AirSpace, Redux - Kyle Chayka Industries

Kyle Chayka Industries

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AirSpace, Redux<br>A new intro.<br>Kyle Chayka<br>Oct 07, 2022

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Below I am reprinting my 2016 essay “Welcome to AirSpace,” which was published by The Verge. Their website redesign didn’t update the original article, so here’s an archival copy. I also wrote a new brief introduction. My upcoming book Filterworld will further explore all of these themes.<br>AirSpace, Redux

Lately I think that the power of a piece of nonfiction writing comes more from its content and its accuracy than its style. The subject is compelling because it’s real, because we’re living it and everyone can see it. I wrote the AirSpace essay because I wanted to tackle something I was seeing in the world: the creeping sameness of coffee shops and Airbnbs that I encountered wherever I traveled. It has resonated with people over the six years since it was published because its core argument turned out to be true. Globalized digital platforms and feeds of algorithmic recommendations have flattened vast swaths of culture, encouraging uniformity and frictionless mediocrity. What’s more, since 2016, the phenomenon has extended everywhere you look: Movies, TV, music, visual art, design, and marketing.<br>Many other pieces over the years have identified this sameness and sense of exhaustion. A short essay this week about the picturesque city of Positano being overrun with TikTok and Instagram tourists was only the latest. It’s yet more homogenization: “Too many people wanting to experience the exact same thing because they all went to the same websites and read the same reviews.” The algorithmic overcrowding makes the travel experience worse and also robs it of its meaning, like a form of semantic satiation.<br>As writers, we’re all caught up in the same contemporary condition, struggling to make sense of it. Something about digital technology itself, the way that massive digital platforms delimit culture, has caused this situation over the past decade — as an unintended consequence of the business model of turning everything into data. I often think of a line from Gayatri Spivak: “Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.” In this case, culture — the aesthetic uniqueness of different places, the capacity of art to provoke instead of numb — is the damage. Near the end of my essay, I posed a question: Do we mind the sameness, the flatness of culture under algorithmic feeds? For years now, we have tolerated it, as it creeps further. But I hope that we’re turning a corner, if simply because we’re realizing how much it sucks.<br>Welcome to AirSpace (2016)

How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world

Igor Schwarzmann is the German co-founder of Third Wave, a strategy consultancy based in Berlin that works with small-scale industrial manufacturers. The company’s clients range across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, so Schwarzmann often finds himself moving between poles of the global economy. While traveling, he turns to Foursquare for recommendations about where to eat and drink. "It knows what I like," he says.<br>Every time Schwarzmann alights in a foreign city he checks the app, which lists food, nightlife, and entertainment recommendations with the help of a social network-augmented algorithm. Then he heads toward the nearest suggested cafe. But over the past few years, something strange has happened. "Every coffee place looks the same," Schwarzmann says. The new cafe resembles all the other coffee shops Foursquare suggests, whether in Odessa, Beijing, Los Angeles, or Seoul: the same raw wood tables, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs.<br>It’s not that these generic cafes are part of global chains like Starbucks or Costa Coffee, with designs that spring from the same corporate cookie cutter. Rather, they have all independently decided to adopt the same faux-artisanal aesthetic. Digital platforms like Foursquare are producing "a harmonization of tastes" across the world, Schwarzmann says. "It creates you going to the same place all over again."

It’s easy to see how social media shapes our interactions on the internet, through web browsers, feeds, and apps. Yet technology is also shaping the physical world, influencing the places we go and how we behave in areas of our lives that didn’t heretofore seem so digital. Think of the traffic app Waze rerouting cars in Los Angeles and disrupting otherwise quiet neighborhoods; Airbnb parachuting groups of international tourists into residential communities; Instagram spreading IRL lifestyle memes; or Foursquare sending traveling businessmen to the same cafe over and over again.<br>We could call this strange geography created by technology "AirSpace." It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a...