Photo by Gregory Gentert
Current Projects
The New Yorker: I am a staff writer at The New Yorker, where I write a weekly column about technology and culture called Infinite Scroll.
How to Be Moved: My third book, on life-changing encounters with culture & sensory experience, will be published by Doubleday.
Kyle Chayka Industries: A personal newsletter where I send out periodic work updates and personal essays.
One Thing: A weekly culture newsletter & experimental publication where I work with collaborators to publish link dumps and spicy arguments, the fun stuff.
I previously co-founded Dirt and Study Hall, now exited from both. I have given talks at Cannes Lions, Nike, The Menil Collection, Círculo de Bellas Artes, and many other institutions.
Email: chaykak@gmail.com / kyle_chayka@newyorker.com
Literary agent: Caroline Eisenmann at Frances Goldin Agency
For booking events, podcasts, or interviews email chaykak@gmail.com
Books
Filterworld
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture was published by Doubleday in January 2024 and in paperback in 2025. Find it in bookstores or at these links:
It was published by Bonnier in the UK and has been translated into a dozen languages, including Spanish, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian.
Filterworld is about how digital platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify took over our modes of cultural distribution in the 2010s. Algorithmic recommendations, like TikTok’s For You feed or Netflix’s homepage, control the majority of what we see and hear online. Though they promise personalization, the net result of so many algorithms is a homogenization of culture — a hyperglobalization of design, food, music, and identity. The book is a reported investigation as well as an essay. I had conversations with tech executives, computer scientists, users, influencers, and artists of all kinds to figure out what algorithmic recommendations have done to our cultural ecosystem. A running theme is “algorithmic anxiety”: the paranoia, fear, and confusion we feel when algorithms judge us either incorrectly or far too accurately.
Filterworld had an excerpted essay in The New Yorker and was reviewed in publications including the New York Times and The Atlantic. I was interviewed about it on The Daily Show, Fresh Air, The Ezra Klein Show, and many more venues.
The Longing for Less
The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, my debut nonfiction book, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2020, and in paperback in 2024 with an updated afterword. It’s available at these links:
Bloomsbury / Bookshop / Amazon
UK buyers can pick it up through Amazon UK. It is also available in translation in Russian, Spanish, Korean, and other editions.
The Longing for Less deconstructs the contemporary fascination with minimalism, analyzing the Marie Kondo cleaning boom and austere Instagram aesthetics as well as uncovering the roots of our fascination with absence in art, architecture, music, and philosophy. It’s a history told through the stories of the people who practiced minimalism, from artists like Agnes Martin and Donald Judd to the composer John Cage and the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. For more information on the book, see below.