Kyle Chayka

EO

Let’s talk about what happened to the internet. Filterworld is great because it gives context of its history, specifically regarding the emergence of the algorithm and the transition to the feed. You say, “We live in an era of algorithmic culture.” What does that mean and what does the algorithm do?

KC

That phrase, algorithmic culture, occurred to me in the last few years and I kept coming back to it. I think it means culture that is the product of our era of technology that’s driven by algorithms. It’s a funny phrase because you could say there was a radio culture era, a CD culture era, and a cable TV culture era. But now we live in the era of algorithmic culture because we both produce and consume culture the vast majority of the time through these algorithmic channels, whether it’s social media or streaming. And so social media became algorithmic. It didn’t start out as algorithmic necessarily. That’s a shift that happened over the course of the 2010s. Before then, most social media and digital platforms that we spent time on were not dominated by algorithmic recommendations. They were still feeds of information, but they were ordered by chronology. They were just lists of what was posted from most recent to oldest—that was a whole different system. And I think the change from linear and chronological feeds to algorithmic feeds also changed our behaviors online. It changed what we consume and how we consume it.

EO

Chronology didn’t just change our understanding of the internet, it changed our relationship to time. And it ruptures how we experience time in general now.

KC

In the book, I talked to this influencer guy who I started following in the 2010s. He was a classic men’s wear lifestyle influencer-type guy—coffee shops, SoHo, and fire escapes. And he was talking about that switch from chronological to algorithmic, saying that he could no longer tell when his audience would see something so he could post a coffee in the morning, which he would often do, but he wouldn’t know that his followers would see it in the morning. There was no longer that linear time experienced together. It’s like you could post a coffee in the morning and you might want people to see it then, but they might not see it till 8:00 p.m.

EO

Yes, it really changed what “liveness” means. I also want you to talk about Facebook and Instagram. Instagram used to have a similar function to Flickr, in that it started as a photo editing tool. Facebook initially used to mimic the larger structure of the internet. You had this profile, you uploaded a photo of yourself, you logged a name, and listed your interests. It was one dimensional to an extent. It served more as a shorthand for all of your personal interests and taste, and functioned as a business card. I remember being on Facebook in high school and based on someone’s profile, you knew a person’s sexual orientation, relationship status, where they went to college, and what their social scene and taste was.

KC

Yes, it was a representation of your whole life in a way.

EO

And it was really coherent. But that got distorted as time went on. It used to be so chronological, and you had to intentionally and directly reach out to people. Suddenly, everything was in one singular feed and you could see people commenting on other people’s posts and who said happy birthday to whom, and it got to a point where I was like, “I’m so not about this life. I never signed up to know what other people were doing.” [Laughs.]

KC

[Laughs.] It makes sense. I think there was this shift circa 2010, we were like, “Oh, it’ll be great to live our lives on the internet. The internet will be our new place of socialization and connecting with our friends, and it’ll be our phone calls and letter writing and ambient social connection landscape.” And then that really quickly went away. The peak of that was maybe 2012-2013, at least for the millennial and younger demographic. We realized that one, living your life on the internet kind of sucks. [Laughs.] You don’t want all of your social landscape to be on the internet. And two, Facebook, the company, does not care that you want to have a good social experience.

EO

You talk about that in terms of growth, you say “Monopolistic growth is more important to these entities than equitable information.” And I think that that’s true. They don’t really care about me now, but did they ever care about us? These resources and platforms weren’t built to weaponize our information, but that’s what it has become. I don’t think people realize and we are now feeling it with the disbanding of X, formerly known as Twitter. Facebook used to be an epic deeply functional organizing and networking tool. It was a place to congregate. It was its own form of letter writing. It didn’t feel like you were throwing information into a void because Facebook was like a garden. You kind of regularly tended to it.

KC

Yeah. It was a more one-to-one reflection of your actual life landscape. And then as it became more commodified and less about the user experience and more about the advertising, then it became less connected to our real lives. We kind of fled away from it as well. But I’m nostalgic for that version of online socializing where it felt more like your real life—the 100 or 500 even connections that you actually wanted to have, you could manage on Facebook, and that was really useful.

EO

I think the reason I enjoy Zoom so much is because it reminds me of iChat or AIM.

KC

Totally. The real time presence. That’s another thing about the real time context. I remember on Facebook or even earlier on AIM, there were times of day where people were more likely to be online. Now it’s all the time, being ambiently online, getting push alerts on your phone. And that’s a harsh change. It didn’t used to be that ‘always on’ connection. It had more actual connection to the routines of your life and now it doesn’t.

EO

It has eclipsed so many creative arcs. But I’d like to hear you talk more about this moment online specifically in 2008. That’s a really specific year for tech, following the financial crash.

KC

Yeah, it was funny to think about. I graduated college in 2010. So we were watching the students older than us graduate into the great recession and not find jobs and feel like everything was hopeless. But at the same time, there were more things happening online. I was on Twitter in 2008-2009, being like, “Oh wait, there’s a whole economy and media industry on Twitter, on Facebook. You can reach people and communicate with people.”

EO

That’s exactly right. Let’s map it out. There was Facebook, which introduced "likes" in 2009. There was the financial crash, and 2009 is when I signed up for Twitter while I was a freshman in high school.

KC

I think it was a growing awareness that the tech industry was going to be where the next economy happened, and the sense that no one’s just going to give you a job. No one’s going to get grandfathered into this economy of jobs and internships. You have to make it for yourself and find it for yourself. And the way to do that was online. That was the beginning of that idea that you have to put a billboard for yourself out there on the internet and tweet a lot about your expertise and clean your drinking photos off of Facebook. The internet became a resume builder.

EO

That’s a good way to put it. How did you make sense of that shift? I was young enough where we’d use them socially, as a new form of experimentation. Facebook was a new medium to communicate your brand with everyone and which community that you belonged to.

KC

In that time period, there were different competing platforms before Facebook bought Instagram. Tumblr was still active, a very mainstream social network. Different languages and different cultures evolved on all of those different platforms. If you were a specific kind of person, you could find your kind of people on a specific platform that you couldn’t find elsewhere. You could find your media nerds and type A politics—people on Twitter who were just constantly shouting about stuff. You could find the weird niche cultural people on Tumblr organizing mood boards of ’90s fashion. And I think that became lost too, with the kind of homogenization of platforms and the way that every company has tried to do everything.

EO

What was it like meeting culture from that purview?

KC

In the 2000s when I was online in late high school and early college, social interactions on the internet were based around forums and message boards. And online video games were becoming more popular. This was pre-World of Warcraft, pre-Call of Duty. So what was out there was mostly Japanese and Korean, MMORPGs—multiplayer online role-playing games—and more nerdy shit, really. But I think that socialization was so disconnected from real life. It had nothing to do with who you were in the real world or what your profession was, or it was all enclosed in the digital space. It wasn’t about finding an influence to make or design fashion or something. You were purely existing online and crafting your presence there. Where to me, when the shift toward digital platforms and digitizing real life came, it felt more like personal brands became a thing. Your online presence began to influence your offline life in a way that it didn’t before. And so there was this pressure to craft a particular kind of image that also reinforced your real life identity.

EO

One of the things that you talked about in terms of “curating your life” really struck me as I was reading the book. I really do believe that studying art has been so essential in terms of understanding the architecture of the internet and culture more broadly. Everything is architecture and has its own logic, structure, narrative, and system that refines and regurgitates and produces new variables, standards. But art theory provided me with the actual language and frameworks to understand and interpret these systems. And I’m curious if you feel the same way, because you started out working in art, but then pivoted to writing rigorously about technology and culture.

KC

Yeah. I feel like the internet world works more like the art world than not. There’s so much overlap. The internet is primarily visual culture. We study art history to understand how visual culture changes and operates. We focus on the movements and the shifts and rebellions that happen through art history that inform the present. This framework provides a productive model for how culture evolves on the internet.

EO

What was it like studying art history in high school? And how did it mutate and evolve in college?

KC

It’s a good question. I started studying art history senior year of high school and studied it through college, and then landed a job in the art world. I’m from Connecticut. In high school, I studied AP Art History. So it was like, “Learn the book of western art history and learn art history in one year.” What is it H.W. Janson? The big blue book, History of Art, which was great. [Laughs.] It was so inspiring. But then I was also in an afterschool weekly program at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, which focused on contemporary art. So that was when I started to understand what a curator was or that such things existed. I was amazed that there were people whose job it was to work with artists and decide what goes in galleries. That was mind blowing.

EO

In my senior year of high school, in Los Angeles, I took a museum studies class. We spent a lot of time at LACMA, the Norton Simon Museum, and Getty Museum. We also went around to all the galleries like Blum & Poe, Regen Projects, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology and others. In retrospect, this period is the perfect encapsulation of the commercialization of my interests. It's when I recognized that there’s a market within crafting narratives through visual culture, while I was also being hyperactive on Tumblr. Blogging made clear monumentality and potential commerciality of the museum and gallery as a context, platform, and product.

KC

Well, you start to realize that there’s an industry at work here. It’s not just art history. It’s not just the big blue book. It’s the people who are making commercial markets happen, who are promoting their own artists, and reflecting the interests of gangs of very wealthy collectors. [Laughs.] And the art world is driven by business first and foremost. It’s not driven by the interests of art historians. So that was a shift in my thinking for sure. But maybe in terms of the internet, that speaks to how tech companies commodified the more freewheeling organic stuff that was happening.

EO

What happened in college?

KC

I studied art history at Tufts University. I was interested in contemporary art, but there’s not that many contemporary art studies programs, like museum studies, at that kind of place. So I focused on more historical subjects at school. I had an amazing Latin American art history professor who taught postcolonial art history theory, which was incredible. And a great medieval art history professor who talked a lot about semiotics and postmodern interpretation of medieval artifacts. Then I got an internship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the contemporary department. I was so excited to get that internship and see what this world was like on the inside. But I found it incredibly boring. That was another wake up moment where I realized that the work of a museum was so much caretaking. Curation is a lot of caretaking. I initially had this sense that all curators did was make up shows, and create cool exhibitions, but that isn’t the case.

What I did for most of that summer was update the card catalog of where collection objects were held. And I’m like, “Oh shit. There’s a lot of that kind of work here.” It’s a giant warehouse of stuff that you have to deal with. It’s a lot of logistics. So that experience and the art history studies pushed me more into art criticism because it turned out that art criticism was what I liked about art history, which is the active interpretation of what was out there. The act of bringing information to an audience who didn’t know so much about it. You can achieve more at a faster pace with writing than you could actually organize the shows. That takes five years at least.

EO

It’s funny because museums still control the narrative. While they can’t contextualize what’s happening in real time because of the lag, once they do it changes the receptions of these theories and movements. When you realized the shift, what did criticism mean to you at that point? Who was it? I am not saying Jerry Saltz–

KC

No, but it was Jerry Saltz. My parents were not big media consumers. I didn’t grow up reading magazines, I only started reading them in college, like The Village Voice. And then I was encountering Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, and the art blogs like the Art Fag City and Hyperallergic. That’s what I was consuming and what my image of art criticism was at the time.

It was a curiosity that was driven by knowing what was happening in New York. I was in Boston, it wasn’t far away, but I only went to New York a few times a year. It was reading Roberta Smith at The New York Times for cultural art happening on the scene, and Jerry Saltz to get a view of the latest big MoMA show. Or reading Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker to get a real art historical viewpoint on something that’s happening at the time. And then reading the art blogs to get the contemporary discourse of what was happening at the galleries from Chelsea to Bushwick. The blogs gave me context of the different scenes in the artworld. With museums, they were an extension of an academic practice but now that’s changing and they’re participating more on the market level. .

EO

What was your first job?

KC

After college I got a job working for this art magazine, Leap, in Beijing because I studied abroad there in 2008. When I graduated in 2010, I was like, I can’t find a job or internship anywhere in America. Then this art magazine editor and curator, who I had a contact for was like, “Yeah, we can pay you a grand a month to come live in Beijing. You’ll be fine.” So I did that for six months or something. Then I got offered a job as a staff writer at Hyperallergic. I had no idea what I was doing. I think I got that job because I tweeted a lot. And hopefully my writing was good. [Laughs.] But that was the reason that I moved to Brooklyn and kind of got involved in the whole contemporary art world there.

EO

Was the power with the mega galleries or museums at that point?

KC

The art world has so many different sectors. I had tried and failed to get internships at Chelsea galleries. I did an interview with a dealer who had a Rothko sitting in the chair next to me. I remember feeling like, “I don’t belong here.” The Brooklyn art world was the place I felt very at home. The power was mostly in the cool underground alternative art spaces, artist-run galleries, open studio weekends, it was all super DIY and accessible even to someone who was an outsider.. It was far away from the world of Chelsea galleries entering the mega gallery era. It was only just starting in 2010. There wasn’t a sense of Gagosian becoming a worldwide conglomerate yet.

EO

What was it like socializing in those spaces?

KC

To me, it was just a bunch of people partying in Brooklyn. As with any era, it was a bunch of bars, studio buildings, and restaurants in Williamsburg and Bushwick, which were moving out of their seedy bohemian phase and moving into the hyper-gentrified luxury brand phase. It was a lot of meeting artists, doing studio visits, going to open studios, learning what an art fair was, and talking to young curators. My scene at that point was this emerging generation of artists that were beginning to make work on the internet and about the internet, in the form of blogs,social media accounts, andwebsites. That was also where the action was happening. Being online was part of participating in the art world at that point.

EO

I look back at articles written in 2016 and I’m like, “They were actually quoting Facebook as a primary source.” It’s wild. In Filterworld, you talk a lot about trying to cheat the algorithms of Facebook, which you call the “the recommendation systems.” You write about embedding the articles in other popular threads for engagement purposes. It was funny to read you write about marriage announcements on Facebook, because when I was in high school, there was a culture of announcing college acceptances as status updates, which was done in poor taste in retrospect. [Laughs.] It was just like, “Status: I got into Yale!,” or some people would wait until the very end and then be like, “Got into Yale, Brown, Harvard, and waitlisted at Haverford,” which would have like 3,000 likes. It was weird because we didn’t understand the significance of what we were doing. We just lived alongside the internet.

KC

At the same time the Brooklyn art world was developing, the media industry was also going through a huge change because of the rise of indie blogging, which was seen as rebellious and interesting and new. You had the Gawker network of blogs, and you had tiny ones like Hyperallergic that were trying to make money on their own. But then there was a flood of venture capital that was pouring in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which commodified digital media. It was the beginning of BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and Vice. Brooklyn culture became synonymous with Vice.

EO

That’s when the terms of the internet were being reassessed and defined. Though, it was a time when these still platforms felt very DIY. Each platform was so writer and editor driven. For whatever reason, I associate Vice with Jackass. [Insert Spike Jonze.]

KC

Well, they were synonymous and shared that spirit of rebellious stupidity.

EO

Yes, and also raw documentation, provided an immediate lens and vehicle for criticality to flourish.

KC

All of it was commodifying found media and user-generated media online, and that was what BuzzFeed was doing too—taking viral clips or viral tweets and aggregating and reposting them, and then making money off the traffic that was created. But it was a different era of media, it wasn’t about Conde Nast, and driven by Vogue. It was about Vice being in Brooklyn and making videos at a club in Brooklyn. They created a different image of aspirational culture that hadn’t existed before and didn’t depend so much on the old elite voices and instead relied on rich venture capitalists.

EO

Can you actually speak about what BuzzFeed and Vox did and how they infiltrated culture? There were stars of these publications who became media personalities, or went on to create television, like Quinta Brunson and Issa Rae. It also created room for experimental comedy like Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s Broad City. We really saw this generation being born in real time.

KC

Yeah. It was because they could distribute themselves too. I think social media and the internet gave people the option to broadcast their own material. And you didn’t need a cable TV channel, you didn’t need an MTV show, you didn’t need anything but yourself to broadcast media. You could suddenly just upload a video on YouTube. Or post on Gawker or Tumblr or Twitter—suddenly everyone had access to the kind of reach that news anchors had before.

EO

In Filterworld, you talk about the timelines of these platforms now being institutions themselves. I was so taken with how Flickr was started in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Instagram in 2010, and then I was thinking about the impact MTV had on culture in the 1980s. The crazy thing to me is that YouTube is almost 20 years old. And Instagram’s is nearing its 15th anniversary.

KC

These platforms have become the old regimes. They feel traditional. And now what’s rebellious is going back to work for old sources of prestige, like Vogue…

EO

Can you talk about migrating to Substack? You were there very early on,then started to build out Study Hall, which was a new platform for freelance and media workers to inhabit.

KC

I was working as a freelance writer because there were a lot of random media properties out there. And I could make a decent living just writing stuff on the internet. And for Study Hall, similar to people who can broadcast their videos to reach big audiences, suddenly anyone could build a media structure on the internet. So it wasn’t just about you personally. I think anyone could suddenly build a magazine or start a newsletter, and I think we’re living in a Substack era now. But I think that actually started around 2015, 2016, and cemented in 2017 with Patreon and Kickstarter. I realized that you could create a media product where people could pay you for directly that was only online. I wanted to create a platform that addressed the community that I was in, which was freelance digital media workers.

EO

There’s this line you have about economy workers, where you write, “our freelance economy made us all entrepreneurs.” But the truth is that even those who are salaried aren’t treated any better. [Laughs.]

KC

The internet has made us all entrepreneurs, not by choice necessarily or by desire, but now you have to be one.

EO

We’ve been made entrepreneurs by design.

KC

Certainly. Now you’re always out for yourself, because you can always reach an audience that’s just yours alone. And I think that’s really powerful. But also, not everyone wants to do that or be a personality in public. And I don’t think everyone should have to be. Now, we’re in an interesting phase where the most powerful media companies are the most traditional, which is The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker or The Atlantic. And those are places that don’t necessarily embrace the same cult personalities that Vice or Gawker did. The age of the casual internet celebrity is over in favor of a Mr. Beast-type who is optimized to an inch of his life. And figures like that are not even interesting as people, they are just a vehicle for content.

EO

I’ve been thinking about X, formerly known as Twitter, and my “for you” page recently. This algorithm reflects what my original feed used to look like in 2015.

KC

I think that Twitter falling apart and the general ennui with the social part of the internet has made things more functional in a way because we’re less obsessed with going viral. There’s less reward for building up that personal audience, because I think people are realizing it’s not super sustainable to capture value when it’s the tech companies who hold so much of that power.

EO

Yes, and it makes me think of the TikTok boom in the middle of the pandemic, which turned so many people into micro celebrities overnight.

KC

It definitely got popular in the U.S. during the pandemic, all of a sudden everyone was so online that they were forced to confront the quality of online life. And two years later we’re like, “Actually, the shit sucks so much.” [Laughs.]

EO

Trust me, I want to be anywhere but online! Before the pandemic, there was a community for people online and the people “offline” didn’t have to participate in that culture, it was its own thing. People weren’t held accountable to the trends, news, or these general kinds of social happenings in the same way. The pandemic flattened and leveled the playing field by changing the rules where you now had to know what’s happening on a more granular level to be an authority.

KC

I think you’re totally right that it made it impossible to be offline anymore. You couldn’t opt out. Because the internet was all that existed. And now to say, “I’m offline,” is almost perverse. It’s like either you’re doing that to be cool and niche because you think the next wave is to be offline, which could be right. [Laughs.] Or you’re like my friends in Washington D.C. who are lawyers who just don’t give a shit about what’s on the internet because their lives don’t intersect with that at all. Maybe lawyers are a bad example because they’re very online. But yeah, it felt like suddenly all of the internet’s influence on reality came to the fore. And it showed us how influential it was, and then maybe we realized that was not such a good thing after all.

EO

Can we talk about the engineers who are coding and structuring these platforms? What is the responsibility of an engineer?

KC

Yes, I think people forget there is human interference. It’s pretty clear to me that the tech companies don’t treat culture with any kind of reverence for ethical or moral responsibility. The ideology of Silicon Valley and the engineers is maximizing engagement, scale, and the reach of a platform. It’s not about creating great art or music or design or writing. It’s just about addictive attention mechanics that get you to spend more time on the platform. So I think curation in a way is the antidote to that, where the internet does give us access to everything. There’s so much stuff available on YouTube that you would never have found decades ago, which is amazing. But you need human people to surface things, to find them, to contextualize what is found on the internet. I think we thought algorithmic feeds would help us make sense of the internet–to sort it into a meaningful order–but actually they didn’t. That did not work out. That has failed. How we actually need to make sense of the internet is human curation. It’s important for real people to tell us what is meaningful and provide context.And I think that’s what we feel is missing and what we’re trying to get back and reconnect to. But the platforms that we have right now are not really built for it.

EO

Can we even afford to create them in this economy?

KC

There’s a lot of inertia right now because the mainstream platforms are so huge. There’s a billion people on Facebook and TikTok. In order to grow a new platform, you need people to use it,be enthusiastic and get something out of using it, and that’s really hard when so much action and attention is being given to these old platforms. But I think it has to be grassroots. I heard this great quote the other day from The Verge’s Decoder podcast. The editor-in-chief Nilay Patel was like, “When you are having fun on the internet, other people will come find you and have fun also.” And I thought that was the best encapsulation of what culture should be online. If you and some of your friends are doing cool, fun stuff, people will come find you and want to join in. That’s just a human force that exists and is enabled online. It’s just that the platforms commodify and amplify that connection. They take it out of our grip. They take away our agency, but we still want the fun of it. We still want to go on a website and see something cool.

EO

How does traditional publishing factor into this?

KC

I think the best capacity for books is to be concerned with long-term thought, to consider something at length, at a scale and depth, that is not possible online. You have to do the work of assembling all this writing, thinking about it, putting it into a book. It’s like one object that also contains multitudes. And I think that’s still very powerful. It’s like the product of a book forces you to have a lot of thoughts, crystallize them, and then put them into a finite form. Whereas on the internet, everything is always changing and updating and going away and coming back. I find that physical artifact appealing. And the internet loves swag. The internet loves tote bags and T-shirts and stickers and artifacts of the things you like. I think a book is swag in a way. A book is a physical symbol of your ideas and your preferences and your allegiances, and that’s also a good role for it to play.

EO

In terms of these media companies folding, layoffs, and everything else, I don’t think people seriously considered the archive being lost online. We’ve lost information that won’t be recovered.

KC

No, the online archive hasn’t been considered at all. That’s a real problem. I always think about how I can’t experience the art that was being made on YouTube or Tumblr, circa 2010 ever again. It doesn’t exist anymore. The context is gone, but I can experience it in a book like if, when those artists make catalogs of their work, when they put together a zine, or even make a print that is a physical artifact of their work that survives past the ephemeral digital platforms. That’s the scary part of the internet, and I think we’re realizing that it’s much less permanent than we thought it was.

EO

I’m curious to hear you speak to that in terms of what we’ve known historically.

KC

What we know of culture of the past is that the physical things that are preserved survive. Art history is built on physical relics that are just fragments of what was once there. There’s this fantasy that the internet would somehow prove to be an infinite archive of every human thought that ever happened in these preceding decades. And I’m sure that will partly be true. Hopefully there will be backups, but there’s an austerity to that and a lack that’s still there. Just because you have the objects and text, doesn’t mean you are going to know how things worked in this moment. Just because you can see 100 tweets doesn’t mean that you know what it was like to be on Twitter in 2011 or whatever. I don’t think that experience survives into the future, and it’s up to us to capture it in some way, whether that’s making art or writing a book about it.

EO

How did it feel writing a book about this? It’s a novel meets auto-fiction.

KC

Someone tweeted that my book was almost a millennial coming-of-age novel. [Laughs.]

EO

That’s literally what it feels like.

KC

Yes. And I love that. I think that’s ideally what it should be. But to write about the internet, I could only do it historically. It’s not about 2023, it’s about 2009 through 2020. I don’t really get into the pandemic that much. I had to bracket it into this period of time, that I knew happened, and how it happened, and when it started and ended. And so that was the way I could contextualize it and make it finite.

EO

Do you resonate with it being a coming-of-age novel?

KC

It’s one of my favorite interpretations of it, because that’s also what it felt like writing it. In the end, I was like, “Oh, this is an intellectual memoir,” in a way of how my sensibility existed and the ideas that I consumed and the spaces that I lived through. It’s also great because to me so much nonfiction is very dry and Wikipedia-ish or just plain unengaging history. To have someone say, “Oh, it’s like a novel, and a memoir,” means that the writing is successful. It convinces you that there’s a human thought behind it,a subjective presence, and that you’re coming into contact with my brain.

EO

It relates back to your thinking on White Noise, where you write, “It reminded me of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, in which the college professor protagonist travels into the countryside with his colleague, Murray, to see the most photographed barn in America. Nothing makes the barn particularly remarkable except its notoriety. A fictional pre-internet meme, observing the crowd of photographers around the barn, Murray says, ‘We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. No one sees the barn,’ he concludes. ‘They are taking pictures of taking pictures in a filter world, it becomes hard to separate the nature of something or its reality from its popularity in terms of attention. Popularity alone often gets confused for meaning or significance,’ as in the case of Don DeLillo’s barn.”

KC

The reality of things is confused by their presence on the internet–how many likes they’re getting, how many views, what’s more popular than something else. I think we’ve lost track of how to evaluate things not based on attention and popularity.

EO

Let’s talk about architecture in Filterworld. You write, “The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was fluent in international convergence. His firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, worked across Europe in the nineties and became known for daring conceptual buildings that weren’t always actually built. Koolhaas’s designs were otherworldly. OMA’s 1996 Hyper-building, which looks like several skyscrapers crouched together at sharp angles, could be built anywhere as a self-contained city for 120,000,” as the firm’s description ran: “The building is structured as a metaphor of the city: towers constitute streets, horizontal elements are parks, volumes are distinct, and diagonals are boulevards.” The characterlessness of the architecture, its easy merger into the burgeoning realm of non-places was a purposeful part of the design–an aesthetic that embraces the generic. Koolhaas described his philosophy in a 1995 essay titled “The Generic City,” which is one of those short pieces of writing that you read once and it never leaves your mind. Its sharp declarations of aesthetic and architectural theory have proven prophetic in the twenty-first century.” Why did you gravitate towards Koolhaas?

KC

Rem Koolhaas was early on to recognize the consequences of cultural globalization, and that was because his firm was working internationally and designing buildings for a globalized society. He was really early on to work with Chinese clients. I think his insect antennae were like, “Oh, I know, I can see this is going to happen to everything. This is not just about buildings. This is civilization.” He was a filmmaker before he decided to embark on being an architect.. So I think that sort of storytelling drove his theories about architecture.

EO

In the introduction to Filterworld, you write, “As the Indian literary theorist Gayatri Spivak wrote in 2012, “Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.” How did you get from Gayatri Spivak to Koolhaas?

KC

Rem’s really emphasizing the benefits and strengths of the generic in a globalized world. He’s very ironic and sarcastic about it, but he is recognizing the power of the generic whereas the Spivak quote really drove the entire book. It was the epigraph for a long time.

EO

Yes, that’s what it feels like. You’re using these examples to conflate the global, local, social and cultural all at once.

KC

In Gayatri’s quote, she’s talking about the discontents of globalization and the negative consequences of it. She’s recognizing what becomes globalized is not the person, it’s not the building, and it’s not even the nation state. It’s the capital and the data. Those are the most liquid commodities of our world: information and money. My interpretation of that quote is that all else follows from the globalization of information and money. Culture is like a downstream consequence. It shows the influence of that change. It’s only determined by the globalization of capital and data.