The Filter Bubble

have to do the busywork of living. The irony is that they offer this freedom and control by taking it away. It’s one thing when a remote control’s array of buttons elides our ability to do something basic like flip the channels. It’s another thing when what the remote controls is our lives.

It’s fair to guess that the technology of the future will work about as well as the technology of the past— which is to say, well enough, but not perfectly. There will be bugs. There will be dislocations and annoyances. There will be breakdowns that cause us to question whether the whole system was worth it in the first place. And we’ll live with the threat that systems made to support us will be turned against us—that a clever hacker who cracks the baby monitor now has a surveillance device, that someone who can interfere with what we see can expose us to danger. The more power we have over our own environments, the more power someone who assumes the controls has over us.

That is why it’s worth keeping the basic logic of these systems in mind: You don’t get to create your world on your own. You live in an equilibrium between your own desires and what the market will bear. And while in many cases this provides for healthier, happier lives, it also provides for the commercialization of everything—even of our sensory apparatus itself. There are few things uglier to contemplate than AugCog-enabled ads that escalate until they seize control of your attention.

We’re compelled to return to Jaron Lanier’s question: For whom do these technologies work? If history is any guide, we may not be the primary customer. And as technology gets better and better at directing our attention, we need to watch closely what it is directing our attention toward.

8 Escape from the City of Ghettos

In order to find his own self, [a person] also needs to live in a milieu where the possibility of many different value systems is explicitly recognized and honored. More specifically, he needs a great variety of choices so that he is not misled about the nature of his own person.

—Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language

In theory, there’s never been a structure more capable of allowing all of us to shoulder the responsibility for understanding and managing our world than the Internet. But in practice, the Internet is headed in a different direction. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, captured the gravity of this threat in a recent call to arms in the pages of Scientific American titled “Long Live the Web.” “The Web as we know it,” he wrote, “is being threatened…. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web…. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights. If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands.”

In this book, I’ve argued that the rise of pervasive, embedded filtering is changing the way we experience the Internet and ultimately the world. At the center of this transformation is the fact that for the first time it’s possible for a medium to figure out who you are, what you like, and what you want. Even if the personalizing code isn’t always spot-on, it’s accurate enough to be profitable, not just by delivering better ads but also by adjusting the substance of what we read, see, and hear.

As a result, while the Internet offers access to a dazzling array of sources and options, in the filter bubble we’ll miss many of them. While the Internet can give us new opportunities to grow and experiment with our identities, the economics of personalization push toward a static conception of personhood. While the Internet has the potential to decentralize knowledge and control, in practice it’s concentrating control over what we see and what opportunities we’re offered in the hands of fewer people than ever before.

Of course, there are some advantages to the rise of the personalized Internet. I enjoy using Pandora, Netflix, and Facebook as much as the next person. I appreciate Google’s shortcuts through the information jungle (and couldn’t have written this book without them). But what’s troubling about this shift toward personalization is that it’s largely invisible to users and, as a result, out of our control. We are not even aware that we’re seeing increasingly divergent images of the Internet. The Internet may know who we are, but we don’t know who it thinks we are or how it’s using that information. Technology designed to give us more control over our lives is actually taking control away.

Ultimately, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy told me, information systems have to be judged on their public outcomes. “If what the Internet does is spread around a lot of information, fine, but what did that cause to happen?” he asked. If it’s not helping us solve the really big problems, what good is it? “We really need to address the core issues: climate change, political instability in Asia and the Middle East, demographic problems, and the decline of the middle class. In the context of problems of this magnitude, you’d hope that a new constituency would emerge, but there’s a distraction overlay—false issues, entertainment, gaming. If our system, with all the freedom of choice, is not addressing the problems, something’s wrong.”

Something is wrong with our media. But the Internet isn’t doomed, for a simple reason: This new medium is nothing if not plastic. Its great strength, in fact, is its capacity for change. Through a combination of individual action, corporate responsibility, and governmental regulation, it’s still possible to shift course.

“We create the Web,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote. “We choose what properties we want it to have and not have. It is by no means finished (and it’s certainly not dead).” It’s still possible to build information systems that introduce us to new ideas, that push us in new ways. It’s still possible to create media that show us what we don’t know, rather than reflecting what we do. It’s still possible to erect systems that don’t trap us in an endless loop of self-flattery about our own interests or shield us from fields of inquiry that aren’t our own.

First, however, we need a vision—a sense of what to aim for.

The Mosaic of Subcultures

In 1975, architect Christopher Alexander and a team of colleagues began publishing a series of books that would change the face of urban planning, design, and programming. The most famous volume, A Pattern Language, is a guidebook that reads like a religious text. It’s filled with quotes and aphorisms and hand-drawn sketches, a bible guiding devotees toward a new way of thinking about the world.

The question that had consumed Alexander and his team during eight years of research was the question of why some places thrived and “worked” while others didn’t—why some cities and neighborhoods and houses flourished, while others were grim and desolate. The key, Alexander argued, was that design has to fit its literal and cultural context. And the best way to ensure that, they concluded, was to use a “pattern language,” a set of design specifications for human spaces.

Even for nonarchitects, the book is an entrancing read. There’s a pattern that describes the ideal nook for kids (the ceiling should be between 2 feet 6 inches and 4 feet high), and another for High Places “where you can look down and survey your world.” “Every society which is alive and whole,” Alexander wrote, “will have its own unique and distinct pattern language.”

Some of the book’s most intriguing sections illuminate the patterns that successful cities are built on. Alexander imagines two metropolises—the “heterogeneous city,” where people are mixed together irrespective of lifestyle and background, and the “city of ghettos,” where people are grouped together tightly by category. The heterogeneous city “seems rich,” Alexander writes, but “actually it dampens all significant variety, and arrests most of the possibilities for differentiation.” Though there’s a diverse mix of peoples and cultures, all of the parts of the city are diverse in the same way. Shaped by the lowest common cultural denominators, the city looks the same