RIP Millennial lifestyle brands
& more columns: local newsletters, AI equity, lo-fi aesthetics
This is Kyle Chayka’s work newsletter. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter publication One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I’m primarily on X and Instagram.
I’ve published a slew of New Yorker columns lately, and the purpose of this dispatch is to catch you up on them! I think they circle a particular theme: an intense dissatisfaction with the direction that technology is driving culture (and our lives) right now, but also proactive attempts to get beyond that dissatisfaction. The column from my last newsletter, on why Silicon Valley got obsessed with taste, has been resonating with readers. I think what it comes down to is: the tech industry still lacks an idea of what “good culture,” or a good life, might be, and we’re desperate for some kind of optimistic vision.
Everlane and the Death of the “Good” Millennial Lifestyle Brand
“Slop” is fast becoming the central metaphor for the cultural output of the late twenty-twenties. A.I. produces slop, but so do vampiric private-equity investors and rapacious billionaires, through corporate consolidation and hollow brand-licensing deals. The central promise of the millennial life-style brand was that, with the help of digital technology, new businesses could produce higher quality by cutting out the layers that had accumulated between producers and consumers. If this did not exactly amount to something artisanal, it at least represented a hope that corporate slop could be functional and positive, that products could be both mass-manufactured and part of a better-made, less mediated world. In the Shein era, the offering has declined to unapologetic slop, an ephemeral transaction that loses its appeal once a cycle of online attention has moved on. Just look at Blank Street, a venture-capital-backed international chain of coffee shops with an Everlane-esque aesthetic palette, minus the pretense of conscientious consumption. Unlike the striving third-wave cafés of the twenty-tens, Blank Street stores don’t convey any ideals; they promise neither taste nor provenance, only speed, price, and availability.
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.”
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.
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.
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!
Good to read about local newsletters. Shout out to my local East Village Grieve, which is a good ol’ blog rather than a newsletter.
Good riddance, honestly.