You're listening to Doing It Right with me, Pandora Sykes, a podcast where I talk to experts about the myths, anxieties and trends of modern life.

In this series, series four, I'll be exploring topics including postpartum psychosis, sociopathy,

and how technology has flattened personal taste. This is a podcast that asks, what can we do

to understand life better? Not just for ourselves, but for everyone. For the first time ever,

I'm dropping the whole series in one as a capsule box set,

so tuck in.

And don't forget to let me know your thoughts at doing it rightpod at gmail.com.

Kyle Chaker is a staff writer at the New Yorker,

where he writes about tech and social media culture.

He's also the author of a book, Filter World, How Algorithms Flattened Culture, about how technology has come to shape and oversee what we think of as personal taste.

What we watch, what we listen to, how we shop, even how we travel.

The homogenisation or memeification of taste is something I've been thinking about for a long time.

In my 2020 essay collection, How Do We Know We're Doing It Right, which spawned this very podcast,

I wrote an essay called Get the Look

about how internet culture encouraged young women to dress as facsimiles of each other.

It was inspired by that Zara poker dot dress. If you don't know which dress I mean, Google

it. Kyle has zoomed out to look at how the Algo has flattened all aspects of popular culture.

Music, TV, movies, coffee shops.

We discuss the homogenisation of taste, the paradox of choice, decision fatigue, surveillance capitalism,

and whether or not an algorithm could, in fact, make a fairer recommendation than a

human tastemaker, all of whom come with their own biases. I had such fun talking to Kyle and I hope

you enjoy the episode. Let's start with the basics for any Luddites listening.

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