"Algorithms promise: If you like this, you will get more of it, forever."

Style Is an Algorithm

No one is original anymore, not even you.

By Kyle Chayka  Apr 17, 2018, 10:00am EDT

"Algorithms promise: If you like this, you will get more of it, forever. This experience is leaking from the internet of Google ads for the bag you just bought into the physical world. Look to the artist Jenny Odell’s investigation of “free watch” offers on Instagram for an example. The watches appear, at a minimum, stylish, with small variations on minimalist faces and metal bands. But they are not the result of an enlightened sense of taste, per Pieratt’s definition. The brands that sell them are thin fictions whipped up in Squarespace and the actual products are the result of Alibaba manufacturing and Amazon drop-shipping, in which a product moves directly from manufacturer to consumer having never entered a store. The phantom watches are empty fashion language, objects without content.

Other ways in which our experiences are warped by algorithmic platforms include Spotify possibly commissioning original music from “fake” artists to match the latent content desires of its audience, as Noisey noticed; delivery restaurants that are only virtual, conjuring a digital brand out of a shadowy group kitchen and serving food via Uber Eats; the surreal kids’ YouTube videos, which exist because they are rewarded with views by the feed algorithm and thus earn their creators advertising profit; and the globalized visual vernacular of Airbnb interior decorating, which approximates a certain style emerging from the platform itself. Having analyzed the data from some platform or another, these are things the machine thinks you want, and it can serve them up immediately and infinitely."