Elon's AI coup

plus, my Grub Street Diary

Hello, this is the personal newsletter of Kyle Chayka, aka me! You may know me from my Internet column at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my earlier book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. My New Yorker column recently restarted after a break for an in-progress feature, and my goal this year is to send the column out here every week with some extra thoughts and b-side riffs. As a reminder, I do more riff-y newsletter writing in One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I’m really enjoying it, so please sign up. I post most often on social media on Bluesky and Instagram.

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Column: Elon Musk’s War on Human Agency

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.

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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.

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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.