Read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka (<https://bookshop.org/p/books/filterworld-how-algorithms-flattened-culture-kyle-chayka/20025251 https://bookshop.org/p/books/fi

Read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka (<https://bookshop.org/p/books/filterworld-how-algorithms-flattened-culture-kyle-chayka/20025251 https://bookshop.org/p/books/filterworld-how-algorithms-flat...>); it's a fine enough read, and while I thought myself already avoiding a lot of algorithmic stuff, he did a good job pointing out the places where I was still being dictated to (e.g. what businesses a map surfaced, what flights the search engine promoted). His discussion of tastemakers and curation were the most interesting part, I thought, and in particular how algorithms push toward the boring. >Taste is an abstract, ineffable, unstable thing. A listener to music or reader of a book cannot truly tell if they will enjoy something before they experience it; pleasure in a piece of art is never guaranteed. So when encountering an artwork, we immediately evaluate it by some set of mental principles, and, hopefully, find the beauty in it, feel affirmed, even if we can't quite describe what that beauty is or how exactly we determined it in the first place. Taste is supposed to be ambiguous. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarized in his 1979 monograph on taste, "Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it." and then >As taste requires surprise, it also thrives on challenge and risk, treading too far in a particular direction. Safety may avoid embarrassment, but it's also boring. and so >The bounds of aesthetic acceptability become tighter and tighter until all that's left is a column in the middle. While popular styles shift, like moving targets, the centralization and normalization persist.