From the New Yorker's most exciting young writers: a brilliant breakdown of how algorithms have shaped our physical and artistic worlds.

One of the BBC's most anticipated books for 2024
An i-D non-fiction book of 2024
A Stylist non-fiction book of 2024

'An essential book' i-D

What happens when our cultural and artistic lives are dictated to us by an algorithm? What does it mean when shareability supersedes innovation? How can we make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us?

From coffee shops to city grids to TikTok feeds and Netflix homepages the world over, algorithmic recommendations prescribe our experiences. This network of mathematically determined choices - the 'Filterworld' - has taken over, almost unnoticed, as we've grown accustomed to an insipid new normal. But to have our tastes, behaviours, and emotions governed by computers calls the very notion of free will into question.

Internationally recognized journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka journeys through this ever-tightening web woven by algorithms. He explores how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption. How the lowest common denominator is promoted at the expense of the complex, diverse or challenging. How users of technology contend with data-driven equations that promise to anticipate their desires but often get them wrong. How the FIlterworld is determining the very shape of culture itself.

Chayka skilfully and compellingly traces this creeping, machine-guided curation that influences not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced. In doing so, he attempts to answer to the most urgent question currently facing us: is personal freedom ever again possible on the Internet?

Filterworld is a fascinating history of the rise of the algorithm and an important investigation into where it could take us next - if we let it.

"'An essential book for anyone questioning if their phones are "listening" to them.'" - i-D

"'Fascinating and deeply enlightening'" - Spectator

"'Chilling ... evocative ... incisive'" - Wall Street Journal

"'Brings stark clarity to the formulas that guide our behaviours online ... it does the near impossible: it makes algorithms, those dull formulas of inputs and outputs, fascinating'" - The Atlantic

"'Unlike the cascade of content from strangers on the internet, Filterworld, as a proper book will, evokes less transient impulses than genuine, lingering feelings: depression about our big-box corporate dystopia and admiration for Chayka's curiosity and clear writing style'" - New York Times

"'If our old tech anxiety amounted to well-founded paranoia ("Are they tracking me? Of course they are."), the new fear in Filterworld is more existential: "Do I really like this? Am I really like this?" ...[With Filterworld] Chayka offers an alternative to the numbing flow of the feed'" - Esquire

"'Filterworld nearly vibrates ... Chayka brings his background as an art critic and curator to the fore. He positions curators as a potential salve for our current cultural malaise, a sort of anti-Mechanical Turk that rejects computational sleights of hand in favor of deep, patient research'" - Los Angeles Review of Books

"'Filterworld is the kind of book worth wrestling with, critiquing, and absorbing deeply'" - Elle Magazine

"'Intriguing - and distressing ... Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity'" - Kirkus Reviews

"'Chayka's logic is seductive. The internet of today, where Filterworld's impact is most keenly felt, is both less weird and more corporate than anyone who lived through the GeoCities era could have possibly imagined. There's a palpable sense of grief in Filterworld when Chayka describes the walls of the internet closing in as it consolidated onto privately owned platforms'" - Washington Post