Vox: All Posts by Kyle Chaykahttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2020-04-03T10:10:00-04:00https://www.vox.com/authors/kyle-chayka-2/rss2020-04-03T10:10:00-04:002020-04-03T10:10:00-04:00Why we want to buy so much stuff during quarantine
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<p>Why we want to buy so much stuff we don’t really need right now.</p> <p id="TVxE5g">My greatest concern at the outset of quarantine, I admit, was boredom while working from home and being stuck in my apartment for weeks on end. It was the very thing I had spent years avoiding even as a freelance writer, renting co-working spaces and going to cafes. So when I had reassured myself that the necessities were in order in my and my girlfriend’s apartment — enough food, toilet paper, disinfectant wipes — or at least available nearby, I embarked on an Amazon-enabled nesting campaign. </p>
<p id="FQvx96">Anxiety comes in different varieties right now. We worry about the basics, like staying healthy and feeding ourselves. Then the second-order concerns emerge, if you’re privileged enough to be able to work remotely. The fear of boredom, coping badly with confinement, or not having the best equipment to do your work — those are anxieties, too, albeit lesser ones. So I bought some things that I thought might offer more comfort and stability: a fancy television, a bungee-cord office chair, and a door-mounted pull-up bar. I figured that the products might even be a net good for social distancing, since they would further discourage me from going out.</p>
<p id="H7Dz5a">Quarantine is a confusing moment to be a consumer. So much “nonessential” business has ground to a halt, yet goods still have to be produced, marketed, and sold in order to sustain factories, companies, and, most importantly, the jobs they create. All the closed storefronts are just the symbol of people, particularly hourly workers, out of work. With a <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2020/4/2/21201905/coronavirus-economic-crisis-recession-depression-stimulus-checks-covid-19">recession or even depression</a> looming, we’re all worried about our livelihoods. </p>
<p id="6KTmu0">The quandary is, should we make ourselves comfortable in the short term by stockpiling whatever’s available, relying on exploitative digital platforms and putting pressure on the supply chain, or should we be saving money for the future? Quarantine consumerism is either a way of stimulating the economy one pull-up bar at a time, or it’s an unnecessary risk both for ourselves and for delivery workers. Still, it’s a risk many are taking. Plenty of distinctly nonessential products, like those I bought, are selling out.</p>
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<p id="spXzty">When I described my shopping haul to Shipra Gupta, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies how consumers react to scarcity, she differentiated between consumers’ utilitarian motivations and their hedonic motivations. Utilitarian motivations are functional, urging us toward buying necessities, especially when we perceive scarcity. Hedonic fulfillment is instead “derived from the perceived fun or playfulness of the shopping,” according to <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1461/ca52c1a69695324f8f80aba9126a444a726a.pdf">International Management Review</a>. In a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223829941_Hedonic_Shopping_Motivation">2003 paper</a>, Mark Arnold and Kristy Reynolds identify <a href="https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/hedonic-shoppers/">six categories of hedonic shopping</a>. The most relevant right now, in the absence of physical interaction, are “adventure shopping for stimulation and excitement,” “gratification shopping to enhance mood,” and “idea shopping to stay current with trends.”</p>
<p id="PefRN0">Such purchases might not be totally necessary, but they are an important way of exercising freedom that’s lost during a moment like quarantine. “Buying a TV was more about your hedonic fulfillment, trying to regain your lost control which the environment has given you,” Gupta said. In other words, we shop so we can feel some agency over this uncontrollable situation. </p>
<p id="peTOe9">Chris Casey, a video producer in Brooklyn, was worried about losing his exercise habit without access to the gym during quarantine, so he mulled a set of PowerBlock weights on Amazon. By the time he made his decision, however, the maker said they weren’t available anymore, possibly because Amazon’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/3/17/21183310/amazon-coronavirus-fba-inventory-seller-vendor-restrictions">warehouses are now focusing on</a> “household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products.” “I shouldn’t have spent so much time researching the different varieties of adjustable dumbbells, that’s what killed me,” Casey said. The same thing happened with a pull-up bar he tried to buy — it’s now back ordered. (It was from the same brand as mine, marked as Amazon’s pick.)</p>
<p id="z5uJ0r">For Erik Hyman, a nonprofit development manager, the go-to hedonic quarantine product was upscale Fever-Tree tonic water for gin-and-tonic cocktails. “Knowing I would be isolated, I wanted to treat myself,” Hyman said. But, “I went to five different stores and couldn’t find Fever-Tree anywhere.” Whole Foods-Amazon deliveries were limited to a single bottle. He eventually found it by surprise during a trip to Target, but his cache is already running low. “All these virtual happy hours, what am I going to drink during them?” </p>
<p id="TcKDtr">Buying this kind of stuff is an obvious attempt to replace the pre-quarantine lives that we’ve been forced to leave behind. “In some ways, we’re overcompensating,” Hyman said. He described his thinking: “If I usually go to a cocktail bar and order a gin drink, but I can’t keep a full bar stocked in my apartment, what’s the best tonic I can get?” We’re craving a few symbols of normalcy in the midst of a terrifying situation. Substitutes for real life are everywhere: Liquor sales are <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/americans-drinking-crazy-amount-of-alcohol-during-coronavirus-lockdown/">up more than 75 percent</a> over the same time last year, since all bars are closed. Missing cafes, I’ve been sure to stock up on fancy-ish coffee beans; sure enough, even the oat milk that you used to get in a cappuccino is now seeing sales growth of over 500 percent, <a href="https://twitter.com/nmeyersohn/status/1243594483683467266">according to Nielsen</a>. Mirror, an at-home virtual-gym portal, is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/style/coronavirus-fitness-gyms.html">going through a boom</a> in sales and class attendance as an IRL gym replacement. </p>
<p id="ywtzKb">Even when consumers need to buy simple necessities, there’s a materialist tendency to seek out the nicest, best versions that we possibly can. And if the best isn’t available, some people get frustrated. Steve Sando is the founder of Rancho Gordo, a seller of heritage beans grown in Mexico. A few weeks ago, he announced that Rancho Gordo wouldn’t be fulfilling orders to its Bean Club — a group of subscribers who get quarterly shipments of rare bean varieties — because of an inundation of quarantine-related new orders. Orders went from around 200 a day to consistently over 1,000. Some Bean Clubbers got mad. “One guy said, ‘You’re reprehensible, Bean Club is what made you and you won’t be loyal to us,’” Sando told me. </p>
<p id="c6Z2Tk">He understands why they’re upset. “A well-stocked pantry means you’re in control. You can’t control what’s around you but you can control what your family’s gonna eat.” Still, Sando said, “We had a great harvest this year, there’s no point in hoarding them.” The Bean Club beans are already set aside; it’s just going to take more time to ship them out to customers. “My staff’s sanity is more important than anything,” Sando said. Rather than trying to push output, he is spreading out workers in the factory and has hired more for a new second daily shift.</p>
<p id="xu3gqx">The same thing is happening to seed companies like Baker Creek, a seller of heirloom seeds in Missouri (heirloom seeds are marketed as more genetically diverse and longer-lasting than their industrial counterparts). Jere Gettle started the company in 1998. Y2K caused a growth spike and so did the financial crisis; right now he’s seeing double his usual volume of orders. On March 19, the company had to shut down its website to deal with the overflow. Still, they’re getting emails from aggrieved first-time customers asking if their seeds will get shipped. “People are afraid,” Gettle said. “I don’t blame them on this one.”</p>
<p id="lzX7Zp">Even the content of the orders is coronavirus-influenced. There’s an emphasis on “things that are rich in vitamins and minerals; people want to grow healthy food,” he said. But, “we’ve seen a decrease in sales from Chinese varieties.” Gettle attributed that to customers’ association of coronavirus with China; the perceived risk is, as he said, obviously “not logical.”</p>
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<p id="o3Nyqs">Worrying about which brand of seed, bean, pull-up bar, or television to buy is an indulgence when so many people can’t afford to stay home in the first place. Quarantine purchases might be less about the actual product than some vestige of conspicuous consumption, the need to project your class identity as a response to insecurity. Our jobs aren’t the same, our social lives aren’t the same, but the appeal of maintaining a high-status image remains. </p>
<p id="JkcC2U">That these products are in such high demand makes sense, according to Wharton professor Nikolai Roussanov. “I think conspicuous consumption has evolved in the era of social media, so that you can still show things off even under quarantine,” Roussanov said. “Objects that were once classified as less visible, like home furnishings, become more so when everyone is stuck at home and interacts with each other over videoconference and social media.” The coronavirus could actually end up intensifying the retail market for upscale domestic products. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see an uptick in luxury durables that are used inside the home if social isolation measures continue,” he went on. </p>
<p id="OQVrlk">The composition of our shopping has changed, though the overall scale of consumption may not have, according to Homa Zarghamee, a professor of economics at Barnard. “We’re buying things that are not what we were buying three weeks ago, and not buying things we were buying three weeks ago.” Groceries instead of restaurants; loungewear instead of suits. Zarghamee observed it herself with video games: “The night before the quarantine started in New York, the line at the GameStop in Harlem was around the corner.” There’s a real sense of urgency at play. “It’s not totally clear that buying sooner isn’t better than buying later for yourself,” Zarghamee continued. “It’s also unclear what you would be buying in the future and whether the prices are going to be reasonable.” Maybe the TV was a good purchase after all. It’s certainly getting a lot of use.</p>
<p id="VqND5K">Pursuing your hedonic motivations during quarantine is always going to benefit yourself more than other people. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be made more equitable. Zarghamee told me that an individual’s impact on the possibility of a recession is limited, so that’s not an excuse for shopping more. What’s actually impactful is thinking about which businesses you want to survive. “There’s an obvious need to support the ones that are going to help in the near future,” Zarghamee said. Amazon will be just fine. If you need to splash money around, do it at a local bookstore, boutique, or deli that’s moved online. It’ll make you feel more in control just the same. </p>
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/3/21206230/coronavirus-shopping-beans-seeds-weightsKyle Chayka2019-12-17T09:00:00-05:002019-12-17T09:00:00-05:00Can monoculture survive the algorithm?
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<p>And should it?</p> <h3 id="4VTtUY">Big Endings</h3>
<p id="Mlh1ZH">The past year has felt like a peak in mega-budget world-spanning media spectacles that command our attention, one outrageous finale after another. On April 26, 2019, the film<em> Avengers: Endgame</em> was released in the United States. Less an original narrative than an accretion of capital, technology, and celebrity, it had a budget of $356 million. </p>
<p id="KJ3DJz">By July, the movie — the closing of a phase in the vast Marvel Cinematic Universe — was the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/7/22/20703487/avengers-endgame-avatar-biggest-movie-all-time-box-office">highest-grossing movie in the history of Hollywood</a>; it has so far achieved a global box office of around $2.8 billion. A month later, on May 19, the final episode of <em>Game of Thrones</em> aired on HBO, the end of an eight-season run that began in 2011. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/20/media/game-of-thrones-finale-ratings/index.html">19.3 million people watched the episode</a>, a record for the series. The latest <em>Star Wars </em>film will cap off the franchise’s third trilogy on December 20 and attract millions more viewers. But it’s not just the stories that are ending.</p>
<h3 id="bAyYjR">Two Concerns</h3>
<p id="wYd31a">This communal moment of mass culture has occasioned celebration as well as a bout of anxiety. We’re in the midst of the Streaming Wars, with so many different media products and platforms competing for our attention — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, AppleTV+, and the still-to-come Peacock and HBO Max, to name but a few. Journalists and critics are worried that the huge popularity and sense of universality that <em>Avengers </em>and <em>Game of Thrones </em>achieved are now disappearing for good. The word often used to describe these omnipresent mass-entertainment products is “monoculture.” </p>
<p id="DADhvE">The Ringer <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/7/12/16078066/game-of-thrones-hbo-tv-monoculture-535f73ad5014">eulogized <em>Game of Thrones</em></a><em> </em>as “the very last piece of TV monoculture” and Vulture “<a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/game-of-thrones-the-last-show-we-watch-together.html">the last show we watch together</a>.”<em> </em>“Monoculture is dead, or will die with <em>Game of Thrones</em>,” according to <a href="https://www.laineygossip.com/chris-pine-promotes-i-am-the-night-with-90s-boy-band-hair/55650">Lainey Gossip’s Elaine Lui</a>. Now, “we watch what we like, and we cluster together with the people who also watch what we like.” Even the era of extensive recaps was <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/12/18303780/game-of-thrones-last-tv-show-monoculture">pronounced over</a>, if not the reign of prestige TV itself. We live in a “time of cultural fragmentation,” <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/155340/nobel-prize-literature-just-trolling-now">wrote Alex Shephard</a> in the New Republic, arguing that not even the Nobel Prize for literature has survived as a representation of monoculture. </p>
<p id="suN2vr">Within the monoculture obsession, there are two concerns. The first is that in the digital streaming era we have lost a perceived ability to connect over media products as reference points that everyone knows, the way that we used to discuss the weather or politics, at least in a bygone time before our realities were split by climate change and Fox News. The fear is that we exist in a fragmented realm of impenetrable niches and subcultures enabled by streaming media.</p>
<p id="5hZObN">The second concern is that, because of the pressures of social media and the self-reinforcing biases of recommendation algorithms that drive streaming, culture is becoming more similar than different. We are worried that our digital niches cause a degree of homogenization, which the word monoculture is also used to describe.</p>
<p id="hMKoGX">“If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors,” Jennifer Senior wrote in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/teen-fiction-and-the-perils-of-cancel-culture.html">New York Times opinion piece</a> about young-adult literature. Mass media has “been getting more mass,” wrote Farhad Manjoo, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/opinion/old-town-road.html">also in the Times</a>, responding to the popularity of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which went from a TikTok meme to one of the most popular pop songs ever made, at least according to <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/7/29/8937934/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-billboard-charts-record-breaking-single">its time on the charts</a>. </p>
<p id="2wlJ2L">“Despite the barrage of choice, more of us are enjoying more of the same songs, movies and TV shows,” Manjoo continued. The effect is happening across different cultural industries: “We’re returning to a media monoculture,” made up of corporatized, homogenized websites instead of smaller blogs, <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/8091/vogue-rihanna-profile-2019?zd=2&zi=b5sajtc4">Darcie Wilder wrote</a> on the Outline. Martin Scorsese echoed the complaint when he argued that Marvel movies “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-marvel.html">aren’t cinema</a>” but instead bland, market-tested products without artistic integrity. </p>
<p id="JdsZ2n">These two concerns appear in some ways irreconcilable, and yet they coexist. Is there less monoculture today, or is culture more mass than ever? Are we siloed within our own preferences or are we unable to escape the homogenized net-average, consuming all the same things?</p>
<p id="hKKavK">The debate over monoculture seems to be less about our inherent desire for CGI dragons or superheroes than human connection and recognition — the assuaging of some existential loneliness induced by the internet. With streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, you never really know how many people are watching, hearing, or following the same things you are, so you’re never sure which media experiences are shared in common and which are not. That leaves us consumers feeling adrift.</p>
<h2 id="XstPOC">I. FRAGMENTATION</h2>
<h3 id="ibZHbh">The Meaning of Monoculture</h3>
<p id="tnflJc">Monoculture is more a messy symbol than an exact term. The Latin root “cultura” means cultivation. Monoculture in a <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/monoculture">scientific sense</a> is an “area of farm land on which only one crop is grown or one type of animal is kept.” Much of industrialized farming is monoculture: think vast stretches of corn or wheat, or the undifferentiated green of a suburban lawn. </p>
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<p id="JSbeKC">Monoculture might be efficient as far as agricultural output, but it’s <a href="http://fafdl.org/blog/2017/01/26/the-problem-with-monoculture/">also dangerous</a>, decreasing diversity, depleting soil, and using more water than varied fields. By the early 19th century, “<a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/culture">culture</a>” moved from referring to plants to the cultivation of learning and taste, and by the 20th century it described the “collective customs and achievements of a people.” </p>
<p id="oRRnhC">Today, the word monoculture is used to describe a <em>monolithic culture</em>: the range of artifacts, characters, voices, and stories that a specific demographic — Americans, for example — find recognizable and relatable. But the word also evokes a homogenized space, a Monocultural Cinematic Universe in which everything is bright, vapid, and family-friendly, and any whimpering of dissent is smoothed over into sameness: <em>monotonous culture.</em></p>
<h3 id="hea9ZC">What Was the Monoculture?</h3>
<p id="OfpvBA">The monoculture seems to refer to some ill-defined age of universality made up of everything from Johnny Carson hosting the <em>Tonight Show</em> to <em>Friends</em>, <em>Seinfeld, </em>and <em>The Office</em> — the 20th-century aegis of white, middlebrow American entertainment, usually starring white Americans. This was also the ascendant era of broadcast media in radio, film, and linear television (the term for cable and network TV that isn’t on-demand). Industry gatekeepers made top-down decisions about what content would be made and when it would be shown, resulting in a lack of diversity that is only now <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/ucla-s-2019-hollywood-diversity-report-hopeful-more-inclusive-future-n973801">beginning to change</a>. </p>
<p id="vSq2gB">Monoculture is a <a href="https://collider.com/pleasantville-movie-explained/#images">Pleasantville</a> image of a lost togetherness that was maybe just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone <em>wanted </em>to watch primetime <em>Seinfeld</em>, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default. </p>
<h3 id="5Vtq8B">Digital Monoculture</h3>
<p id="3uejZK">We are in the midst of determining if the kind of monoculture that thrived during the broadcast era can exist when many forms of media are opt-in: we can watch whatever we want, when we want. The “digital monoculture” could refer to the array of popular, recognizable reference points that have arisen and are accessed through the on-demand internet, whether it’s <em>Game of Thrones</em> or <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/11/18177097/what-is-baby-shark-dance-challenge-explained">“Baby Shark.”</a> </p>
<p id="iHgCyN">The universality that monoculture entails is valuable, because what everyone already knows is what they are likely to keep consuming — hence the overwhelming popularity of <a href="https://redef.com/original/the-absurdities-of-franchise-fatigue-and-sequelitis-or-what-is-happening-to-the-box-office">reboots and sequels</a>. It’s also why Netflix <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/4/18126596/friends-netflix-warnermedia-att-hulu-apple-deal">paid $100 million in 2018 to keep <em>Friends</em></a><em> </em>on its platform for another year (WarnerMedia later outbid Netflix, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/friends-officially-leaving-netflix-warnermedias-streaming-service-1223151">$85 million a year</a> for five years, to put the show on HBO Max). </p>
<p id="IXZUJX">Big-budget productions try to worm material into the now-fragmented monocultural framework by manufacturing new universal reference points, as <em>The Mandalorian </em>has with its insta-meme <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/11/23/20972511/baby-yoda-meme-the-mandalorian-gif-star-wars">Baby Yoda</a>. Piggybacking on old monoculture is less risky than starting from scratch. The most successful example of digital-native monoculture might be Netflix’s <em>Stranger Things</em>, which merited the iconic public display of <a href="https://specialreports.oaaa.org/strangerthings3/">billboards in Times Square</a> (not coincidentally, it’s also a show that references decades of pop culture). </p>
<p id="gmQaQC">Businesses turn their own intellectual property into self-reproducing mini-monocultures because monopolies are easiest to monetize. The streaming platforms and their various signature franchises form walled gardens, a metaphor that also recalls the scientific definition of monoculture: nothing else is allowed to grow there; there is no cross-pollination. Surely the monoculture isn’t quite dead if Netflix viewers have consumed a net <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/17/15331674/netflix-adam-sandler-movies-half-a-billion-hours">500 million hours of Adam Sandler movies</a>.</p>
<h3 id="59IC6L">Watching Together </h3>
<p id="HyYOgj">More than a sheer volume of viewers, what monoculture entails is a feeling. Linear TV gave us a monocultural feeling because we knew millions, tens of millions, of other people were watching the same channel as us at the same time, though we couldn’t see them. While <em>tuned in</em> we felt connected to the “grid of 200 million,” the social community of American TV watchers that George W.S. Trow observed in his 1980 essay on television, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1980/11/17/within-the-context-of-no-context"><em>Within the Context of No Context</em></a>. (Social media is our <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/george-trow-context-no-context-book-harpers-reviewing-social-media/">new grid</a>, and its fervent fandoms in part a response to the desire for more communal experience.)</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="tpFowY"><q>More than a sheer volume of viewers, what monoculture entails is a feeling.</q></aside></div>
<p id="NEThqN">Streaming television lacks much of that feeling because it is on-demand and because the platforms are pointedly opaque about their metrics for the sake of protecting their business models. (Nielsen ratings, which publicly measure linear TV audiences, are only just <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/amazon-prime-video-ratings-nielsen-netflix-streaming-viewers/">starting to cover</a> streaming services.) </p>
<p id="aTbfmP">The only way of knowing how many other people are consuming the latest season of <em>Bojack Horseman </em>at the same time you are is to check some other part of the internet, like searching a show’s hashtag on Twitter. This kind of asynchronicity is particularly deadly for talk shows, which Netflix has been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/business/media/netflix-talk-shows.html">struggling to produce</a>. Maybe the format was optimized for linear TV, sparking watercooler chat that you didn’t have to preface with the streaming-era refrain, <em>“Are you watching _______?” </em>The answer is rarely yes.</p>
<p id="qyYp3R">Streaming “forces a little bit more evangelism,” investor Hunter Walk told me. Walk is the co-founder of the venture-capital firm Homebrew, which invests in digital platforms, and a commentator on new-media consumption habits. “If you’re watching something early or first, you’re going to be the carrier of that to your friends.” The feeling digital media induces is, “‘It’s my job to get them to watch it so we can talk about it,’” he continued. We all become the programming head of our own virtual TV network, deciding what gets airtime and what doesn’t. </p>
<p id="dmK2Hp">If monoculture depends on this feeling of watching together, then streaming makes it more difficult to establish, because we watch different things at different paces for different reasons. Though widespread popularity is clearly still possible, there’s a newfound distinction between media’s content — its subject matter — and its context — the social environment, or lack thereof, in which we consume it. Certain shows rely on generating a public discourse while others thrive without it, or find fans only in an online niche. As Walk put it: “Some things you watch just because your friends are watching it; some things you watch even if your friends aren’t watching it. I don’t give a shit what my friends think about <em>Westworld</em>. I need the sub-Reddit that’s going to unpack the foreshadowing.” </p>
<p id="4wWFgi">Monoculture is a subjective, shifting frame of reference, not a default reality. Walk’s points underline how we now create our own communities around consuming and discussing particular media. On Twitter, I feel like <em>Succession</em> has fully saturated the discourse and become inescapable, but elsewhere, linear TV’s <em>This Is Us</em> is the height of popularity. </p>
<p id="jQ0ogU">At its peak after the 2018 Super Bowl, <em>This Is Us </em>had some <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2018/02/this-is-us-super-bowl-ratings.html">27 million viewers</a> in one day, while <em>Succession </em>only hit one million during its recent season-two finale. A show about mean rich people isn’t exactly universal, but it gets talked about more intensely in certain media-dense environments and thus takes on the aspects of active monoculture, where <em>This Is Us</em> has faded in coverage from magazines and entertainment websites, though many more people watch it.</p>
<h3 id="hvvPJt">A Chart of Digital Media Consumption</h3>
<p id="TImJhI">When we talk about monoculture, it usually includes content that is widely consumed, and socially consumed. We could arrange various modes of digital media consumption on a chart, with a horizontal axis of the scale at which the content was designed to exist (trying to appeal to many people, or a smaller group?) and a vertical axis of the context in which the content is consumed (do you actively discuss it with others, or watch it privately?). We can fill it in with a few linear and streaming TV shows: </p>
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<p id="bWRzT8">In the top-right corner, Social-Mass, is the relevant monoculture, the stuff that is actively creating its own communities of interest and public discussion. In the lower-right, Intimate-Mass represents the mundane monoculture, the productions that are already familiar comforts. The top-left is the first draft of monoculture, the Social-Niche content that a smaller demographic of advance tastemakers pore over intensely. The bottom-left is content consumed predominantly as a personal pleasure, which might never make it into the public sphere. </p>
<p id="0I9ZYs">Shows and movies (or any cultural products) can move across the categories over time, and exist on a spectrum of points between them. <em>Fleabag</em>, for example, had a gradual movement from Intimate-Niche to Social-Niche to Social-Mass — the hot-priest-meme stage. </p>
<p id="cSryCE">Linear TV has an incentive to keep as many viewers as possible from changing the channel, which confines its content to the right side of the chart: shows you can’t miss without feeling left out and shows you don’t mind rewatching if you stumble upon them. The top-right, must-watch products usually fall to the bottom-right over time. We get bored of them, though nostalgia maintains some appeal. (<em>Fleabag</em> <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/08/bbc-series-fleabag-ending-season-2-9132477/">wrapped up</a> just before it fully succumbed to its popularity and became tiresome.)</p>
<h3 id="uAptjS">Watching Separately</h3>
<p id="i9YcFf">Digital streaming can better occupy the left side of the chart, supplying content that we can discuss in small, dispersed communities online or simply watch by ourselves. (For me, that purpose is filled by the soothing Japanese reality show <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/155683/gentle-pleasures-terrace-house?utm_content=buffer195d1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer"><em>Terrace House</em></a>; I don’t need everyone to like it, and I know they never will.) Netflix’s never-ending supply of food shows that are 75 percent slow-motion B-roll — <em>Chef’s Table</em>, <em>Taco Chronicles</em>, <em>The Chef Show</em>, <em>Street Food</em> — demonstrate its commitment to content we barely have to pay attention to or talk about at all. You could call it ambient television, the obverse of big-budget monoculture. David Chang’s latest addition to the Ambient Netflix genre, <em>Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner</em>, is what you would get if you recorded a celebrity podcast with their mouth full.</p>
<p id="Y2cJ3v">Maybe it’s not that we have less monoculture today; it’s that we’re more aware of everything else in the other quadrants of the chart. They appear as a threat to the old regime, which was accustomed to manufacturing monoculture quickly and easily through the content monopolies of broadcast media. Studios, directors, and producers of the past were better able to dictate our tastes because there were no other convenient options for on-demand entertainment.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="Nte42k"><q>Maybe it’s not that we have less monoculture today; it’s that we’re more aware of everything else in the other quadrants of the chart.</q></aside></div>
<p id="9Ebvgg">Martin Scorsese critiqued the Marvel movies’ lack of communal social context as well as their artistic content: “To be in a packed house in one of the old theaters watching <em>Rear Window</em> was an extraordinary experience: It was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the picture itself, and it was electrifying.” The director is mourning the IRL universality that his work — that by no means emerged from a universal perspective — was able to achieve under the old system. He mourns his ability to impose his auteurship on massive audiences.</p>
<p id="6RSAbb">Scorsese complains about the homogenization of “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified” content. Yet in terms of representation and access, for people who aren’t Martin Scorsese, this change feels like a step forward. The range of widely available mass media no longer represents the vision of only one demographic group. The retro-monoculture of <em>Goodfellas, </em>or <em>Friends</em>, or <em>Seinfeld</em>, is just one choice among many. But what do our other choices look like?</p>
<h2 id="21mBY3">II. HOMOGENIZATION</h2>
<h3 id="t630Qb">Jazz</h3>
<p id="2nukAl">Rather than the monoculture dictated by singular auteurs or industry gatekeepers, we are moving toward a monoculture of the algorithm. Recommendation algorithms — on Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, or Spotify — are responsible for much of how we move through the range of on-demand streaming media, since there’s too much content for any one user to parse on their own. We can make decisions, but they are largely confined to the range of options presented to us. The homepage of Netflix, for example, offers only a window into the platform’s available content, often failing to recommend what we actually want. We can also opt out of decision-making altogether and succumb to autoplay. </p>
<p id="Sss2jB">Spotify in particular demonstrates the effects of algorithmic culture, since the decision of which song to listen to or whether to interrupt the stream happens so much more often than a TV show or movie. For example, I started an album on Spotify by Bill Evans while cooking dinner for friends. The album continued playing for hours. Except it wasn’t the album; it was a series of tracks that sound more or less like the album — syncopated piano, upright bass, brushed drums — weaving between tracks by Evans and other jazz musicians in a pleasantly monotonous wash. I barely registered the change until everyone left and I went to my laptop to turn it off, noticing the playlist that accrued, filled with artists’ names that I promptly forgot.</p>
<h3 id="19eVIq">The Problem with Automatic Suggestions</h3>
<p id="nS3sLu">The jazz monotony is passive: Since Spotify’s radio function is automated, I can consume more music without thinking about it. Without anyone thinking about it, in fact, except the recommendation algorithm making its calculations and supplying the next song. My own private monoculture builds up under the heading of Bill Evans-esque jazz, a kind of jazz that the algorithm delimits for me. We media consumers end up smoothly siloed into how a recommendation algorithm has predefined a particular genre or medium, like the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKTBv7ZqFcU">Plinko game</a> in <em>Price Is Right</em>: the chip takes a random path down the board, but ends up in one of just a few slots. The algorithm’s definition is often wrong, or at least incomplete.</p>
<p id="Lb2f0C">In September 2019, the country music star Martina McBride attempted to create a country playlist on Spotify. The platform can automatically recommend songs to add to a playlist; in this case, it suggested <a href="https://theboot.com/martina-mcbride-spotify-rant/">14 pages of songs by male country artists</a> before it came up with a single woman. McBride was shocked, posting on Instagram: “Is it lazy? Is it discriminatory? Is it tone deaf? Is it out of touch?” </p>
<p id="jWRWmB">Jada Watson, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies country radio airplay, <a href="https://songdata.ca/2019/10/">tried the same experiment</a> and took 12 refreshes to get a woman. Even though, for research purposes, Watson only uses Spotify to listen to women musicians, she found that: “Within the first 200 songs (19 refreshes), only 6 songs (3%) by women and 5 (3%) by male-female ensembles were included (all emerging after 121 songs by male artists).” 121 songs! Shouldn’t a well-trained algorithm know her obvious preferences? </p>
<p id="1HMRVy">Contrary to our expectations of personalization, Spotify’s playlist-recommendation function only takes into account the title of the playlist, not the habits of the individual user. According to the algorithm, country = men, an equation that not even a playlist titled “<a href="https://twitter.com/BillsvilleHouse/status/1179067410189606919?s=20">Country Music By Musicians With Vaginas” could shake</a>. Spotify had created its own homogenous definition of the genre, a “very narrow perspective of what country music means,” as Watson told me. </p>
<p id="mnvZEE">Technology users are increasingly aware of how <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/23/18194717/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-ai-bias">biased algorithms can be</a>, but as the rampant sharing of Spotify <a href="https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-12-05/spotify-wrapped-2019-reveals-your-streaming-trends-from-2010-to-now/">end-of-year recaps</a> shows, we still have a general expectation that algorithmic recommendations at least reflect our own taste. Yet the country-music playlist problem demonstrates how individualization fails, or is more about marketing than actual technology. </p>
<p id="yt4fRD">We all get driven toward the same things. “You expect it to be an equal playing field or a space where you have a greater variety of choice, but it actually looked like any old country radio playlist,” Watson said. This both immediately decreases diversity and operates at the level of perception: If we think we are getting relatively unbiased, data-backed recommendations, then we’re even more likely to absorb the way an algorithm defines a genre and accept it as all that exists.</p>
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<blockquote>
<p id="mm2jc5"><strong>Addendum: A Holistic Index of Taste</strong></p>
<p id="bIivpt">Every recommendation algorithm is different, and some are better or more complex than others. The veteran music app Pandora now indexes podcasts as well as songs; the two data-sets are also cross-referenced, so your podcast-listening data can be applied to your music recommendations in order to improve them. </p>
<p id="cZpcjx">Oscar Celma, Pandora’s head of research, told me about these “cross-domain recommendations.” People who listen to “The Bible: Son of God” podcast also listen to Casting Crowns and Chris Tomlin. People who like true crime podcasts listen to Five Finger Death Punch and Post Malone. People who listen to “Fresh Air” like Norah Jones and Van Morrison (duh). “Six Minutes,” a podcast for children, correlates with Kidz Bop and Taylor Swift. Amazon also benefits from this kind of holistic data set: The more it knows about what you buy, the better it knows which TV shows you’re likely to watch on its streaming service, applying one marketplace to the other and forming a more perfect recommendation algorithm.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="pad9ZS">Data Drives Sameness</h3>
<p id="46tLWq">Watson described how the country radio charts, like Billboard’s <a href="https://www.billboard.com/charts/country-songs">Hot Country Songs</a> list, which includes streaming, “have become incredibly homogenous, not just in gender but with songs that stay number one the entire year.” She sees the homogenization of music as being caused by data — a consequence of the fact that streaming, radio, and record companies can access more information about their listeners than ever, faster than ever.</p>
<p id="pjtv7O">“Now that everything’s digital, we have data every minute of every hour of every day,” Watson said. “In the past it was very manual, reported over phone or paper — that’s really slow.” On the broadcaster side, the data motivate snap business judgments: “If a particular style is really driving ratings of your service up, whether radio or streaming, you’ll want to continue to play that kind of artist, based on fear of loss of ratings.” On the label side, the data create an excuse for homogenization. “If artist X is doing really well with a particular style, or a particular production value, then a label might do the same thing with artist Y,” explained Watson. </p>
<p id="umNvYI">These are not new strategies, of course; culture is always driven toward copycatting by money and the hope of a larger audience. But the difference is how fast the iterative loop happens, and how algorithmic recommendations intensify the effect across cultural areas: music, television, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification">interior design</a>, or even <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/decade-in-review/the-age-of-instagram-face">plastic surgery</a>. </p>
<p id="NGs64s">We thought the <a href="https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/">long tail of the internet</a> would bring diversity; instead we got sameness and the perpetuation of the oldest biases, like gender discrimination. The best indicator of what gets recommended is what’s already popular, according to the investor Matthew Ball, a former head of strategy at Amazon Studios. “Netflix isn’t really trying to pick individual items from obscurity and get you to watch it,” Ball said. “The feedback mechanisms are reiterating a certain homogeneity of consumption.”</p>
<h3 id="y5Hf0L">An Updated Definition of Monoculture for 2020</h3>
<p id="YZefgW">Instead of discrete, brand-name cultural artifacts, monoculture is now culture that appears increasingly similar to itself wherever you find it. It exists in the global morass of Marvel movies designed to sell equally well in China and the United States; the style of K-Pop, in music and performance, spreading outside of Korea; or the profusion of <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification">recognizably minimalist indie cafes</a> from Australia to everywhere else. These are all forms of monoculture that don’t rely on an enforced, top-down sameness, but create sameness from the bottom up. Maybe the post-internet monoculture is now made up of what is <em>aesthetically recognizable </em>even if it is not <em>familiar</em> — we quickly feel we understand it even if we don’t know the name of the specific actor, musician, show, or director. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="aIbFEP"><q>Instead of discrete, brand-name cultural artifacts, monoculture is now culture that appears increasingly similar to itself wherever you find it.</q></aside></div>
<p id="E1MifU">A monocultural product reinforces our established range of taste-signifiers rather than challenging them or adding something new. Is it better to choose between a few things that everyone knows, or between 100 things that share a fundamental similarity, algorithmically sorted into a you-may-also-like category? The latter may not be that much more authentic, original, or diverse than the former. In fact, it often feels oppressive, as if there isn’t much of a choice at all. By the metric of similarity, we have more monoculture than ever. </p>
<h3 id="lndA2g"><strong>Streambait and Spotify-core</strong></h3>
<p id="FfNP1j">Each digital platform is its own monoculture, with a homogenized style optimized for the structure of the platform and the algorithms that serve its recommendations. There are monocultures of Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter (see all the “RT this with the worst thing you ever ate for breakfast” tweets). The sameness creates an aura of communal recognizability. The writer Liz Pelly coined the term “<a href="https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly">streambait</a>” in a 2018 essay to refer to “this idea of creating music that people will stream and continue to stream, similar to the concept of clickbait,” she told me in an interview. </p>
<p id="RfUfkI">A related label is “Spotify-core,” used by the New York Times journalist Jon Caramanica to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/arts/music/playlist-pink-khalid-asap-ferg.html">describe a song</a> by the virtual Instagram influencer Miquela. Miquela’s 2017 track “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsMc1nsx0Iw">Not Mine</a>” is characteristic of the style as it now stands: soft vocals, an airy backbeat like the echoes from a club, and slight acoustic touches. Pleasant, ignorable, and instantly forgettable — not great but not the kind of thing that would make you pause the stream. </p>
<p id="Ro0OaC">Streambait’s stars range from pop favorites — Billie Eilish and Lana del Rey — to more indie streaming grist like Big Thief, Clairo, and Cuco, who have all made it to mainstream attention via the internet. Spotify’s narcotized Chill Hits playlist, with over 5.1 million followers, is the genre’s breeding ground. </p>
<p id="qcYCLT">Like airplay on a major radio station, when a song hits a big playlist, it gets popular, promotes the musician to new listeners, and makes money. “Labels have been incentivized to either make music that fits on playlists or prioritize music that works on these playlists,” Pelly said — adapting to the Spotify monoculture like a goldfish to a pond. Optimization comes at the expense of originality. According to Pelly, streambait “is similar to the way that clickbait has a negative impact on journalism, when editorial decisions are made based on what is popular.” </p>
<p id="Po0rnb">“There’s a negative impact on art when such a high value is placed on what is popular,” she said. “Popularity is not a good metric for deciding the value of art.”</p>
<h3 id="pe5FG6">Is What Is Popular Necessarily Good?</h3>
<p id="0Daj4H">Relying on algorithms to dictate our culture means evaluating things on the basis of popularity, engagement, scale, and speed. Yet we already know that what is popular is not necessarily good, and what is good is not necessarily popular. On top of that, the data provided by Netflix and Spotify are biased, shaped by their proprietary algorithms, which are <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-bias-black-box">black boxes,</a> not transparent and precise evaluations of human taste. With social and streaming media, there might be more ways around the gatekeepers of the past. But algorithms are the new gatekeepers. Their parameters are still set by a small group: not Hollywood producers, but <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/computer-science-graduates-diversity/">white, male engineers and data scientists</a>. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="jzswsI"><q>Relying on algorithms to dictate our culture means evaluating things on the basis of popularity, engagement, scale, and speed.</q></aside></div>
<p id="29NF7j">What gets surfaced is still a small subset of what exists, and it doesn’t get surfaced in a democratic or transparent way, as Galaxie 500’s <a href="https://twitter.com/dada_drummer/status/1202616728791986177?s=12">Damon Krukowski discovered</a> looking at his band’s Spotify account. Their volume of plays from “Spotify algorithmic playlists” has been slowly declining, but the platform gives no reason or explanation for the change. “Which leaves us, too, a passive participant in all this,” Krukowski wrote. Passivity is not a good quality for making or consuming art.</p>
<h3 id="i5t0Lr">Mono-Monoculture</h3>
<p id="Dmqcse">The critics giving <em>Avengers</em> and <em>Game of Thrones</em> the epitaph of Last Universal Content are wrong: Today’s form of monoculture is both larger in scale and less human, more mechanically automated, than ever before. Culture is now Big Data. Just what we have lost in the transition from human to machine tastemakers is still bearing out. </p>
<p id="RelVQs">There seems to be more <em>opportunity</em> for diversity (anything can theoretically go viral) and yet the cultural artifacts that do become mainstream appear relentlessly optimized for the digital platforms of the attention economy. Take “Old Town Road,” for example. It’s a song by the creator of a <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/lil-nas-x-was-a-popular-twitter-user-before-old-town-road.html">popular Twitter account</a> that was primed to spread <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8524319/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-tiktok-beginning">on TikTok</a>, then embraced as a meme, and then made even more famous by a preexisting country-music celebrity. The song itself is fine, but the most interesting thing about it is how it’s a product of the structures that now govern our digital culture. </p>
<p id="VgfUZR">Instead of worrying about the loss of monoculture, I’m more concerned that there isn’t enough room for products or projects (or even <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/10/21/20905485/iceland-overtourism-reykjavik-blue-lagoon-northern-lights">places</a>) that are not<em> </em>memes, that aren’t pre-optimized for sharing or scaling. In the end I fall more on Scorsese’s side of the argument, though I wouldn’t wish for any more Scorsese: The non-homogenized alternatives to the mainstream become harder and harder to find. As we grow more accustomed to the algorithmic monoculture, allowing it to occupy our senses, we might lose our understanding of, or our taste for, anything else. </p>
<h3 id="NZD4nZ">Lofi Monocultural Beats to Exist to</h3>
<p id="COQdYl">If you want a vision of the future of culture, imagine an infinite playlist of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHW1oY26kxQ">lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to</a>, in all media — forever. Picture the ambient-music YouTube channel’s aesthetic applied to everything else: anodyne, blameless, meaningless, boring, designed only to occupy time. Form will outweigh content’s authorship, originality, or artistry. The future will be to the present as TikTok is to prestige television.</p>
<h3 id="MHEU5b">Human™ Culture</h3>
<p id="ucXROf">Digital-platform companies seem to be realizing that they need to move away from totally automatic recommendations, or at least appear to do so. They are turning to human “curators” as a way to break from algorithmic sameness and demonstrate that there’s still a personal (that is to say monocultural) connection when consuming digital content. They are deploying humanity as branding.</p>
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<p id="FpqJRE">Earlier this year, Netflix began <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/23/20830154/netflix-collections-ios-test-human-curation">testing playlists curated</a> by “experts on the company’s creative teams” with themes like “Artful Adventures” and “Critics Love These Shows.” Facebook is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/technology/facebook-news-humans.html">hiring curators</a> — “seasoned journalists” — for its News Tab in order to fight misinformation. You shouldn’t let “computers decide what you want,” the CEO of Disney Bob Iger <a href="https://twitter.com/edwardroussel/status/1186841046736465920?s=21">said during a Wall Street Journal technology conference</a>. HBO’s latest advertising campaign is titled “<a href="https://www.humanreco.hbo.com/">Recommended by Humans</a>,” featuring human fans explaining why they like the human HBO shows that they have watched with their human eyes. Preference appears to be shifting away from the algorithmic, similar to how consumers might prize handmade goods over mass-manufactured ones.</p>
<p id="1ZujG9">These are attempts to reassure us that our culture is not yet fully robotic, that it is still meaningful. In the end, we shouldn’t just want to consume things that are fully engineered to attract our attention, which gets converted into money. We should actively seek out elements of messiness and magic, serendipity that pure data can’t provide. As HBO’s head of programming <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2019-08-09/hbo-casey-bloys-game-of-thrones-netflix">Casey Bloys told the Los Angeles Times</a>: “Our shows will never exist just to exist; they all have something to say about the world.” </p>
<p id="SFLWrP">Bloys gave the example of <em>Succession</em>: The show was motivated by his own personal desire to see a resonant story about family, not some abstract, algorithmic calculation. He made the decision not to hire established celebrity actors for the show, which would mathematically increase its chances of attention, but to start from scratch with lesser-known talent: “At HBO, we make our own stars,” Bloys said. </p>
<p id="ekzdGk">The result is a successful example of human taste, something that we didn’t quite recognize and didn’t yet know we wanted (the opposite of how <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cards-using-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html">Netflix claimed in 2013</a> that it made <em>House of Cards </em>because of Big Data). <em>Succession</em> was an unhomogenized surprise that could be on its way to becoming new monoculture.</p>
<h3 id="MUYsb3">The Value of Surprise</h3>
<p id="QyUUyl">Art’s deepest impact comes when it is least expected. In contrast, algorithmic recommendations lead us down a path of pleasant monotony: a looming monoculture of the similar. To resist it, we should embrace obscurity, difficulty, diversity, and strangeness as just as important as recognizability or universality. </p>
<p id="etVOEv">These are the qualities that need most to be preserved against the frictionless consumption pushed by our automated feeds. Otherwise, any new, surprising content that enters the machine of digital monoculture will quickly have its innovative quirks stripped and copied, scaled up and repeated until they become cliches. They will be incorporated into a constantly updated global homogeneity that possesses the sheen of familiarity but no substance beyond style.</p>
<h2 id="lB0I3u">III. RESISTING THE MONOCULTURE</h2>
<h3 id="lgfTsS">Introspection</h3>
<p id="Cje6G1">Reading the author Caleb Crain’s recent novel <em>Overthrow</em>, I was particularly struck by a single line: “It’s like there’s a sumptuary law against introspection,” the character Elspeth pronounces after getting badmouthed on the internet. (<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/sumptuary-law">Sumptuary laws</a> are rules governing consumption, often limiting what lower classes can buy or wear.) Elspeth considers how thinking too much, or being too self-aware, might be cast as an excessive, illegal luxury. </p>
<p id="Pq3Mes"><em>Overthrow </em>is, in part, about the uncanniness of post-internet life, when you are never sure when you’re being surveilled and what some distant server might know about you, or which thoughts or desires could be subconscious digital implants rather than your own. The novel’s protagonists resist the numbing effects of automated <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697">surveillance capitalism</a> through their participation in an Occupy-esque protest, deploying Tarot cards and (perhaps) gentle mind-reading powers to resist the invasive specter of technology. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="KOzWyL"><q>The algorithm is a replacement for our internal monologues and our judgements about what we want to consume.</q></aside></div>
<p id="40k8vB">I called Crain to talk about what he meant by this antipathy of introspection. “We’re in this moment where just being alone and by yourself and having your own thoughts that maybe you don’t share is almost frowned upon,” he said. There is a pressure to make every statement as unambiguous as possible: to be a huge fan of the new thing. The monoculture actually dominates public discourse, an effect intensified by the media industry’s decline and the lack of opportunities for well-paid criticism, according to Crain: “Unless you’re weighing in on the big cultural product of the moment, who cares what you think?” </p>
<p id="gsqr3j">The algorithm is a replacement for our internal monologues and our judgements about what we want to consume. Streaming’s passivity is different from linear TV, but in the end, it’s still passive. In a <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/9aem4y/teju-cole-on-trump-god-and-how-twitter-makes-us-stupid">2017 interview</a>, the author, critic, and former Twitter celebrity Teju Cole likewise described social media as “a monster that feeds on noise” that “could not allow for a kind of distance, silence, refocusing of energies.” In a <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-defense-of-fiction/">recent essay</a>, Zadie Smith critiqued the “digital maw” that digests our language and spits it back at us, warped and commodified. For Smith, the excess of data forms a “shadow text” that replaces human culture with its uncanny facsimile. </p>
<p id="zEdcDp">Under these conditions, pursuing obscurity instead of attempting to participate in the monoculture becomes a defense mechanism and a survival strategy. </p>
<p id="6bIfmd">“I personally like the idea of hiding out, finding your own rabbit hole. I think I believe in making yourself irrelevant as an almost spiritual quest,” Crain told me. “Every time you open a book that nobody has recommended, you hope that you’ll find that secret voice that you needed to hear, that nobody could have told you was there.” </p>
<p id="ypbCWS">The magic is still in what the algorithm can’t surface, what data doesn’t touch — the introspective space in which you can develop your own opinions in private before making them public commodities and measuring them against the mainstream. Because once something enters the cycle of digital monoculture, its essence will, inevitably, be lost. So enjoy it while you can.</p>
<h3 id="f5DTOL">Bathroom Rembrandt</h3>
<p id="GXs2a8">The desire for monoculture is understandable, though its disappearance is more perception than reality. Art is communal. We want to connect with other people over experiences that we share in common. But just as important is being alone, having a unique encounter — not seamlessly recommended or autoplayed — with something that another person created, and then gauging your deepest emotional response. The internet makes this more difficult, even as it makes sharing (or superficially liking) things easier and faster.</p>
<p id="CHPbwH">I often think of something the New Yorke<em>r</em>’s longtime art critic Peter Schjeldahl <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2007/09/11/the-feeler/">said in a 2007 interview</a>, a kind of manifesto for his criticism: “Give me a Rembrandt in a subway station toilet and a flashlight and I’m happy.” I take this to mean that the delivery mechanism of culture doesn’t have to be slick and seamless, nor does the way we consume it. The masterpiece doesn’t have to be shown off in a white-walled gallery and the viewer handed an espresso in a porcelain cup. It is worth a struggle to access, Schjeldahl argued; perhaps the struggle, the precarious intimacy of the experience, makes worthwhile art shine even more.</p>
<p id="IhvXka">Rembrandt died in 1669, impoverished, in obscurity. And yet it is his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/19/rembrandt-late-works-review-national-gallery-magnificently-defiant">late work</a>, the deeply luminous portraits with scumbled brushstrokes, completely unpopular with his contemporaries, that strikes us most today. It took centuries for the paintings to become mainstream. The process was neither fast nor convenient, though it may now seem like a foregone conclusion. </p>
<p id="S3koWR">Digital media, by contrast, prioritizes immediate engagement over the slow blooming of art. I get the sense that today’s algorithms would prioritize <a href="https://psmag.com/environment/googles-deep-dream-is-future-kitsch">Deep Dream patterns</a> — a memetic style without content — over late Rembrandt. The danger of prioritizing the monoculture is that we might not get as many Rembrandts in the future.</p>
<h3 id="CERGQl">Watching Separately, Together</h3>
<p id="WKqAwb">Instead of taking the place of linear television’s monoculture, the streaming-media internet can, at its best, be more like a digital permaculture: an ecosystem of smaller platforms and bigger; smaller projects and bigger; and artists both famous and not, all sustaining each other. The anxiety comes more from the ways that we find and share the things that we’re interested in. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="oTs3rm">At a moment when culture is indeed more “mass” than ever, accepting the freedom of going outside of what’s already popular can be scary. But if we don’t take the risk, the other option is boredom, the boredom of having too much content and none of it interesting enough. </p>
<p id="ELOJFp"><em>Thanks to Till Janczukowicz of Idagio, Penelope Bartlett of Criterion, David Turner, Samantha Culp, Kelly Loudenberg, Nick Seaver, and Erika Hapke for other conversations that informed this piece.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/12/17/21024439/monoculture-algorithm-netflix-spotifyKyle Chayka2019-10-21T08:00:00-04:002019-10-21T08:00:00-04:00Travel has never been “authentic”
<figure>
<img alt="A waterfall in Iceland with a rainbow arc." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/caUFHqWD4eUEJqBgyo8GgWDiJtU=/114x0:1934x1365/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65514741/Vox_tourism_iceland_084.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Iceland’s Gullfoss, the Golden Waterfall, was going to be made into a hydroelectric dam until, the story goes, a local farmer’s daughter mounted a protest.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tourism has never been “authentic.”</p> <p id="ni08Wj">There’s a place in Iceland where you can see the northern lights any time of year, regardless of the weather. You don’t have to ride a snowmobile into the mountains or rent a glass-roofed igloo. You don’t even need a winter jacket.</p>
<p id="3exnSn">Leaning back in my recliner, I gaze upward at the ethereal reds, greens, and blues arcing across the sky, wavering like alien signals, an extraterrestrial message that we don’t know how to decode. I’m struck by their closeness. The bands of color appear right above me, like I could reach out and pass my hand through them. </p>
<p id="LH6kFJ">These northern lights are glowing at 1 p.m. on an 8K resolution screen inside a well-heated IMAX planetarium at Perlan, a natural history museum set on a hill above downtown Reykjavik. Every hour on the hour the planetarium plays <em>Áróra</em>, a 22-minute-long documentary with footage of the lights taken from all over Iceland. The screen’s pixel density is so high that it runs up against the limits of what the human eye can perceive. The digital image might be clearer than reality. It’s definitely more convenient. All you need is a $20 ticket.</p>
<p id="RiDlsl">Places like Perlan — magnets for visitors and secondary representations of the country’s natural charms — are increasingly a necessity for Iceland, which in recent years has become synonymous with the term “overtourism.” Overtourism is what happens to a place when an avalanche of tourists “changes the quality of life for people who actually live there,” says Andrew Sheivachman, an editor at the travel website Skift, whose 2016 report about Iceland established the term. In other words, Sheivachman says, “a place becomes mainstream.” Iceland has about 300,000 residents, but it received more than 2.3 million overnight visitors last year. Tourists have flooded the island, crashing their camper vans in the wilderness, pooping in the streets of Reykjavik, and eroding the scenic canyon Fjaðrárgljúfur, where Justin Bieber shot a music video in 2015, forcing it to close temporarily. No wonder the museum is safer.</p>
<p id="BkpevD">Overtourism also comes with a kind of stigma signified by that word “mainstream.” A reputation for excessive crowds means the tastemaking travel elite actually start avoiding a place, like a too-popular restaurant. “The early-adopter travelers are already onto the next cool, cheap, relatively intact place,” Sheivachman says. Since the Skift article, the term has been widely applied to places like Barcelona, Venice, and Tulum to suggest that no one who’s in the know would want to go there anymore.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qrlWqR2IqGD46cD32AO5Pxlrfhc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19275950/Vox_tourism_iceland_054.jpg">
<figcaption>Popular tourist destination Geysir is actually a collection of several different geysers that periodically erupt to cheers from the rings of tourists trying to snap photographs and selfies.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="BiZhlu">Such is the case with Iceland. From 2013 to 2017 the country saw tourist numbers rising more than 20 percent annually, but in 2018 and for projections into the near future, it looks more like 5 percent. There’s a sense that the tourists took all the Instagrams of waterfalls and glaciers they wanted and then left, leaving the Icelandic economy vulnerable. In 2017, <a href="https://www.export.gov/article?id=Iceland-Market-Overview">42 percent</a> of the country’s export revenue was tourism, meaning that Iceland’s biggest product, larger than its fishing and aluminum industries, is itself. There are both too many tourists and not enough; Wow Air, one of the major conduits of Icelandic tourism, declared bankruptcy in March after an unsustainable expansion. </p>
<p id="91yS1u">While traveling in Iceland this spring to talk to Icelanders about the boom and subsequent slowdown, however, I began to doubt the concept of overtourism itself. The stigma of overtourism is contingent on the sense that a place without as many tourists is more real, more authentic, than it is with them. It poses tourists as foreign entities to a place in the same way that viruses are foreign to the human body. From the visitor’s side, overtourism is also a subjective concern based on a feeling: It’s the point at which your personal narrative of unique experience is broken, the point at which there are too many people — like yourself — who don’t belong in a place. </p>
<p id="Bxzj2h">There are more tourists now than ever before: The <a href="https://www2.unwto.org/press-release/2019-01-21/international-tourist-arrivals-reach-14-billion-two-years-ahead-forecasts">World Tourism Organization</a> counted 1.4 billion international tourists in 2018 and predicts 1.8 billion by 2030. In terms of creating new tourists, developing countries are growing the fastest. Even the Icelandic “collapse,” as <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-20/icelanders-in-shock-as-tourism-collapse-halts-economic-miracle">Bloomberg described it</a>, seems to be more of a pause; Wow Air <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/9/20857460/wow-air-comeback-october-iceland-us-airport-dulles-bankruptcy">plans to relaunch</a> late this year. If fully one-fifth of humanity are traveling away from home, then how foreign are tourists, after all? Tourism is not a localized phenomenon that we encounter in crowded piazzas and then leave but an omnipresent condition, like climate change or the internet, that we inhabit all the time. Maybe we need to accept it.</p>
<p id="IenC9v">Watching <em>Áróra</em> in Perlan’s theater, I sit in the dark surrounded by empty seats while a disembodied female narrator with an Icelandic accent explains how the various colors of the northern lights come from the vibrations of different atmospheric gases hit by electrons. It strikes me that it doesn’t matter that I’m not seeing the actual northern lights; the season ended just before my arrival anyway. I am here in Iceland — surely that makes it a little more real than seeing it in New York? And besides, I’m not damaging any glaciers or emitting gas fumes. In the era of overtourism, the digital display isn’t just responsible. It’s authentic.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="ycEWV5">
<p id="oYzBZT">Iceland might be the modern symbol of overtourism, but it was hardly the first or only victim of tourists. The tradition of the Grand Tour started around the 17th century: British nobility would take a spin around the classical sites of the European continent after university, before settling down. Hordes of young men traipsed through Italy, returning with oil portraits of themselves amid castles or ruins to document the journey for their friends back home. In a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=YiJ0pYyhxVgC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=smollett+grand+tour&source=bl&ots=RXbKvF_A3m&sig=ACfU3U1HiL302RYdSbF8Cxg0hBUjDjUSwA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjEvcvdmYXkAhWytlkKHcBtBsYQ6AEwE3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=smollett%20grand%20tour&f=false">journal published in 1766</a>, the Scottish author Tobias Smollett complained of <a href="https://archive.org/stream/grandtourineight00mead/grandtourineight00mead_djvu.txt">carriages packed with travelers</a> on the Tour route: You “run the risk of being stifled among very indifferent company.” In Rome, Smollett also observed his compatriots acting badly: </p>
<blockquote><p id="0TP8Zc">“[A] number of raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into contempt: ignorant, petulant, rash, and profligate without any knowledge or experience of their own.” </p></blockquote>
<p id="Gntlts">It’s an 18th-century description of overtourism that’s still applicable today. But now the scale is vast and extreme, a <a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/introducing-the-idea-of-hyperobjects">hyperobject</a> of loutishness enabled by cheap flights and social media. Tourists seem to be ruining tourism everywhere. Geographical places have been reduced to disposable trends.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hfSnU0Z9Nr-B-XPjD97a9ah_RBA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19275969/Vox_tourism_iceland_107.jpg">
<figcaption>Nature is delicate in Iceland. Tourists are fenced onto pathways so as not to disturb plants including the signature local moss, which can take decades to grow back.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="OfwWtp">Over the past year, headlines have presented a litany of the absurd ways that we’re wrecking the places we attempt to appreciate. Indonesia’s Komodo Island <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/01/indonesia-cancels-komodo-island-closure-saying-tourists-are-no-threat-to-dragons">considered closing</a> because people keep stealing the lizards; Greece’s Santorini posted signs asking <a href="https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-worrying-future-of-greeces-most-instagrammable-island">visiting Instagrammers</a> to stop trespassing on scenic rooftops; selfie-takers ruined <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/24/netherlands-tulip-fields-barriers-tourists-selfie-takers">fields of tulips</a> in the Netherlands as well as California’s <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/california-superbloom-poppies-instagram-influencers-photoshoots-a8840176.html">poppy super bloom</a>; and Peru instituted <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/jun/20/machu-picchu-tickets-peru-timed-entry-control-flow-of-tourists">timed tickets to Machu Picchu</a> to stop the archaeological site from being trampled into nonexistence. </p>
<p id="d0IgjJ">The crowds can even cause a kind of overtourism rage. Last year, two visitors <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/10/selfish-selfie-takers-spark-trevi-fountain-fisticuffs?CMP=twt_gu">beat each other up</a> trying to take photos at Rome’s Trevi fountain and local protestors <a href="https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/986064/barcelona-holiday-protest-tourist-backlash-arran">stormed a tourist bus</a> in Barcelona, agitating against the invasion of the city by travelers. Venice, the most tragic victim of overtourism, recently instituted a new <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/venice-biennale-city-access-fee-1535137">entrance tax</a> to compensate for the damage the sinking city suffers; each visitor requires a daily fee of €3 to €10, depending on the expected traffic. </p>
<p id="P69Lnx">The pace of tourism fads also seems to have accelerated. One year the popular place to go is Berlin, the next it’s Iceland, then Lisbon, Bali, Mexico City, Dubrovnik, or Athens. Suddenly everyone is Instagramming from the same place, reproducing the <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/7/11/20686194/antelope-canyon-instagram-page-arizona-navajo">same cliche images</a>. In part, the speed is because of media, both print and digital. Travel and lifestyle magazines have long sold the dream of the next hot destination, from <a href="https://www.cntraveler.com/">Conde Nast Traveler</a> and <a href="https://www.travelandleisure.com/">Travel + Leisure</a> to <a href="https://www.gq.com/about/travel">GQ</a>, <a href="https://www.vogue.com/living/travel">Vogue</a>, and <a href="https://monocle.com/travel/">Monocle</a>. The New York Times’ “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/column/36-hours">36 Hours In…</a>” and “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/travel/places-to-visit.html">52 Places to Go</a>” series instantly become #goals. Guides published by <a href="https://www.eater.com/a/food-cities-maps-travel-guide">Eater</a> (also owned by Vox Media), <a href="https://goop.com/travel/">Goop</a>, and the content farm <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/">Culture Trip</a> occupy online search results. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="NDaAo9"><q>“How deep do you have to dig before you start seeing places that would really be something special?”</q></aside></div>
<p id="0m1E1F">These tips expire quickly in the age of overtourism; you have to follow them while the spots are still semi-obscure in order to cash in your cultural capital — before they’re <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/17/17979806/travel-dating-tinder-bumble-hinge">pictured on Tinder profiles</a> above the words “Travel is my life.” Tourism is competitive. “The places where the magazine editors go, they’re quick to turn them into something, then quick to declare them over,” says Colin James Nagy, head of strategy at the agency Fred & Farid and a travel tastemaker himself. “In Tulum, that happened in five years.” New York magazine <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2019/02/who-killed-tulum.html">declared the Mexican beach town “dead”</a> in February 2019. Nagy suggests instead Denmark’s Faroe Islands, Todos Santos in Mexico, and Dakar, Senegal, as up-and-comers. No doubt they’ll be deemed dead soon, too.</p>
<p id="LvZBS2">The ephemeral trendiness — travel as fast fashion — is part of a structural change in the tourism industry, according to Stanislav Ivanov, professor of tourism economics at Bulgaria’s Varna University of Management. Centuries ago, Grand Tour trips would take up to three years; you could stay in Rome for six to eight weeks alone. In the 20th century, traditional travel agents and tour operators offered pre-packaged trips that encouraged a sense of loyalty to particular places or hospitality brands, which tourists would return to repeatedly. There was less variety and more consistency. But since the 2000s, any traveler can easily use an “online travel agency,” or OTA, like Expedia or <a href="http://booking.com">Booking.com</a> and visit a new place every holiday. “People are collecting destinations,” Ivanov says. “Loyalty is not toward the hotels or destinations but toward the distributors.” </p>
<p id="tIZ99a">Plug in your travel dates and an OTA will serve you a long list of possible flights from various carriers, plus bonus car and hotel rentals and activity suggestions. OTAs were once cheaper and considerably smoother than direct booking; many companies have since upgraded their digital services, but the <a href="https://www.duettocloud.com/library/consumers-still-believe-ota-rates-cheaper">preference for OTAs</a> remains. In the end, the service is less personalized and more automated. </p>
<p id="bg4H3d">Operating at a massive scale with call centers full of staff who may not know much about a traveler’s destination, OTAs end up serving the same itineraries over and over, according to Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson, the director-general of the Icelandic Tourism Board and a vehement critic of the digital platforms. They create what he calls a “top 10” list effect, reducing a country or city to a series of boxes to check off. OTAs “don’t give a damn about what’s really happening” in a place, Steinarsson says. “They are just shoveling out packages.” </p>
<div class="p-fullbleed-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="A tourist on an Iceland shopping street hugs a large stuffed polar bear white getting their picture taken. Other tourists wait their turn to pose." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wPi9l7kZs2dFDHHQbHDzNerKZqw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19275988/Vox_tourism_iceland_024.jpg">
<figcaption>On Reykjavik shopping streets like Laugavegur, tourists in heavy winter jackets wander boutiques and pose with kitsch (in fact, there are no real polar bears in Iceland).</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="z9DzuY">The problem is particularly acute in Iceland because so much of its tourism is routed through packaged bus trips; charting your own route with a rental car is both more expensive and more forbidding due to the weather, terrain, and not-insignificant chance of, say, <a href="https://www.icelandreview.com/news/tourists-rescued-from-highland-river/">getting stuck in a river</a>. So visitors are most likely to succumb to convenience and take a spin around the Golden Circle, a 190-mile loop through the southern uplands that features the geysers, waterfalls, and rocky cliffs that everyone posts on Instagram or Facebook — the same spots that are sustaining the most damage. “If you go to Iceland, you have to do that list. ‘Go onto our site, it’s on the front screen, just take out your credit card, pay, get it over with, and start enjoying,’” Steinarsson says. “How deep do you have to dig before you start seeing places that would really be something special?” </p>
<p id="F0MAlB">Where we go and how we get there are increasingly influenced by a series of digital platforms — not just big OTAs, but Airbnb, Yelp, and Instagram — that prioritize engagement over originality. Overtourism is a consequence, not a cause. The more often a particular destination or package proves successful, the more users a site’s algorithm will drive to it, intensifying the problem by pushing travelers to have the same experiences as one another on a single beaten track around the globe, updated and optimized in real time. When one spot gets too crowded and its novelty used up, the next is slotted into its place.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="tVXEUw">
<p id="vz8tav">For my trip, I decide to take the path of least resistance, relying on OTAs and recommendation sites to tell me exactly what to do — a tourist experience as well as an experience of tourism. It is indeed frictionless. I book an apartment in downtown Reykjavik through Airbnb and day-trips through Arctic Adventures, a local OTA. I buy tickets for a tour of <em>Game of Thrones </em>shooting locations and a day-long Golden Circle trip that hits all the main spectacles. Every activity seems to be rated 4.5 stars out of 5 or above. Weeks before my Icelandair flight, I’m algorithmically bombarded on YouTube by hypnotic pre-roll ads for the northern lights. </p>
<p id="ErNTGn">On the plane, I’m forced to watch a three-minute trailer for Iceland before I can even access the entertainment system. The flight map shows me why the country is such a tourism target. The frozen ovoid island is like a period in a chain of ellipses linking North America to the United Kingdom, Europe, and Scandinavia, making it a perfect stopover point. Iceland has no native inhabitants; in a sense, everyone has been a tourist since Norwegian and Swedish Viking sailors started accidentally landing there in the ninth century and settled when they found out the summer wasn’t so bad. Anything that exists on the island is a result of its visitors, making it difficult to determine where the “real” Iceland ends and where tourism begins. </p>
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<figcaption>It’s dangerous to take selfies at Gullfoss. One wrong move and you could plunge into the ravine, where “it’s impossible to find you,” says Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson of the Icelandic Tourism Bureau.</figcaption>
</figure>
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<p id="mZoDy3">Almost every flight passes through Keflavik airport outside Reykjavik, by far the largest city, which functions like a fire hose, spitting out tourists. Icelandair has been offering free layovers through Keflavik <a href="https://www.icelandair.com/about/history/flying-since-1937/">since 1955</a> but only began marketing them aggressively in 1996 as it added destinations in North America, branding the country as a quick drop-in. The 2000s brought marketing campaigns including one with the euphemistic slogan “<a href="https://www.visir.is/i/DA5F6C2E2EA8130E67070DCA313C2CC446080DA3EF6F7DFD2133419B0C723CE4_713x0.jpg">Fancy a dirty weekend in Iceland?</a>” showing a photo of a couple with geothermal-bath mud on their faces. </p>
<p id="q8xsMy">In 2008, the financial crisis sunk Iceland’s previously expensive currency, which was terrible for Icelanders but great for tourism — the income from added visitors sped up economic recovery. “People were flocking there because it has a very high standard of living, it’s very beautiful, and now you could get it for one-third of the price,” Michael Raucheisen, Icelandair’s US-based communications manager for North America, tells me. Raucheisen, who flew Icelandair with his German father as a child, has worked at the company for two decades. “Nineteen years ago, people had no idea where Iceland was,” he says. “They thought Icelandair was an air-conditioning company.” </p>
<p id="gQB8HQ">Iceland is also located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the crack between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, making it one of the most volcanic spots on earth. Beginning in the early 1900s, Icelanders harnessed this energy as geothermal and hydropower for heat and electricity, making it much more comfortable than in chilly centuries past. <a href="https://www.inspiredbyiceland.com/about-iceland/renewable-energy">Ninety-nine percent</a> of the primary energy use in Iceland now comes from local renewable sources. The countryside is dotted with natural hot springs and futuristic power plants, all gently leaking steam. The place is a planetary Juul. (Reykjavik’s name, given in 874, means “smoke cove.”) </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="UgfgAH"><q>The condition of overtourism pressures places to become commodities in the global marketplace the same way we warp our lifestyles to attract Instagram “Likes”</q></aside></div>
<p id="yVetAp">A volcano was in fact the biggest spark for the tourism boom. In April 2010, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, grounding more European flights than at any time since World War II, though in Iceland its impact was limited to the evacuation of a few farms and about <a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1983887,00.html">800 people</a>. The eruption put maps and videos of Iceland on primetime TV news around the world, which amounted to free advertising. “Even during the volcano, the rest of Iceland was clean and beautiful. It was like, ‘Oh, it’s there, I didn’t know that,’” says Inga Hlín Pálsdóttir, the cheerful director of the tourism initiative Visit Iceland. The eruption happened, by chance, just as Pálsdóttir was helping to launch the country’s biggest tourism marketing push yet. “It was basically crisis communication,” she says. Several weeks of her life blurred together, but the campaign succeeded.</p>
<p id="JS49aj">Iceland became a year-round destination, not just the warm months. Summer had been peak season; now, more tourists come for winter and the “shoulder seasons” between peak and off-peak, thanks in part to marketing campaigns highlighting the northern lights, festivals, and outdoor activities. American tourists gradually surpassed the German and French groups that traditionally came for long hiking trips. Tourists from Asia are now the fastest-growing demographic.</p>
<p id="dBmnc5">My first stop after Keflavik is the Blue Lagoon, a short, sparsely filled bus ride away. It’s recognizable from photos: a luminous pool of bright-blue water, like an aqueous latte, set amid jagged black volcanic rocks. But rather than the idyllic natural hot spring it resembles on Instagram, it’s actually a kind of giant artificial bathtub filled with wastewater from a nearby geothermal power plant. The Svartsengi power plant opened in 1976 and its superheated liquid and steam bubbled up through the surrounding lava field; one psoriasis patient bathed in it and saw an improvement and thus a business began. </p>
<p id="initvY">Blue Lagoon built a cement-bottomed pool that spreads out in a faux-organic layout and a clutch of modernist spa buildings. In 2017, the site accommodated 1.2 million visitors who buy timed entrance tickets and pay extra for bathrobes and drinks at the lagoon’s float-up bar. “Can you imagine how many people have sex in it?” the Icelandic politician Birgitta Jonsdottir later asks me. The 240°C water that gets pumped from deep underground is so mineral-heavy, however, that no bacteria can survive, even after it gets cooled down to bathing temperature for visitors to soak in.</p>
<p id="PMmob3">I get a wristband for locker access and cash-free payments then make my way through the bustling locker rooms. Guards in all-black uniforms yell at guests for not showering nude and scrubbing down according to Icelandic hygiene, helpfully illustrated by explicit diagrams. The hot water is a fast cure for my jet lag but the lagoon feels like a crowded hot tub. The first thing I notice after I get a plastic goblet of prosecco and smear my face with some local silica — filtered out of seawater by precipitation and served up in a bucket — is just how international the crowd is. An Indian family snaps selfies, holding each other’s drinks. A German man asks me to take a photo of his friend and send it to him, maybe because I had followed the advice of travel blogs and squeezed my phone into a nerdy waterproof bag strung around my neck. I hear as much Chinese as English. </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Tourists pose behind a painted outline of Vikings with only their faces uncovered. Another tourist snaps their picture." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DRBJjCZhhKqDPkc5U7ooXFPaTTE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19276030/Vox_tourism_iceland_025.jpg">
<figcaption>Vikings were the first tourists to Iceland, which had no native inhabitants before sailors crashed there around the 9th century; now they’re a tourist attraction, too.</figcaption>
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<p id="izCuuh">An American man floating by declaims to his friends, “Can you imagine if we built a concept like this in Las Vegas?” And that’s exactly what the Blue Lagoon is: a concept, a playground-Iceland that can be consumed at will, something packaged and branded as representative of the place despite its artificiality. (One Trip Advisor review deems it “<a href="https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g608874-d207805-r210343921-Blue_Lagoon-Grindavik_Reykjanes_Peninsula.html">expensive and fake</a>.”)</p>
<p id="qs5BPa">The rest of the resort follows the same logic. When I begin feeling like a wobbly sous-vide egg I wade out of the water, shower again, and go inside for my reservation at Lava, an upscale restaurant where one wall is polished lava-rock and two others are floor-to-ceiling glass. Guests in the same white robes as mine dot the tables like hospital patients in a waiting room. I order the $50 two-course set menu that features local lamb. It tastes transcendentally gamey and like nowhere else on Earth, literally, because Icelandic sheep were first brought to the island 1,000 years ago and left alone to evolve in uniquely delicious ways. </p>
<p id="sHV14f">The condition of overtourism pressures places to become commodities in the global marketplace the same way we warp our lifestyles to attract Instagram “Likes.” “You have to compete as a brand,” Pálsdóttir tells me. Countries and cities must constantly perform their identities in order to maintain the flow of tourists.</p>
<p id="N3iEcY">Icelandic tourism is a paradox. Visitors might outnumber locals, but the place must take care to preserve the brand of lonely natural grandeur that has become its product, offered up like a dish of roast lamb belly. The maintenance of this image is its own kind of artificiality. Fun fact: If an Icelandic horse ever leaves the island, it isn’t allowed to come back. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="bEIDKu">
<p id="CtBopq">My Reykjavik Airbnb was listed on the website as a penthouse, but that’s not hard to achieve when few buildings are more than three stories tall. It’s polished and pleasantly anonymous without lacking personality entirely; above the TV there’s a giant photo print of the Brooklyn Bridge. From the balcony on one side I can see the white specter of Snæfellsjökull, a glacier-capped stratovolcano, across the chilled blue of Faxa Bay. On the other is downtown Reykjavik, like an overgrown ski town, with the skeletons of new hotels and high-rise glassy condos under construction on the outskirts. </p>
<p id="PHsONa">Though Airbnb initially helped the growth of Icelandic tourism by housing visitors while development was only in planning, the government instituted a new regulation in January 2017 limiting most short-term rentals to 90 days a year; more than that and the owners need special certification. My place clearly falls into the latter category, since the owner rents out the building’s two penthouse apartments full-time and lives in a unit below them. The apartment is on a quieter stretch of the main shopping strip, Laugavegur, sprinkled with storefronts selling outdoor gear, souvenir puffin dolls, and Viking kitsch. It’s easy to tell tourists apart from the locals because they wear brightly colored Gore-Tex coats despite the relative warmth, and wander aimlessly, unsure of where they’re going. When I go out I try to wear a casual jacket and carry a tote bag instead of a backpack, wanting, illogically, to be disguised. </p>
<div class="p-fullbleed-block"> <figure class="e-image">
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<figcaption>Reykjavik sometimes resembles an overgrown ski town. Vast mountain ranges loom immediately over the rooftops, reminding visitors of the city’s isolation.</figcaption>
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<p id="fsplqi">These days, Reykjavik is full of the kinds of signifiers that mark an “authentic” travel experience, at least according to the influencer set: artisanal coffee shops like Reykjavik Roasters, locavore restaurants like Skál, and shops with names like “Nomad.store” selling minimalist coffee-table books and scented candles. None of these things are bad, necessarily, but they’re also not particularly local to Iceland in the first place. Unlike Paris, for example, where the centuries-old urban culture is what attracts visitors, Reykjavik developed in tandem with tourism.</p>
<p id="27ciAY">“I grew up in the city center and I remember the streets used to be empty. It was a small fraction of the cafes and restaurants you have now,” says Karen María Jónsdóttir, at the time the director of Visit Reykjavik, the marketing office for the city. We’re sitting in The Coocoo’s Nest, a homey farm-to-table bar-slash-restaurant in the harbor neighborhood, where old fishermen’s supply sheds are being turned into boutiques and food halls in a familiar flavor of industrial gentrification. We drink two fashionably non-alcoholic lemonade cocktails at the wood bar. Icelanders used to only go out on the weekends and shop at outlet malls outside the city; now things are open all week long. “You need a certain mass of people to [sustain] a selection of good restaurants and services for everybody,” Jónsdóttir says. “We all want the services but then we complain about the people using them.”</p>
<p id="bNwsMf">Gunnar Jóhannesson, a professor at the University of Iceland who studies tourism, tells me about a recent survey: the closer to the center of Reykjavik, the more positive locals are in their perception of tourists. We need to “re-humanize tourists and tourism,” Johannesson says. “It’s important to stop thinking about tourism as the other and realize that we are also tourists. Tourism is part of our society.” (After all, whenever Icelanders leave their small island, they’re tourists too: According to data sent to me by Visit Iceland, 83 percent of Icelanders traveled abroad for vacation in 2018.) There’s a “standardization” that follows global travel, the professor says, a wave of generically luxurious cafes, hotels, and food halls. “Maybe it’s a bit comforting. It shows that people like the same things.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="mR9BdR"><q>“It’s important to stop thinking about tourism as the other and realize that we are also tourists. Tourism is part of our society.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="2VsX5r">Perhaps the problem isn’t the actual tourists but the way that some people — international entrepreneurs and developers in particular — profit from the tourism industry while others don’t. In other words, extractive capitalism is at fault, causing gentrification and displacement. “When tourism grows out of proportion, when it starts to be based on and motivated by international capital but not the community’s values, then we might have a problem,” Johannesson says. “I don’t think it has gotten to that point in Iceland, but it easily can get there.” Of course, it’s easier to say that on an island with plenty of extant empty space than at a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/aug/30/why-tourism-is-killing-barcelona-overtourism-photo-essay">Barcelona market so crowded</a> with people Instagramming produce that residents can’t actually shop there. </p>
<p id="TgNFM3">Whether the balance has already tipped in favor of capital depends on who you ask. One evening I open Yelp and search the city for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/6/10/18650601/natural-wine-sulfites-organic">natural wine bars</a>, which are the latest international hipster shibboleth and the 2010s update to Thomas Friedman’s <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1413fc26-f4c6-11e4-9a58-00144feab7de">Golden Arches Theory</a> of peace-via-globalization: Instead of McDonald’s, no two countries with natural wine bars will ever go to war with each other. I head to Port 9, down the alleyway of a residential complex. It’s a faux-industrial space with raw cement walls, hanging pendant lamps, and plush green-velvet banquettes, like <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification">every other cool bar</a>. A piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich is playing. Wine connoisseurship is itself a recent import in Iceland; the country had a form of alcohol prohibition from 1915 to 1989, and beer is far more popular. </p>
<p id="yMlmGN">Sitting at the bar are two young men swirling glasses with the bartender. They are both musicians and graduate students in the whimsical, long-term manner enabled by Nordic socialism. They both recently moved back from Berlin, nostalgic for the Icelandic summer and nature in general. Markus Sigur Bjornsson is wiry and wry, dressed in streetwear, while Thorsteinn Eyfjord is taller, neck-scarved and more formal in manner. We discuss the state of the country over a funky Italian red pulled from under the bar. Bjornsson says he might not have ever left his home if it weren’t for exposure to tourists showing him that an outside world existed (Iceland is 93 percent Icelandic; the second largest demographic is Polish at 3 percent). “The tourism bubble, in 20 years we can look back and think, okay, this did more positive than negative to our society,” he says. In fact, as Elvar Orri Hreinsson, a research analyst at the Bank of Iceland, tells me, Iceland is more financially secure now than it used to be, even with the slowdown: The economy is more diversified, the central bank holds a large currency reserve, and foreign investors are more interested than ever.</p>
<p id="gddKdL">Eyfjord is more pessimistic. Like most millennials, he feels a looming generational burden. If the bubble bursts, “we will have to take the blame and build up society again,” he says. But he has a plan. Without tourists, there will be a lot of empty hotels and Airbnbs. “I hope there will come a wave of squatting and the young people and artists will take over.” The spaces could be turned into affordable housing, art studios, and startup offices. “Then at least I can live alone without having to have help from my parents.”</p>
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<img alt="Tourists on a street painted with rainbow stripes take pictures with their cellphones." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/quZF1VV6QtbkMpt09JTO2HyyyKU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19276071/Vox_tourism_iceland_039.jpg">
<figcaption>Every tourist to Iceland travels through Reykjavik; the country as a whole gets over two million tourists but only has 300,000 residents.</figcaption>
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<img alt="Two people crouch on a sidewalk outside a gift store to take a picture of a cat." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Io5PlLGZnrM0hG0O7wtV-5fgaYY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19276073/Vox_tourism_iceland_029.jpg">
<figcaption>Before Iceland’s precipitous rise in tourism a little over a decade ago, downtown Reykjavik was quiet. Now tourists and locals alike support plenty of shops, cafes, and bars.</figcaption>
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<img alt="Tourists taking pictures of themselves and others at Hallgrimskirkja church." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YL_wBXPMAX2Ezsi-0ukukBR5MFU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19276074/Vox_tourism_iceland_033.jpg">
<figcaption>Hallgrímskirkja is the largest church in Iceland and an icon of Reykjavik; one of its wave-like wings is visible in the background here. </figcaption>
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<p id="CoCBQP">The rise of isolationist nationalism might slow it and climate change, accelerated by every plane flight, will change its targets, but as a global growth industry tourism doesn’t seem likely to stop. We can’t return to a time when overtourism didn’t exist, and the desire to do so is as problematic as the concept of overtourism itself: there’s prejudice at work when wealthy, white Westerners have been tourists, if not colonizers, for centuries, but now that the rest of the world is joining in, it’s cast as excessive. Rather, the task left to us is to imagine a post-overtourism world in which we can all participate in and benefit from the human flow. </p>
<p id="uotVFi">I meet Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the 52-year-old former Icelandic Parliamentarian and onetime friend of Julian Assange, in a Fleetwood Mac-soundtracked hostel cafe that she suggests near her apartment in a quieter area east of downtown. Across the street, children bounce on a trampoline. As the former face of Iceland’s Pirate Party, a loose, global coalition of digital freedom activists that was the most popular political party in the country between 2015 and 2016, Jonsdottir is something of a celebrity. Icelandic style is usually sober; she has purple-tinged eyelashes, iridescent nails, dyed-blonde hair, and a set of chunky, biomorphic rings, a contrast to her anonymous black winter jacket.</p>
<p id="VHXxVP">While in Parliament, she tried to pass a bill that would tax new hotels and direct the funds toward Reykjavik itself but was stymied “because people in the countryside wanted their share of it,” she says. The funding would fight what she calls the “Disneyfication” of Reykjavik as well as help safeguard the area’s natural sites. “A lot of places I hold sacred in nature, places I would go to get some energy, there are so many people, so noisy, so disrespectful to the space they’re in, that I don’t go there anymore. I just get very upset,” she says. “You do not become sympathetic to other people’s cultures just tracking through it like a horde of oxen.”</p>
<p id="XSy96c">She thinks we might need a different kind of tourism altogether. Rather than her old favorite spots that are now overrun, these days Jonsdottir prefers exploring her own backyard garden, a choice that’s both quieter and less damaging. She plants potatoes, like her family did in the village where she grew up. “I have a different experience every day because of the weather and the way the plants grow,” she says. “Look at the crisis we’re in with our planet. It’s time that people go on trips in their own area and say goodbye to the diversity that is there.”</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="sFfAh0">
<p id="0kxBia">There’s a blank-slate quality to Iceland, extending to the freshness of the air itself. The place has spun stories around itself since the Vikings wrote down their Sagas, tales of family lineages and heroic deeds, in the 12th century — some of which went on to inspire a novelist named George R.R. Martin. The landscape has had many things projected upon it. “There are different layers to the fantasy of Iceland,” the Icelandic novelist Andri Magnason tells me over dinner at Snaps, an old-school French bistro beloved by locals down the street from Hallgrímskirkja, the wave-like, expressionist church that is one of Reykjavik’s best-known symbols. “The Sagas are one layer, <em>Game of Thrones</em> is another layer, maybe the economy is another.” </p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2YoEz6Upkq66DI-6y8d6IzFO2P8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19276085/Vox_tourism_iceland_003.jpg">
<figcaption>Theo Hansson — graduate student, part-time Viking re-enactor, former <em>Game of Thrones</em> extra, and current <em>Game of Thrones</em> tour guide — gets ready for a tour on a recent Friday morning.</figcaption>
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<p id="0S8cqM">The fantasy can be the attraction. Early one morning I climb onto a coach bus familiar from childhood field trips for an eight-hour tour of <em>Game of Thrones</em> shooting locations. In the front of the bus sits our bearded guide, Theo Hansson, who is wearing a Night’s Watch outfit complete with faux-fur cape, drinking horn on his belt loop (I watch him fill it with coffee), and two actual swords, his long hair tied back with a bandana. Hansson explains that he worked as an extra on the show in various seasons playing a Watchman, an undead wight, and a wildling, braving thin costumes, recalcitrant horses, and very bad weather. Hansson speaks in a deep growl that’s half Hound rumble and half Littlefinger hiss; I assume it’s a put-on until he later speaks on the phone the same way, his voice shot from a day of narration. A Reykjavik native, in Hansson’s off-time he is an academic studying Viking history at the University of Iceland.</p>
<p id="cyUILA">“I really, really hate tourists,” Hansson growls with feeling. “But you guys aren’t tourists. You’re <em>Game of Thrones</em> enthusiasts.” The tour happens the day after the finale of the television show, which I had stayed up very late Iceland time to watch, using a proxy to access American HBO. I’m the only one in the group to have done so, and so no one else is massively disappointed yet. I’m jealous. </p>
<p id="BU7RKV">On the bus are two-dozen other tourists, mostly American, including John and Marsha, an older couple from Buffalo, New York. They booked a free stopover through an OTA when it popped up as an option on their flights back home from Copenhagen, following a long cruise. “We never even thought of Iceland. I couldn’t even spell Reykjavik,” Marsha tells me. But it turned out their neighbor had just visited and loved it, then a woman they met on the Copenhagen flight suggested this specific tour. Marsha says she wishes they had planned to stay for a day longer. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="1JURjp"><q>“I really, really hate tourists. But you guys aren’t tourists. You’re <em>Game of Thrones</em> enthusiasts.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="IShjTu">Hansson swears a lot, tells repeated ex-girlfriend jokes, and puns incessantly. He’s had the gig since 2016. “This used to be a normal tour, then it became an R-rated tour,” he says. His humor has offended some groups, especially Germans, but his boss has been on the tour and loved it. In between anecdotes, we make our stops, like Thingvellir, where Vikings established Iceland’s first parliamentary government, the Althing, in the 10th century, in a ravine-ridden field where the earth is actively splitting apart. It’s also where <em>Game of Thrones</em> shot the Bloody Gate, an elaborate tiered guardhouse outside of the Eyrie castle, in season four. Hansson holds up laminated screenshots from the show that he printed out himself so that we can see the precise camera angle and observe that reality conforms to the image, except, of course, for the missing CGI gate. We ooh and aah.</p>
<p id="cpdAg1">Westeros is not a real place. Even the northern parts of the show were shot between Iceland, Scotland, and Ireland then spliced together as if they were contiguous. But we are tourists of the fiction regardless. Hansson brings us to Þjóðveldisbærinn Stöng, a replica of a Viking-era farm on a hilltop, where the show shot a Wildling raid. Hansson was in the scene; his job was to chase down a 6-year-old child. “I just kept stabbing her again and again and again. It was marvelous,” he says. Then he selects a volunteer from the audience and proceeds to demonstrate the stage-stabbing technique.</p>
<p id="anpE9p">I drift away from the group and lean up against the grassy sod that covers the entire structure of the farmhouse to insulate it from the weather and cold. It starts to rain, but the grass shields me just enough so that I can look out into the gray mist over the surreal landscape, which stretches and pitches into hills and valleys like a skate park for giants. I feel briefly connected to some universal sentiment: the authentic dreariness of the Vikings and the <em>Game of Thrones</em> villagers alike.</p>
<p id="QaMZwe">My Golden Circle tour is more prosaic. I climb aboard another bus, this time filled with a group of quiet Norwegians and a single American family with two rambunctious kids; I’m the only solo traveler. Emil, the tour guide, has an affectless storytelling style, like a podcast of Wikipedia entries, much less appealing than Hansson’s profane patter. Whenever we stop, he seems more interested in talking to our otherwise silent driver, whose name he says is Gummy Bear, than explaining anything. On the itinerary is Thingvellir again, sans CGI; Geysir, the much-photographed clutch of geysers on a hillside; Gullfoss, an iconic waterfall; and the Secret Lagoon, a not-so-secret geothermal spring whose ironic slogan is “We Kept It Unique for You.” </p>
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<figcaption>Theo Hansson with one of his DIY printouts of <em>Game of Thrones</em> scenes that were shot in Iceland, this one at Thingvellir.</figcaption>
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<p id="SCsXU2">Geysir actually refers to the single Great Geyser, but that one only erupts around earthquakes. The star of the show is Strokkur (Icelandic for “churn”), which explodes every 10 minutes or so, causing a great gasp from the assembled visitors. Rings of tourists face backward and lean over the boiling-hot water in order to take possibly fatal selfies. Footprints mark a trodden path in the muddy hill that winds around each pool. </p>
<p id="Ir21bh">More than a natural wonder, it’s now something of a highway rest-stop, grandiose in its attempt to cater to tourists. On the other side of the road from the geysers is a sprawling visitor center, featuring a huge store selling clothing from the brand Geysir, one of Iceland’s most recognizable fashion labels, named after the place itself. The food court offers pizza as well as fish and chips readymade under heat lamps. Next door is a newly developed spa hotel, geyser-themed. Compared to the infrastructure, the waterworks themselves seem even smaller and less remarkable. I recall Markus Bjornsson, the student in the wine bar: “If you’ve seen one geyser, you’ve seen them all.” </p>
<p id="5oMpHV">Gullfoss — Golden Falls — is a mammoth crack in the earth through which runs 140 cubic meters of water per second. The gathered force is like a nuclear bomb but all the time. There were attempts to turn the falls into a hydroelectric power plant, but the story goes that the daughter of one of the farmers who own the land mounted a charismatic protest and saved it. Now there’s a beaten trail with staircases and handrails along the lip of the canyon where we could look down and take photos. Patches of grass that draw even closer to the edge are blocked off with signs. (“If you fall over, it’s impossible to find you, you’re just gone,” Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson of the ITB tells me.) We stand with our phones in front of our faces, the surging water too massive to consider as reality, as anything other than a picture that we can save to show friends later, shorn of its existential dread. I think of Don DeLillo’s description of “the most photographed barn in America” in his novel <em>White Noise</em>: “No one sees the barn.” </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="gSE1Vs">
<p id="RpDIhq">In the face of overtourism, I want to make an argument for the inauthentic. Not just the spots flooded with tourists but the simulations and the fictions, the ways that the world of tourism supersedes reality and becomes its own space. It is made up of the digital northern lights on an 8K movie screen, the manmade turquoise geothermal baths, and the computer renderings of high-budget television shows overlaid on the earth. I don’t regret any of these activities; in fact, the less authentic an experience was supposed to be in Iceland, the more fun I had and the more aware I was of the consequences of 21st-century travel.</p>
<p id="hOrfKh">This is not to discount the charm of hiking an empty mountain or the very real damage that tourists cause, disrupting lives and often intensifying local inequality. But maybe by reclaiming these experiences, or destigmatizing them, we can also begin regaining our agency over the rampant commodification of places and people. We can travel to see what exists instead of wishing for some mythical untouched state, the dream of a place prepared perfectly for visitors and yet empty of them. Instead of trying to “<a href="https://lbbonline.com/news/largest-airbnb-campaign-to-date-tells-travellers-to-live-like-a-local/">live like a local</a>,” as Airbnb commands, we can just be tourists. When a destination is deemed dead might be the best time to go there, as the most accurate reflection of our impure world.</p>
<div class="p-fullbleed-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Tourists taking pictures in front of a spouting geyser." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bOH1O4I2oyVTiIc1BQHrpE7lzVo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19276102/Vox_tourism_iceland_052.jpg">
<figcaption>As tourists, we consume images of the places we go as much as the places themselves.</figcaption>
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<p id="EZVlZM">Back at my Airbnb, I call Theo Hansson to see what he thought of the end of <em>Game of Thrones</em>. He was, like me, dissatisfied. “I’m very glad I was not a part of the last season. It would have soured everything,” he says. He doesn’t expect his gig to last forever. In 2016, “I was doing groups of 40 or 50 people to 100 people. It’s gotten a lot less,” he tells me in a low, hoarse rumble. “I’m expecting maybe two years more of this. The engine is going to fade.” <em>Game of Thrones </em>will drift away like the other narratives, maybe faster than slower.</p>
<p id="zaPTIR">Hansson’s other sideline, making use of his academic background, is being a Viking reenactor. He’s in a group of 200 people, not just born-and-bred Icelanders, who train in sword-fighting, archery, and crafts. They camp out for a week at a time, wearing period-correct clothing and sleeping in Viking tents based on archaeological discoveries. They fight, cook food over open fires, and get very drunk. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="zgPBkQ">This is what refreshes him, participating in the illusion of another life, which is the same thing that we’re always seeking when we travel: to get outside of ourselves and imagine new possibilities, however unlikely or unreal they are. Iceland remains ideal for this purpose. “It’s what fantasies are made of,” Hansson says. “This untamed wild, this alien landscape, this vastness.” </p>
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https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/10/21/20905485/iceland-overtourism-reykjavik-blue-lagoon-northern-lightsKyle Chayka2019-02-12T08:00:00-05:002019-02-12T08:00:00-05:00The best $24.95 I ever spent: an ugly organizer for cables and cords
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<figcaption>Dana Rodriguez for Vox</figcaption>
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<p>The future is not beautiful, nor particularly organized. </p> <p id="aK4ORf">In November 2008, Circuit City closed 155 stores and declared bankruptcy. The following year, it was liquidated. The retail company is now better known for the carapaces it left across the American landscape, concrete boxes like the megaliths of a forgotten ancient civilization. Sometimes I catch a glimpse from the highway of the old sign with its italicized, all-capital letters that zoom toward some future now vanished. It was an anachronistic future of chunky plastic mp3 players, voluminous CD binders, and thick high-definition televisions in suburban living rooms.</p>
<p id="NLIqV2">Circuit City was the tech utopia of my childhood. The store was right next to the only Borders within hours of my hometown in Connecticut (<a href="https://www.racked.com/2014/8/27/7579267/mall-stores-fashion-bug-lerner-gadzooks">RIP all retail</a>), so after perusing the books, I’d go wander among the televisions in the cavernous space, like a goth Home Depot. All the devices at Circuit City looked like they were designed to be installed in your basement where no one else could see them, as with any other source of shame. Ah, the days when “computers” hadn’t become immaterial meshes of data and content pervading the very air we breathe! You could log off by pulling a plug.</p>
<p id="2miXrY">I’ve been thinking of Circuit City lately because of a storage pouch I bought a few years ago that has become totally indispensable to my travel routine, precisely because it returns to that older, rougher era of technological aesthetics. As devices become increasingly Apple-fied, all slick and smooth, this pouch revives the comfort of functional awkwardness. The STM Cable Wrap is a foot-long fold-up bag designed to hold all your technological accessories: charging cords, batteries, earbuds, whatever. It is very useful because even as our devices promise to be less material and more wireless than ever, we’re actually awash in wires, adapters, and dongles, and it’s very easy to lose them. At $24.95, it also costs less than walking into an Apple store. </p>
<p id="Y2HgAr">The STM Cable Wrap can pack a Didion-esque list of writerly accessories vital for the late 2010s: </p>
<ul>
<li id="CKMuIw">International plug adapter </li>
<li id="qCvuW2">Laptop charger </li>
<li id="Cf0jqF">Portable phone battery </li>
<li id="JIqGtj">Actual batteries</li>
<li id="YzkVWK">Handheld recorder</li>
<li id="J81Ofi">Those little white cubes that go into wall sockets</li>
<li id="76Jtl7">USB cable for non-Apple devices</li>
<li id="A6jqmY">USB cable for Apple devices </li>
<li id="ywDOuz">Another cable in case my janky third-party one stops working</li>
<li id="KYodnO">Dongle to actually plug headphones into Apple devices </li>
<li id="x93FdI">Etc. </li>
</ul>
<p id="ELhFac">But its real advantage is transparency. The open pockets mean that when the case is unfurled, you can see what is present and what is not, like a chef’s knife roll. If one of the larger pockets isn’t bulging, then I know my laptop charger has gone missing and I need to dig it out. Ditto the spaghetti tangle of USB cords in the slots in the middle. Before I go anywhere, I leave the wrap out until I’ve packed everything else. Once I snap it shut, it’s the last thing to go into my backpack.</p>
<p id="p919yp">There’s an emotional security that comes with having all these cords where I know I can find them. I need them to make money to survive, of course, but they also guarantee the morphine drip of constant stimulation that I’m now addicted to, provided by iPhones and Kindles and Macbooks, their battery icons filled to the healthy brim. Without all this gear, I might be <em>bored</em>.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="EiYR8q"><q>There’s an emotional security that comes with having all these cords where I know I can find them</q></aside></div>
<p id="Z4Pa0l">The reality of our current technological world has more in common with the STM Cable Wrap/Circuit City axis than <em>Star Trek</em>, <em>Her</em>, or the new circular, <a href="https://www.curbed.com/2017/12/14/16777578/apple-park-cupertino-campus">wall-less Apple headquarters</a>. We don’t have immersive virtual reality environments or robot servants. Instead, we have valueless cryptocurrencies with silly names and batteries that, because they have to be so thin, need to be charged twice a day. Instead of this shallow utopianism, maybe it’s the old honesty that I crave. I want products that acknowledge their finickiness, that show they’re not so seamless as their branding implies. </p>
<p id="F9utMm">Smartphones are marketed as totally life-changing. They’ll get you places, spark new relationships, deliver food, and make your friends jealous. But we cannot depend on upgradeable devices for salvation. The STM Cable Wrap’s textured, plasticized fabric and gray buckle closure — all the sex appeal of a chastity belt — doesn’t promise beguilement or fulfillment like the curve of an iPhone does. It has no pay-to-play upgrades or limited-edition rose gold colorways. The only reason you’d buy another is if you lost one, and, like me, couldn’t live without it. All it has to do to be charming is underpromise and overdeliver. It’s there whenever you really need it.</p>
<p id="yFfKD3">The wrap is excessive. It does not suggest that less is more. You can throw it on the ground. You can spill coffee on it. You can stow literally whatever you want inside without worrying about compatibility issues. This is the true version of enduring technology: as effective as it is ugly. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="Ndi2TV">Like any good fossil, however, the STM Cable Wrap is now discontinued. There are currently only <a href="https://www.amazon.com/STM-Cable-Peripheral-Travel-Organizer/dp/B00R61TIDQ">two left on Amazon</a>.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/12/18217440/cable-wrap-bag-binderKyle Chayka2018-04-17T10:00:02-04:002018-04-17T10:00:02-04:00Have Algorithms Destroyed Personal Taste?
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<p>No one is original anymore, not even you.</p> <p class="p-large-text" id="MN6ohb"><em>The message of many things in America is “Like this or die.”</em><br><em>— George W.S. Trow, </em><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1980/11/17/within-the-context-of-no-context"><em>Within the Context of No Context</em></a><em>, 1980</em></p>
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<h3 id="IZZ7A3">The Seeing Robot</h3>
<p id="br88nR">The camera is a small, white, curvilinear monolith on a pedestal. Inside its smooth casing are a microphone, a speaker, and an eye-like lens. After I set it up on a shelf, it tells me to look straight at it and to <em>be sure to smile</em>! The light blinks and then the camera flashes. A head-to-toe picture appears on my phone of a view I’m only used to seeing in large mirrors: me, standing awkwardly in my apartment, wearing a very average weekday outfit. The background is blurred like evidence from a crime scene. It is not a flattering image. </p>
<p id="iiA5bd">Amazon’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Echo-Look-Camera-Style-Assistant/dp/B0186JAEWK">Echo Look</a>, currently available by invitation only but also <a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xamazon+echo+loo.TRS0&_nkw=amazon+echo+look&_sacat=0">on eBay</a>, allows you to take hands-free selfies and evaluate your fashion choices. “Now Alexa helps you look your best,” the product description promises. Stand in front of the camera, take photos of two different outfits with the Echo Look, and then select the best ones on your phone’s Echo Look app. Within about a minute, Alexa will tell you which set of clothes looks better, processed by style-analyzing algorithms and some assistance from humans. So I try to find my most stylish outfit, swapping out shirts and pants and then posing stiffly for the camera. I shout, “Alexa, judge me!” but apparently that’s unnecessary.</p>
<p id="2DdbVP">What I discover from the Style Check™ function is as follows: All-black is better than all-gray. Rolled-up sleeves are better than buttoned at the wrist. Blue jeans are best. Popping your collar is actually good. Each outfit in the comparison receives a percentage out of 100: black clothes score 73 percent against gray clothes at 27 percent, for example. But the explanations given for the scores are indecipherable. “The way you styled those pieces looks better,” the app tells me. “Sizing is better.” How did I style them? Should they be bigger or smaller? </p>
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<p id="Vkz6p7">The Echo Look won’t tell you why it’s making its decisions. And yet it purports to show us our ideal style, just as algorithms like Netflix recommendations, Spotify Discover, and Facebook and YouTube feeds promise us an ideal version of cultural consumption tailored to our personal desires. In fact, this promise is inherent in the technology itself: Algorithms, as I’ll loosely define them, are sets of equations that work through machine learning to customize the delivery of content to individuals, prioritizing what they think we want, and evolving over time based on what we engage with.</p>
<p id="ldZGBX">Confronting the Echo Look’s opaque statements on my fashion sense, I realize that all of these algorithmic experiences are matters of taste: the question of what we like and why we like it, and what it means that taste is increasingly dictated by black-box robots like the camera on my shelf.</p>
<h3 id="YVLuA8">Theories of Taste</h3>
<p id="DCMhEU">In his 2017 book <em>Taste</em>, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben digs up the roots of the word. Historically, it is defined as a form of knowledge through pleasure, from perceiving the flavor of food to judging the quality of an object. Taste is an essentially human capacity, to the point that it is almost subconscious: We know whether we like something or not before we understand why. “Taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it,” Agamben writes. He quotes Montesquieu: “This effect is principally founded on surprise.” Algorithms are meant to provide surprise, showing us what we didn’t realize we’d always wanted, and yet we are never quite surprised because we know to expect it.</p>
<p id="asnVki">Philosophers in the 18th century defined taste as a moral capacity, an ability to recognize truth and beauty. “Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge; it’s a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know,” wrote Montesquieu in 1759. This unknowingness is important. We don’t calculate or measure if something is tasteful to us; we simply feel it. Displacing the judgment of taste partly to algorithms, as in the Amazon Echo Look, robs us of some of that humanity. </p>
<p id="tqITex">Every cultural object we aestheticize and consume — “the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration,” Pierre Bourdieu writes in his 1984 book <em>Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste</em> — is a significant part of our identities and reflects who we are. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” Bourdieu adds. If our taste is dictated by data-fed algorithms controlled by massive tech corporations, then we must be content to classify ourselves as slavish followers of robots.</p>
<h3 id="ODPve0">But Fashion Is Already Arbitrary</h3>
<p id="LOasdJ">We might say that “taste” is the abstract, moralized knowledge, while “style” is its visual expression. Fashion makes taste easily visible as style, in part because its distinctions between color or cut in clothing are so specific and yet so random (“rules which we don’t even know”). In the past, a whimsical consensus among elites dictated fashion culture; a royal court or an echelon of magazine editors imposed a certain taste from the top of society, down. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="5tCOTa"><q>Taste is an essentially human capacity, to the point that it is almost subconscious: We know whether we like something or not before we understand why. </q></aside></div>
<p id="fn3MQ8">Roland Barthes noticed this arbitrariness in his 1960 essay <em>Blue Is in Fashion This Year</em>. Barthes scrutinizes a fragment of text from a fashion magazine — “blue is in fashion this year” — to see where its thesis, that a particular color is particularly tasteful right now, comes from. His conclusion is that it doesn’t come from anywhere: “We are not talking about a rigorous production of meaning: the link is neither obligatory nor sufficiently motivated.” Blue is not in fashion because it is particularly functional, nor is it symbolically linked to some wider economic or political reality; the statement has no semantic logic. Style, Barthes argues, is an inexplicable equation (a faulty algorithm).</p>
<h3 id="fkeCZI">That Scene from The Devil Wears Prada </h3>
<p id="kkqovS">Further evidence of the artificial and hierarchical nature of style in the past can be found in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5WWy_0VLS4">that scene</a> from the 2006 film <em>The Devil Wears Prada</em>, in which Meryl Streep (as magazine editor and Anna Wintour facsimile Miranda Priestly) tells her assistant played by Anne Hathaway that the chunky blue sweater she is wearing was, in essence, chosen for her. “That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think you made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff,” Streep says.</p>
<p id="8BPKoG">In other words, <em>blue is in fashion this year</em> because some people decided it was. You, the non-tastemaker, have no choice in the matter. </p>
<h3 id="gcu8Sb">Data-Based Fashion</h3>
<p id="L1dy81">Is it possible that instead of this artificial fashion language, algorithms like those powering Alexa could create a more systemic, logical construction of fashion aesthetics built on <em>data</em>? <em>Blue is in fashion this year</em> because 83.7 percent of users purchased (or clicked like on) blue shirts, the Amazon Echo Look algorithm says, therefore it is in fashion, therefore businesses should manufacture more blue shirts, and you, the customer, will buy and wear them. No human editors needed.</p>
<p id="IVSUkD">I’m not sure if this technology-derived algorithmic facticity of taste is better or worse than Meryl Streep-Anna Wintour deciding what I wear, which might be the core concern of this essay.</p>
<h3 id="0TbYwH">“Collapsing Dominant” </h3>
<p id="KEZQnj">When modes of tastes change, there is a certain fear: Am I in or out? Do I understand the new or am I stuck in the old? In 1980, the <em>New Yorker </em>published George W.S. Trow’s essay describing this feeling under the title of “Within the Context of No Context,” from which I took the epigraph and structure for this piece. Trow’s essay came out as a book in 1981 and again in 1997. In the appended introduction to the 1997 edition, he uses the phrase “collapsing dominant” to describe a situation in which an older, established mode of cultural authority, or a taste regime, is fading and being replaced by a newer one. These regimes have two parts: the subjects of taste and the way taste is communicated.</p>
<p id="thYzyr">Today we are seeing the collapse of the dominant regime that Trow originally observed emerging, mass-media television, which had previously replaced the moralistic mid-century novels of New England WASPs. Now, we have Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, and Google-distributed display advertising spreading taste values. Instead of the maximalist, celebrity-driven, intoxicant culture of ‘70s television — Nixon, <em>Star Wars</em>, shag rugs, cocaine, nuclear bombs — we now have the flattened, participatory, somehow salutary aesthetic of avocado toast, <a href="https://www.racked.com/2018/2/16/16987096/outdoor-voices-performance-technology">Outdoor Voices leggings</a>, reclaimed wood, <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/sky-ting-yoga-studio-brooklyn-new-york-domino-williamsburg-krissy-jones-chloe-kernaghan">Sky Ting yoga classes</a>, and <a href="https://www.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17199044/cactus-succulents-trend-interior-design-landcaping">succulents in ceramic planters</a>. </p>
<p id="c7oKOM">That we are in the midst of this shift in taste might help explain our larger mood of instability and paranoia (or is it just me?). We can’t figure out what might be sustainable to identify with, to orient our taste on. The algorithm suggests that we trust it, but we don’t entirely want to. We crave a more “authentic,” lasting form of meaning.</p>
<h3 id="94fUc8">The Death of Svpply </h3>
<p id="nP0Qq9">In 2009, a designer named Ben Pieratt, now living in Massachusetts, launched Svpply. It was a kind of online social network based on shopping, where invitation-only members could curate selections of products from elsewhere on the internet and users could follow their favorite tastemakers. Eventually, any user could become a curator. I remember it from the time as a calm, limpid pool in the midst of so much internet noise. The site presented only cool clothes, bags, and accessories, all chosen by individual humans, since algorithmic feeds weren’t widely deployed at the time. On Svpply you could find the melange of signifiers of a certain class of early-adopter design-bro: minimalist sneakers, fancy T-shirts, Leica cameras, and drop-crotch sweatpants. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="8Zx9y7"><q>The algorithm suggests that we trust it, but we don’t entirely want to. </q></aside></div>
<p id="ibXXTc">In 2012, eBay acquired the company and quickly shut it down. In 2014, Pieratt launched a Kickstarter for <a href="https://verygoods.co/">Very Goods</a>, a Svpply replacement that’s still active. Today he sees Svpply as a cautionary tale about the limits of human curation on the internet. Over the phone, we talk about how taste doesn’t really scale. The bigger a platform gets, the harder it is to maintain a particular sense of style. By opening the platform, Pieratt had tried to “convert from a human-driven community into a machine,” he explains. “When we lost the exclusivity, people didn’t really care anymore.” Svpply’s innate sense of uniqueness didn’t survive: “If everyone’s editing <em>Vogue</em>, it wouldn’t be <em>Vogue</em>.” </p>
<p id="rQs4lq">Another question: How good of a tastemaker can a machine ultimately be?</p>
<h3 id="OlhCdO">Human- v. Machine-Curation</h3>
<p id="0KdSr6">I worry that we are moving from a time of human curation (early Svpply) to a time in which algorithms drive an increasingly large portion of what we consume (the Facebook feed). This impacts not only the artifacts we experience but also how we experience them. Think of the difference between a friend recommending a clothing brand and something showing up in targeted banner ads, chasing you around the internet. It’s more likely that your friend understands what you want and need, and you’re more likely to trust the recommendation, even if it seems challenging to you.</p>
<p id="1fErRz">Maybe it’s a particularly shapeless garment or a noisy punk track. If you know the source of the suggestion, then you might give it a chance and see if it meshes with your tastes. In contrast, we know the machine doesn’t care about us, nor does it have a cultivated taste of its own; it only wants us to engage with something it calculates we might like. This is boring. “I wonder if, at the core of fashion, the reason we find it fascinating is that we know there’s a human at the end of it,” Pieratt says. “We’re learning about people. If you remove that layer of humanity from underneath, does the soul of the interest leave with it?”</p>
<p id="AA0K4z">Pieratt makes a further distinction between style and taste. Style is a superficial aesthetic code that is relatively simple to replicate, whereas taste is a kind of wider aesthetic intelligence, able to connect and integrate disparate experiences. Algorithms can approximate the former — telling me I should wear a blue shirt — but can’t approximate the latter because the machine can’t tell me <em>why </em>it thinks I should wear a blue shirt or what the blue shirt might <em>mean</em> to me. When a machine has taken over the exploration of taste, the possibility of suddenly <em>feeling something</em> from a surprising object is narrowed to only what the machine decides to expose. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as machine taste yet,” says Pieratt.</p>
<p id="lf4Rdt">Of course, he and I might just be part of the fading regime, our “collapsing dominant.” The dystopian babies of 2018 raised on algorithmic <a href="https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2">Spiderman-slash-Frozen YouTube videos</a> may have different appetites in the future.</p>
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<h3 id="EyY4hs">Taste Optimization</h3>
<p id="u8HGIN">The threat of banality (or the lack of surprise) implicit in full machine curation reminds me of the seemingly random vocabulary meant to improve SEO on Craigslist posts. As one chair listing I encountered put it: “Goes with herman miller eames vintage mid century modern knoll Saarinen dwr design within reach danish denmark abc carpet and home arm chair desk dining slipper bedroom living room office.” </p>
<p id="F7nEBo">Imagine the optimized average of all of these ideas. The linguistic melange forms a taste vernacular built not on an individual brand identity or a human curator but a freeform mass of associations meant to draw the viewer in by any means necessary. If you like this, you’ll probably like that. Or, as a T-shirt I bought in Cambodia a decade ago reads, “Same same but different.” The slogan pops into my mind constantly as I scroll past so many content modules, each unique and yet unoriginal.</p>
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<h3 id="F8UwJP">Machine-Generated Content </h3>
<p id="dPBi5y">Algorithms promise: If you like this, you will get more of it, forever. This experience is leaking from the internet of <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/5/31/15666062/online-ad-repeats">Google ads for the bag you just bought</a> into the physical world. Look to the artist Jenny Odell’s <a href="http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf">investigation of “free watch” offers</a> 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. </p>
<p id="caAD09">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 <a href="https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/3kvnnn/streaming-is-killing-the-musical-author-v24n8">Noisey noticed</a>; delivery restaurants that are <a href="https://mashable.com/2017/11/09/ubereats-virtual-restaurants/">only virtual</a>, 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 <a href="https://medium.com/@heyitsnoah/santa-claus-airspace-the-modern-aesthetic-64a5d158099e">Airbnb interior decorating</a>, 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. </p>
<p id="ecL8CB">We find ourselves in a cultural uncanny valley, unable to differentiate between things created by humans and those generated by a human-trained equation run amok. In other words, what is the product of genuine taste and what is not. (This lack of discernibility also contributes to the problems of fake news, which algorithmic feeds <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13850230/fake-news-sites-google-search-facebook-instant-articles">promote like any other content</a>, however inaccurate.)</p>
<p id="ft0lUS">Spotify’s fake artists aren’t fake, per se; they’re a <a href="https://trackrecord.net/spotify-does-in-fact-fill-mood-playlists-with-fake-ar-1820642310">kind of muzak</a> created by a Swedish production company that just so happens to have the same investors as Spotify. That the simple possibility of non-genuine music fed to us by an algorithmic platform without our knowledge created a media frenzy speaks to our fundamental fear — a possibly irrational or at least abstruse 21st-century anxiety — of an algorithmic culture.</p>
<h3 id="xbgR8X">Style in the Age of Digital Reproduction </h3>
<p id="Y4omze">In 1935, Walter Benjamin observed that the work of art in the 20th century was undergoing a change during the advent of photography and film. The newfound reproducibility of the individual work of art through these technologies meant that art was deprived of its “aura”: “the here and now of the original” or “the abstract idea of its genuineness,” as Benjamin writes.</p>
<p id="5vLYei">Photography, as Benjamin observed, could reproduce a singular work of art. Algorithmic machine learning, however, can mimic an entire stylistic mode, generating new examples at will or overlaying a pre-existing object with a new style unrelated to its origins. In 2015, researchers <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576">released a paper</a> in which they turned a photograph of Tübingen, Germany into a van Gogh painting, then overlaid the style of Munch and Kandinsky in turn. The system “achieves a separation of image content from style,” the researchers write (a disconnect that contributes to our anxiety).</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="LZdtZS"><q>Want another Picasso, Gucci, Gehry, Glossier, Beyoncé? Just push the button.</q></aside></div>
<p id="LUNLTA">So it’s not just an individual work which can be reproduced, but rather an artist’s entire aesthetic. The resulting lack of aura devalues unique style, or changes our experience of it, just as photography once challenged painting. “The reproduced work of art is to an ever-increasing extent the reproduction of a work of art designed for reproducibility,” Benjamin writes. Another cultural crisis is looming as we realize that “new” or popular styles will be increasingly optimized for their algorithmic reproducibility (in other words, designed to spread meme-like over digital platforms) instead of their originality.</p>
<p id="sfeuiq">Want another Picasso, Gucci, Gehry, Glossier, Beyoncé? Just push the button. It’ll be close enough. There’s already an Instagram influencer with over 700,000 followers, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en">Miquela</a>, who appears to be a 19-year-old model dressing up in clothes from Chanel, Proenza Schouler, and Supreme. Her vibe is Kylie Jenner, with her malevolent-cherub face and embrace of streetwear. Except Miquela is actually a virtual character her designers rendered by computer, as if produced by a Kardashian-fed AI. Unlike Jenner, Miquela is a style that can be reproduced cheaply and infinitely.</p>
<h3 id="KonEHH">One Tenet of Algorithmic Culture</h3>
<p id="V0FEzN">Every platform, canvassed by an algorithm that prioritizes some content over other content based on predicted engagement, develops a Generic Style that is optimized for the platform’s specific structure. This Generic Style evolves over time based on updates in the platform and in the incentives of the algorithm for users. </p>
<p id="bBV8zx">When we encounter the Generic Style in the world, we feel a shiver of fear: We have entered the realm of the not-quite-human, the not-quite-genuine. Did we make an independent decision or do the machines know us better than we know ourselves? (This anxiety might just be an iteration of the debate between free will and fate.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="MEU5Gh"><strong>Addendum I: Algorithmic Intimacy</strong></p>
<p id="5nVosv">One day, a friend of mine in New York City is on OKCupid, Bumble, or Hinge. He encounters the profile of a young woman and matches with her. He introduces himself with a joke based on the cultural signifiers in her profile, as is the habit of our time. She doesn’t respond. </p>
<p id="xgbDTn">Months later, I am sitting with him in a restaurant at the only two open seats left at the bar. At the end of our corner, there is a young woman sitting alone. My friend and the young woman strike up a conversation that seems to have a certain spark to it. Eventually, the realization occurs to her, or maybe she’d known all along: “Did we… match online?” She apologizes for not replying to his message and they keep chatting with increasing animation. </p>
<p id="npzcA9">Would this flash of intimacy have occurred without the intervention of the algorithm that introduced them? Not so quickly, I think, if at all. The algorithm added a certain missing context through which they identified each other; it can be comforting, even helpful to feel recognized by the machine. He gets her phone number. </p>
</blockquote>
<p id="ViEYC5"></p>
<blockquote>
<p id="ZJrdg0"><strong>Addendum II: Cities </strong></p>
<p id="KRt08k">Then again, aren’t cities (and their bars, restaurants, and boutiques) really just highly attuned machines for sorting people according to their interests and desires? By being here, we have already communicated certain things about ourselves, much like checking preferences on an OKCupid account and surrendering to the equation.</p>
<p id="JEB1jH">Our experiences have always been algorithmic, if not previously driven by an actual algorithm. Sometimes it seems wrong to speak of some kind of lost originality or authenticity, as if life before Facebook were wholly innocent, non-formulaic, pure — tasteful. Taste has always been and always will be derivative, hierarchical, and shallow, but also vital.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="oYzi0i">
<h3 id="s8mZQk">Content Luddism (Ethically Sourced Culture)</h3>
<p id="cfbdlG">What do we do, then, about this shift from human to digital taste? It’s possible to consciously resist the algorithm, like someone might buck the current fashion trend — wearing bell-bottoms and tie-dye, say, instead of trim, blank basics. I might only read books I stumble across in used bookstores, only watch TV shows on local channels, only buy vinyl, only write letters, forsake social media for print newspapers, wear only found vintage. (Etsy is already algorithmic, with its own faux-folksy Generic Style.) I could abstain from algorithmic culture like the Luddites who resisted the automation of textile factories in the 19th century by destroying machines. It would be so organic. Cool! Obscure! Authentic!</p>
<p id="3XDuMc">But as soon as something Cool, Obscure, and Authentic gets put back on the internet, it is factored into the equation, maybe it goes viral, and soon enough it’s as omnipresent as <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/why-millennial-pink-refuses-to-go-away.html">Millennial Pink</a> circa 2017. In this way, algorithmic culture is not encouraging of diversity or the coexistence of multiple valid viewpoints and identities. If a stylistic quirk is effective, it is integrated into the Generic Style as quickly as possible; if it is ineffective, it is choked of public exposure. So you’d also have to keep your discoveries analog. Put an air gap between your brain and the internet.</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="KQgpLt"><strong>Addendum III: One Example of Non-Algorithmic Taste</strong></p>
<p id="2au6Uh">My friend is sitting across from me in a wine bar. She’s wearing a black turtleneck cashmere sweater with long ridges down the sleeves. It looks perfect and yet unplaceable; no brand logo, material texture, or discernible quirk identifies it with one source or another. “Where is that sweater from?” I ask. </p>
<p id="dLz75h">“Oh, I got it from my grandma’s closet when she moved out of Manhattan,” she says.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="LYPP4F">Piracy</h3>
<p id="iy8Bxq">I grew up in the early 2000s during the beginning of the social internet, when there were no smart feeds or adaptive algorithms to sort content. The primary ways I discovered new things were through forums, where members suggested which shoes to buy or bands to listen to, and through digital piracy, which gave me a relatively unfiltered list of possible cultural artifacts to consume on Kazaa or BitTorrent, which did not come with “You May Also Like This” recommendations. (I did not live in a city and the local comprehensive bookstore was a Borders 45 minutes away.) These services were the digital equivalent of used vinyl shops: You take what you find, either you like it or not, and then you try again, constantly refining an image of what you want and (thus) who you are.</p>
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<p id="8JnAs3">Since those were formative teenage years, I derived a good part of my identity as a cultural consumer from DIY piracy. Still, the results were neither exceptional nor original. I downloaded a lot of Dave Matthews Band concert bootlegs and sought out American Apparel in the mall after seeing it online. But at least these things felt like mine? Or at least the assemblage aggregated into something I might have called personal taste.</p>
<p id="F2yh76">Now YouTube tells me which videos to watch, Netflix serves me TV shows, Amazon suggests clothes to wear, and Spotify delivers music to listen to. If content doesn’t exist to match my desires, the companies <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/12/536670493/spotify-is-accused-of-creating-fake-artists-but-what-is-a-fake-artist">work to cultivate it</a>. The problem is that I don’t identify as much with these choices as what I once pirated, discovered, or dug up. When I look at my Spotify Discover playlists, I wonder how many other people got the exact same lists or which artists paid for their placement. I feel nostalgic for the days of undifferentiated .rar files loading slowly in green progress bars. There was friction. It all meant something.</p>
<p id="bt49zL">To be fair, this content consumption was also extremely unethical. And it’s not like I don’t like Netflix shows or Spotify playlists. Like cigarettes or McDonald’s, they were designed for me to like them, so of course I like them. It’s just that I don’t always<em> like</em> that I like them. </p>
<h3 id="CaZgt2">Hipster Platforms & Platform Hipsters</h3>
<p id="to5iog">Yet there are an increasing number of legal alternatives to these mainstream platforms. We’re seeing a profusion of smaller platforms with different brand images, the equivalent of a <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/10/12/16460312/reformation-jeans-new-line-more-affordable">Reformation</a> instead of a J.Crew or <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/7/12/15949530/glossier-international-shipping-canada-uk">Glossier</a> instead of <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/8/14/16098890/clinique">Clinique</a>. If Gap is a mainstream platform for fashion basics, then <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/12/1/16724664/everlane-nyc-store">Everlane</a>, with its transparent manufacturing and minimalist branding, and now <a href="https://www.racked.com/2018/4/2/17188388/entireworld-scott-sternberg-basics">Scott Sternberg’s Entireworld</a>, which purports to offer a utopian clothing system, are its more niche, though no less generic, hipster equivalents.</p>
<p id="Qju3w7"><a href="https://www.filmstruck.com/us/">FilmStruck</a>, for example, streams “critically acclaimed classic movies, hard-to-find gems, and cult favorites” like those in the Criterion Collection, while <a href="https://mubi.com/">MUBI</a> selects “cult, classic, independent and award-winning films from around the world.” The full-bleed, black-and-white stills on their websites differentiate them as far hipper than Netflix or cable — you might feel safer about identifying your taste with them (“I don’t watch TV; I only watch FilmStruck,” a platform hipster says). Instead of Spotify, there’s <a href="https://theoverflow.com/">The Overflow</a>, with vetted Christian worship music, or <a href="https://www.primephonic.com/">Primephonic</a>, with high-definition classical recordings. Quincy Jones launched the “<a href="https://qwest.tv/">Netflix of jazz</a>.”</p>
<p id="ECFAmp">Digital platforms exist for non-digital products, too. The start-up <a href="https://rentfeather.com/">Feather</a> will rent you a “hip bedroom” bundle of faux-mid century side tables and bed frame for $109 a month in a kind of minimally stylish pre-packaged taste kit, a thinly reproduced aesthetic lacking any aura. Similarly, fashion companies like <a href="https://www.weargustin.com/">Gustin</a> and <a href="https://www.taylorstitch.com/">Taylor Stitch</a> crowdfund their new products, counting pre-orders before manufacturing anything. These are different from traditional brands in that they are driven from the bottom-up by the actions of users rather than the diktats of auteur creative directors. And, like the drop-shipped generic watches, they are extremely boring, releasing wave after wave of artisanal fabrics turned into rustic, vaguely outdoorsy gear. </p>
<p id="3THwnG">What these businesses suggest is that you can have the benefits of a digital platform and an algorithmic feed while still feeling self-satisfied, pretentious, and exclusive in the knowledge that your content has been carefully curated by humans. Or, you could hire a tastemaker of your own. As <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/19/16902008/debop-deb-oh-interview-curated-playlists-algorithms-art-collection">The Verge reported</a>, a musician named Deb Oh freelances as a Spotify curator through her service Debop, making custom playlists for $125. She culls from the “the symphony of algorithms,” as she beautifully puts it, and comes back with something more manageable, more human. </p>
<p id="YCjJub">Oh’s services present original curation as a luxury good. It costs money to step off the consumption rails so conveniently laid out for us by tech companies and their advertisers. In the future, taste will be built on allegiances to platforms as much as individual creators or brands. Are you more of an Amazon, Apple, WeWork, Airbnb, or Facebook person? Unless you go off-platform, there are no other choices. Not just for your technology, but for your culture: fashion, furniture, music, art, film, media. </p>
<h3 id="CxHY8P">The Style of No-Style </h3>
<p id="e7jze5">Platformization is something the fashion industry is already familiar with, of course: Each major brand is its own platform, expanding in a profusion of seasonal lines and accessories meant to cater to your every need within a single taste-system. <a href="https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/fashion/engineering-the-end-of-fashion">LOT2046</a> is a smaller, independent algorithmic platform for fashion that I subscribed to last year and I haven’t looked back. Its thesis is simple: Your clothing desires can be reduced to a series of signifiers that the service automates and adapts to you. Shipments of all-black clothing and accessories arrive every month; the only customizations are a few stylistic choices — short socks or long, crew-neck or V-neck — and that the items come with your name emblazoned on them, like a black duffle bag I recently received that says KYLE CHAYKA in raised black thread.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="GUZiS3"><q>If our decisions about what we consume don’t seem to communicate much about ourselves anymore, why not just choose to not make them?</q></aside></div>
<p id="k4MrJl">LOT is pro-algorithm. “Any technology should know what you need and want more than you know,” its founder Vadik Marmeladov, a Russian designer who prefers to stay behind the scenes, told me. “Platforms will be telling you what you want before you want it.” He feels that machines should not just suggest things, but make decisions for us, from planning a weekend trip to a morning coffee order. In other words, they should supplant our taste entirely.</p>
<p id="PO69YE">Surrendering to LOT is a kind of freedom to stop thinking about fashion, freeing the mind for loftier things — like contemplating mortality, Marmeladov suggests. Its promise is that by drastically narrowing the variables, perhaps an algorithm can actually help you achieve individuality, not just through clothing but induced existentialism. I don’t wear LOT’s clothes all the time, but I find its ethos seeping into how I think about my consumption in the algorithm age more generally. If our decisions about what we consume don’t seem to communicate much about ourselves anymore, why not just choose to not make them?</p>
<h3 id="F7ew3n">A Pledge for the Self-Aware </h3>
<p id="e19L16">Say it with me: <em>I enjoy what I enjoy regardless of its potential for receiving likes, going viral, or being found acceptable by an algorithm</em>. </p>
<p id="4bv6IV">Say it with me: <em>I also do not deny that I am implicated, inexorably, in the Generic Style of my time</em>. </p>
<h3 id="EaWfML">Algo-Clash</h3>
<p id="TuAbcN">The promise of algorithms is that they will show you yourself, refining an image of your tastes that should be identical to what you would have chosen on your own. The current reality is that these feeds silo you in homogenizing platforms, calculating the best-fitting average identity. That these average identities come in increasingly minute shades does not mean that they are unique.</p>
<p id="bOtcG0">A better mode of resistance might be to use the algorithms’ homogenizing averageness against them, adapting their data for productive disruption. We can take advantage of the clash between multiple algorithmic ideals, or between an algorithm’s vision of the world and reality, creating a <a href="http://amodern.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2010_Original_Rosa-Menkman-Glitch-Studies-Manifesto.pdf">glitch-based aesthetic</a>. What would be error could be art. </p>
<p id="JVSqNu">As culture has changed to accommodate every other technological innovation, so our ideas about algorithms will change. “Eventually we may opt to shift our definition of art in order to make accommodation for the creativity of artificial intelligence,” says Marian Mazzone, an art history professor at the College of Charleston who worked on a project in which AI created original styles of painting (they mostly look like mash-ups of Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism). </p>
<p id="FvpOod">Oscar Sharp is the director of <em>Sunspring</em>, a short sci-fi film with a script generated by a machine-learning algorithm trained on episodes of The X-Files, Star Trek, and Futurama. <a href="http://video.arstechnica.com/watch/sunspring-sci-fi-short-film">The result</a> is something spiky, mostly non-narrative — it doesn’t make much sense, but it is compelling and unique. The film doesn’t try to fool the viewer into thinking it’s 100 percent human-made. Rather, the actors strain to adapt to the aesthetics of the machine and discover something new in the process. </p>
<p id="aoKmes">“It’s like you’re working on a big TV show with a very powerful showrunner who has written the episode, and the showrunner got drunk last night, passed out, and you couldn’t not make the episode,” Sharp says. “You have to do everything within your power to make the episode as it was written.” The challenge was generative: “Augmented creativity is much more interesting than a replacement of creativity,” he says. </p>
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<p id="TRJOiw">The automated clothing service Stitch Fix, kind of a preppy version of LOT, uses algorithmic help to <a href="https://qz.com/1028624/stitch-fix-let-an-algorithm-design-a-new-blouse-and-they-flew-off-the-digital-racks/">optimize their new original designs</a> to increase sales and address gaps in the market, what they call “Hybrid Design”: customers like ruffles and plaid, so why not plaid ruffles? But we could instead go in the opposite direction, making clothes no one wants — yet. Algo-clash clothing would be more like the artist Philip David Stearns’s <a href="https://www.glitchtextiles.com/">glitch textiles</a>, unique fabrics generated from software gone intentionally awry, the discordant pattern of pixels made into a Baroque style. </p>
<p id="Fw4AAS">Fashion is always one step ahead, though. The <a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/story/asoss-triple-waistband-jean-weird-trend">triple-waistband jeans</a> recently released by ASOS already look like a glitched algorithm designed them.</p>
<h3 id="dy4umx">The Innate Humanity of the Algorithm</h3>
<p id="oQO00O">It is not just that artists can collaborate with algorithms; there is always a person at the end of the machine — like the man behind the curtain in Oz — regulating what it does. The majority of these are currently Silicon Valley engineers. And we human consumers are still on the other side of the algorithm, with our freedom to decide what we consume or to opt out. Our decisions shape what is popular in the present as well as what is preserved into the future. “Let’s not forget the audience has a major role to play in determining what will matter and what will not, what is liked and what is not,” Mazzone says. In the long term, this is slightly comforting. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="t4SF8s">
<h3 id="nMZoOE">Taste Is Over! If You Want It</h3>
<p id="qGcZ68">I leave the cyclopic Amazon Echo Look on a shelf in my living room, where it glares at me every time I walk past, not stopping for it to evaluate my outfit. It yearns to assign inexplicable percentages, and yet I am more comfortable judging for myself. It takes fine pictures, but like a mirror, it mostly shows me what I already know. And the device is trying to match me to some universalized average, not my individual style, whatever that might be. It doesn’t know me at all — it can’t tell what kind of clothes I’m comfortable in nor how the clothes I wear will function as symbols outside, in the place I live, in the contexts of class or gender. All-black doesn’t play the same in Kansas City as it does in New York, after all. This is the kind of social, aesthetic intelligence, the sense of taste, that our algorithms are missing, for now at least.</p>
<p id="UXxKaH">Amazon says the Look is for achieving your best style, but its ulterior motives aren’t hard to spot. When I asked the machine about my plaid shirt, an ad popped up on the app’s feed showing me a few other, similarly colored plaid shirts — none particularly stylish or different enough from the one I own, bereft of brand name — that I could <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/4/4/14982426/amazon-fashion-clothes">buy on Amazon</a>. In fact, Amazon is already using the data it collects to <a href="http://wwd.com/business-news/technology/8-brands-amazon-private-label-fashion-apparel-clothing-10850932/">manufacture its own clothing lines</a>, and the results are about what you’d expect from a robot: wan imitations of whatever is currently popular, from the “globally inspired” <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ella-Moon/pages/16152709011">Ella Moon</a> to the <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/7/5/15880176/how-to-french-girl-style-beauty">cool-French-girl</a> knockoff <a href="https://www.amazon.com/PARIS-SUNDAY/pages/16140439011">Paris Sunday</a>. Training on millions of users’ worth of data and images from the Look showing what we actually wear could make the in-house brands slightly less uncanny. Then again, imagine a potential leak, not of credit card data but an extensive cache of your outfits.</p>
<p id="gzRbnr">It’s up to us whether or not we care about the shades of distinction between human and machine choice, or indeed if we care about fashion at all. Maybe taste is the last thing separating us from the Singularity; maybe it’s the first thing we should get rid of. “I don’t think the consumer cares, as long as it works,” one <a href="https://www.fastcodesign.com/90128248/how-stitch-fix-is-using-algorithmic-design-to-become-the-netflix-of-fashion">Stitch Fix executive said</a> of its algorithmically designed clothes. </p>
<p id="P3WiE5">But if we do want to avoid displacing or reassigning our desires and creativity to machines, we can decide to become a little more analog. I imagine a future in which our clothes, music, film, art, books come with stickers like organic farmstand produce: Algorithm Free. </p>
<h3 id="6xidTR">Echo, Echo, Echo</h3>
<p id="bRAjdQ">“Echo” is a good name for Amazon’s device because it creates an algorithmic feedback loop in which nothing original emerges.</p>
<p id="r3bJEl">Alexa, how do I look? </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="FIu60C"><em>You look derivative, Kyle.</em></p>
<p id="YJ9xBn"><a href="https://twitter.com/chaykak"><em>Kyle Chayka</em></a><em> is a writer living in Brooklyn.</em></p>
<p id="Ta7V36"><em>Editor: </em><a href="http://www.racked.com/authors/julia-rubin"><em>Julia Rubin</em></a><br><em>Copy editor: </em><a href="http://www.laurabullard.com/"><em>Laura Bullard</em></a></p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/17/17219166/fashion-style-algorithm-amazon-echo-lookKyle Chayka