Surfing the Overload. Escaping Algorithmic Sameness

Luigi Vitali in conversation with Kyle Chayka

Kyle Chayka has spent much of the past decade trying to understand what the internet is doing to culture. Through his work for The New Yorker, his newsletters, and books like The Longing for Less and Filterworld, he has mapped how algorithms and platform dynamics have altered not only what we consume, but how we perceive taste, identity, authorship, and attention itself.

At the core of Chayka’s work is a simple but far-reaching argument: digital platforms do not merely distribute culture—they actively shape it. In Filterworld, he describes how recommendation algorithms, engagement metrics, and platform incentives produce a global aesthetic of sameness, flattening difference into content that is easily circulated, recognised, and consumed. What appears as infinite choice often results in increasing uniformity.

Long before discussions around AI became unavoidable, Chayka was tracing the emergence of a culture increasingly organised around optimisation, visibility, and performance. In this world, people are encouraged to turn themselves into brands, shaping how they present their identities, interests, and creativity to fit the demands of platforms and online audiences.

DUST sat down with him for a conversation that felt somewhere between an interview and a mentoring session, discussing the insidious architectures of the feed, what escapes its logic of commodification, and whether an independent magazine can still create friction within systems engineered to eliminate it.

Luigi Vitali — You know, for those of us running independent magazines, the question is whether we can still create friction within the structure—and whether anybody even cares about it. As you say, the system is designed for smooth circulation. So how do you create friction inside a structure built to eliminate it?

Kyle Chayka — You keep doing that. Friction is exactly what works against this whole structure. The platforms we’ve become used to over the past decade are all about speed. They’re about removing friction and consuming as quickly as possible at the highest possible volume.

To work against that, you have to slow things down. You have to throw a wrench in the gears. You have to create your own context for the work. Right now, the internet controls so much of how we consume and how we see things. If you want to make a video, it has to work on YouTube. If you want to write an article, it has to fit the logic of X or Twitter in some way. But if you create your own context—your own container for the work—that slows the whole process down. It gives the audience something different to experience and a different way to experience it.

So I think friction is incredibly valuable right now. People want it. They want to slow down. They want to get out of these feeds. I just think they don’t quite know how to do it. And it’s difficult to find ways of doing that short of logging off, reading a print magazine, or simply turning your phone off.

L.V. — That’s why we still believe in the magazine’s structure—as an analogue tool that slows things down. But at the same time, we’re working against the feed. We’re competing with the feed and with the way circulation works today. That’s the whole challenge. Even if you create your own context, you still have to compete with the feed.

K.C. — Yeah, that’s the irony of it all. To create culture, you first have to survive. You need to survive in order to make things. And you need an audience that can actually find your work, because it’s difficult to sustain art without one. The problem is that tech platforms now control both monetisation and discovery. They control how people find things. So we’re all forced to work through these channels, even when we’re trying to work against them.

L.V. — Which means embracing surface. Because surface is often just the way you reach people, the way you engage them. The real question is what happens after that. Once you’ve captured someone’s attention, how do you keep them there while still offering depth?

The idea behind this issue is to turn the magazine into one giant surface by making every page a cover—to erase the distinction between outside and inside, between surface and depth. Every image becomes a printed cover because every image is competing for attention. But if you have four hundred covers, then in a way you have no cover at all. That’s the paradox we’re interested in: what happens when everything becomes surface at once?

K.C. — That’s an interesting way of thinking about it, and there’s probably something there. I think magazines should experiment with all sorts of new ways of capturing attention off-screen. Whatever it is. I was recently looking at a magazine about cats—published by Broccoli, a really interesting independent publisher in the US. It was beautifully produced, but what struck me was that every page had some kind of physical intervention. There were glossy overlays, die-cut pages, and different printing techniques. There was an extra-sensory engagement with the object itself. Part of me thinks it’s a little silly. Shouldn’t a magazine page be enough? Shouldn’t it work without tricks or gimmicks? But it was genuinely more engaging because it offered an experience you simply can’t have online.

L.V. — I guess we’re all in the same boat then. Us and the cat magazine.

K.C. — Not only. I think every creator pushing back against the logic of the feed is trying to find ways to introduce friction back into the experience. For instance, there’s this American musician, Cindy Lee, who released an entire album exclusively through a website. It looked like an old GeoCities page. You could listen to the record there, but it was just one continuous two-hour piece of music. It wasn’t on Spotify. You couldn’t stream it anywhere else. There were no individual tracks, no way to jump around. That really struck me as a way of introducing friction into the experience of listening to an album. You have to spend time with the whole thing.

L.V. — Which is also a statement about authorship. It’s a refusal to let the platform dictate how the work should be experienced, and ultimately how it should perform within the system. Because that’s really the question, isn’t it? Authorship is progressively being taken away from us—first by platforms, and now by machine-generated content.

K.C. — I think my writing over the past—I don’t know—15 years or so has been observing how digital technology has kind of taken over human authorship, and how it influences our sense of creativity and the way we consume culture. To me, what happened over the 2010s and now into the 2020s with generative AI is that various digital platforms and tools have created dominant new aesthetics, cultural forms, and styles. The styles that emerge from them, the culture that is produced, are often more the result of the technology’s structure than of human originality.

Those platforms and technologies have increasingly come to control both cultural distribution and cultural creation. The way those tools are designed ends up shaping the culture that exists around them. And I think it’s actually a pretty literal thing to talk about a loss of human authorship.

If you’re a musician trying to succeed today, what you’re worrying about is no longer just a human listener. It’s not your fans. It’s: What does Spotify want from me? What does YouTube want from me? What does Instagram want from me? Your authorship ends up being dictated by Spotify, YouTube, or Instagram—not just by your own sense of artistry.

L.V. — We grew up thinking authorship was everything. And in a way, we’re living in a cultural environment where authorship no longer seems to matter.

K.C. — It’s interesting because people still desire authorship. But I think authorship has basically become personal branding. The role of the author today is to create the identity of the author. It’s no longer necessarily about imparting some kind of genius originality to the work itself. If you think about the twentieth-century modernist ideal of the artist, it was someone who existed on the outskirts of acceptable society, who made radical choices, lived in a radical way, and produced radical work. It wasn’t about building an acceptable personal brand that could attract Instagram followers and create a monetisable audience. So I suppose authorship today is increasingly about your own identity. It’s less about the authorship of the work you’re actually producing.

L.V. — Authorship is dying under the pressure to turn ourselves into brands. But what does identity mean in this context? You describe ambient sameness as one of the defining conditions of contemporary culture. We’re surrounded by the same feeds, the same references, the same trends. Everything tends to become the same, which encourages us to become the same in order to fit in. And yet we’re constantly instructed to be ourselves, to be authentic, to discover what makes us unique. How do those two dynamics coexist?

K.C. — That’s a good question. It reminds me of the hipster conundrum in the 2010s. Hipster culture was all about being yourself, having your own taste, and being authentic. But in the end, everybody liked the same bands, drank the same beer, wore the same trucker hats and plaid shirts.

I think the two things coexist because social media has created this ambient sameness. We’re all watching each other. We’re all gathered inside the same algorithmic feeds. And when everyone is exposed to the same things, the pressure to stand out becomes even stronger. You have to find what makes you different. You have to build a distinctive identity.

But individuality has been completely commodified. Finding your individuality is not the same thing as escaping the system. In fact, individuality is one of the things the system monetises most effectively. That’s what the influencer is.

The influencer is someone who finds an individual identity and then turns it into attention. So in a strange way, ambient sameness creates the economic need for individuality. Much of cultural evolution now depends on individuals discovering something new, posting about it, and building an audience around it. But once that succeeds, everyone copies it. Internet culture needs creative individuals to generate novelty so that everyone else can reproduce it. Over and over.

L.V. — I wonder if the way digital culture tends to flatten aesthetics—turning complexity into something immediately readable and easy to classify—is the same thing that’s happening to our inner lives. For instance, we seem increasingly unable to simply experience emotions without naming and categorising them. Teenagers today often describe themselves through clinical language—they don’t just say they’re sad, confused, or anxious. They immediately reach for diagnoses and labels. Do you think aesthetic flattening is also becoming a form of existential flattening?

K.C. — I think that’s a really good point. In a way, it’s the same dynamic we’ve been talking about all along. You have aesthetic sameness, and then you have this intense desire for individuality. One way people pursue that individuality today is through categorisation. Instead of allowing identity or emotions to develop organically, there’s a need to label everything and fit experiences into predefined categories.

Part of that comes from the internet itself. Online, you have to classify yourself. You have to fit into the right category, the right audience, the right stream of content. So I think social media has trained us to think of ourselves in terms of categories. And now there’s almost a mania for categorisation. We’ve lost some ability to simply experience life without documenting it, publishing it, or translating it into labels and trends. So yes, I think that’s a very real phenomenon, and it’s connected to the structure of social media itself.

L.V. — At the same time, more people now have language for experiences they didn’t know how to describe before. Maybe the problem isn’t categorisation itself. Maybe it’s the impulse to make everything immediately legible, without really digging into it.

K.C. — Exactly. I think that’s the paradox. Technology can help us understand ourselves better, but once a system encourages categorisation, it becomes difficult to resist. You start seeing yourself through the categories that are available to you. We’re trying to preserve our individuality within a system built around scale, and in the process, we end up doing all sorts of strange things.

L.V. — To exist online, we have to make it legible, sortable, shareable—because the system only really knows how to do one thing: turn everything into something that can circulate. Even our identities get pulled into that logic.

K.C. — To go further, the system turns everything into something that can circulate, but also something that can be commodified—and identity is no exception. Personal fulfilment is increasingly measured by visibility itself, regardless of what one actually does. You follow an influencer, they become successful, they start doing brand deals and sponsorships, and people congratulate them for it. They’re proud of them for effectively monetising themselves. That simply wasn’t the ethos in the 2000s, or the 2010s, certainly not in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.

 The creator as an economic engine has become the ideal. Success no longer necessarily means making great work. More and more, success means successfully monetising yourself. The highest form of achievement becomes sponsored content rather than an artistic masterpiece.

L.V. — Go figure. Selling out was almost a bad word. Now it seems like the main goal. If success was once measured by how effectively you challenged the system, now it’s measured by how effectively you can leverage it and turn yourself into something marketable. Do you still think there’s room for something genuinely meaningful to be made?

K.C. — Yeah, I think so. There’s always been popular mass culture and then smaller, more niche cultures where more experimentation and innovation happen. That hasn’t disappeared. I think the problem is that all of us—you, me, everyone participating in culture—are hustling online in one way or another. And that ecosystem is distracting. We see audiences, numbers, visibility, and people succeeding. It’s exciting. It’s seductive. And gradually it shifts our creative aspirations toward getting more followers, more attention, more money. So I think every day—or every time we try to make something—we’re making a choice. Do we make what seems likely to work online and attract attention? Or do we make exactly the thing we want to make? Do we express ourselves? That possibility is always there. We just don’t choose it very often because it’s easier, more glamorous, and more profitable to chase what people are already paying attention to. And when you do choose expression over optimisation, it’s less visible. People don’t necessarily see it happening because it’s not designed for the algorithmic feed. But ideally—as an artist—you make what you want to make, you’re satisfied with expressing yourself, and you’re satisfied with whoever finds it. It’s just a difficult way to survive.

L.V. — And in this case, being in an environment shaped by optimisation—where everything is designed to perform—what happens to everything else that doesn’t? What happens to images that aren’t efficient? Do they still have a place—or do they simply disappear?

K.C. — They disappear. The unoptimised image. The unoptimised song. The video that doesn’t immediately grab attention. They fall out of the feed. No one sees them unless another ecosystem directs attention towards them. There’s this essay by Hito Steyerl called In Defense of the Poor Image—have you read it?

L.V. — No, I guess I should.

K.C. — It’s really good. The essay looks at what happens to images once they start circulating online: they get copied, compressed, reposted, translated across platforms, and in the process, they lose resolution and become degraded. Steyerl calls this the ‘poor image’ — not just a low-quality file, but an image whose value comes from circulation rather than fidelity. The poor image is the messy JPEG, the pirated upload, the copied file that keeps moving even as it loses quality. But I think today there’s another kind of poor image: the ignored image. The post nobody likes, the video with no views, the Spotify track that stays in obscurity. And actually, when you come across one of those things—a YouTube video with a hundred views—it can feel special. It feels like you’ve found something outside the system of attention. 

There’s this animation series I’ve been obsessed with called Titanium Daydream. It’s this lo-fi polygon animation project. When I first found it a couple of years ago, it had a tiny but intensely dedicated audience. It felt specific, strange, and genuinely original. As it grew, more people discovered it, but when the creators stopped posting regularly, the algorithm stopped surfacing it. Unless you actively looked for it, it essentially disappeared. That could be read as a failure. I see it as an artistic success. They were making something on their own terms, not competing in the content race.

L.V. — Totally. But at the same time, repetition is central to how images now circulate and gain traction. Do you think there is a point where repeating something starts generating meaning instead of flattening it?

K.C. — I’m sure it can. But right now, repetition is mostly a strategy creators use to survive. I think there are two kinds of repetition. There’s repetition in format and in practice. One is repeating yourself. The other is pursuing the same line of thought over time. If you’re following the same creative path every day, deepening the same questions and moving somewhere new, that’s a good repetition. That’s not doing the same thing. It’s thinking the same thoughts for longer.

L.V. — Like a form of accumulation. It’s true that meaning doesn’t always come from constantly producing something new. Often it comes from staying with an idea and deepening it over time. I wonder if something similar can be said about aesthetic flattening. We often talk about aesthetic flattening as a loss, but can a shared visual language sometimes create the conditions for new forms to emerge?

K.C. — I think it can. Globalisation has positive sides too and maybe the upside is that everything now circulates within the same ecosystem, so, in theory, anything has the potential to find an audience. Maybe globalisation doesn’t just flatten things—it also creates new combinations. There was a period in the US when Korean tacos became really popular. Mexican street food mixed with Korean food culture into something genuinely new. That only happens inside a highly globalised environment. But then the cynical part of me looks at that and thinks: if every interesting thing can become global instantly, what’s left? Every new thing becomes everyone’s thing. And then maybe resistance starts appearing elsewhere—in places that are harder to circulate, harder to reproduce.

Last year, my wife and I went to Sardinia for our honeymoon. We stayed mostly outside the tourist areas, and it felt completely unfamiliar. It felt like a place with its own rhythm, its own references. And then the cynical part of me kicks in again: people like you and me are constantly hunting for new and cool things. We’re looking for what’s interesting, what’s compelling. And when we find it, we perpetuate it—we tell more people, we make it more popular. And then that thing gets globalised too. And suddenly you’re just starting the cycle over again.

L.V. — So we’re doing it all wrong.

K.C. — I don’t know. Good things should become popular. You want to share a good experience.

Maybe the alternative isn’t rejecting circulation—it’s becoming less obsessed with novelty. Instead of looking for the next thing every six months, maybe we should value deeper engagement.

Like—I loved Sardinia. Maybe the answer isn’t finding the next Sardinia. Maybe it’s going back there and understanding it better.

L.V. — Sometimes I wonder if we’re still carrying a modernist idea of what culture should be—how it should be made, distributed, and experienced. Maybe we’re judging the present through standards that no longer apply.

K.C. — Yeah, I think that’s true. One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is that, instead of constantly pursuing novelty, we should probably pay more attention to what’s local to us.

This sounds almost old-fashioned, but when my parents were growing up in upstate New York, they would spend their weekends seeing local bands play in bars. That was the cultural event. Not the biggest act in the country—just people making things around you. I feel like we’ve lost some of that. People want to see Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter. They don’t necessarily want to see the band from their own town. If we valued local culture more—local creators, local scenes—we might be able to build a healthier ecosystem.

But that requires a different ambition. Instead of trying to become globally visible on Instagram, you try to cultivate a community around you.

And I know ‘community’ sounds like a cliché, especially politically. But culturally, I don’t think we value it enough. There’s an obsession with whatever is most famous, most visible, most exposed. If we cared less about that, things might work differently.

L.V. — We still live inside a system that rewards exactly those things. It doesn’t really allow that shift to happen on its own.

K.C. — Right. You need a different infrastructure. Different incentives. In Washington, there’s this event called PorchFest. Local musicians play on their porches, and people walk around the neighbourhood listening. Thousands of people show up. The musicians aren’t famous. They’re not necessarily professional. Most of them aren’t on Spotify. People go because it’s fun, because it’s local, because it belongs to that place. So I think the desire for those experiences already exists. Maybe it’s partly a reaction to social media culture and globalisation. People are looking for smaller, more meaningful communities again.

L.V. — That sounds almost optimistic.

K.C. — Actually, I’m more optimistic about that now than I was when I was writing Filterworld. When I was working on the book, social media platforms and algorithmic feeds felt completely dominant. Today, I think new forms of infrastructure are emerging that are much healthier for creators. Things like Substack, Patreon, and even YouTube, in some cases. What’s interesting is that they work at a smaller scale. To survive on Patreon or Substack, you might need a few hundred people who genuinely care about what you’re doing. That’s very different from trying to attract thousands of people on Instagram.

It’s still a form of distribution, but it’s easier to understand. More human. So yes, I think it’s possible to build new cultural forms from within the system. The internet today offers better conditions for that than it did five or ten years ago.

L.V. — Which brings us to your new book, How to Be Moved, which shifts the focus from the forces that shape our attention to what it means to be genuinely moved by art, music, literature, and other forms of culture. Because after everything we’ve been talking about—the feeds, the algorithms, the endless competition for attention—the question becomes: what is left that can’t be optimised?

K.C. — That’s exactly the question the book grew out of. After Filterworld, many people asked me what the answer was. What do we do now? And I don’t think I can tell anyone exactly how to fix things. But I do think being moved is part of the answer.

What moves you is different from what moves me. A film, a song, a piece of writing, a landscape—those experiences are deeply personal. You can talk about them, but you can’t fully transfer them to someone else. Being moved is one of the few experiences that remains irreducibly individual. So the book is really about how we place ourselves in a position where that can happen. Not what should move you, but how to remain open to being moved.

L.V. — It’s a question of how we position ourselves in relation to culture.

K.C. — Exactly. If Filterworld was a critical book, this one is much more hopeful. We still have the ability to be moved. We still encounter things that change us. We still have new experiences. The question is how to create more space for those moments—and how to keep that space open.