My year in review
Hello, I’m Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, on Twitter / Threads, and author of the forthcoming book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. This is my personal newsletter, where I share my columns and publish original essays. Subscribe here.
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.
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:
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.
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
Preordering today and plan to say hello in SF. Good luck with the launch and happy new year! 🎊