What to Read Next: The World Beyond the Screen

Issue #328, featuring Matthew Crawford Kyle Chayka

Happy Friday, readers!

This week I’m reviewing two remarkably impactful books that (may) have permanently shifted how I view the world within our screens and what it does to our sense of reality.

I kind of struggled to write this newsletter because of the immense gravity of what these books are saying. I highly recommend both, and each contains ideas worth wrestling with.

One last thing before we get to the books: Last week over on The Big Read (my online book club), I shared a few reasons why our summer selection — Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin — might just be the most important book you read this year. Check out the post and join us if you’re interested:

3 Reasons to Read "Team of Rivals" This Summer

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Filterworld by Kyle Chayka (2024)

The way that social media and other online services present content has been fundamentally altered from the early days, when consumption happened in a purely chronological timeline. The old way allowed for more uniqueness, personality, serendipity, and even weirdness (in a positive way). Algorithms — which filter content based on engagement and popularity — level everything off into an average, baseline product that everyone is okay with and nobody loves.

In Filterworld, Kyle Chayka explores all the facets of how algorithms are actively shaping our culture — from design to art to where we vacation and what we eat.

It’s most obvious in the realms of art — Spotify, Goodreads, and Instagram have rendered music, books, and photography, respectively, into artistic avenues in which it’s increasingly hard to take any kind of risk. Creators and artists are rewarded for catering to “likes” and immediate forms of shallow engagement.

This book is certainly a bit depressing at times, but the call to action — to forge our own tastes outside of the algorithm — is powerfully inspiring after you’ve heard the bad stuff.

The big idea here is that our lives are being far more shaped by tasteless, faceless algorithms than we care to realize or think about. Escaping the feeds not only has clear phsyiological and mental health benefits, it also just makes life more unique and surprising, and, ultimately, more fulfilling.

Filterworld is always easy to read and certainly compelling enough that it’s hard to put down once you get into it. You might just impulsively delete some things from your phone (like I did).

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The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford

Matthew Crawford was a professional intellectual who got sick of his day job and pivoted to a career in motorcycle repair. His first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), documented his philosophical shift and explored the value of cultivating hands-on skills. Five years later, in the early days of the social media explosion, he followed it up with The World Beyond Your Head, which dives into those themes even more directly by examining what screen-world does to our brains and our spirits, along with some proposed remedies.

Now, this might sound like any number of books that ring alarm bells about our devices, but Crawford goes well beyond surface-level ideas. His prose is heavy on philosophical thought and proposes that the origins of our modern screen-time norms were planted well before smartphones were imagined.

So even though this is a book about distraction, smartphones are rarely mentioned. It’s more about shifting the way we see the world and the value we give real-life experience — which inevitably means changing how we spend our time and attention.

Whereas the world in our screens is fairly predictable and clean-cut, the real world is messy and highly unpredictable. But it’s also more engaging and satisfying . . . it’s more authentic. It’s been 10 years since this book was published, but it’s even more salient in the internet’s new AI frontier, where the value of the real has never been more obvious.

The World Beyond Your Head is admittedly often more dense than what I’m used to reading. Crawford’s vocabulary leans academic rather than pop science and the book is best read in smallish chunks. That said, the ideas are so deep with meaning that it’s well worth every bit of effort. It’s not for everyone, but for anyone who finds our modern culture a bit shallow and wants to explore the philosophical underpinnings of why that is, The World Beyond Your Head may become a new favorite.

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Thanks so much for your time and inbox space. I deeply appreciate it.

-Jeremy