My favorite bookstore has long been McNally Jackson, a collection of New York City–area stores whose first location was in SoHo. Though it wasn’t in any way personalized, it always felt like the store was there for me personally, like it understood what I was looking for, because its stock was both so broad and so specific.
Many of the books stacked on display were recent releases, but there was also a selection of the books the store’s staff decided were worth a closer look, a collective act of curation. An academic work of philosophy from a small press was nestled next to popular nonfiction; the fiction table didn’t just hold novels but poetry, zines, fictionalized memoirs, and hybrid-genre books. The arrangements always seemed to say: Just trust us.
The contents of the McNally tables shifted on a weekly basis. Behind each rearrangement I felt the hand that selected the book, an individual intelligence, rather than a singular formula. Browsing was a way of discovering new things; one could argue that Amazon’s formula of “if you like this, you’ll like that” functions similarly, but the connections at McNally were less direct and literal. They expanded the shopper’s idea of what a particular category could contain.
If the Amazon bookstore represents the triumph of algorithmic logic, then McNally is the pinnacle of human tastemakers, the word we often use for the people who sort and select the culture that we consume. Booksellers are tastemakers, but so are librarians who recommend titles for their patrons, professional buyers for lifestyle boutiques, radio-station DJs, movie booking agents who advocate on behalf of films to theaters nationwide, and concert programmers who book bands for venues.
These tastemakers all provide an interface between the creators of culture and its consumers. They constantly gather and judge new material to determine how and why it may resonate with audiences—a process that now falls under the broad banner of the word curation.
Behind each arrangement I felt the hand that selected the book, an individual intelligence, rather than a singular formula.
It’s easy to overlook the fact that when consuming content through digital platforms, what we see at a given moment is determined more directly by equations than such tastemakers. With Netflix’s home page, Facebook’s feed, and Spotify’s automated radio, there is no direct influence from editor, DJ, or booker, but, rather, a mathematical processing of crowdsourced data stretching to encompass every user on the site. The curation, such as it is, is automated, scaled up until it’s beyond the grasp of any individual person. Through our algorithmic feeds, we get only the Amazon retail experience, not the McNally curatorial eye.
Prior to streaming and social media, culture often felt relatively scarce and finite. Either you had access to something or you didn’t. One of my earliest memories of multimedia is this: as kids, my younger brother and I would turn on the television early every weekday morning to try to catch a Super Mario cartoon. We’d make sure to have a VHS tape loaded in the VCR, because we wanted to witness and capture a specific episode, like taping a song from the radio onto a cassette.
One special episode, I recall, had something to do with Mario rescuing Yoshi from a fiery dungeon. After we saw it the first time, it acquired mythical status in our minds, but we could access it only by chance through cable programming. There was no way to Google it or stream the vintage show online. Our luck had to be twofold: the episode had to be on that day, and it had to record successfully onto the waiting tape. (The tape was not always reliable.) Only then would we fully possess it and be able to watch Super Mario at will.
The experience was slow and full of friction. Yet the challenge of holding on to the episode was why it acquired such a compelling aura for me. I invested so much time and emotional energy into it that I still remember it some twenty years later, although now it remains on a VHS tape lost in the bowels of that house. I can’t say the same for any piece of generic digital content delivered through a feed. We might discover things in our feeds, but we must grab on and dig deeper into them for ourselves before they disappear once more into the ether.
The slower and more careful approach is to seek out these seams of culture yourself and chart your path, bookmarking accounts, connecting with other people interested in the same things, and comparing notes. This is a more conscious and intentional form of consumption—a form that was mandatory before feeds made it so easy to outsource our choices about what to consume online. It recalls the term connoisseur.
The slower, self-managed approach to culture is . . . more sustainable and more respectful of culture, treating it as something important rather than ephemeral, merely fodder for brief attention spans.
The benefit of the slower, self-managed approach to culture is that it might lead to a greater appreciation of the content at hand, and you might be able to lead another person down the same path that you followed, showing them how to appreciate the same things. It’s more sustainable and more respectful of culture, treating it as something important rather than ephemeral, merely fodder for brief attention spans. Flipping through so much incoherently assembled content in our feeds, we don’t have the opportunity to assimilate it, to learn and understand, much less pass on that understanding to others.
Digging deeper was once the default task of finding culture, particularly on the early internet. My first introduction to anime was Dragonball-Z on American cable in the late nineties, but when I wanted to find more complex storytelling than its endless adolescent battles, I had to go online. I found forums where much more experienced anime fans debated their favorites, not in order to gain followers or monetize their expertise as on today’s platforms, but out of personal passion.
Those forums were “communities of consumption,” a term that academics have used to describe the diverse groups of people that congregate online around a particular shared pursuit, whether swapping product tips or discussing avant-garde literature. The likes of Twitter and Facebook, with their unstable interfaces and manipulative algorithms, are less conducive to mutual learning.
From the clichés of Dragonball I progressed, thanks to forum recommendations. I found out how much further there was to go in my own connoisseurship when I discovered Yoshitoshi ABe’s series. ABe created an anime called Haibane Renmei, which translates to “Charcoal Feather Federation.” Years later I discovered that the show was inspired by Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, originally published in 1985. One piece of culture led to the other, and I followed that thread.
The novel and the anime share a mood, a vocabulary, and a philosophy—they both feature walled towns, a certain lo-fi steampunk aesthetic, and the narrative of comprehending your life in a new way by traveling through a different world, which may or may not be part of the real one. Haibane Renmei was one of my first cultural discoveries that truly felt like my own—something new that I encountered in silence. I intuited that most of the people around me wouldn’t necessarily like or understand the show, but it nevertheless spoke deeply to me. It was personal.
We should talk even more about the things we like, experience them together, and build up our own careful collections of likes and dislikes. Not for the sake of fine-tuning an algorithm, but for our collective satisfaction.
In his 1983 book The Gift, Lewis Hyde defines artwork as something freely given by the artist through her creative act, no matter where it ends up: “A work of art contains the spirit of the artist’s gift.” But in a way, taste can be a gift, too. It costs nothing to introduce someone to a new piece of culture that you think they might like, and the act might benefit all parties involved. Culture, after all, is not a one-to-many broadcast system but a peer-to-peer network, where we collectively determine what means the most to us by intentionally sharing it. As Hyde wrote, “The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.”
Having to consciously accrue a collection and think through what you enjoy most about a particular creator or body of culture means becoming a connoisseur. The term has a pretentious quality, but we can become connoisseurs of anything: reality TV shows, noise music, apple pie recipes.
What we gain with algorithmic feeds in terms of availability—having instant access to a broad range of material to be scanned at will—we lose in connoisseurship, which requires depth and intention. It’s ultimately a form of deep appreciation, for what the artist has done as well as the capacities of our own tastes.
Recommender systems, then, are a much more abstracted version of this exchange. Within them, our net behaviors are aggregated by an algorithm, then crunched and averaged and spit back out to create templates of consumption that are imposed on other people. In the guise of speeding it up, it actually impedes that organic development of culture and instead prioritizes flatness and sameness, the aesthetics that are the most transmissible across the networks of digital platforms.
My book, Filterworld, is an attempt to recapture recommendations from recommender systems. We should talk even more about the things we like, experience them together, and build up our own careful collections of likes and dislikes. Not for the sake of fine-tuning an algorithm, but for our collective satisfaction. Though the word might get overused on the internet, what we really need is more curation—the cultivation and deployment of personal taste.
Adapted from Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. Published by Doubleday. Copyright © 2024 by Kyle Chayka. All rights reserved.
