MP Filterworld came out in 2024. Given the speed at which algorithms change, were you concerned its content would be out of date by the time it was published?

KC I sold the book proposal in 2021. The initial thought in my mind was – what if the algorithmic internet improves somehow? As it happened, the timing was perfect because it was released at the peak of algorithmic social media and the nascent AI era. The book doesn’t cover AI because when I finished writing it, ChatGPT had not yet been released. I didn’t need to worry, because the internet has only gotten worse.

MP How would you qualify it as becoming worse? What are the specific forces accelerating its decline?

KC It’s definitely more chaotic, fragmented and confusing. Social media has become driven by one-to-many broadcast instead of sharing directly with your friends, and it’s very hard to know which content is authentically popular and which has just been astroturfed by some quirk or manipulation of the algorithm. I think the average user experience on social media is even worse because you now have generative AI, and moderation is worse on all platforms. In Filterworld, I discuss the 2010s era of massive digital platforms that billions of people were using at the same time; that era has disintegrated. The growth of old-school social networks such as Facebook has stalled, and in their place, there have emerged decentralised group chats and private online communities. Social media got worse, I think, because it lost its focus on the content creator – which is to say, anyone who posts – instead of the advertiser. There has to be a reason to post and to share things, otherwise the billions of people who made social media valuable in the first place will stop showing up. Cory Doctorow called the process of degradation “enshittification”; you could also call it Silicon Valley capitalism.  

MP Is moderation worse because platforms have abandoned responsibility or because users no longer value moderation?

KC It’s a combination of the two. Platforms have realised that abandoning moderation won’t necessarily alienate large amounts of users, or at least not immediately, and users, in some cases, want to see “unfiltered” content. The reality is that everything we see on the internet is filtered in some way, blocking out the most violent, illegal or irrelevant content. Spam filters on our email accounts are a form of moderation. So perhaps we don’t value moderation enough. 

MP You describe algorithms and the culture they produce as “useful, replicable, participatory and ambient”. What are the ethical consequences of these frameworks?

KC I stand by those descriptors. Replicable, insofar as everything is mimetic, scaled up to reach as many people as possible. Ambient is also true: we’re seeing people produce longer content that is not made to be paid attention to, like Joe Rogan’s three-hour YouTube videos. Participatory in the sense that culture is increasingly bottom-up, driven by fans and consumers, sometimes more than artists. Accessible, because content is increasingly middlebrow. I’m an elitist as far as culture goes. Right now, culture is gravitating towards middle-to-lowbrow, with things that appeal to a large amount of people. I do think we’ve hit a saturation point with areas of algorithmic culture, where new ideas are being tested out of sheer frustration. Marvel movies have started failing. You have more interesting indie stuff, even if the indie stuff is Celine Song making a conceptual romance indie film, after which Celine Song the director becomes a commodity and has a ton of money thrown at her, and with it makes a high-budget rom-com with famous people in it. The pendulum swings back and forth.

MP It’s a form that’s born out of exhaustion more than any utopian ideas. 

KC Positivity is hard to come by. Constructive, proactive building of new cultural forms is not happening, and is very difficult. The response ends up being reactionary. 

MP Can the middlebrow ever be radical or transformative? And where does the middlebrow exist – is it in the creation or the reception? I’m thinking here about Jonathan Franzen’s inclusion on Oprah’s Book Club, and how an acclaimed work acquires a somewhat milquetoast gloss based on who is reading and receiving it.

KC I think even reaching the middlebrow with art is an achievement in our current era. Most artists attempt to achieve either extreme lowbrow or highbrow status, but mass audience consumption turns a lot of things middlebrow. Charli XCX’s BRAT (2024) is middlebrow-leaning-highbrow. It’s transformative to the consumer as long as the middlebrow is leading them somewhere new. If someone is having a quality experience of culture, if it’s broadening their worldview, you can’t really argue with it. These days Franzen doesn’t read as very radical anyway.

MP A common position of online self-help content is “you don’t owe anyone anything”; therapy-speak transformed into individualist rhetoric. Do you think the endpoint of algorithms is this narcissistic acceleration?

KC It’s the natural endpoint of the “For You” feed, because “you” are the special, unique, irreducible unit of everything. Everything is funnelled toward your sensibility and desires, and so there’s little sense of collectivity or cooperation. It encourages you to aestheticise everything about yourself and wrap it into this holistic package. The cultural experience is atomised through this lens too: I don’t know what you’re consuming, you don’t know what I’m consuming. We don’t have the same shared monocultural access, unless it is vastly popular artists like Taylor Swift. The biggest hits are still massive, but everything else is obscured.

MP What do you make of the fact that even resistance to the idea of lifestyle-as-culture, embodied by Instagram pages like @sockshousemeeting, or the practice of de-influencing, themselves become another lifestyle aesthetic?

KC This is becoming the problem that I run up against: even something that putatively resists an ecosystem becomes subsumed by it almost immediately. I think of it as like evolution: as soon as one fish crawled out of the water, every fish crawled out of the water. If a mutation works, if something starts to become popular, even if it’s a mode of resistance, then it gets everyone chasing after that shift and copying it. You could see that in the 2010s aesthetic of flattened minimalism. The flatness and smoothness and blankness were the most scalable qualities you could have. It was emptied of character, intentionally. I see more of this at the moment in the embrace of extreme texture. There’s this very small Instagram account that was being advertised to me called @marseille__blue. It was a mixture of French and Japanese aesthetics, and a bunch of historical artefacts and objects from both countries. I thought to myself, do I like it? The aesthetic is cool. But even that is sickening in a way because it merely adopts the texture as a new aesthetic. And as soon as that aesthetic becomes popular, it becomes emptied of meaning. Even though this woman is French and Japanese – it’s authentic to her – when I see it, I think, oh no, this looks cool, therefore it’s gonna suck in the year. Even that texture, the hyper-specificity, doesn’t work, because then everyone chases after it, and it becomes a cliché.

MP How does the resurgence of craft practices – knitting, woodworking, ceramics – complicate or deepen the idea of texture as a lifestyle aesthetic? 

KC Those craft practices are about leaning into texture and leaning into culture as a one-to-one process: you make a bowl or build a table. That strikes me as positive, but it feels cringe to consume this stuff as digital content – watching the TikTok videos of the crafts – without actually making things yourself, as compelling as the high-texture videos are. I think we should all practice culture more in our own lives, like making drawings, writing songs, decorating rooms. The shortcut to that is copying the texture aesthetic, as in the rarefied jumble of material objects, but there’s no shortcut to actually doing it.   

MP In Filterworld, you discuss how in the algorithmic era, knowledge itself is not powerful, but the ability to mediate it is. We already know what the implications are for traditional forces of mediation such as news reporters, university professors and artists. What is the impact on less obvious cultural actors – brands, politicians or audiences?

KC Everyone becomes a mediator. In the same way the news reporter or the magazine editor has a big channel to communicate their tastes, all of us on a tiny level have these channels where we wonder: what do we send to our group chats, or what do we post? That assumed responsibility to mediate information turns us all into personal brands of one kind or another, whether you’re an insurance claims adjuster or a nurse or a guy who thatches roofs in rural England. We are all the media now. We are all pushing forward trends and cultural ideas, and that forces us to consider how we’re passing things on. The real problem, outside of the conceptual, is economics. How, as small cultural makers or participants in culture, do we sustain ourselves? 

MP You discuss other examples of how lifestyle aesthetics have infiltrated “high culture”, including how Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014-2018) describes the privileges of upper-middle-class life and the narrator’s interior world. Is it a structural feature of the algorithm that suffering is aestheticised into lifestyle?

KC An example is TikTok videos where someone is slicing carrots for a meal while simultaneously talking about their personal trauma, or putting on nice makeup while talking about a dating app. Alluring aesthetics are often popular content, particularly the luxurious and  comfortable, the lush. There are things that work similarly, like horror movies or the kind of disgust-fiction that’s been popular in the last few years, like Ottessa Moshfegh’s books. Her characters are gross and you’re not supposed to like them, but the foulness comes wrapped in luxurious prose, or in a luxurious authorial brand. 

MP Do you find these works genuinely challenging, or just another means of soothing, scratching the South Park part of the brain? Is this the final stage of lifestyle aesthetics, where even disgust comes in a pretty package?

KC It seems paradoxical, we’re kind of just selecting the sensory impulse that suits us best and then mainlining it. Sometimes it’s disgust, sometimes it’s smoothness. Maybe neither of those produces actual discomfort, in the sense of a work of art that challenges your preconceptions. Disgusting art could be provocative and innovative, but sometimes it’s just disgusting to no particular end. I guess there’s a difference between the sensation and the content of the sensation, what it means or says. Too often, we’re just consuming pure sensation.

MP You’ve reminded me of ASMR in that way as well, couching the unusual within an aesthetic lushness.

There’s no meaning besides the experience, beyond pure sensation. It’s pornographic, but it’s not pornography

KC A lot of my thoughts lately are about how culture is simply entertainment. Its purpose is to soothe, to comfort, to placate, to satisfy. It’s not this modernist idea of art being something that you don’t understand, or something shocking outside of your frame of reference. With ASMR, I think about this account that does wood soup, which is big bowls of liquid with wooden balls and blocks in the soup. There’s no meaning besides the experience, beyond pure sensation. That to me feels like a race to the bottom solution. It’s pornographic, but it’s not pornography: it’s slotted into all these niche categories so you can get your favourite flavour of just pure sensation. It’s also authorless: most ASMR accounts are anonymous or pseudonymous and they don’t rely on the genius single artist to make it or to put their face on it, or to have a personal brand behind it. It’s just about the content. 

MP I feel the algorithmic internet is returning us to an era of premodern religion. We are trying to reason with an omniscient, shadowy, nebulous entity over which we have no control. Is technofeudalism a useful concept for you? 

KC Yes, it is, but technofeudalism has different valences. Economic technofeudalism is very relevant. We are the serfs farming attention for our overlords by posting content and participating on these platforms with our individual behaviours and beliefs. Our relationship as single users to the massive platform is closer to the relationship of the individual believer to the Catholic Church. We participate without understanding it. We interact without being able to change or talk back to the system at all. AI religious beliefs are around the corner, if not already here. The opposite of the algorithmic internet also feels feudal to me, like a small Italian village, where you are born and die. You make candles all your life and you’re surrounded by many people. Maybe you will go to Genoa once in your life. And it’s probably great: you’re unalienated from your society and the products of your labour. 

MP When Charli XCX released BRAT in 2024, I was struck by how in tune with algorithmic thinking the rollout was. Is that an example of how this vibes-led sensibility could be culturally productive rather than flattening?

KC We are living in a vibes-first era, and a vibe has a lot in common with a brand identity. To have a good vibe is to have a good brand. With BRAT, there was the creation of the vibe – the graphic design, stage sets, colour, the memetic tools where people could make their own images – and the music, somewhat separately. I found that very successful: the cultural atmosphere around it propelled the music to a place that it wouldn’t necessarily have reached on its own. I don’t think it was just the music that built stadiums. BRAT is contentless; it’s an attitude or a loose set of signifiers. You can do anything with it. It’s like going back to the qualities of culture: it is replicable and accessible. 

MP Do you think it’s possible for vibes to sustain political or artistic movements – or do they inevitably collapse once the vibe shifts?

KC Right now it seems as though the vibe is the movement. Which is to say, the creation of some aesthetic wave is the start and end of the collective social impulse. But I’m just looking at culture. I think a strong vibe – like visual branding, language, memes – helps a movement catalyse itself. But it’s not enough on its own. The dominant vibe always changes and one has to change with the vibe. In terms of artistic movements, all I can see is that the creation of vibes has become a creative accomplishment. Everything is more atmospheric, less grandiose, more ambient. If vibes are bottom-up culture, then artists also can’t keep control of what they may have unleashed.  

MP Is there an extent to which we actually desire total subordination evinced by the algorithm? 

KC I think we wouldn’t go along with it if we didn’t want it so much: its success is a sign that we, on some level, want it. Is that a little fascistic? Do we want to have a dictator? In a cultural context, we want the numbness, we want the meaninglessness, we want the atmospherics; it does something sensorially and psychologically in a different way than before, a different kind of subordination. It’s like a sensory deprivation tank, immersing yourself in the nothingness and letting yourself drift along wherever the culture takes you. That’s a new mode of culture, and that might be a dynamic that continues into the future.

MP If culture thrives on qualities of flatness, onwardsness, endlessness and predictability, is there a way that we could consciously practice being unpredictable? How can we cultivate habits that would disrupt the algorithm? 

KC It’s very possible. As soon as we take one step away from these systems, we realise the rest of the world still exists. You close the YouTube ASMR video, and you stop thinking about it. A trick of “Filterworld” is convincing you that there is no other option, that you have to cultivate attention and participate. But simple habits shift your focus. It’s as easy as going to the library and picking up a random book, or going to a record store and buying an unfamiliar vinyl record and just playing it. You might be more inspired, and you’re definitely more differentiated. 

MP Donald Trump has leveraged the algorithm with great success, but so has Zohran Mamdani. How do you think the algorithm will continue to factor within political organising? 

KC Mamdani projected this extremely authentic image, and he adopted the TikTok “man on the street” ambient video aesthetic. The far-right and Republicans have already adopted vibes-based politics: the broadcasting of media that fits with their image. I think the left is picking it up more. It already works that way with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders; they are digital figures in their own right. But I think doing politics is different from broadcasting the vibe of doing politics. I think, unfortunately, Trump has succeeded in broadcasting the vibe that appealed to his voters and is now executing on these horrific real-life actions. To be a successful politician or public figure, you have to have good digital branding and be a good performer. You have to exist on television or TikTok at this point. In a positive sense, it can create more demand for authenticity, and more demand for follow-through, and committing to the brands: actually walking the walk. This younger generation of voters and newly engaged political people will have been so exposed to this messaging and this person’s face that they will hold them to account more. It’s more intimate in a way. The political ideology that fits with this is accelerationism, leaning into the chaos and the disintegration of these ecosystems. I think you’ll see people like that, or with those ideas succeeding and getting attention. 

MP Do you think top-down forms of communication can survive in the algorithm era?

KC There’s always a bureaucracy, the deep state, and the technocrats who are keeping things moving. I don’t think that goes away at any point. I recently read that America will have fewer tourists than ever this year, because we’re actively rejecting people and making it difficult for them to visit. That’s the brand identity now: cruelty and punishment. .