Surprise me

Exercises in friction, issue #1: leaving Spotify for the radio and good old-fashioned recommendations

Mar 15, 2025

Upon finishing Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture last week, a spark ignited a much-needed change: I desperately needed to climb out of the algorithmic vortex. This slippery social media vortex, composed of endless engrossing content tailored to each user based on equations driven by that user’s data, is a vacuum of attention. I think of the hours I’ve spent watching reels on Instagram, or the music I’ve started listening to because of Spotify’s Smart Shuffle, or the popcorn movies on Netflix that I play as ambient noise almost every evening. Chayka’s analysis of the flattening effect of social media algorithms, with corporate growth and profit as their ultimate goal, was the illumination I needed to see how deeply, badly I had been embedded in them lately.

The content—the videos, albums, books, products, and movies—is not the issue. In fact, many of the things I have found are delightfully entertaining or surprisingly insightful, and serve as beloved influences and favorites. (The first time I heard Chappell Roan was when Smart Shuffle put on “Red Wine Supernova”. The guitar followed by crescendoing vocalizations at the first three seconds hooked me on the spot.) The issue is that I can’t say that I found them. Rather, they were given to me by an algorithm that predicts my behavior and anticipates my needs, arranged in an order beyond my comprehension. My agency in the ideas I let shape me is, to my own mind, now dubious.

As Chayka points out, “It’s easy to overlook the fact that when consuming content through digital platforms, what we see at a given moment is determined more directly by equations than such tastemakers.” Tastemakers, he earlier describes, are the people who “constantly gather and judge new material to determine how and why it may resonate with audiences”. These are the librarians, DJs, movie booking agents, boutique owners, and concert programmers dedicated to cultural discernment. Equipped with extensive knowledge of their respective fields, they organize the racks and shelves, and shape the cultural canon (or they used to). Elitist gatekeeping is a very real concern in empowering these tastemakers to make calls on what material deserves praise or attention, but at least their biases are easier to point out and critique. Their authority can be questioned, reinforced, challenged—as they should. But when the gatekeepers and their underlying biases are invisible, as they are in the form of these algorithms—because it is fundamentally untrue that algorithms are neutral—then who do we have to debate with? Even in trying to challenge the norm on social media, one still has to play by its rules to achieve the attention required to be disruptive. By that point, when the platform has allowed it to be seen by millions, is it really that disruptive?

Filterworld is the term he uses to describe the “vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influences our lives today”. For this vast network to have the influence it does, points of friction are undesirable. Online shopping has to be as seamless as possible to dissuade us from thinking too hard about spending money. Videos and songs need to have a strong, formulaic hook to win our attention. Films and TV can’t stray too far from tried-and-tested structures to avoid estranging the casual viewer who, at the end of a long day, doesn’t want to be confronted with discomfort. In this world, frictionlessness, which requires generic content that can be slipped into any context, is the ideal. It is why we can freefall within it for hours.

Exercises in friction

“Resistance to algorithmic frictionlessness requires an act of willpower, a choice to move through the world in a different way.” — Kyle Chayka

To regain a sense of agency over the culture I allow into my orbit, I have decided to reintroduce friction into select parts of my life. Friction, as I talk about it here, is the experience that makes me stop in my tracks. It happens when I brush up against something, usually something new and possibly uncomfortable, and when I do, I am invited into a moment to think. What is this? Do I like this? Do I want to keep going? Why is my immediate reaction to it a certain way?

I say select because friction is not always a positive thing. Inaccessible buildings and red tape are manifestations of friction, ones that I do believe we collectively must move towards eliminating. Inconvenience is another, but its vanishing from activities like shopping, dining, and dating has arguably done more harm than good.

In this series, I’ll explore the everyday endeavors I’m making a little more difficult and inconvenient for myself—but more rewarding, too. Good things don’t and shouldn’t come easy. The first is music.

A matter of taste

I’m a picky music listener. I often wish I had a voracious appetite for music, but the truth is I like to linger for months on a handful of songs or a single album. When Agust D’s D-DAY came out in April 2023, I listened to nothing else until June. I did the same with Carly Rae Jepsen’s The Loneliest Time in October 2022, and Will Joseph Cook’s Something to Feel Good About in the middle of the pandemic.

Evidently, I mostly listen along the spectrum of pop, from the most mainstream to indie. I adore pop music’s catchiness and cheeky wordplay, especially when it surprises you with a riptide of a concept delivered in the simplest of words, like when Tessa Violet juxtaposes sublime Catholic imagery with orgasmic pleasure: If you keep it up, imma see the light / open up the gates to my paradise like / My God! My God! Oh! My God! My God!

On other days, I oscillate towards classical, and can listen to nothing but that. I’m particularly a fan of the Baroque period, with its delicious polyphonic sound and long phrases. When I first started paying close attention to the music that would play from classical playlists, I had come to identify a sound that turned out to be characteristically Baroque. Through Bach I discovered a strong affinity for the twang of the harpsichord and medieval lute — instruments we don’t often hear anymore today. In my research into the genre, I did discover that there is such a thing as Baroque Pop, which fused the ornamental Baroque composition with rock music. This short-lived genre encompassed some songs from the sixties that I had, in the past, already been drawn to, like The Beach Boys’ love song “God Only Knows” (a beloved recommendation from my former roommate E—) and the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renée”.

Because I listen to these two genres the most, I only ever get recommendations that already resemble my recent listening history. The algorithm reinforces my supposed taste, when the fact is that I have been surprised many times by albums seemingly outside it. Rapper and poet Nitty Scott’s Creature! (2017) was so influential that it provided me with symbolic guideposts for my undergraduate thesis on Philippine ecofeminism. Because of The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, I discovered The Voidz’ eclectic album Tyranny, which I thought was so brilliant I composed a series of Tumblr posts analyzing its lyrics. The album, released when I was a college freshman in 2014, was also one of the first vinyl records I had ever bought. There is no way Spotify’s algorithm would have recommended that to me today.

Expanding my musical palate

To break out of this limiting, flattening mold, I decided to stop finding music on Spotify.

Instead, I turned to an internet radio app, paid its $2 monthly subscription, and browsed radio stations from all over the world. This way, I reasoned, I would at least listen to a playlist organized by the individual preferences and whims of a DJ or program director. A person, not a machine (though I don’t dismiss the possibility that many of these stations now also just play AI-generated playlists). Each station skews, of course, a certain genre, but within the various programs is the possibility of surprise. This is the point of my frictional exercise: I don’t expect everything to inspire me, but a continuous exposure to diversity, to the unexpected, slowly expands my horizons. I may discover something that disrupts my pattern, and thus makes of my taste something malleable and dynamic. When I do, I have to take the time to write it down. “Taste is not passive; it requires effort,” Chayka rightfully points out. Resisting the laziness I’ve fallen into, I’d like to reintroduce that effort into my listening habits.

Can’t do this without you

For friction to occur, one object must be in contact with another. It does not happen in solitude. In an age of increasing isolation and individualism, friction has become an unwanted thing, but I realize now that in evading it much has been lost. The occasional commentary in between songs, once a feature I may have found annoying, is now a welcome breath of fresh air. A reminder that, while bobbing my head to a song, I am not alone.

When Sabrina Carpenter smugly sings to her ex’s new beau, just know you’ll have to taste me too, she intends it to be diss. An unwelcome reminder that she was there first. But I think it’s a gift. I think it’s a gift that we can “taste” other people in the things—in context of the song, people—we share. I do, in fact, want to “taste” the metaphorical hands that have held a piece of art with affection and reverence. The ear that carefully listened to a song and, by the end of it, decided it was worth passing along to a friend or playing on the radio. I remember all the songs and artists that I’ve fallen in love with that came from a friend’s recommendation, and this web provides the meaningful context that makes a work of art transcend the bars of simply being “content”. I want those specks of human skin, not the sterile queue lined up by AI.

So, friend, this is where I invite you to recommend me an album. Comment below or write to me. Tell me why, if you please. I can’t promise I will love it the way you do, but I promise to give it a try. This, for music, is my exercise in friction.