to know that what I like is what I actually like," Peter said.
, I thought. I pictured the ending from Alex Garland's 2018 sci-fi film "Annihilation," where Natalie Portman's character, Lena, confronts a faceless extraterrestrial that mimics, with growing violence, her every move. It's the strange dance of today's surveillance economy: Users give platforms data, which platforms use to adapt to the user (and sell more precisely targeted ads), which in turn better adapts the user to the platform. Every algorithm-driven platform is an alien.
