Culture isn’t boring; we are
Are algorithms making us boring? But we train the algorithms - so maybe we're the boring ones?
My daughter made someone laugh in the car park last week by shouting out, “Boom! Shake shake shake the room”. We’ve no idea where she learnt that phrase or if they’ve been listening to that song at nursery, but it’s now a fixture of our in-car playlists.
It still slaps, for the record, and listening to it in 2025 made my wife and I wonder - why don’t they make bangers like this any more?
Which inevitably leads to troubling questions of “Are we now officially old?” There may well be plenty such bangers in existence; it’s just that we’re not plugged into the TikTok algorithms that serve them up.
And there’s also the school of thought that says even if we discovered a “Boom! Shake The Room"-style banger on TikTok, it wouldn’t have the same effect. Studies show that our music tastes take shape when we’re teenagers, so it’s harder for newer music to grab us in quite the same way.
I’ve grown increasingly comfortable with this state of affairs - my Spotify Wrapped dominated by 90s music, enjoying Friday night Top of the Pops re-runs (we’re up to 1997) and getting teary watching a bunch of older blokes getting teary in Blur’s To The End documentary.
But there’s this persistent broader narrative swirling through my Substack inbox, which feels that our broader culture, including music, is stuck. And that this stuck-ness translates to a feeling that everything is bland, sterile, and boring.
The idea that it’s all down to the mythical “algorithms” underpins much of this stuck narrative. That getting what we want in our FYP and Explore pages means we avoid seeking out interesting work. That algorithms disincentivise creators to innovate in favour of chasing the latest viral trend.
Leaving aside the 2016 vibes of blaming “algorithms”, this assertion is worth exploring in more detail. In his excellent piece from February last year,
does just that, asking the question “Are “algorithms” making us boring?”Read does this through the lens of a review of Kyle Chayka’s book, Filterworld, unpicking some of the examples of alleged cultural homogenisation caused by those same algorithms. The examples include generic hipster coffee shops, the popularity of Iceland with tourists, and bookshops where titles are displayed based on customer reviews instead of staff creation.
As Read points out in his critique, such observations may make you nod “your head in recognition”. But is this down to algorithms, or are we actually talking about trends? Yes, social platforms may amplify such trends more quickly and at a larger scale than ever before, but a trend is a trend. Humans are trend-led creatures, after all.
And maybe that’s why, as Read highlights, the problem isn’t the algorithms; it’s us.
“…the book is not really an argument about globalization or its attendant cultural homogenization, so much as it is the articulation of anxiety about taste on the part of a relatively small demographic cohort. Am I boring now? Are we all boring? Do I even know what boring is?”
And perhaps that confusion over what boring is stems from that same feeling of stasis in our tastes. What we get served by those legendary algorithms is actually quite basic - particularly the Spotify and YouTube versions. More of the same, playing back our tastes that we shaped during our impressionable teenage years.
To break out of those recommendations requires effort - the act of self-curation involves research and taking chances. Which, as you get older, becomes less attractive - so instead you lose yourself in the endless vertical video scroll or let Netflix serve you re-runs of shows you vaguely remember from the noughties (I’ve seen a few mentions of rewatching House across my newsletter subscriptions lately).
But let’s be honest, it doesn’t take that much effort to seek out new cultural inspiration. It’s certainly easier than when I was a teenager in the 90s, when buying an album based on a recommendation in a magazine you paid for was a risk. If it’s rubbish, you’re stuck with it.
There are still online sources providing alternative recommendations, and you can head to Spotify and try something new for free. It's the same with streaming video. You can choose not to listen to algorithmically-generated playlists and switch off the “automatically play more songs” option (my number one top Spotify tip). Break yourself out of your bubble. As Don Draper said, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation”.
It’s also worth remembering that this cultural stasis, this dissatisfaction with algorithmic recommendations, comes from a tiny section of the Internet. Many people remain entirely satisfied with their endless scrolling and Netflix nostalgia.
Indeed, during the final three months of 2024, more people watched Netflix than BBC One.
We may not like how Meta continues to optimise its platforms for algorithmic discovery and consumption, but the numbers don’t lie. Users spend less time on Instagram if it has a chronological feed.
Nine million people watch every episode of The Traitors - it might not have a cool NYC pop-up like Severance, but it speaks to our desire to feel part of a collective cultural conversation.
The cultural stasis conversation is a timely reminder that we all exist in little bubbles of taste and commonality. A reminder also that, to paraphrase one of Daniel Kahneman’s heuristics from Thinking, Fast and Slow, what we see isn’t all there is. That when we work on campaigns and ideas, nine times out of ten, we are not the target audience.
And that means taking steps to burst our filter bubbles and put ourselves in our audience’s hands.
The most rigorous way to do this is to get out and speak to those audiences - working with organisations such as
But reality often fails to provide the time and budget to access authentic lived experience, unfortunately.Luckily, social and digital offers some workarounds. You can easily refresh your social habits and try out some alternative personas. Set up some alt accounts on TikTok and YouTube and intentionally train your recommendations differently. Instead of starting with “Boom! Shake The Room” and going down the 90s nostalgia rabbit hole, kick off with Sabrina Carpenter and see where that takes you.
Take the plunge and try out a platform you find baffling on paper. Set up a Twitch account. Download Fortnite. Ask a young nephew or niece in your family to show you how Roblox works (the platform is famously impenetrable to newbies). Look at the most downloaded free games in the App Store and give one a try.
Or simply switch up your media diet - sign up to some new newsletters, try a new podcast, visit a media site you’d typically avoid.
Like any good research journey, trying out some new starting points might lead you down some interesting rabbit holes that could end up with a new idea or evidence about audience behaviour.
Suppose we develop our strategic approaches and creative ideas based only on our existing knowledge, without taking time to understand our audience or get a sense of their cultural touchpoints. In that case, the ideas will only appeal to ourselves. It’s up to us to train our internal algorithms differently so that they generate new results.
And ultimately that’s also the solution for anyone feeling that sense of cultural stasis in their lives. Reset the algorithms, or ignore them and get comfortable with who you are. Boom! Shake The Room is a great song. The 90s were a great period for music. Even for 90s aficionados like me, there are still songs and albums to discover from that era - you just have to get out and look for them.