Filterworld cover launch!

My new book on algorithmic culture.

Here is the cover for my next book! It’s a fantastic design by Oliver Munday, a creative director at The Atlantic and designer of covers including Hua Hsu’s beautiful recent memoir Stay True. If you’re excited about it, you can also pre-order the book now — it comes out in January 2024.

Pre-order Filterworld at Amazon / Barnes and Noble / Bookshop / other options listed at PRH, or please call your favorite local bookstore and request it!

You can also go Like and comment on the cover on Instagram here — just another signal to the all-powerful algorithm that it’s relevant, important, and deserves more promotion.

We settled on this cover after a lengthy design process with Oliver and my great editor Thomas Gebremedhin that I hope to discuss in full later on, it was very fun. Oliver created something simple and iconic, a cover that would transmit well across the Internet but also symbolizes in one glance what the book is about. My argument is that algorithmic recommendations and feeds — like those of TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify, and so many others — have homogenized both what we consume and what we create online. Hence the cookie cutter: an endless stamping out of the same patterns and styles. “Filterworld'“ is my term for the tightly woven network of algorithms that we exist in today, both online and off.

I think there’s a certain anxiety to the image. Sameness is boring and stultifying. It’s not diverse and it’s not compelling — it’s not what we ultimately want from culture. We want culture that surprises and challenges us, two qualities that are not prioritized in Filterworld.

This book follows years of reporting and writing I’ve been doing. I began noticing the effects of algorithmic recommendations around 2016, when I was writing my essay “Welcome to AirSpace,” about the sameness of Airbnbs. Ever since, I’ve noticed that the digital platforms we spend so much time on are making our tastes more similar than different. There have been complaints of persistent sameness everywhere: in music, art, food, and travel.

The book is a reported critique — an investigation as well as an essay. I had conversations with tech executives, computer scientists, users, influencers, and artists of all kinds to figure out what algorithmic recommendations have done to our cultural ecosystem. A running theme is “algorithmic anxiety,” as one scholar termed it: the paranoia, fear, and confusion we feel when algorithms judge us either incorrectly or far too accurately. We’ve all caught algorithmic anxiety.

Some authors I really respect have already read the manuscript and said very nice things about it. Here are blurbs from the playwright and author Ayad Akhtar and the journalist and media executive Ben Smith:

Filterworld will be published by Heligo (Bonnier) in the UK and translations are planned in many other countries. If you’re a critic or journalist, contact Elena Hershey at Doubleday for press inquiries and galley requests. Non-U.S. publishers or press can also contact my agent Caroline Eisenmann at Frances Goldin Agency.

Stay tuned on this newsletter for many, many more updates and previews of the book. As always, this email list is my favorite space to be in online and I love having conversations through the newsletters. Let me know what you think of the cover, what questions you have about the book, and how I can convince you that this is a vital discussion to have today. Thanks so much for reading.