Archives par étiquette : Kyle Chayka

HOW TO BE MOVED de Kyle Chayka

New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka belnds memoir, criticism, science, and history to build a theory of our most sublime personal encounters with culture and beauty, drawing examples from 11th-century diaries of women in the Japanese royal court to mountain treks, psychedelic therapies, and art-induced epiphanies, in order to discover how we can achieve more moments of revelatory wonder that restore our capacity for meaning, connection, and attention in a world made dull by digital automation and artificial intelligence.

HOW TO BE MOVED
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, March 2029
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Photo credit: Gregory Gentert

Most of us have a precious, private catalogue of things that have moved us. It might be art, music, a meal, a landscape: we tend to remember exactly where and who we were when we encountered these singular things, and can often still feel echoes of that palpable sense of awe, of transformation, of transportation out of the normal terrain of our lives. To be moved is to have an encounter with culture or beauty that opens a new space in ourselves, revealing interior territory that we hadn’t understood previously; these experiences leave a marked before and after in the line of our lives.

As powerful as these encounters are, most of us would also probably say that they feel increasingly scarce in today’s cultural environment, where deadening entertainment is plentiful and challenge is minimized by design. In HOW TO BE MOVED, Chayka will expansively turn to what Filterworld might have left a reader wondering: in our algorithmically decimated landscape, with our own taste feeling more deformed and remote to ourselves, how do we go about actively looking for what will move us?

The book will explore being moved in two parts. The first looks at the external qualities of things that move us, such as scale, difficulty, and alterations in our brain chemistry. The second part will lay out tactics for cultivating an increased internal openness to being moved, with practices like amateurism, patience, and using the things that move us as passageways both to ourselves and the people around us. A warm, wry blend of personal, critical, and historical writing, the book will aim to sit on a shelf with books like Four Thousand Weeks, Your Brain on Art, and (on the memoir end) All the Beauty in the World. This might also appeal to a reader who resonates with the brainy but practical philosophy of writers like Jenny Odell or Katherine May.

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a column on digital technology and the impact of the Internet and social media on culture. His debut nonfiction book, The Longing For Less was published in 2020 and his second book Filterworld was published in 2024. As a journalist and critic he has contributed to publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Republic, and Vox. Kyle is also the co-founder of Study Hall, an online community for journalists, and Dirt, a newsletter about digital culture.

FILTERWORLD de Kyle Chayka

Author of The Longing For Less and a contributor to The New Yorker and NYT Magazine, Kyle Chayka’s FILTERWORLD focuses on the history and investigation of living in a world ruled by algorithms, which profoundly determine and shape culture in both digital and physical spaces, leading to flat and frictionless experiences that are remaking human identity.

FILTERWORLD:
How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, Fall 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

You’ve seen the smooth, uncanny artifacts: a blank, white café that looks like it could be located anywhere in the world; TikTok dance videos repeating in a dull echo; restaurant design and food plating which begs to be posted on Instagram; endlessly bingeable streaming television; influencers’ faces made up and surgically altered towards a certain photogenic ideal. While appearing in different mediums, these pieces of culture are characterized by a slick sameness. Rather than provoking us, they’re pleasing, ambient, frictionless.
In this new book, Kyle Chayka argues that these seemingly disparate cultural phenomena all have been shaped by a similar force: the algorithms governing and filtering the content that appears on digital platforms. We increasingly live in a world where the culture we encounter is not simply curated by these algorithms, but in which algorithms profoundly determine and shape culture itself in both digital and physical spaces. Chayka names this new reality, of a world both inescapably mediated and changed by algorithmic filtration, “Filterworld”.
In FILTERWORLD, Chayka traces a brief history of how we arrived in this place—from the rise of the algorithm through the corresponding erosion of human curation and taste—before launching a penetrating exploration of the flat hallmarks of Filterworld byproducts and the way that algorithmically determined taste is fundamentally reshaping human identity. Ultimately a pointed critique of the frictionless culture of Filterworld, the book turns towards what we might do to escape and dismantle this numbing cycle.
Building on the popular criticism Kyle Chayka has published for both The New Yorker online and elsewhere, FILTERWORLD is the product of a career spent as one of our keenest observers of the intersection of technology and modern culture. While much has been written about the way that algorithms impact everything from news to policy, there has been no major book published on the impact of algorithms on culture.
FILTERWORLD will appeal strongly to readers of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: a book that not only seeks to give language to the slippery ways that technology is reshaping our lived experience, but also gives readers tools to imagine a world in which things could be otherwise.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, n+1, Vox, the Paris Review, and other publications. He has contributed chapters to Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology and A Companion to Digital Art. Chayka is cofounder of Study Hall, a newsletter and digital community for journalists. He began his career as a visual art critic for Hyperallergic in Brooklyn, and now lives in Washington, D.C.