This is Kyle Chayka’s work newsletter. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter publication One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I’m primarily on X and Instagram.

Kareem Rahma and the Tyranny of Web Video Shows

My latest column in The New Yorker is a subject that’s been gnawing at me for a while. So much digital content — whether influencers, podcasts, or even high-end Hollywood productions — is falling into this format of serial video clips that repeat a certain gimmick. Maybe the host asks what song someone is listening to, or investigates a guy’s messy bedroom, or asks for a spicy opinion while sitting on the subway. This is the “show”: everyone is trying to build parasocial multimedia franchises that gather audiences, and then sell ads, or subscriptions, or spon con on them. Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes on TikTok is one of the most successful of these shows; I reviewed his new, more expansive YouTube production, "Keep the Meter Running,” in which Rahma rides with NYC taxi drivers to their favorite destinations. IMO the show is a bit too bound by the norms of the internet:

To follow in Bourdain’s capacious footsteps is no crime (and, if it is, many people are guilty of it), but Rahma is a surprisingly downbeat, reticent passenger, particularly compared with his teasing, provocative persona on “Subway Takes.” The editing of the show is frenetic, the better to hold a distractible YouTube audience’s attention and provide fodder for clips, and as a result much of the dialogue comes across as choppy, with Rahma inserting quick punch lines. (Instead of commercial breaks, there are ads abruptly spliced in, at least if you don’t pay for a YouTube subscription.) The premise wears thin; viewers don’t learn much about the locations they vicariously visit. The stars of the show are the drivers, who recite their biographies in sound bites: Norman, who takes Rahma to a bowling alley, explains that he raised his younger siblings from the time he was nine, and that he met his now wife while participating in a bowling league. He is initially a staid presence but begins to tear up while recounting his childhood as Rahma listens from the back seat; then the emotion is undercut with a goofy scene at a “rage room” in which the pair smash china and computer monitors. There’s a thwarted, in-between quality to the proceedings: the show is not long or intimate enough to go very deep, and it’s not always focussed enough to be funny. Rahma strives for a cinema-verité aesthetic, with footage sometimes shot on vintage digital cameras, but the show’s style can’t overcome the limits of its format.

Read the column

The Absurd Virtual Spectacle of Trump’s D.C.

This column was quite personal for me, on witnessing the second Trump administration’s impact on DC as a resident, and then seeing the way the president has manipulated the city’s image online, as he builds White House UFC rings and triumphal arches:

For nearly eight years, while living in Washington, D.C., I often played out a thought experiment in my mind: Which Presidential candidate would Americans vote for if they knew, as I and my fellow-D.C.ers did, that the winning candidate would be moving into their proverbial back yard? More than ninety-three per cent of District constituents voted against Donald Trump in the 2024 election, only to find themselves living in a city remade in Trump’s image.

Last August, D.C. provided an early proving ground for the deployment of the National Guard in cities. I watched troops chase delivery drivers on Eighteenth Street, the stretch of dive bars and restaurants that entertain the city’s crowd of earnest twentysomethings, and then, eight months later, patrol aimlessly in groups of four outside of grocery stores and in public parks in the middle of quiet afternoons. Huge banners with Trump’s face on them went up on the headquarters of the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture. In December, board members installed by Trump voted to rename the Kennedy Center the Trump-Kennedy Center and had its new name emblazoned on the façade. Fences rose not just in front of the White House but around parks; in March, the grass at Logan Circle was fenced off with chain-link and opaque mesh, preventing pedestrians from crossing the park, and plans were announced to close the top of Meridian Hill Park, a popular gathering spot, for most of the summer. Trump also demolished the East Wing of the White House, of course, to make way for a vast ballroom. In case the architectural iconoclasm wasn’t enough to offend, some of the rubble from the torn-down building was dumped on the grounds of the public East Potomac Golf Links. For many locals, these incursions into the sites of daily life represented a kind of siege against which they had little recourse.

Read the column

Summer reading recommendations: The New Yorker asked a bunch of its staff writers, my excellent colleagues, to suggest slim books to read this summer, preferably on the beach. My recommendation for Gerald Durrell’s mid-century memoir My Family and Other Animals is below; check out the rest here.

If you’re not already, subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with my work! As discussed, social media doesn’t work for writers anymore. Newsletters are way better.

This is Kyle Chayka’s work newsletter. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter publication One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I’m primarily on X and Instagram.

I’ve published a slew of New Yorker columns lately, and the purpose of this dispatch is to catch you up on them! I think they circle a particular theme: an intense dissatisfaction with the direction that technology is driving culture (and our lives) right now, but also proactive attempts to get beyond that dissatisfaction. The column from my last newsletter, on why Silicon Valley got obsessed with taste, has been resonating with readers. I think what it comes down to is: the tech industry still lacks an idea of what “good culture,” or a good life, might be, and we’re desperate for some kind of optimistic vision.

Everlane and the Death of the “Good” Millennial Lifestyle Brand

“Slop” is fast becoming the central metaphor for the cultural output of the late twenty-twenties. A.I. produces slop, but so do vampiric private-equity investors and rapacious billionaires, through corporate consolidation and hollow brand-licensing deals. The central promise of the millennial life-style brand was that, with the help of digital technology, new businesses could produce higher quality by cutting out the layers that had accumulated between producers and consumers. If this did not exactly amount to something artisanal, it at least represented a hope that corporate slop could be functional and positive, that products could be both mass-manufactured and part of a better-made, less mediated world. In the Shein era, the offering has declined to unapologetic slop, an ephemeral transaction that loses its appeal once a cycle of online attention has moved on. Just look at Blank Street, a venture-capital-backed international chain of coffee shops with an Everlane-esque aesthetic palette, minus the pretense of conscientious consumption. Unlike the striving third-wave cafés of the twenty-tens, Blank Street stores don’t convey any ideals; they promise neither taste nor provenance, only speed, price, and availability.

Read the column

A Booming Shadow Market of Sketchy A.I. Investments

Want to get a tiny piece of Anthropic equity? (Some people will sell their houses for it.) If you don’t have a major hookup, the only way to go may be backroom deals that are investments in investments in investments in Anthropic, three layers removed from the software engineer who actually owns the equity.

If A.I. is going to create a “permanent underclass,” as many prognosticators fear, then what choice is there but to try to cash in somehow while you can? As Chan put it, “Inflation’s crazy, housing prices are insane, people are discovering that the typical route of ‘Go to college, get a good solid job, then build wealth’ is really difficult nowadays.” As Chan sees it, one reason for the secondary-market fever is that OpenAI and Anthropic have stayed private for too long. By the time there’s an I.P.O., it might be too late for the little guy, because the hype-inflated valuations will have nowhere to go but down. “If and when these large companies go public at one-trillion-dollar valuations, retail is going to get hosed,” he said. “Because it’s just too high.”

Read the column

Your Friendly Local Neighborhood Newsletter

People often ask me what I think is actually good on the internet. Hyperlocal newsletters are a real bright spot, with a wave of Substacks that cover particular cities or neighborhoods. In Brooklyn, there seems to be a newsletter every ten blocks, and plenty of people are paying subscriptions for them. Read here about LA’s Eastside Rag, London’s Wooden City, Brooklyn’s Court Street Journal and Boerum Hill Bulletin, and many more. If your neighborhood doesn’t have a newsletter maybe you should start it??

There are strategic benefits to going narrow but deep. The e-mail newsletter platform Beehiiv has found that the so-called click-through rate for neighborhood newsletters is two and a half times higher than that of the average newsletter across the platform. Preeya Goenka, Beehiiv’s chief customer officer, told me, “The more hyper-local and hyper-niche you make your content, the more engaged your audience might be.” Many of the newsletter proprietors I spoke to sounded surprised by the enthusiasm with which readers paid for subscriptions, and by the hunger for neighborhood news.

Read the column

A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against A.I.

On embracing the handmade, the DIY, the messy and accidental as signals of anti-AI art or culture:

Visual perfection is easy to come by these days: just type whatever you’re envisioning into a text box on ChatGPT, Gemini, or Midjourney, and back comes a glossy, detailed digital rendering of, say, your living room with fancier furniture, an aspirational outfit, or a new company logo replicating mid-century-modern style. This instantaneous slickness—which the trend forecaster Emily Segal has labelled “tasteslop”—is easy and abundant, and the appearance of “good taste” is robotically ubiquitous. So it’s no wonder that the artists and designers whose livelihoods are threatened by it have begun moving aggressively in the opposite direction, toward the scrawled, the sloppy, the seemingly mistake-riddled.

Read the column

More columns

Review of Techno-Negative: I reviewed a fascinating new book on the deep history of people destroying technology, from the ancient Greeks onward through to French software developers who burned down tech offices. Quite academic at times, but very nicely written and worth reading.

The medieval Catholic Church associated technology with the devilish temptation of pride; one twelfth-century historian accused Pope Sylvester II of using magic that he’d learned in Islamic Spain to call forth a demon and have it build an omniscient talking statue head that helped him to become Pope. (Sylvester had evil statuary; we have ChatGPT.) “Sinfulness is the hidden condition of technology,” Dekeyser writes, summarizing the Church’s posture. Amen!

The origin of pro-Iran AI-generated LEGO propaganda: I broke the news of who created those pro-Iran LEGO-style videos that lampooned Trump and turned Iranian resistance to US bombing into rap songs. The globalization of generative AI models and tools has caused a kind of leveling, as any aspiring creator anywhere can work in the same visual idioms.

American viewers who are accustomed to maga-style trolling might expect the Lego videos to be driven by a certain clickbait nihilism—brain rot, Tehran-style. But the Explosive News representative spoke of their efforts with a lofty earnestness. “Every scene, every frame, every hidden detail, and every idea in our work feel like our own children,” he said. He quoted a Persian proverb (“What comes from the heart will surely sit upon the heart”) and said that the team hopes that their videos can inspire viewers with “a glimpse into a different kind of spirit—something more poetic, more human, maybe a bit more gentle.” Those might not be the first words that come to mind when one watches clips of a Lego Trump whose plastic butt is often on fire. But Explosive News sees itself as fighting “a battle between truth and falsehood.” The spokesperson wrote, “Quick wisdom from the Qur’an: ‘The noblest are those who stay righteous.’ ”

Notes

I always mean to send this column alert email more often, but it’s tough to stay on top of! Still, I think Substack is the ideal way to keep in touch with people who want to read me. I can provide more notes, riffs, and reflections on my columns and contextualize them better than anywhere else online. I’m wondering how to use this newsletter and email list better. Let me know if you have any ideas or requests!

This is the work newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I’m on Bluesky, X, and Instagram.

As a writer, it’s a joy when you notice a story that’s just squarely within your sensibility. Things crystallize — the world seems to tell you that you have to write about this thing. That’s how I felt when I noticed that Silicon Valley seemed obsessed with the word “taste,” in social-media posts and podcast clips and entrepreneurial exhortations. In the age of AI, personal taste is all that matters, because robots will do everything besides decide what to do! Or that’s the argument. I critiqued the concept in my latest column for The New Yorker.

A.I. companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley. Many people view A.I. tools as a threat—to their livelihoods, to their futures, to their senses of self. Few, whom I know, see them as individuality-affirming life-style choices. We might call what’s going on now “taste-washing,” an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism. The Times perpetuated this mythmaking when it launched a poll last week asking users to read passages drawn from well-known works of literature, and passages generated by A.I., and choose which they preferred stylistically. Nearly fifty per cent of participants preferred the texts written by artificial intelligence. Is A.I. now so adept that it can write like Hilary Mantel? Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted—so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz—that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.

Read the column

I’ve been writing about taste and technology for a long time, not least in my 2024 book Filterworld. It first came to the fore in my 2018 essay for Racked (now published under Vox), “Style Is an Algorithm.” Back then, I argued that algorithmic feeds were automating style and undermining our personal senses of taste, which is to say, the pieces of culture we individually like and identify with. At that time, I didn’t know TikTok’s For You feed was going to hypnotize us and then generative A.I. was going to automate not only the consumption but the production of culture in ever more generic forms. Taste was already under attack; I think it’s vital now to actively think about your own taste and separate it from the influence of digital machinery. (That’s kind of what my next book is about, but moving past deconstructing the technology into rebuilding the human experience.)

Other recent columns

War in the Age of the Online “Information Bomb”: The war in Iran is documented online in a mess of influencer vlogs, AI-generated clips, and meme propaganda.

Global conflict has played out over social media for many years now, dating back to the Twitter-based organizing of the Arab Spring, but the current warfare in the Middle East marks a new level of saturation. Personal footage mingles with official releases from state militaries that are now proficient in the language of the internet. Any clear hierarchy of trustworthy information remains elusive as on-the-ground videos come from all directions, and government agencies are as likely to post memes as anonymous online trolls.

Why You Hate Your Weather App: Do you miss Dark Sky as much as I do?? The founder is back with a new weather app, Acme, which I reviewed, delving into the difficulties of weather apps.

One of Acme’s advantages over its smaller competitors is that it generates its own, bespoke forecasts, comparing and merging the various data sources and predictions using machine learning, and adjusting for factors such as regional microclimates. The app also uses its own algorithm to determine which information to show a user at a given moment. A radar map will pop up at the top of the scroll, for instance, when inclement weather is predicted.

Some personal news

My wife Jess and I recently welcomed a beautiful baby! We’re having a great time in the soft haze of early parenthood. If you have any reading (or watching or listening) recommendations for this moment, please do send them along, or email your best bit of infancy advice.

This is the work newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post on Bluesky, X, and Instagram.

For years now I’ve been fascinated by this YouTube video that chops out the chorus of a TikTok-famous song called “Tek It” and loops it for ten minutes straight. The video is an audio overdose, excising the most addictive part of a track to listen to it over and over again — it’s almost more ASMR than actual music. I’ve always wanted to hear about the band Cafuné’s experience of having “Tek It” go mega-viral on TikTok in 2022 and adapting to the new realm of compressed, looped, user-remixed music online. So their new album Bite Reality coming out September 12 gave me the perfect chance to write a column about the whole thing:

Read the column

The band told me about the pressure of creating content in order to promote their music and the ways in which the audience now has power over how songs sound. Here’s a paragraph:

“Tek It” became one of the emblematic songs of TikTok’s rise in the United States. Riding its momentum, Cafuné signed to the major record label Elektra. “Everyone who goes viral is immediately pressed with the same task, which is to keep the ball in the air,” Yoo said. The band hustled to build their social-media accounts, play shows, and produce a new EP. They also put out an official sped-up version of “Tek It,” replicating the most popular online iteration. “Tek It” and its variations now have more than a billion streams on Spotify, a success by any measure. But the band’s boom was short-lived. In 2024, Cafuné was dropped from Elektra amid a wave of music-industry restructuring. “That amount of profit wasn’t enough to convince anyone of anything,” Yoo said. Cut loose, the duo decided to use their earnings to spend a whole year acting like a more traditional band: writing songs full time, guided by nothing other than their creative whims. They put together an album to release on their own independent label, Aurelians Club, and signed a distribution deal with SoundOn, TikTok’s in-house musician platform. Schat told me mordantly, “It’s funny that the TikTok corporation gave us more favorable terms than any label was capable of giving.” Every musician today is forced to become a content creator, “whether they want to be or not,” Yoo added. “It feels like we’ve all become, like, employees for platforms.”

Listen to the very fun lead single “e-Asphyxiation” — the lyrics are all about the frustration of not wanting to be so online: I don’t want to post my face anymore. (Fans often compare Cafuné’s music to the outro of a 90s anime, that should tell you if you’ll like it.) It’s very relatable; the internet is so toxic but we kind of have no choice but to interact with it if we want to be heard as musicians / writers / artists / citizens.

More new music

Nourished By Time is one of the few new musicians / bands I’ve gotten really into in the last year or two. (Otherwise I’ve just been going deep into the ‘60s jazz and samba archives, I’m guilty.) His new album The Passionate Ones is out now and it’s great. The vibe is a bit indescribable. Soaring vocals, abstracted lyrics, wavy synths, twisted samples, dancey club beats like a rave in an abandoned brutalist building. It feels very new. Start with the bouncy “9 2 5” or my current fav “Baby Baby”.

This is the work newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post on Bluesky, X, and Instagram.

You might have seen the little fuzzy toy monsters around or heard the name Labubu. (I am told they now cost $65 on the black market.) Maybe you’ve seen signs for Dubai chocolate, or a garish new strawberry matcha latte from Starbucks. Or a smoothie that looks like a rainbow cyclone, with some kind of seaweed in it. I think there’s a new Gen Z aesthetic emerging, one that’s often visually ugly or yucky but also freighted with symbolism. I wrote a long-ish essay for The New Yorker about this “IRL Brain Rot” lifestyle and the mutability and mutation of the digital self:

Read the column

Something I love doing in essay writing is gathering a big group of cultural phenomena and “drawing a circle around it,” as an editor once put it to me — demonstrating how all of these things are connected, responding to the same themes and perhaps anxieties in contemporary life. It’s easy to dismiss youth-culture trends or just see them as capitalistic trash, but I think this slop-adjacent realm of dupe products and Instagrammable potions points to our increasingly desperate need to manipulate our own images, and an acceptance of the fact that we’re kind of hybridized monsters ourselves in this post-A.I. human-machine moment:

These products feel hallucinatory. They take the social-media mandate of self-modification to its logical extreme, embracing easy-breezy chemical additives and image augmentation: enhancing the self until it spills from its pores. The aesthetic is as much a defense mechanism against the internet era as it is a self-aware in-joke: We can see what late-hyper-digital-artificially-intelligent capitalism is doing to us—isn’t it a laugh? “It’s very unnatural-looking,” the cultural critic Dean Kissick told me, describing the dominant visual style of extremely online consumerism. “It kind of relishes its own artificiality.” Any pretense of the pure or organic is undercut by a kind of willful alchemy; everything is an admixture.

In this case, the keystone for me was seeing that the generic drug / beauty brand Hers makes an Ozempic-like semaglutide in packaging the color of matcha, mingling two trends that appear vastly different. One is a green caffeinated beverage and the other is an injection that dampens your desire to consume and helps you lose weight. Yet here they are crashing together, representing a runaway consumerism without a coherent endpoint. It’s magical thinking, which makes sense given the incomprehensibility of our moment. Go read the essay!

Other recent columns

• Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui? A column on the decline of mundane content on social media and the lack of a desire to share your life when the rest of the internet is AI slop, bad news headlines, and polished influencers. I was interviewed about this piece a few times, including in a BBC video and Jon Favreau’s Offline podcast. And I made a talking-head video about it for The New Yorker that ironically got over 2 million views on Instagram!

• The Revenge of Millennial Cringe A good companion to Labubu brainrot, this column took on the viral clip of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros playing an indie stomp-clap song from 2009. Maybe unbridled sincerity is more appealing when everything is so confusing. Made another New Yorker video for this.

• A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts I read through studies and interviewed academics about experiments that prove generative A.I. makes us more generic as writers, thinkers, and communicators. Test subjects who used ChatGPT wrote more like each other, made the same arguments, and used less diverse vocabulary.

• Gentle-Parenting My Smartphone Addiction I’ve been using an app called Opal to block social media apps on my phone during the workday, and it’s been working surprisingly well! I had an insightful conversation with the app’s creator.

• Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics Whether it’s negotiations with Ukraine and Russia or the NYC mayoral race, politics is all about what you put out there on social media, the tone of your videos, images, and memes. Mamdani succeeded by adopting the latest TikTok style.

As always please let me know what you think! Or should I just be posting videos of myself summarizing everything I write?? Subscribe to this newsletter with the button below if you don’t already.