Filterworld

The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet.

There is no teleological arc for digital platforms; they don’t move in one direction toward perfection, the way hard drives have been able to store more and more data over time. Instead, it is cyclical, swinging between different strategies of centralization and decentralization like a pendulum.

Since tech platforms rarely address the enormity of the social changes they have caused, preferring to deemphasize their own power, it surprised me that he admitted Airbnb had an effect not just on how people travel, but on where they go, actively influencing the destination.

Chesky ultimately sees the shift as positive: “The optimist in me hopes that the implication of all this is that the world feels a little bit smaller. If you can make the physical world smaller, that’s almost entirely a good thing. I think that’s the endgame.”

We point demand to where we have supply, to cities that want it,” he said. Like other kinds of content in Filterworld, geography suffers from a problem of discovery. It’s hard to find a particular place to travel when there are so many options; recommendations must serve up interesting finds while also suggesting what is familiar and recognizable.

Yet that vision of smallness is under the auspices and control of Airbnb, following the template the company has set and the conditions that it profits under. Smallness implies homogeneity and a move toward uniformity, most likely under a Western default, under the ideology of the tech industry. The trade-off that Chesky implied was that the more m

“You hit on one of the central questions of our time: What is our relationship to place? Is there more or less nationalism in a world where people can freely move across countries?”

travel redistribution.”

If you could design the perfect picture, you would fairly equally distribute people across many places across many dates, and you wouldn’t overload any one place.”