How tech flattened personal taste, with Kyle Chayka

Doing It Right with Pandora Sykes

The homogenisation of popular culture is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. In my 2020 book, How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? (which spawned this very podcast), I wrote an essay called Get The Look - inspired by a wildly successful Zara polkadot dress - about how internet culture is encouraging young women to dress as facsimiles of one other.

So I was really excited to talk to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of a book Filterworld, about how technology - and more specifically, the algorithm - has come to shape what we watch, listen to, eat, dress and even how we travel.

In this episode, we discuss the paradox of choice, decision fatigue, surveillance capitalism, dumb phones and how to break free of ‘the algo’ in order to re-learn what you actually like.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

Read Kyle’s writing on tech and social media for The New Yorker here.

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Presented by Pandora Sykes

Sound by Kelsey Bennett

Co-production by Pandora Sykes and Kelsey Bennett