Say hello to December's book of the month

When it came to choosing the final Curious pick for 2024, I wondered which direction to go. It's the start of gift-giving season—so, maybe something classic? Or perhaps, at the end of a tumultuous year, something fresh and new? There is a lot new reading around at the moment but it’s mostly political… which means there's lots of sound and fury and not much signal. I didn't want noise, I wanted something that helped make sense of the world we live in.

So with that frame in mind, I dragged my eyes down the list of everything I'd read this past year, and one answer stuck out straight away: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka.

It's our December book of the month, and copies are on their way to club members right now. (Want to get a copy? It’s easy to sign up for just $25 per month.)

Filterworld is about the way we consume media through feeds and recommendations. It's about “The Algorithm” in a broad sense: the concept that machines don't just do tastemaking for us now, but that their demands inevitably shape how new art looks, feels, and sounds. It's a book that explores how the internet takes an almost infinite landscape of ideas and ends up grinding it up into a kind of creative equivalent of pink slime.

Chayka, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker, is a clean and pacey writer who follows the twists and turns of culture from his own perspective (a slightly gimmicky digital detox) and through the eyes of others. He diagnoses some of the flatness we see, and suggests a few ways to remedy it.

I don't know that I agree with everything it argues, even though I share some of its anxieties and its nostalgia. But I do know that when I read this book in February, I devoured it.

In fact, I have a distinct memory of finishing this book while sitting in a parking lot outside a fairly remote Northern California bakery during some extremely heavy rain (tip: try the bear claws at Gold Coast in Duncan's Mills, they are immense in every way.) I read this book hungrily as I munched on my pastry, and enjoyed being in conversation with it all the way through—and I hope you feel the same.

Next stop, 2025.

Onward

Bobbie