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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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!

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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.

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”.

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.

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What is it called when technology takes over the government? It’s helpful to have a label for what’s going on right now so that we can have a communal framework to discuss Elon Musk and DOGE. The upheaval is increasingly often being called a coup. But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg’s dictum to “move fast and break things” and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else. My latest column is about the ideas running through the Trump-Musk government’s actions, including techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, and techno-accelerationism. All of them have to do with giving tech free rein in the operation of the state, not just the websites we visit for fun.

Read the column

For the piece, I spoke with the academic Janis Mimura, who studies the fascist Japanese government in World War II. Her book Planning for Empire looks at the little-known bureaucrats and political managerial class that took power under the guise of the emperor in the 1930s and pushed the nation into all-out war. Mimura has been struck by the parallels between those 1930s Japanese technocrats and Musk’s DOGE, both technology-driven groups who have taken on unanswerable authority. I really enjoyed my conversation with her and found it revealing for what we’re dealing with today. Here’s a bit from my column:

In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights.

What ended the rein of the technocrats was the dissolution of their alliance with conservative politicians and the military. Ultimately, the technocrats created a war machine that they themselves could not stop and they were pushed out of the government when they began to urge caution, wanting to avoid an unwinnable fight. It made me wonder which direction Musk and the other Silicon Valley CEOs are really pushing the U.S. in, and what it would take for the bond between Trump and Musk to dissolve.

Notes

• My New Yorker colleague Lauren Michele Jackson wrote a great essay on “The End of Seriousness.” We want to laugh at the chaos that’s going on right now, but laughter, even at the blatant absurdity, doesn’t offer much relief. It pinpoints a feeling I’ve been having lately: We can’t not talk about Trump-Musk and the destabilized international arena, but we also can’t talk about it directly — it’s just too extreme, too dramatic, too unknown. A bleak newsletter, sorry!

Distraction seems to be flowing in all directions the last few weeks. The flurry of extreme executive orders and dramatic media moments of the second Trump administration is distracting from the mass layoffs and cuts that Elon Musk is making with DOGE. And disaffected voters are seeking distraction from all of it: Tuning out politics news is tempting, especially when it’s unclear how much of this chaos will actually be meaningful in a few months. I wanted to find out what people are doing to absorb their attention elsewhere, which is the subject of my latest New Yorker column:

Read the column

The answers included binging reality TV shows like Vanderpump Rules and Culinary Class Wars — streaming is immersive and absorbing — as well as cutting back on news consumption, period, turning off phone alerts and relying on summaries. Social media is a different place than it was during the first Trump administration. There is less political resistance and less coherence, period, because the platforms themselves have changed:

Doomscrolling, as Eiseman referenced—the overindulgence in anxiety-inducing news stories and commentators shouting in text online—accomplishes even less than it did before, because Internet discourse lacks any coherent direction. There is no longer a clean division of anti- and pro-Trump; the field is crowded and the President himself can appear at times sidelined by larger forces. The Democratic Party and its organizations seem at a loss to develop any kind of unifying messaging in the short term. But that inertia may be intensified by how the social-media ecosystem has palpably decayed since the late twenty-tens, and not just because the politics of the platforms have shifted toward Trump. A.I. is rampant, algorithmic feeds such as Instagram’s have been known to favor posts from businesses and aggregators over individuals, and Meta’s social networks have suppressed political content by default.

My conclusion is that you can’t rely on social media or the endless stream of news updates for insight into what’s going on right now. It can be unproductive, better to watch that reality show for a while and conserve your attention for later without getting overwhelmed. The metric that I’ve been thinking about is, which choices or actions make things meaningful in the context of your own life? Taking a walk or supporting a local institution you love is more meaningful than doomscrolling.

Notes

• Here in DC, where some distraction is very necessary, we recently went to a concert at the 9:30 Club (a great local institution) of three bands: Nourished by Time, Panda Bear, and Toro y Moi. Nourished by Time, a musician from Baltimore, has been one of my favorite new sounds of the last year or two. The track “Daddy” is kind of deconstructed disco, dance beats and Dadaist lyrics, with a gothic grandeur behind it. Very cool, very different.

Column: Elon Musk’s War on Human Agency

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As many of you probably are, I am very freaked out by what’s happening in the government right now. No one elected Elon Musk and I doubt voters, even Trump supporters, thought they were putting into office a technocratic regime of Silicon Valley elites who would love nothing more than to automate their subjects’ lives and turn them into serfs managed semi-benignly by artificial intelligence. This column takes on Musk’s political ideology and the ways in which AI is already leaking into the operation of the government through DOGE. Here’s an excerpt:

A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk’s program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk’s special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology. Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations. As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them.

Grub Street Diet: On the occasion of the paperback release of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture (it’s on shelves at many bookstores now), I wrote New York Magazine / Grub Street’s iconic food diary column! It’s six days of my life in eating and drinking, during which I fly to Madrid (a city I love) to give a talk at a culture festival — lots of perfect Spanish white wine and cured ham — and then crash in Brooklyn for a bunch of home cooking with friends. It’s kind of my magnum opus; you could follow it for a vacation planning guide to Madrid or stock a bar with Verdejo and Garnacha. And of course some thoughts on homogenous globalized coffee shops. Read it here.

Sala de Despiece is modeled after a traditional Spanish butcher shop, but turned into a kind of clinical Damien Hirst installation with gleaming white countertops and steel shelving. Slightly delirious with jet lag, I take in the meat performance. It’s a combination of omakase counter and Salt Bae; the chef-bartenders roll up little bundles of beef and pork and fish in front of you. I order the signature fried artichoke topped with caviar; a tray of grilled white shrimp with their shells on; tomato chunks rolled in cured tuna; and an entire limb of grilled octopus with muhammara and squid-ink sauce. Alongside it, I have glasses of Albariño and Garnacha Blanca.

Editorial note: We’re in a weird phase of media now where, more than anything else, I think we have to manage the distribution of journalism and culture in a new way. I’ve been exploring that in my Media Thoughtz series on One Thing. I’m kind of thinking, everything needs its own channel, its own surface to reach readers. For you all who want to follow me personally and keep up with my personal and professional writing, this newsletter is the channel. Readers and writers want to find each other — we’re all seeking stability for that relationship.

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I have a Profile piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine! It’s the April 1 issue, the one on stands now or in your mailbox this week, with a cute dog on the cover. The print headline is “Water World”; in it, I explore the career of the Dutch architect Koen Olthuis, who has spent the past two decades designing modern buildings that float on water. His firm Waterstudio is building floating apartment towers, theaters, and entire urban neighborhoods. Here is the lovely story spread, with photography by Giulio Di Sturco.

It’s really fun to see the piece listed on the newsstand cover and the table of contents as well:

You can read it online or pick up a print copy (or return to it in your New Yorker backlog in a few months, I don’t mind). I traveled to the Netherlands and France to hang out with Koen and experience Waterstudio’s buildings, plus sleep in an underwater concrete box. The end result is a blend of reportage and thinking about architecture today: how we’re adapting to climate change, what the post-starchitect era looks like, and what it means for someone to maintain such a singular creative pursuit.

Read the story

Filterworld update

My book Filterworld is now more than two months old! I’m really happy with the responses I’ve received to it and happy to keep seeing it in bookstore displays. I’d still love to hear what any of you newsletter readers thought of it and if you spot it out in the wild. I recapped a bunch of podcast appearances and reviews in a previous newsletter, but here are a few of the latest:

Decoder: I’m a big fan of Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast. As the editor-in-chief of The Verge, he runs a thriving website and experiences the effects of online distribution firsthand. This was a great conversation about how we make culture online, the media industry, and what algorithmic flattening entails.

People vs. Algorithms: I talked with Brian Morrissey and his media-industry colleagues about how we struggle to make ourselves heard as journalists through algorithmic feeds. (PS sign up for Brian’s The Rebooting newsletter for smart and unsentimental media commentary.)

Offline with Jon Favreau: On this Crooked Media podcast, Jon and I talked a lot about how it feels to be on the internet right now (mostly bad).

Factually: I talked to the comedian Adam Conover about how hard it is for creators to make sustainable livings in the era of Filterworld.

On the Media: Micah Loewinger and I talked about personal taste and the frictionlessness of streaming for a segment on the great radio show.

Decoder Ring: This was a really fun production with Willa Paskin in which we chatted IRL in a generic Manhattan coffee shop to figure out why so many cafes look the same.

Soon I plan to write some follow-up pieces on the themes of the book for this newsletter, like an instructional guide for doing an algorithm cleanse. Let me know if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see!

One Thing newsletter

Most of the casual writing I’ve been doing lately has been for my other newsletter project, One Thing. It’s an ongoing discussion of taste and authenticity, one object or idea at a time, with posts every Tuesday and Thursday. Here are a few of my recent contributions:

Why did we stop saying “hipster”? (really liked this one)

Hype olive-oil chips

The internet’s distribution problem

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Jess’s new job

My wife Jess Bidgood has a new job! And it’s a newsletter. Pretty much like this one but way, way more important. She’ll be writing the New York Times’s On Politics newsletter. I’m super proud of her for taking it on and if you know Jess you know it’ll be an insightful, accessible guide to the craziness of this election. Sign up here! (You don’t need to be a NYT subscriber.)

Thank you for following along, as always this newsletter is my favorite place to put thoughts. It’s the single channel I can rely on to reach people who are actually interested in what I do and what I’m thinking about rather than just wanting to fight online. Newsletters are context-creating in the vacuum of the internet, and context is good.

The book

The hardcover book is beautiful! You can see some more glamour shots here. I love seeing it on shelves, in stores or at home, so please send them to me if you see them. Here are Filterworld and The Longing for Less new paperback version in the window at my favorite bookstore, McNally Jackson!

If you want your book to get on bestseller lists, the first week is often your best shot: Then, all the pre-orders and launch purchases count toward the total. That is to say, if you plan to buy a copy of the book, please do it now! Head to your local bookstore or order it online. And if you have picked it up, it really helps to rate the book highly and leave a review (even very short helps) on Amazon, Goodreads, or your preferred digital cultural marketplace. The algorithm book has to survive the algorithms.

Buy Filterworld

Tour events

My DC and NYC events are over, and were so much fun, but I still have stops in Boston, LA, and SF in the coming week. I’d love to see you there

1/19 (tonight!) — Boston at Harvard Bookstore at 7 PM, talking with designer, artist, thinker Oliver Munday.

1/23 — LA at Skylight Books at 7 PM, talking with podcaster, columnist, consultant Chris Black.

1/24 — SF at Book Passage Ferry Building at 5:30 PM, talking with novelist, newsletterer, olive-oil producer Robin Sloan.

Coverage

The press around the book has been absolutely fantastic. It’s great to watch the message resonating with readers; when a book comes out, you actually get to see how it is interpreted and the directions other people take it in. Here are some highlights.

Podcasts / Radio:

The Ezra Klein Show: Ezra took this in a fun self-improvement direction, figuring out how we can be more intentional cultural consumers. It’s a conversation on how we discover our own tastes and why digital platforms can make it harder to really experience a work of art.

Fresh Air: It was a huge career highlight to be on Fresh Air last week, interviewed by Tonya Mosley! We walked through the themes of the book, how algorithmic feeds choked the internet, and why fiddle-leaf figs are so ubiquitous.

Big Technology: Alex Kantrowitz and I discussed the strengths of algorithmic feeds and how they helped build the internet, even as they’ve become so overwhelming as to be much less useful now. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How Long Gone: A totally off-the-wall talk on my favorite chat podcast with “bicoastal elites” Chris Black and Jason Stewart. We talked wfh, why everywhere shouldn’t be one place, romantasy dragon erotica, running with your dog, Washington DC, and I’m sure other stuff I’ve forgotten.

Text Q&As:

British GQ: On the benefits of doing an algorithm cleanse.

Esquire: On the importance of human curation.

Inc.: On small businesses navigating algorithmic recommendations

Reviews: As a practice, I don’t read all of my reviews right away — or ever. But these two were very nice to read and have such great critics grappling with the ideas in the book.

New York Times review by Alexandra Jacobs:

“Unlike the cascade of content from strangers on the internet, “Filterworld,” as a proper book will, evokes less transient impulses than genuine, lingering feelings: depression about our big-box corporate dystopia; admiration for Chayka’s curiosity and clear writing style; dismay about the electrical engineering graduate — electrical engineering! — who can’t get astrology out of her timeline and regrets being influenced to buy a pair of leg warmers. (“I just want to know if what I like is what I actually like,” she tells him, plaintively.)”

The Atlantic review by Megan Garber:

“The book is a work of explanatory criticism, offering an in-depth consideration of the invisible forces people invoke when talking about “the algorithm.” Filterworld, in that, does the near impossible: It makes algorithms, those dull formulas of inputs and outputs, fascinating. But it also does something that is ever more valuable as new technologies make the world seem bigger, more complicated, and more difficult to understand. It makes algorithms, those uncanniest of influencers, legible.”

Also, I loved this tweet from Evan Osnos, a journalist whose New Yorker pieces truly helped me realize that magazine writing was something I wanted to do.

Thanks for reading! If you picked up Filterworld, please let me know what you think, tag me on Instagram, etc. I’ll have more updates on the book soon, and eventually, back to thoughts that may not even be about algorithmic feeds.

This newsletter is my annual Year in Review! A collection of my favorite ten pieces I wrote this year and a summary of what I’ve been up to. Please enjoy. 

Filterworld tour schedule

My new book comes out on January 16! If you have not pre-ordered it already and are planning to buy the book, please please do — pre-orders really influence how much promotion a book gets, and the most important period for pre-orders is actually the few weeks right before a book launches. (Here are purchase links at Bookshop, Amazon, and Doubleday, but the best way is to call up your local bookstore and request it.) My big update here is my finalized tour schedule! See the graphic below. I’ll have Filterworld events in DC, NYC, Boston, LA, SF, and the Tucson Festival of Books, with a slew of great conversation partners: Evan Osnos, Hua Hsu, Oliver Munday, Chris Black, and Robin Sloan. For NYC on 1/17, please be sure to RSVP at McNally Jackson to reserve a spot. 

Pre-order Filterworld

One Thing newsletter

In late November, I started a new newsletter project called One Thing, with my friend Nate Gallant. The idea is to create a “catalogue of authenticity” — a slowly flowing feed of compelling objects, ideas, trends, and people, around twice a week, under 500 words. Readers seem to really like it so far! You can subscribe here or read more about the editorial ethos here. So far we’ve published newsletters on subjects including: 

• Connecticut as a trend

• Vintage shopping on Etsy

• French tablecloth dupes

I’m enjoying this experiment as part of an effort to bring more curation to digital spaces and cut through the increasing noise of social networks and algorithmic feeds. I’d love to have more contributors! If you have an idea, please email onethingnewsletter@gmail.com.

Subscribe to One Thing

My year in New Yorker columns

The vast majority of the writing I did this year was, of course, for my New Yorker column Infinite Scroll, through which I cover the Internet, new technology, and how culture changes as it flows through digital platforms. The column has been the most satisfying format of my journalism career because I get to build up this conversation with readers over time, repeating themes and ideas, creating a sense of continuity. It’s a true body of work, encompassing a wide variety of subjects that are nevertheless connected — even if I can’t always pinpoint how. 

Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists? — 2023 was without a doubt the year of artificial intelligence. I covered it more than any other subject. AI tools became publicly accessible long before anyone knew quite what to do with them, and a vast collective experiment ensued. We’re all in the midst of deciding what AI is for, and its consequences so far appear more negative than straightforwardly positive. Visual artists and writers in particular are pushing back against their work being appropriated and rehashed by AI models. The critical comments that artist Kelly McKernan made here have really stuck with me. 

The Uncanny Failures of A.I.-Generated Hands — For this piece, I got to interview my high school art teacher Kristie Soucie, which was delightful. It underlines how AI models have no coherent understanding of reality; they only run on averages and associations. The models don’t know that human hands have five fingers, or that fingers have bones in them. They just have a vague association between the word “hand” and a particular kind of hand-like image — thus they often get it wrong. 

The Stupefying Success of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” — Journalism is a great excuse to do something you might not have done otherwise, in this case see a blockbuster movie for children. Even as a nostalgic Nintendo fan, I didn’t find much to love in the Mario movie, though it was one of the popular global films of the year. The risk of intellectual property-driven culture is popular art being reduced to a series of superficially recognizable symbols, moments at which you can say “I know where that comes from!” and not think or feel any deeper.

My A.I. Writing Robot — In order to figure out how well AI tech was actually working, I had an AI startup called Writer train a model specifically on my writing style, crunching my career of journalism into a digestible data set. Over a few months, I tried to use the model, aka the Kyle Robot, to replace myself, as AI companies promise. It called into question the purpose of writing, how writing relates to thinking, and the meaning of personal style. It was surreal to recognize shreds of myself within the machine, but it also failed to come up with any insightful original thought. I’m particularly proud of the reporting and thinking in this piece. 

Touchstones: Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” — The New Yorker’s Touchstones series explores one work of art that has been deeply meaningful to a writer over their lifetime in an interactive, multimedia format. It was a privilege to write one on ITMFL, my (and many others’) favorite film. I thought through how my interpretation of the film’s fraught central relationship changed as I got older and how the director weaves such a holistic aesthetic that millions of social media users have made it their own in Instagram and TikTok posts, casting their own lives in ITMFL’s image.  

Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I. — I reviewed Brian Merchant’s surprisingly suspenseful and action-packed nonfiction book on the anti-tech rebellion of the 19th-century Luddites and how they have been misinterpreted over the past century. The Luddites weren’t against technological innovation; they were against the exploitation of workers for the benefit of the ruling class that owned all the capital. Sound familiar? 

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore — This essay really struck a chord with readers! I think that’s because it catalyzed a feeling many people are having but is difficult to pin down. The Internet feels less useful and compelling today than it did a decade or two ago, partly because of the overwhelming influence of algorithmic feeds. I think the piece has subsequently been somewhat misinterpreted, which is the consequence of anything going sufficiently viral. I’m not arguing that nothing interesting or new exists on the internet; it’s that mainstream users are having a worse experience being crammed into algorithmic molds and passive positions as consumers. We have less agency online, which leads to less fun.

How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News — Among many other important effects, Hamas’s attack on Israel and the subsequent war demonstrated just how shoddy much of social media has become for the purposes of following news. Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter has meant the loss of the last platform left that was relatively un-algorithmic, where you could follow news in real time and have some hope of sorting fact from fiction. Meta and TikTok are content to leave hard news behind. The result is users left to be responsible for themselves in a digital environment that’s messier and more confusing than ever. (AI-driven search and question-answering will make this much, much worse.) 

Your A.I. Companion Will Support You No Matter What — Writing this feature on AI chatbots and the intimate relationships that users can develop with them convinced me that personalized digital assistants are going to be a huge part of the AI boom. A personalized robot, with its own memories and character, might even be the iPhone, as it were, of AI. But we barely have language or frameworks yet for the kind of very real emotional exchange that happens with an AI model, without any human on the other side of the equation. 

The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era — This piece has maybe my favorite lead I wrote this year. It came from a persistent feeling I had of historical vertigo: What if we’re at the dawn of a new dark age for humanity and we just don’t know it yet? I canvassed a bunch of very smart people about how we define historical periods, why the medieval dark ages weren’t so dark, and why everything might just be chaos forever. 

Finally, thank you to every follower of this newsletter for reading it, I truly love sending out these updates knowing that they reach a group of people who share the same interests and concerns that I have. I hope to meet more of you in person in the new year on my book tour and continue this ongoing conversation. — Kyle

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I have two announcements: First, if you or your friends or family are in Houston, Texas, I am giving a talk at The Menil Collection, a fantastic art museum, this Wednesday at 7 PM — free and open to anyone. The talk is called “Minimalism, Between Art and Life,” and it stems from my first book The Longing for Less while also responding to the museum’s show of the minimalist and conceptualist Hanne Darboven. Some notes toward that talk are below in this newsletter. Please do pass on the link to anyone who might be able to make it!

Second, speaking of that book, the new paperback of The Longing for Less will be out from Bloomsbury on January 9! You’ll be able to find it in bookstores and online. It has a lovely new paperback cover:

It’s been four years since that book came out, and my next book, Filterworld, is out January 16. (Pre-order it!) It’s a nice moment to look back on some of those themes. One nice thing about writing a book is that after it’s done, you’ve thought through all of your thoughts about a subject. It’s like a sculpture that you never have to carve again; it just rests there, the work completed. But it lives on as (hopefully) more and more people read it.

Essay: Minimalism, Between Art and Life

Minimalism is an art movement that became a lifestyle. The first proper Minimalists — capital-M, you might label them — were artists in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s who reclassified industrial materials as art objects. These were people like Donald Judd, who turned factory-made aluminum boxes into sculptures (“specific objects,” he called them), and Dan Flavin, who did the same with fluorescent light bulbs. Other artists who were drafted, usually against their will, into the Minimalist label made art that looked as simple as possible. They adopted the stark austerity of the industrial — like Sol LeWitt’s geometric wall drawings or Agnes Martin’s square canvases of only a few stripes or a grid.

That transformation was something like changing the stuff of life — mundane infrastructure, detritus — into the stuff of art. Minimalism was an act of recontextualization. When encountering a Judd, you have to experience the aluminum box as art in the same way you would a Michelangelo marble. The artists were helped along in that process by the invention of the “white cube”: the blank empty box that we all now know as the archetype of gallery or museum architecture. The white cube reinforces the idea that anything that resides within it is art, much as how an elaborate gilt frame marked a portrait on canvas as important in the 19th century. You don’t have to figure out if the fluorescent light bulb mounted on the wall is art or just lighting; the gallery space tells you that it’s art. (It doesn’t always work: I once saw a crumpled cup on the desk-side ledge of a gallery in DUMBO. I thought it was trash, but it was an intricately constructed trompe-l’oeil sculpture made to look like trash.)

But a funny thing happened over the decades. The strategy of Minimalist art in the white cube was applied to other things. Fashion boutiques took it on, building empty stores that proclaimed the idea that their luxury bags and shoes were art, too. Then it was the vocabulary of residential architecture, with endless empty condos that mimicked the factory lofts that the original Minimalist artists lived in. Did that mean the human life inside the white-cube apartment was the art? The aesthetic of minimalism became separated from its original insight, which is that what we overlooked could be art, too. What was once radical became fetishized, a fossilized style. Which, of course, is always happening to the avant-garde.

In 1959, the artist Robert Rauschenberg wrote in a statement about his work, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two)” Rauschenberg isn’t usually classified as a Minimalist — perhaps his work is too visually maximalist — but he performed a similar trick, turning newspaper fragments, cardboard, and screenprints into transcendent painting-sculptures. Another time, he recast the line: “You can’t make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined.” Minimalism, I think, was particularly successful in operating in that oft-mentioned gap between art and life. It shuttled between the two, functioning on both levels, providing both a way to see the world and the objects with which to populate it. Modernism created industrial space; minimalism showed us how to live in it.

The avant-garde can’t survive popularity. Minimalist art itself is still radical — it’s not particularly appreciated by viewers nor by collectors (at least not as much as vintage Abstract Expressionism or the contemporary figurative painting revival). Yet the style is everywhere, dulled into banality. I think that’s because the Minimalist artists were early to recognize the fact that for many more people beyond the Manhattan creative elite, life was becoming art, and vice versa. Life is now a performance in the white cube — of the empty apartment, or of the Instagram photo frame or the TikTok video backdrop that makes use of a white wall’s visual clarity. When we fetishize everything as art, we don’t need that original art object quite as much.

What is often missed about the Minimalist artists is that they lived in different ways, too. They inhabited the world in a different way; they constructed their own environments and routines, developing ways to structure space or time into patterns that they found more beautiful. Judd moved to Marfa, Texas, and carved gracious living spaces out of defunct desert infrastructure. Agnes Martin moved to New Mexico and drove cars fast. Casting a wider net, we can look to On Kawara’s minimalist paintings of dates, simple numbers on monochrome, and his postcards reading “I am still alive,” which he sent to friends and art dealers. Or Tehching Hsieh’s arduous durational performances, which consisted of following repetitive or restrictive commandments. For his “Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece),” Hsieh physically tied himself to the artist Linda Montano for a full year, 24/7. Hanne Darboven cocooned herself in her family home in Hamburg for decades and stocked its rooms with scattered artifacts of the twentieth century, which she enclosed in vitrines and surrounded by her minimalist drawings that transcribe dates and numerical patterns.

Minimalism is perhaps the process of translating between art and life, of determining what the gesture will be that connects them. It doesn’t just happen in the studio. It happens in the home, while traveling, out in the world. It can happen anywhere, because it isn’t defined by a particular visual outcome. Like one of Flavin’s fluorescent bulbs, it exists in plain sight for the viewer, an encounter with the unfamiliar that challenges us to change how we perceive our surroundings.

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Read to the end to get on my latest project: One Thing.

Filterworld: On shelves January 16

It’s mid-November (just past my birthday) and that means it’s only two months until Filterworld comes out!! It’s both a lot of time and no time at all. I’m at a moment in the book-publishing cycle when journalists, critics, and book influencers (!) have physical copies and are hopefully reading them, but before there’s much public chatter in the form of reviews. I have gotten one formal review, from the book-industry publication Kirkus Reviews, and Filterworld got a starred review! That means it’s a standout book, particularly excellent within Kirkus’s purview. The (anonymous) critic wrote:

“Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity.”

I love that summary, particularly how it catches the message of hope. Filterworld isn’t a wholesale complaint about social media; it’s a quest to figure out how we can have something better than our self-reinforcing and flattening algorithmic feeds. That is what I want people to get from reading the book, in the end. Even though digital platforms are so dominant right now, we can still find and appreciate culture, artists, and our own creative sense outside of them.

In a way, this moment is the weird silence before the storm for the book. Press will start, if I’m lucky, in late December into early January, and I’ll get more reviews and start seeing how other people perceive this years-long project I’ve invested myself in. I’ll see how the message lands. In the midst of every social network enshittifying and the general lack of fun on the Internet, I hope that it helps us express our dissatisfaction with homogenization and have a conversation about what we actually want from digital consumption, separating the good aspects from the bad.

Like every other cultural artifact — pop songs, TV shows, choreography — Filterworld will have to fight various algorithms to be seen. It is subject to the same forces that I document, including the Amazon marketplace, the Twitter feed, and TikTok’s For You equation. Even if you’re not a journalist or a critic, there are things you can do to help it on its way. One of the commandments of Filterworld is that engagement begets more engagement. My book will get more attention and more investment if more people are already interacting with it online, a cycle that can be virtuous or vicious. Here’s how to goose the algorithm:

• Pre-order the book on a site like Amazon or Bookshop

• Call up your local bookstore or library and request it

• Favorite or ‘want to read’ the Goodreads listing

• Fav, comment on, or share my Instagram of the cover:

It feels kind of cynical right!? And yet these kinds of metrics have completely become our cultural arbiters. What we deem successful is really whatever gets the most likes online. Until we build better ecosystems and retrain ourselves to get outside of automated recommendations (which is what the book is about), the only survival strategy is surfing the algorithm as best we can.

New Project: One Thing

The other day I spat out a Twitter (X) thread about the media industry that emerged unbidden from my subconscious. It’s here; people seemed to like it. The gist is that reader loyalty now matters above everything else. To build better ecosystems online, we (editors and writers) have to seek out and cultivate loyalty. That means giving an audience something that they truly want. Filterworld is about how algorithmic feeds warp what we want and what we’re looking for. One solution is to build a better filter and pursue person-to-person curation.

So as part of my Filterworld campaign, here’s a newsletter that will highlight things I think are cool and good, plus build a dialogue around what constitutes a better digital experience post-Filterworld. It’s called One Thing, because it’ll surface one thing at a time: an object, a person, an observation, or an idea in a brief blurb. I’m working on this with my friend Nate Gallant, a writer and Japanese translator (you might remember him from the one podcast experiment we did with the same name). The vibe is early-00s Internet, NotCot, GeoCities, obscure personal HTML fan blog. Therefore, I made the banner myself with vintage Photoshop tutorials:

Subscribe to the newsletter here:

Subscribe to One Thing

Note the [beta] tag. Our first slogan for the newsletter is “a catalogue of authenticity,” because that’s what we’re looking for: the somewhat undefinable, unstable feeling of realness, wherever it lays and however it can be expressed these days. That could be found in literally ancient history or it could be the most contemporary digital artifact.

The Substack site is not totally polished yet. We’re not sure when it’ll start publishing in earnest, maybe next week. But some of the initial posts we have in mind are: Moka pots, bulk Greek olive oil, the evolution of taste in medieval Japan, good Etsy stores, and Rimowa advertising. The point is purely to have fun and develop themes from the book. Once again, subscribe here and stay tuned.

What we’re hoping for here is a small community of a few hundred people to follow along with this experiment and help create the dialogue with us, figuring out what we think is cool and good, what feels valuable amidst the 2020s digital lifestyle. Feedback and participation is key; it’s about conversation more than broadcast. It doesn’t take many readers to create a community, and a new banner holds a surprising amount of power. (I also don’t want to crowd my Kyle Chayka Industries email list with material that not everyone is interested in — opt-in is always better.) I love how my friend the novelist, writer, and olive-oil maker Robin Sloan distributes his various activities across several different newsletter spaces, for example. Hope you join in.

If you got to here, thanks so much for reading and following along! The next few months will be very fun. — Kyle

Work

How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News: In the first days of the Hamas-Israel attacks and conflict, it was impossible to navigate the morass of mislabeled videos, duplicitous tweets, and propaganda online. This New Yorker column is on how recent changes in social networks have made it even harder to consume news — which was once the core selling point of Twitter.

Recent Recommendations

Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Vulnerables: Nunez’s most famous novel, The Friend, was what you get when you take autofiction from a well-established NYC writer and add a big, friendly dog. As we all know, dogs sell books. This new one is the same vibe — mellifluous writer-narrator in Manhattan describing her thoughts and experiences — but during pandemic quarantine, and with a parrot instead of a dog. Something about Nunez’s voice makes her books addictive to me. Their softness and slightness belies their sharpness; Nunez gets in daggers about art, life, and the literary industry that few others would have the confidence to attempt.

Bryan Washington’s novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved. Bryan’s books are building him into the kind of novelist you follow like a film director: You just want to know what he’ll cast his vision on next. The vibe is immaculate, and immaculately him. This one is about a childhood, a tragedy, a couple, other couples, a family bakery, bars, Houston. That’s all you really need to know.

Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True: This book is now out in paperback, and you probably don’t need me recommending it (it won a Pulitzer), but it is fantastic. An elegy for a friend whose life was cut short in college, it’s a portrait of the self in a transitional phase, a person establishing their own identity through cultivating music taste, making zines, growing friendships, and reading books. In some respects, it’s about the pain of gaining self-awareness as an adult. Memoirs promise to depict the specific, the unique experiences of a life. But the trick is allowing every reader to recognize themselves, too, and Stay True succeeds perfectly. The dénouement is incredible.

Low Power Mode shortcut: My iPhone is basically always on Low Power Mode because I’m terrible at charging it. I’ve always switched it on by searching for “low power mode” in the settings, which is really annoying. Now I’ve added it as a shortcut on that menu you get when you swipe down, next to the flashlight! So much easier.

Rice cooker Hainan chicken recipe: I’m trying to be a faster home cook, or at least not make everything as complicated as possible. This is an easy dinner that tastes like you put a lot of time into it. I’ll write it out in prose:

• First, marinate 4 boneless skinless chicken thighs in soy sauce, vinegar, hoisin sauce, Chinese cooking wine, tiny bit of baking soda, and whatever chili oil / paste.

• Then buzz up 2-3 scallions, two garlic cloves, and some slices of ginger in a food processor with 2-3 tbsps of neutral oil. When that looks saucy, slice up some more scallions and mix them in with the sauce.

• Wash your rice. If you want to, mix or toast your rice with some of the scallion sauce. Then put it in the rice cooker, and fill to the normal water level with half water and half chicken stock (from a box duh). Take the chicken thighs out of the marinade and pile them on top of the rice in an even layer. They will mostly be covered by liquid, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.

• Turn on the rice cooker for normal or quick cooking (I have a Zojirushi, either setting works). The chicken will steam in the broth and get cooked through by the time the rice is done. Slice the thighs and pile them on top of the chicken-y rice when you serve. (Boneless skinless makes it much faster to slice.) Then put more scallion sauce, soy sauce, chili oil on top. Done!

• Next time, I might start the rice cooking on its own and then put the chicken in 10 min later (for normal cooking setting at least), it could have been slightly less done.

Let me know if you try any of these recs! And if you have recs, email them to me and I’ll put them in the next batch. Social media is fucked, all we can do is recommend things to each other with our human words.

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My latest New Yorker column is on a feeling that many people are having right now: being on the Internet kind of sucks, at least a lot more than it used to.

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

read the column

The biggest reason I feel that way is the total decay of Twitter. Twitter used to be the watercooler of the Internet, something like a universal chat room holding millions of people at once where you could reliably find someone talking about pretty much anything you were interested in. It could have been medieval art history, the theory of international relations, housing codes in Germany, or an obscure anime. The ambient chatter produced a sense of what was happening in the world right now, unimpeded by automated recommendations. Simply by opening the app you could get a vibe: which events were in the public consciousness, what your friends were obsessed with, even what the weather was doing.

I could depend on my Twitter timeline to deliver a cross-section of what I was interested in, a feed that I hand-curated over more than a decade that had become something like a mental appendage. It was a community of people all thinking out loud at once, together, creating a pure distillation of the zeitgeist. Of course, under Elon Musk’s ownership that has all fallen apart. I miss the voices I used to hear chattering in my ear every day. I miss the inspiration and the energy that the community delivered. Not the standard news-posting accounts or the established influencers, but the oddballs like me who had stuck around quietly but consistently pursuing our own little niches.

Those voices have gradually fallen silent. They either left the platform intentionally or their tweets just don’t reach me because of the increasingly algorithmic, increasingly glitchy feed. I question every day why I’m still on there. In part it’s a habit, or an addiction: I still crave the background noise while I’m writing, the chance to open a new tab and dip into a raucous conversation. (Similar to how I always want to work in coffee shops, with the distraction of public commotion and randomness.) But that noise no longer has much value. Twitter today is not a crystal ball. It’s foggy, gauzy, all static interference and nonsense. We still go there expecting news, information, insight — the quality of human thought that we came to expect. I have to remind myself that that’s a mistake.

The thing is, I’m not so sure where to get human thought on the Internet anymore. Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone, has an aggressively algorithmic feed. Instagram, which remains a pretty fun place on the Internet, is decidedly not a good place for actual information (as opposed to vibes). Substack increasingly looks like the best option, because it is non-algorithmic and sustainable through monetization, but its Notes social network is sleepy. Still, I think this newsletter is where I want to cultivate a community of readers and writers, to create an ongoing conversation — the kind I used to have on Twitter.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture comes out January 16, 2024 from Doubleday! Request it at your local bookstore or pre-order here.

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Touchstones: In the Mood for Love: I got the chance to write a reconsideration of Wong Kar Wai’s great 2000 film “In the Mood for Love” for The New Yorker’s Touchstones series. The magazine’s interactive team turned my memories of discovering the film as a teenager into a very cool multimedia exploration. Several people told me that this piece helped them re-experience the film, like watching it again for the first time. I love that!

Reconsidering the Luddites in the Age of AI: I reviewed Brian Merchant’s new nonfiction book Blood in the Machine about the Luddites, the 19th-century rebels against industrialization who smashed weaving machines. Their pro-labor activism has lessons for us as we face a wave of automation through artificial intelligence. 

Filterworld: My book on how algorithmic feeds have flattened culture is coming out January 16! You can pre-order it on Amazon here, or Bookshop, or Doubleday. Galleys are also starting to roll out for critics and journalists; email me if you want more info on that, or await a future newsletter.

TikTok’s Eurocore Summer

This past summer (sob), I went on a long-delayed vacation in France. For the first part of the trip, Jess and I landed at a perfectly rundown hotel on the Giens peninsula, which sticks into the Mediterranean like a promenade. Then, we met up with a bunch of friends at a house outside of Eygalières, a rural Provence village with a few blocks of main street hosting one butcher, one bakery, a small grocery store, and a handful of restaurants. But on Saturday morning we walked the ten minutes into town to find that it was flooded with people. An antiques market filled the streets. Visitors in wide-brimmed straw hats brandished smartphones at vintage dish sets, mid-century furniture, and racks of chore coats. The vendors muttered that the market had blown up on Instagram and thus gotten too crowded with influencers — the antiques set out against the antique stone streets were “too photogenic” for the social-media set to stay away. That day, the one ATM in Eygalières ran out of cash; Jess ended up buying a few tablecloths from a shopkeeper who accepted US dollars because her husband was American. 

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at the crowds: My TikTok feed had been full of European tourism content all summer before the trip. There were clips of the pastel-colored townhouses of Positano in Italy, “gatorade water” beaches on the French Riviera, terrace dinners on Greek islands, train rides from Nice to Monaco, and even empty stretches of sand in Croatia and Albania. The feed proferred a generic wash of seaside videos; it didn’t matter so much where they were from so long as they had sun, sand, water, and artfully arranged platters of raw seafood. Many of these videos were hashtagged #europeancore or #eurocore. In TikTok argot, the suffix -core appended to a word turns it into a signifier for a cohesive aesthetic. It was Europe as a style that anyone can participate in — in other words, Europe as a meme. Tara Torcaso, an event designer in Newport Beach, California, who posted her own eurocore TikToks from Saint Tropez, told me: “People are either going to Europe, or if they’re not going, they’re trying to find a piece of Europe at home, with their decor or throwing a party.”

That “-core” often presents a perversion or misunderstanding of its subject, however. “Normcore” in the mid-2010s was the fetishization of the normal — thus making it abnormal. Cottagecore is more about the bucolic aesthetic and making cups of tea than actually having a thatched roof. Eurocore, then, is “the romanticization of life in the Mediterranean,” Ingrid Martins de Barros, a fashion consultant in Brazil, told me. She continued, “It's about being immersed in culture, well-being, and beauty, with no other concerns than enjoying the summer.” She said that Brazilian influencers were pursuing the trend, too, even though it was winter in the southern hemisphere. Aesthetics like eurocore are combinations of disparate symbols and signifiers; like playing dress-up, you can try a few on even if you’re not literally living the trend. 

“Tomato Girl Summer” is another label for the eurocore look. Participants put on makeup to look a bit like the seasonal fruit that everyone was making into sandwiches: a base layer of terracotta blush with pops of red on the cheeks and forehead. It’s a visual suggestion of “being outside, sun-kissed, maybe in your garden or out by the water,” Janet Ribando, a beauty TikTok creator in New York, told me. “People want to feel like they’re somewhere else.” Ribando wore the look during a trip to Seattle. “I would love to do the Tomato Girl in actual Italy,” she said. The great thing is that you can be eurocore anywhere. Some influencers in Virginia embraced it by turning off their air conditioning — just like Paris. Amalfi coast-themed dinners have become popular with Torcaso’s event-planning clients. (“I feel like my life year-round is eurocore,” she said.) Having a vermouth on your balcony at 5 PM? Eurocore. So is walking to get a gelato after dinner. For a while after our vacation, I liked to walk around our neighborhood in DC and point out all the tall stone townhouses and neoclassical architecture: très eurocore. 

Eurocore is a game, a way of experiencing the world that becomes participatory and shareable through the multimedia space of TikTok, which is a machine for turning life into real-time digital content. Lately I’ve been thinking of such affective filters of reality as “moods.” This is not original; first, it’s already slang: Europe is such a mood, meaning that European lifestyle has a strong vibe, it’s aspirational, we like it. But the German philosopher Heidegger (whose work I do not by any means understand) thought a lot about moods in the early 20th century, too. He described human existence as “being-in-the-world” and a “mood” as a way of being. Heidegger wrote, in a translation by William Blattner, “A mood is a way, not merely a form or a mode, but rather a manner, like a melody, which does not float above the so-called actual being occurrent of a person, but rather sets the key of this being, that is, it attunes and determines the manner of his being.” A mood makes you interface with your surroundings, perhaps even your era, your milieu, differently. 

TikTok has been adept at codifying these moods and branding them into hashtags. One type of video has stuck in my mind. In them, people demonstrate how they play medieval-ish music and role-play a “tavern wench” while cleaning their kitchen, almost subconsciously sliding into the role of a productive domestic servant — for themselves. It makes the labor pass faster, because the ambient environment feels more conducive or encouraging for the task at hand. Similarly, the TikTokers documenting themselves wading into the sea, reading by the beach, drinking espresso, and riding Vespas for the sake of #eurocore are live-action role-playing Europeanness, in Europe. Which is, of course, what tourists have been doing for centuries. In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American novelist whose ex-pat lifestyle would have presented quite well on social media, described the Mediterranean as “a playground for the world.”

TikTok makes it easy to participate in the ambient vibe of a place, to exist within a chosen mood, without engaging as much with physical reality. It’s a bit like the experience of playing Pokémon GO in its heyday. You walk around the physical world, but your mind is in the digital overlay, engaging with the monsters that exist only on your screen. The conversation you are participating in, even the primary experience that you are having, exists there, online. You’re not eating; you’re having Girl Dinner. You’re not cleaning your kitchen; you are taverncore. Your family isn’t rich; you’re just a coastal grandmother. The mood makes real life more interesting, or at least interweaves it more with life online, where feedback is instantaneous and it’s easier to keep score. 

There is an actual jump in European tourism this year; it’s not just a TikTok phenomenon. In part it’s due to the pandemic recovery. “Many of these trips were in gestation for three years, and Europe is benefiting as a result,” Rafat Ali, the founder and C.E.O. of the travel-industry publication Skift, told me. “It also has a feeling of a last hurrah from pandemic saving before people hunker down for 2024,” he said. (A frightening thought.) A recent article in The Guardian observed that Australian tourists are also increasingly turning to classical European grand tours instead of, say, backpacking through Southeast Asia, almost twice as many as two decades ago. Everyone wants to go on vacation, and nothing seems to epitomize vacation more than a rented beach chair beneath a striped umbrella in front of turquoise-blue sea. 

The French and Italian Riviera regions in particular have an aura of old money and “quiet luxury,” another aesthetic TikTok has been fascinated by since the stars of Succession donned cashmere baseball caps and congregated on yachts. In fact, the rich and famous have been summering in these destinations for centuries, if not millennia. Emperor Tiberius had a pleasure villa built on the Italian island of Capri in 26 C.E., establishing a trend among ancient Roman elites. The ruins of a villa preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius were found underneath Positano’s Church of St. Maria Assunta in 2004. These destinations are the tourism equivalent of the dining obsession with burgers and martinis: pure, nigh-universal pleasure. You can’t argue with them. (Maybe the Mediterranean mania is the 2020s’ update to the 2000s’ Under the Tuscan Sun, but driven by user-generated videos rather than a single memoir or film.)

Thus, some travelers get upset when it’s not so simple or frictionless. Physical reality intrudes on their eurocore moods. There are also TikTok videos of tourists cramming into overcrowded buses, dragging their suitcases up the streets of precipitous hillside towns, and queuing in single file to take clear photos of Santorini rooftops. They complain that Europe is maybe a little too European, too real. But after all, these geographical places aren’t just fodder for a mood; they resist being turned into pure digital content to be consumed. 

I talked to some tourism professionals in Italy to see what they made of this new wave. Elizabeth Minchilli, an American author, tour planner, and prolific TikToker who has lived in Rome and Umbria for more than 30 years, told me that she saw more tourists planning their trips based on social media. “People are getting their travel advice from TikTok. If they see someone who looks like them in a beautiful place doing something delicious, they’re more likely to save it,” she said. You might see one of Minchilli’s idyllic videos of an Umbrian farmhouse luncheon (I really recommend following her), or one of the photographer Sam Youkilis’s beatific clips of cliff diving in Ravello and decide you just have to go there and do that thing. The copycat effect isn’t resulting in ideal travel. “Positano sucks,” Minchilli said. “It sucks in that there’s no easy way to get there. I’ve been telling people not to go to Positano for at least six years now.”

“Eurocore” is a misnomer because “Europe” does not just consist of getting a gelato. “People think Italy is one destination, or Europe is one destination. Europe is not a country; Italy is barely a country,” Minchilli said. It follows a certain American brand of consumerism: Travel is defined by replicating a photo of Lake Como that you saw on Instagram, rather than engaging more deeply with the history or specificity of a place, much less the actual residents. As Agnes Crawford, a British tour guide in Rome, described the tourists’ approach, “On your holiday, you can’t just lounge about and see what’s what; you have to go to the place that people went to, otherwise you’re missing out.” Crawford continued, “There’s a certain kind of lack of imagination in wanting to go to the same place as as everyone else.” Dabbling in the mood of eurocore does not entail learning about Tiberius. Instead you’re probably just reading Emma Cline’s The Guest.

So what do we want from eurocore if not Europe? I think it’s more like an attitude, a lifestyle — the mood rather than its source. I asked Tara Torcaso, the event planner, what she found so appealing about it. She said that when she was traveling in France and Italy, everyone around her just seemed to be more present, more engaged in their own lives. “People aren’t just sitting on their phones and taking pictures. They really are in the moment with things,” she said. That mood of being offline, fully immersed in drinking wine and chatting with a friend on a seaside terrace, ironically makes for the best online content. Other people, like me, want to consume it because that sense of analog experience is so desirable at the moment — even though by mainlining it through our phones we might be missing the point. Elizabeth Minchilli compared it to the local Italian ethos of dolce far niente, embracing the pleasure of doing nothing. “The hashtags are an attempt by tourists to capture this lifestyle,” she said. “They don’t alway get it right, but that’s ok. At least they’re trying.”

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If you liked this essay, please pre-order my book on the same subjects! Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture is out from Doubleday on January 16, 2024.

When I launched my Filterworld book cover last Monday, it was a great opportunity to test how social media works at the moment and see how algorithmic feeds pick up content. Every platform behaves differently, but they all measure engagement: how many users decide to click the like button on a particular post. My Substack newsletter itself got 34 likes — a fine amount, since likes matter much less than email opens. (It’s not clear what a Substack like really means.) On Twitter, my tweet of the cover got 130 likes, which is not very good considering it was a big personal announcement and I theoretically have 26,500 followers! (I feel like I’m negging myself here.) And yet I was okay with it, because Twitter is actively falling apart and few of my tweets get many likes these days, whereas a few years ago 130 was a common occurrence. (Negging myself again.) Twitter’s feed is much more algorithmic now and I can’t compete with monomaniacs like Menswear Guy. But on Instagram, where I very rarely post on the grid and my median like count is maybe 30, my cover post got 551 likes, with 4,246 followers. 551! It’s quite possibly my highest ever.

Many factors go into this success. The cover is a visual artifact, of course, so it suits the Instagram feed. It was also reposted by other people — friends, colleagues, and collaborators. That helped it get more exposure. But watching who liked the post and when, it was clear to me that Instagram was serving it up to more and more of my followers over time as the algorithmic recommender system saw that the post was succeeding. The first people to see and like it were my friends, who I interact with on Instagram all the time. Then the likers grew farther flung and less known to me; the post reached a swath of people who, though they do follow me, never see my posts because the algorithm doesn’t think they’re that good (which is to say, likely to inspire likes).

We’ve been encouraged to judge ourselves by likes ever since Facebook added the thumbs-up button in 2008. Likes are a way to keep score, to compare content that is actually incomparable — an engagement announcement versus a vacation photo, say. I’ve certainly judged my articles on how many likes they get. But as feeds have become more algorithmic, it’s harder to tell when a post gets fewer likes because the algorithm ignores it, or because your followers just don’t like it. The calculus has changed. It feels like the middle ground has fallen out: a post either gets zero attention or tons of it. Which factors determine its fate — likes, comments, replies, shares? — we never know, we just try to guess and game the system in our constant state of algorithmic anxiety.

So I’m sad that I got too few likes on Twitter and happy that I got more likes than I expected on Instagram. That doesn’t say anything about the actual quality of the book, none of which is public yet, only the cover and the marketing copy. Two articles this week reminded me of the stranglehold likes, and the pursuit of online engagement that they represent, have on our lives:

• The Connecticut senator Chris Murphy wrote a NYT op-ed titled “Algorithms Are Making Kids Desperately Unhappy.” “Algorithmic recommendations now do the work of discovering and pursuing interests, finding community and learning about the world,” Murphy writes. The way that algorithms figure out what you will pay attention to is by your likes: Whatever you hit like on, you’ll get more of it. But that process robs us of some of the wandering, ambiguity, and challenge that happens when we figure out what we like on our own. Murphy writes: Why should users “take the risk to explore something new when their phones will just send them never-ending content related to the things that already interest them?”

• At Vox, Rebecca Jennings wrote another fun jeremiad against tourism culture. TikTok-era, post-pandemic tourists are crowding the same small set of places (cough Lake Como cough) and making them more miserable both for themselves and the locals. Do the “best” places get the most likes? The piece is against optimization, the idea that one needs to hit the best spots, follow the best-of lists, sort your experiences by the highest number of likes. (Note that Vox Media publication The Strategist is very guilty of perpetuating this kind of life-hacking consumerism.) Stay tuned for next week, when Jess and I and the gang head to lesser-known areas of Provence and watch out for other Americans in the village boulangerie.

The age of likes might be slowly ending, but not in a good way. On TikTok, you don’t need to hit a like button for your attention and engagement to be measured and factored into the recommendation algorithm. It’s enough to just keep watching a video, search a term, or click in to an account. It’s not that likes aren’t there; it’s that they’re mostly invisible, but they’re still influencing everything regardless, reinforcing the tyranny of data, engagement, and likability.

My next book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture comes out January 16, 2024 from Doubleday! Request it at your local bookstore or pre-order here.

Pre-order FILTERWORLD

Notes

• Jess wrote a great piece on how extremely online the Republican party has become. Ron DeSantis is courting the Internet far-right with incomprehensible references and meme-y videos, but Trump is still winning by far on his home digital turf.

• Bloomberg says that mini-martinis are in!!! I’ve long been a fan of making these at home, where drinking a full martini before dinner has a tendency to make me a worse cook. But the other night at a hotel bar in DC, at a friend’s urging, I ordered a round of mini-martini shots, which came in little crystal glasses. These were a resounding success. The bartender even customized each one, dirty, with a twist, or clean with an olive (my standard order). Try it at your local cocktail bar!

  

Pre-order Filterworld at Amazon / Barnes and Noble / Bookshop / other options listed at PRH, or please call your favorite local bookstore and request it!

Pre-order FILTERWORLD

You can also go Like and comment on the cover on Instagram here — just another signal to the all-powerful algorithm that it’s relevant, important, and deserves more promotion.

We settled on this cover after a lengthy design process with Oliver and my great editor Thomas Gebremedhin that I hope to discuss in full later on, it was very fun. Oliver created something simple and iconic, a cover that would transmit well across the Internet but also symbolizes in one glance what the book is about. My argument is that algorithmic recommendations and feeds — like those of TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify, and so many others — have homogenized both what we consume and what we create online. Hence the cookie cutter: an endless stamping out of the same patterns and styles. “Filterworld'“ is my term for the tightly woven network of algorithms that we exist in today, both online and off.

I think there’s a certain anxiety to the image. Sameness is boring and stultifying. It’s not diverse and it’s not compelling — it’s not what we ultimately want from culture. We want culture that surprises and challenges us, two qualities that are not prioritized in Filterworld.

This book follows years of reporting and writing I’ve been doing. I began noticing the effects of algorithmic recommendations around 2016, when I was writing my essay “Welcome to AirSpace,” about the sameness of Airbnbs. Ever since, I’ve noticed that the digital platforms we spend so much time on are making our tastes more similar than different. There have been complaints of persistent sameness everywhere: in music, art, food, and travel.

The book is a reported critique — an investigation as well as an essay. I had conversations with tech executives, computer scientists, users, influencers, and artists of all kinds to figure out what algorithmic recommendations have done to our cultural ecosystem. A running theme is “algorithmic anxiety,” as one scholar termed it: the paranoia, fear, and confusion we feel when algorithms judge us either incorrectly or far too accurately. We’ve all caught algorithmic anxiety.

Some authors I really respect have already read the manuscript and said very nice things about it. Here are blurbs from the playwright and author Ayad Akhtar and the journalist and media executive Ben Smith:

Filterworld will be published by Heligo (Bonnier) in the UK and translations are planned in many other countries. If you’re a critic or journalist, contact Elena Hershey at Doubleday for press inquiries and galley requests. Non-U.S. publishers or press can also contact my agent Caroline Eisenmann at Frances Goldin Agency.

Stay tuned on this newsletter for many, many more updates and previews of the book. As always, this email list is my favorite space to be in online and I love having conversations through the newsletters. Let me know what you think of the cover, what questions you have about the book, and how I can convince you that this is a vital discussion to have today. Thanks so much for reading.

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Alert: Next Monday, I am going to send out a big update newsletter about Filterworld! Watch our for that and tell anyone who is interested to sign up.

Artificial intelligence is looming over everything right now. It’s less an abstract threat than an imminent reality. The Hollywood strikes, now both writers and actors, are motivated in part by the workers’ fears that they will be replaced by AI: the writers by generative text and the actors by generative videos, trained on all the movie material already out there and produced on demand. (One Hollywood contract proposal would have taken extras’ likenesses to be replicated in perpetuity by AI in exchange for just one day’s pay.) “We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” Fran Drescher, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, said. Even novelists are having to negotiate contracts that ban publishers from using their work to train AI models.

But at the same time, people are also using AI, the way we use tools like photo filters or text-message stickers. It’s becoming part of the furniture of our digital lives. Friends have told me they turned to ChatGPT when it came time to write a toast or officiate a wedding. Students use it for homework and tourists to plan itineraries. AI chat bots are threatening to replace the long-established structure of Internet search, answering questions directly instead of driving traffic to websites that have published relevant articles. We’re in ambiguous territory, attracted to the novelty of the technology and the convenience it seems to deliver, but also scared of its consequences.

I wanted to better understand the state of these tools, what they can actually do right now. So I asked an AI startup called Writer to train a custom model on my body of writing, 150,000 words including dozens of articles and the manuscript of my first book. The bot was meant to be able to write in my style and copy my voice. My encounter with Robot Kyle is the subject of my latest New Yorker piece here:

>My A.I. Writing Robot

Spoiler: The robot was quite good at copying my style, but much less good at writing anything meaningful. It could predict which words I would be most likely to use but it couldn’t make an original argument for me. Using the robot made me think a lot about the nature of writing and what goes in to its peculiar form of labor. AI tools fundamentally promise to make things more convenient. They’re supposed to find or create information faster. But writing isn’t convenient. It’s not an instantaneous process — worthwhile writing by nature takes time and effort. There’s only so much you can speed it up. Here’s the pull-quote that many readers are grabbing from my article:

“The most unsettling aspect of A.I.-generated text is how it tries to divorce the act of writing from the effort of doing it, which is to say, from the processes of thought itself.”

While a painter might enjoy playing with the AI image generator Midjourney to try out ideas or visualize outlandish concepts, I found that Writer and other AI writing tools actually took the fun out of writing for me. I know most people hate it, but writing — stringing together words in a particular order, assembling sentences into paragraphs, alone at the keyboard — is my favorite part of my job. Writing isn’t just how I communicate ideas or discoveries; it’s how I come up with them in the first place. Writing an essay feels like assembling a vast puzzle that’s different each time. But rather than creative, my interactions with the AI felt combative. It turned me into a collagist or a frustrated editor instead of a writer as I decided which random texts it created were relevant and constantly reshaped prompts to get better results.

Working with an AI is a different form of mental labor than writing something on your own, and it is likely to be a less efficient one, at least until AI improves dramatically. Its efficacy depends, too, on what you want out of your writing — both for a writer and their reader. If what you want is a content-marketing blog post that serves more to incrementally improve Google search results than to be read by an actual human, AI might help. If you want to think deeply through a subject and synthesize knowledge, then communicate that knowledge to others, it’s going to be better if you just struggle through the painful process yourself. Most AI-generated writing is content that no one but the prompter wants to read. As it stands, the Kyle Robot has no place in my writing process.

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Notes

Filterworld is about algorithmic feeds, a form of digital technology that has dominated the Internet over the course of the past decade. In some ways, with Twitter falling apart and the general ennui with social networking, it feels like Peak Algorithmic Feed might be over. We maxed out with TikTok. But AI is continuing all the problems with algorithms — where algorithmic recommendations automated the finding of content, AI automates the creation of content in the first place. Whatever the role of AI turns out to be, I think we’ll be able to draw a straight line from the rise of automated feeds to AI-generated content.

It’s hard to figure out how to end a book, particularly one that deals so much with the exact present. I finished writing Filterworld many months ago, and then finished editing as well. But I keep seeing it everywhere.