Two months til Filterworld / a new project

My book + a book spinoff.

Hello, I’m Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a guy on Twitter (for now), 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.

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

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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:

kchayka

A post shared by @kchayka

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:

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