🟧 The revenge of elitism

Plus new MoMA design store, burgers, AI ads

Oct 02, 2025

This season of America sucks!!! I was reminded of this as I watched a trio of heavily armed National Guard troops patrol DC’s 18th Street in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, as if the president had sent the army in to occupy SoHo and arrest anyone buying Vuori. My only optimism comes from people still continuing to write and create things that matter to them, that elicit collective joy in a time dominated by conflict. This newsletter collects some of them, or at least the things that make me stay interested. First, a brief essay from me, then other links w/ Emily Chang reviewing burgers and the MoMA design store redesign. Hope you like this format. — Kyle Chayka

The Revenge of Elitism

by Kyle Chayka

Abdication of Charles V, 25 October 1555, by Frans Hogenberg (source)

Everywhere I look I see elites, which is to say, people who already have power (or clout, fame, and capital) leveraging their power to gain more of it and to exert authority over other people. What’s more, the top-down hierarchy has become somehow cool — desirable or at least inescapable and thus ripe for adoption and appropriation. The crackpot tech philosopher Curtis Yarvin calls for an American king, which Trump acts like anyway. The Trump family forms a royal court that is busily extracting money from their demesne like any crew of evil princes of centuries past. Hangers-on compete to get closer to the center, or they just go to Butterworth’s in DC to bask in the elitist aura. (Even as government workers, the non-elites, are forced out of their jobs and lives.)

In culture, print magazines are getting new, young editors-in-chief: see Noah Johnson at Highsnobiety, Mark Guiducci at Vanity Fair, and Chloe Malle at Vogue, who instantly become power brokers themselves. People genuinely care about Taylor Swift’s and Charli xcx’s weddings. (If you don’t get married abroad are you really elite?) Celebrities all have podcasts where they interview other, even more famous, celebrities — see Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang.” And we listen to them, reinforcing their fame. Perhaps part of it is the fossilization of audiences: it’s harder to build a crowd online organically now, so it helps if everyone knows you already. Your clout can translate from film to TV to TikTok to YouTube. Or the elites have realized you can make real money on their own from the internet, so they’re jumping on board.

In tech, AI is a vector of total elitism, with its practitioners at the top. Sam Altman already acts like king of the world, and when he decides it’s a good time to launch a feed of video slop, he does it, and millions of piggies follow. The new OpenAI video advertisements glorify living your life as ChatGPT instructs you to, in faux-grainy, Ryan McGinley-ish hipster clips. Under AI, the robot is the true elite and the next layer down are those who adjust its variables, like worshipers tweaking the corpse of a dead god. There is no longer the hope of social-media “democratization” or lowering the barrier to entry. The self-negating idea of “AI-enabled creativity” is just culture as dictated by Zuckerberg and Altman and Musk, molded into shape by the algorithm and the LLM.

You can do very well right now by catering to these elites, peddling their ideas and following the pathways they build. (Congratulations to Bari Weiss for posting her way to wealth and dictatorial power over a television channel, for some period of time.) To be anti-elitist, however, is to stop caring about attention as a metric of quality, because those who already have it will always win. It requires caring about the people who aren’t on magazine covers and don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers. It requires engaging in smaller-scale, more private, and more coherent efforts — the community of friends and collaborators, people whose opinion you respect (as opposed to the passive hoards of onlookers and bots). Newsletters are a part of this, as is throwing your own parties. Some people call for the return of “selling out”, or the public shaming of this lean in to elitism. You could go further and say: Don’t give your attention to those who you think have sold out. Elitism doesn’t need to be so aspirational.

Wanna smash? Remember when fast food was actually good and actually fast? If you’re feeling nostalgic for the McDonald’s flavor of yesteryear, Smashy in Union Square comes pretty close in taste, speed, and style — like when McDonald’s had tiled walls and didn’t look just like Chipotle. The burgers are simple. A soft bun, a flavor rocket of a beef patty that’s slightly blackened on the ends and not too smashed, melty American cheese, pickles, and tomatoes. The fries are substantial and so crispy on the outside that you almost crunch into them. This one’s from Budapest, not San Bernardino. — Emily Chang

Scene report from the newly-renovated MoMA Design Store: Okay, so they’re playing “My Immortal” by Evanescence. Next up on the playlist: “We Fit Together” by O-Town and 2008 teen anthem “You Belong With Me” by Taylor Swift. Is this the MoMA store? If only they spent as much time architecting the mood as they did on the clarified physical space, as handled by Peterson Rich Office. Still, lots of products are worth seeing, some old, some new, but step back out onto Spring Street if you miss secondary colors. — Emily Chang

Speed round

The FT on late-night restaurant deals, which sound amazing. Discounts on martinis after 11 PM! Reviving nightlife requires a subsidy (and probably free childcare).
Chris Kraus, of I Love Dick fame, gives a deep interview to The New Yorker about her new novel and delves into the problems of creative career competition in relationships. What happens when you become a later-in-life literary celeb? As her interviewer says, “I think it might be hard for ambitious women who date men to read this.”
Highlight of Substack publishing this week is an essay on life as fodder for content by Freya India: “We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.” It’s pretty brutal:

Marketing your memories also desecrates them. You hand over your hope, your hurt, your life to be consumed, reducing it to reality TV. Your precious memories are my mindless entertainment. Your trauma becomes my background noise. Your life-shattering divorce my slop. Your children my characters; your pain my distraction; your feelings my filler episodes. I will swipe past your birth video when I get bored. I will downvote your divorce if it isn’t entertaining enough. Your life is what I clean my kitchen to, what I kill time with. And if you fail to entertain me, fine, I will scroll for another life to consume.

Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum for 26 years and thus one of the major forces of contemporary art and culture in NYC, is stepping down next year. This is huge news, but not entirely unexpected as the museum is on the verge of reopening with a new building next door and may be looking for a fresh start.
True tech criticism: a literary review essay on the new iPhone Air and its camera, comparing it to classic film rangefinder cameras.

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