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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. Catch last month’s episode, where we dig into the rise of “waiting-in-line culture” in cities across America, the Spotify vs. Kalshi saga, Lebron James’ post-factual free agency, and more.

Here at CUJO, we love ourselves a good topical film. And as far as hot-button topics are concerned, Our Hero, Balthazar, a new movie from Oscar Boyson and Ricky Camilleri, has it all: coastal elite vs. red state class antagonism, the performance of self on the internet, gun violence, toxic masculinity, MLMs, designer drugs, and more. Written during the internet-addled lockdown days of the pandemic, it follows Balthazar (Jaeden Martell), a wealthy private school teen and online “cryfluencer” from New York City who becomes a obsessed with Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a working-class internet troll he suspects is planning a school shooting, and travels to Texas to stop him.

It’s a crazy premise for a film, but what transpires ends up being a deeply believable exploration of what happens when you bring social media and the attention economy into one of the most challenging phases of life: adolescence. And while the subject matter isn’t funny at all, the film, surprisingly, very much is.

Balthazar hits streaming on Apple TV on August 11, so we’re thrilled to have Oscar, who directed the film, and Ricky, who co-wrote and produced it alongside Oscar, on today’s episode. You might know Oscar from his work as a producer on 2010s indie classics like Frances Ha, Good Time, Uncut Gems, along with the show Chillin Island, and Ricky from his work as a film commentator and video talk show host for media companies like HuffPost, but the pair have known each other since meeting at film nerd camp in their teens. We talk about how they came back together later in life to write Balthazar; why they chose to frame the movie, somewhat controversially, around the specter of a school shooting; and its unsparing examination of what it is like to come of age in a world where attention is currency.

Plus: We get into the challenges they faced making a dark topical indie satire during a period of extreme risk-aversion in the film industry, the story behind the film’s amazing Iceage needledrop, and how they drew inspiration from idiosyncratic coming-of-age films from the turn of the millennium like Larry Clark’s Bully.

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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. Catch last month’s episode with Callahan & Witscher’s Jack Callahan, where we dig into the Fenix Flexin saga and the future of AI-assisted music, the recent hipster discourse, and more.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “the marketplace of ideas”: the classical liberal belief that when ideas compete freely in the public square, the best ones will always rise to the top. But what does that “marketplace” look like in the media landscape of the 2020s, where ideas are distributed via personalized algorithmic feeds and the public sphere has fragmented into clusters of charismatic content creators with cult followings?

That’s the question that Doomscroll’s Joshua Citarella and New Models’ Carly Busta and Lil Internet tackle in “The Online Marketplace of Ideas,” an installation they put together for Strange Rules, a group show currently on display at the Palazzo Diedo at Berggruen Arts & Culture in Venice, curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herdon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Adriana Rispoli. Hint: It’s a room packed with over 400 t-shirts, hats, books, and other “dropship basics” from the personalities that have dominated the discourse in the 2020s, ranging from Joe Rogan and Call Your Daddy to Chapo Trap House, “Abundists” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Andreas Malm, Curvis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and Byung-Chul Han.

We brought on Josh and Carly to walk us through the exhibition, what bringing together all these objects reveals about the larger economic and geopolitical shifts this apparent ideological diversity obscures, the increasingly blurred line between being a content creator and being a politician, and our transition from the age of linear media into a neo-oral one. Plus: a cameo appearance from New Models co-founder Lil Internet, discussing his theory that this wild profusion of internet ideologies has become America’s primary cultural export.

Strange Rules is on display at the Palazzo Diedo in Venice until November 22, 2026

Subscribe to New Models on Substack or Patreon

Subscribe to Doomscroll on Substack and YouTube

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For our cultural predictions roundup back in January, the musician and technologist Trevor McFedries predicted that 2026 was going to be a really good year—professionally speaking—for people with good taste. The jury’s still out, but it’s definitely turning into a big year for talking about taste. And for the first time in history, the tech world seems to be leading the charge, from engineers penning essays about how “personal taste” is the new moat, to startups promising us more aesthetically discerning AI, to the Palantir chore coat and tech billionaires sitting front row at Fashion Week.

To make sense of why taste has become such a Silicon Valley buzzword—and what that tells us about the changing meaning and role of taste more broadly–we brought on Drew Austin, a writer and urban planner who runs the excellent Substack, Kneeling Bus, where he recently penned a piece called “Tastecore and the Enclosure of the Commons.” We discuss Drew’s research on the tech world’s changing relationship to fashion in the post-pandemic era, the growing epidemic of “tasteslop,” and how the current discourse frames taste as something less about personal distinction and more about gaining a competitive edge. Plus, we tap Pierre Bourdieu to try to parse the evolving function of taste in society over time—and what the tech industry’s taste obsession can tell us about the shifting landscape of class and class antagonism.

Follow Drew at Kneeling Bus on Substack.

Read Drew on taste:

“Tastecore and the enclosure of the commons”

“Worn out: Tech elites’ supposed indifference to fashion is a contempt for the commons” (Real Life)

“Here comes a regular: Taste is obsolete & gatekeeping is code for what the internet took from us”

“Bots in the beerlight: Sometimes embodiment is all you’ve really got”“Lo-fi beats for studying: How to push more through the human attention bottleneck”

Additional references:

“Taste is Eating Silicon Valley” by Anu Atluru (Working Theories)

“Personal Taste is the Moat” by Wang Cong

“Tasteslop: Notes on technological anxiety” by Emily Segal (Nemesis)

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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms, from Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick. You can learn more about it here.

For fans of independent music, the Geese psyop allegations earlier this year raised an anxiety-provoking question: How much of our taste is our own, and how much of it is just a function of the music industry using a range of tactics (from the mundane, to the shadowy, to the straight-up fraudulent) to manufacture consent?

We held back from commenting on the story at the time because we were cooking up a longer response that we finally unveiled this week: a deeply researched, centuries-spanning history of the art and science of musical taste manipulation, spanning Tin Pan Alley sheet music scams, chart manipulation, streaming farms, the modern clipping economy, viral “trend simulation,” and more. Our hope was that shedding light on these historical persuasion tactics — and the psychological mechanisms that underpin them, from the mere-exposure effect to René Girard’s mimetic theory of desire — would help our listeners make sense of a present where it can feel like everything on the internet is fake.

The episode, titled “Free Clout for Sale,” is part of an exciting collaborative podcast project called Tranche that came out this week on Metalabel. Tranche is the brainchild of friend of the pod and Nothing But Respect cohost Harry Krinsky, who you may remember from our episode on the psychology of the modern Knick fan a few weeks back. As Harry describes it, it’s basically a literary magazine, but instead of articles, you get podcast episodes.

Listen to today’s episode for an interview with Harry about the project and an excerpt from our contribution to it — and please consider supporting our work by purchasing Tranche 001, which gets you five episodes for just $5. Other entries include a history of the word “based” (from Naomi Zeichner and Eamon Whalen), a meditation on Eddington and the fate of the Western in the 2020s (with Nate Fisher and Eddie Averill), an aesthetic analysis of Praxis and the Palantir chore coat (featuring past CUJO guest Sam Venis), and a cross-generational analysis of major life milestones with CUJO regular Ben Dietz and friends. All proceeds will be split among contributors.

Something we loved this week: This fascinating episode by the excellent podcast No Such Thing on the history of different corporate management styles and the problem of micromanaging at work, featuring The Drift editor and Harvard historian Erik Baker, author of the book Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

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What does it take to chronicle contemporary culture through the ancient medium of theater, and what new insights can it unlock about the present? On this episode, we talk with playwright, author, and critic Matthew Gasda about his recent staging of The Last Days of Downtown, the third and final installment of his “Dimes Square” trilogy, which chronicles the aspirations, anxieties, attentional antics, and creative rivalries of New York’s post-pandemic downtown scene.

Matthew joins us to discuss his role leading a resurgence of DIY theater in NYC — including as the founder of an institution called Brooklyn Center for Theater Research — and how he’s used the medium to capture subcultures in real time, before they’ve even had a chance to register their place in history. We talk about the downtown’s scene’s polarizing legacy and where it fits within previous eras of NYC counterculture, what happens when you and your work become part of the story you’re trying to tell, and how the world of the trilogy acted as a harbinger of culture in the decade to come.

Visit the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research for upcoming plays from Matthew

Follow Matthew on Substack

Read Matthew’s novels and plays

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If you were on the music internet at all during the 2010s, you’re probably familiar with vaporwave. You know, that archival-obsessed musical microgenre based on synthy, hypnotic samples paired with aesthetics like classical sculptures, retro corporate imagery, and Japanese kanji.

It’s almost a meme at this point, but vaporwave was one the first internet-born genres and art movements created entirely using digital tools, plundered from online archives. And beneath the placid, detached surface of vaporwave—somehow both nostalgic and ironic—there was a passionate community of musicians and fans creating something that in retrospect was actually quite political and subversive—if not in subject matter, then in form.

A new documentary called Nobody Here: The Story of Vaporwavecaptures the evolution and cultural impact of vaporwave, told from the perspective of more than 50 artists, producers, and other key figures from across the scene, including Daniel Lopatin, 猫シ Corp. (Cat System Corp.), Luxury Elite, George Clanton, Saint Pepsi. In keeping with the spirit of the movement, you can watch it for free on YouTube.

Director Christian Britten and producer and artist Enzo Van Baelen, who’s also co-founder of the label My Pet Flamingo, join us to talk about the genre’s origins, including as an outgrowth of noise music, the role of anonymity in the scene, and how its use of meme-able visual iconography foreshadowed visual communication on the internet today. Plus, we discuss what we can learn from the story of a musical movement that was by definition unmonetizable (unless you’re creating your own samples, that is).

Watch Nobody Here: The Story of Vaporwave for free on YouTube.

Download the film here.

Check out the Nobody Here companion sampler over at Bandcamp.

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We are making a film about Mark Fisher. Or at least, that’s what artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter say we are doing by interviewing them about We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher, an experimental documentary about the late British intellectual Mark Fisher that is currently making its way in decentralized fashion through cities across the globe. (You can set up a screening in your town if you want). They made the film with the help of over 70 pro bono collaborators and produced it entirely via Instagram, with no budget, studio, or institutional support. We’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Fisher was a political and cultural theorist, music critic, and philosopher who first gained notoriety blogging under the alias K-punk in the early 2000s, before becoming known for penning some of this century’s most clear-eyed and affecting analyses of capitalism, popular culture, and our collective political future (or lack thereof). That includes his wildly influential 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, which explores the idea that capitalism has become so dominant we struggle to even imagine alternatives.

Fisher has been a big influence on us, so we decided to invited Sophie and Simon on the show to tell us about the film and offer us a little primer on his ideas. We dig in to concepts that were central to Fisher’s work, including hauntology, hyperstition, and capitalist realism; why his work seems to be having a moment right now, especially among Gen Z; and how it reflected both the utopian promise of the internet and its eventual descent into today’s commoditized, culture-war nightmare.

We also discuss how Fisher’s working-class background and refusal to accept hierarchies between fields like critical theory and music blogging shaped his unique perspective on the world—and how this “decapitalized film,” and the larger art project of which it is part, doubles as an invitation to gather offline and imagine new artistic and political futures together.

Follow the project on Instagram, or attend a screening near you

Check out more of Sophie and Simon’s work at Close and Remote

Listen to our Hauntology retrospective with Simon Reynolds, Fisher’s friend and contemporary

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Andrea just got back from Coachella, so it’s time for our annual report where we use the festival as a crystal ball for talking about where contemporary culture is going. And this year was particularly interesting — not just because of Justin Bieber and his laptop, but also because of Coachella’s marked transformation into a mass televisual couch spectator event.

Joining us for the debrief is Billboard editor Andrew Unterberger, who was in the trenches with Andrea for Weekend 1 and hosts the Greatest Pop Stars podcast. (He also moonlights as a basketball guy) We talk about how Coachella is actually three festivals now — Weekend 1, Weekend 2, and the livestream — and how the latter is transforming everything from the festival’s booking strategy, the performances, to what the experience feels like on the ground.

We also get into an overall aesthetic shift from influencer polish to rawness and imperfection, how the Bieber’s set functioned as a metacommentary on how YouTube is TV now, and how the Strokes’ performance visuals on Weekend 2 — which featured imagery of the wars in Gaza and Iran — touched a third rail in what was otherwise a surprisingly apolitical scene. Listen to the end for Andrea’s dispatch on this year’s style highs and lows, including the fate of the infamous boho circle belt.

Follow Andrew on Bluesky

Listen to his Coachella episode of Greatest Pop Stars

Read Andrea’s L.A. Times column “Inside Coachella’s fractured world: Weekend 1, Weekend 2 and the livestream that changed everything”

Read Andrea’s L.A. Timesstory about how people are affording Coachella

Check out Andrea’s full style report over at Biz Sherbert’s American Style

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It sounds strange to say it, but the notion of the recording artist seems to be becoming increasingly a thing of the past. Artists are still releasing albums, sure, but our experience as music fans and the industry as a whole seems to be increasingly centered around live music — at least in terms of where people are actually spending their money. Today’s guest, writer and musician Jaime Brooks (you may remember her from our episode on the geopolitics of pop culture), joins us to discuss what that means for artists and the future of music itself. We dig into Jaime’s recent viral essay, “Why do so many big artists hate touring?,” which draws on her own touring experiences as part of the electronic duo Elite Gymnastics to explore how the music business seems to be in the midst of an experience economy arms race. Artists are risking serious money on ever-bigger spectacles, ticket prices keep climbing, and all roads — even for indie artists — seem to lead to Live Nation and AEG. Meanwhile, the psychological tolls of life on the road, combined with the near-constant surveillance of being a celebrity in 2026, has led to a growing wave of cancellations and burnout. All leading Jaime to ask: Is it time to let go of the idea of pop stars (or at least human ones) entirely?

We dig into why touring seems to become more stressful for artists as they become more successful, what happens when scarcity pivots from music recordings to tickets, and how even early and mid-career artists are feeling the pressure to manufacture the illusion of endless growth. Jaime also raises a spicy possibility: If the music industry continues down this path, the future of pop stardom might belong more to animated or AI-generated performers in the mold of K-Pop Demon Hunters than real people.

Read “Why Do So Many Big Artists Hate Touring?”

Subscribe to Jaime’s Substack, The Seat of Loss

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Hi pals. In 2022, we did an episode with artist, technologist, and friend-of-the-pod Mat Dryhurst to discuss a question that now feels almost quaint: Is AI good or bad for art? This was back in the days (pre-ChatGPT) when everybody was freaking out about text-to-image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney, and we discussed what they might mean for working artists. Obviously, a lot has happened since then, so it felt like time to check back in with Mat.

Mat is the rare artist and leftist we know who’s also an outspoken proponent of AI tools, if not the broader economic structures shaping their creation and deployment. While we don’t agree on everything, we share a core perspective: This tech isn’t going away, and artists and creative people need to understand it if they want to have a say in what the future will look like.

Having worked with AI in his practice for over a decade alongside his partner Holly Herndon — they’ve even co-authored a book about AI and cultural production — Mat brings a deeply informed perspective to the ethical implications and creative possibilities of these tools. Given that conversations about AI tend to fall into polarized culture war-style faceoffs, we wanted to dig into the fine print of what’s actually going on, where the AI industry is heading, and where creative workers should be focusing their attention.

Mat talks with us about what running a start-up focused on giving artists more power over their training data taught him about the limits of current copyright debates, and whether slop is as big as a problem for culture as people are making it out to be. We also get into why blanket bans of AI-generated art and music are not only impractical, but bad for artists. Plus, we discuss why Mat thinks open models are critical to creative control in a landscape that is increasingly consolidated around a handful of powerful companies.

Follow Mat on Instagram and X

Subscribe to Mat’s Substack, Token dump

Check out works and events by Mat and Holly on their studio website

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Hello! Emilie here. For most of my adult life, Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In the Bathroom has been the only definitive book about the New York music scene of my youth. The trouble is that a lot of important stuff happened alongside and after that, particularly across the river in Brooklyn. So, thank God for Ronen Givony. The founder of longtime concert series Wordless Music and former Le Poisson Rouge booker braved the wilds of the publishing industry to bring us the first comprehensive history of the Brooklyn music scene: Us vs. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (out now via Abrams).

Us vs. Them traces the years 2004 to 2014 and a wide cast of artists and other characters, some familiar, many not. But part of the point is to look past the usual suspects to talk about the lesser-known artists and promoters who built the scene, often with their very own hands. The book traces how Bush-era political dissatisfaction, cheap rents, and digital technology gave rise to one of those uniquely fertile cultural moments in music history that only come around every so often—you know, where great gigs felt endless, scenes felt possible, and you and your friends were the ones making it happen.

Ronen joins us to discuss what it was like to chronicle a scene that, unlike the Manhattan scene of the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol, was geographically far-flung and features a lot of characters who never became household names or whose careers have been lost to time. We also get into what conditions made it possible for north Brooklyn to become home to a creative ecosystem that, in Ronen’s words, “existed for a reason other than profit” and its complicated relationship to commerce, the media, and selling out. And we talk about what this history teaches us about how we might go about fostering culture in New York—and cities like it—today.

Ronen was also kind enough to make us a playlist featuring artists from the book. Cue it up for a great companion listen to the episode.

Buy Us vs. Them

Follow Us vs. Them on Substack and Instagram

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Besides the Bad Bunny vs. Kid Rock faceoff, arguably the biggest headline to come out of Superbowl LX was the sheer volume of money being traded on prediction markets, online exchanges where anyone 18 and older can bet on event outcomes. Fans exchanged a whopping $1.5 billion on the winning team alone through prediction platforms like Kalshi and PolyMarket. But these markets aren’t just limited to sports: During the game itself, more than $100 million changed hands every three minutes over which song Bad Bunny would drop first in the halftime show.

John Herrman, New York Magazine tech columnist and our guest on last year’s episode about the future of the internet, has been all over how prediction markets are creeping into just about every area of life. And in our 2026 culture predictions episode (with zero dollars on the line), he forecast that politics is next — bringing all the sponsorship, gamification, and corruption risks we’ve already seen with the rise sports betting.

John joins us to discuss how, in his words, prediction markets serve as “a new way to narrativize the world.” We explore what prediction markets have in store for politics and the historical conditions that have converged to make prediction markets so popular, from young people’s flatlining economic prospects to having a former casino owner as our president; why prediction market true believers see markets as the most effective way of adjudicating reality, and how the prediction market “sharp” — or whale — became an aspirational career path for young people in the 2020s, not unlike Wall Street traders in the '1980s or the influencer in the 2010s.

Follow John on Bluesky

Read “Screen Time” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer

More by John:

“Gambling Ate Sports Media. Is Politics Next?”

“What Good Are Prediction Markets If Nobody Can Agree on What Happened?”

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Hey guys. Following our 2026 predictions episode (thanks to everyone for all the love), we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. And speaking of things we think everybody should be paying attention to this year, today we’re talking about network states.

Popularized by Twitter-famous VC philosopher and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, the network state is basically what happens when a bunch of crypto bros and entrepreneurs pool their money, buy land, negotiate regulatory exceptions, and attempt to start a new nation-state around an ideology or practice, like life-extension research or the keto diet.

Until recently, network states felt like a fringe libertarian concern—a kind of 2020s remix of seasteading, super-charged by crypto and AI tooling. But especially since finding a receptive ear in the second Trump administration, the movement and its guiding ideas have quietly mutated into an influential ideological force in American politics, both domestically and abroad.

To help us get a grip on the whole thing, we brought on fellow culture journo Sam Venis, who’s been reporting on it for places like The Guardian, Playboy, The Guardian, The Point, and Mars Review of Books. He takes us inside his travels documenting network-state experiments across the globe, from the medical research enclave of Próspera in Honduras, to a hacker house full of urbit engineers hanging in Bukele’s inner circle in El Salvador, to Trump’s vision of deregulated “Freedom Cities” on “unused” federal land in the US.

We discuss why someone would want to found or join a network state in the first place — i.e., how much of it is ideological, and how much of it is tax evasion — what life is actually like at places like Próspera on the ground, and how the network state movement represents both a mechanism of American imperialism under Trump and a possible blueprint for the US economy’s next phase.

Sign up for Sam’s Substack, Technical Personae

Read Sam:

“Could new countries be started – on the internet?” (The Guardian)

“The island of eternal Life” (The Mars Review of Books)

“Turbo America” (The Point)

“Waiting for the End of the World In El Salvador” (Playboy)

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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. As special treat, you can now listen to our 2025 retrospective with Ruby Justice Thelot for free.

Hey pals. Welcome to our first annual cultural predictions episode. To kick off 2026, we asked some of our favorite culture critics, media theorists, filmmakers, technologists, journalists, fashion bloggers and more to send us a voice note with their best guess about where the zeitgeist will take us this year. To our surprise and delight, 34 people got back to us with their predictions. Plus, Andrea predicts the return of club culture (think: film clubs and salons, not dance parties) in response to attention economy fatigue, and Emilie goes long on “elite midcult” in music and movies as a culture-industry counter-reaction to poptimism.

Topics range from writer and podcaster Steven Phillips-Horst talking the end of bright white lighting and a return to warmer, yellower hues, to New York Mag tech columnist John Herrman talking about how prediction markets are coming for politics and political media, to New Models co-host Carly Busta talking about the rise of a neo-oral culture. You’ll find the full list of contributors (with time stamps) below. Sound design and music by Andrea.

Arts & culture (10:30)

Drew Millardon the return of the buzzband

Sam Valenti on no longer complaining that nobody is making good music and listening to music instead

Biz Sherberton the rise of the beautiful white boy rapper

Tony Lashleyon the West London rapper Slew

Mano Sundaresanon the inevitability of somebody releasing an AI-generated or assisted song that gets critical acclaim

Philip Sherburneon the coming mass streaming exodus

W. David Marx on a return to organic and analog aesthetics

Jaime Brookson the rise of “techno nihilism” as an aesthetic movement

Ruby Justice Theloton Timothée Chalamet winning an Oscar — and ushering in the era of “theater kid energy”

Javier Cabral on how 2026 will be the year of heirloom corn tortillas — in all the colors of the rainbow

Technology (21:20)

Taylor Lorenzon the coming mass cultural revolt against technology

Lil Interneton how the escalating theological conflict between luddites and AI true believers could spin out into something resembling the 30 Years War

Yuri Rybak on the vertical integration of everything and prediction market traders becoming religious oracles

Rachel Meade Smithonhow 2026 will be the year where writers find out if the robots are really coming for their jobs

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodmanon a shift in AI discourse toward military and surveillance applications

Mike Pepion a renewed societal yearning for trad media institutions

Trevor McFedries on how AI advances may actually lead to more opportunities for people with good taste

Carly Busta on the rise of a neo-oral culture

Media (33:15)

Ock Sportelloon the death of Twitter as a cultural force

Anthony Di Mieri on the end of the era of shortform vertical video

Matt Pearce on a shift from individualism to collectivism among independent content creators

Harry Krinskyon 2026 as the year of the (antimemetic) stunt

Ben Dietzon the return of low-cost ephemera (zines, stickers, promo CDs) in marketing

T.M. Brownon journalists fleeing Substack

Joshua Riveraon the rise of hyper-niche media and courting “security through obscurity”

John Herrmanon how prediction marks will transform political media—and eventually politics

Society (49:27)

Steven Phillips-Horston the end of bright white lighting

Carolina Mirandaon “the trollification of governance”

Devon Hansenon a coming vogue for esoteric spirituality, the paranormal, and the occult

Kieran Press-Reynoldson the inevitable confrontation between Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump

Kevin Mungeron the Left finally grappling with the political consequences of declining birth rates

Douglas Rushkoffon how things are going to get weird — in a good way

Gideon Jacobson how 2026 will be our rock-bottom moment as a species

Luke O’Neilon one single good day

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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. Stay tuned for our 2025 retrospective in late December with Ruby Justice Thelot.

You’ll also get an invite to our second reading group meet-up: a discussion of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s seminal 1995 essay, “The Californian Ideology,” and Fred Turner’s recent article for The Baffler, “The Texan Ideology.” That’s going down on Sunday, January 11.

Between the looming menace of automation and job search platforms that feel even less effective than dating apps, you’ve probably heard that trying to find work right now is brutal. And while there’s no shortage of speculation about why the labor market is so broken (see our recent episode with economist Richard D. Wolff), there’s far less (public) chatter about what the experience of searching for gainful employment in late 2025 actually looks and feels like.

Rachel Meade Smith, creator of the wildly popular weekly job search newsletter Words of Mouth, wants to change that. Her forthcoming book Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt(out April 7, 2026 via OR Books!) draws on contributions from 30 voices sourced from the WoM community to explore how job searching is actually one of the most existentially significant experiences we can have. And while the book zooms in on the more difficult emotions that can come up when we perform “search work” — her term for the unique labor associated with finding a job — it also captures how the process can be a vector for desire, inspiration, and even joy.

We discuss how the newsletter grew out of her own experiences with search work, including the strange emotional contortions that go into trying on different possible futures and having most of them vanish into the ether. We also discuss what sets this era apart from past eras of search work, the difficulties of squaring our identities and aspirations with the opportunities that are actually available to us, and how navigating the contemporary labor market means accepting that our careers may look less like ladders and more like waves.

Pre-order Search Work now exclusively through OR Books and get 15% off.

Explore and subscribe to Words of Mouth

Check out more of Rachel’s work here

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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. On our latest installment, filmmaker and Zohran Video Guy Anthony DiMieri joins us to talk to tell us about the wild twists and turns of his career as an indie filmmaker turned key contributor to the Zohran & SubwayTakes cinematic universes, dark woke, and why everyone is obsessed with Geese. We’re removing the paywall for the next week so you can give it a listen.

You’ll also get an invite to our second reading group meet-up: a discussion of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s seminal 1995 year essay, “The Californian Ideology,” and Fred Turner’s recent article for The Baffler, “The Texan Ideology.” That’s going down on Sunday, January 11.

In 2005, the music and culture critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher (RIP) began using the term hauntology— a riff on “ontology” — to describe an emergent genre in UK music, built from archival recordings from post-war England, vinyl crackle, and haunted, elegiac atmospherics. (Think: Burial, The Caretaker, and the eerie catalog of the label Ghost Box.) They borrowed the term from Jacques Derrida, who used it to describe a present haunted by futures that had never arrived; Reynolds and Fisher heard that idea vibrating through a generation of musicians excavating Britain’s cultural memory.

Fisher explored hauntology’s political dimension, rooting the movement in a longing for Britain’s pre-Thatcherite social democratic past and an affection for cultural touchstones like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Brutalist architecture, and films like The Wickerman. Reynolds, meanwhile, mapped its musical lineage—back to ’90s hauntology predecessors like Boards of Canada and Broadcast, and across the pond to J Dilla-era hip-hop and underground movements like freak folk, hypnagogic pop, and chillwave.

A recent CUJO reading group on the topic inspired us to invite Simon—the author of books like Rip It Up and Start Again, Retromania, and Futuromania (listen to our ep about it!)—to help us mark the 20th anniversary of hauntology and explore what it has to teach us about mobilizing the culture of the past in a way that feels meaningful and even forward-looking

Simon joins us to dig into the cultural factors that gave rise to hauntology, the 21st-century fetish for obsolete media, and the differences between hauntology and simple nostalgia or “retro.” We also talk about the pasts that continue to haunt us—from rave culture to Marxism—and he gives us a sneak peek at his forthcoming book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994, arriving in 2026.

Listen to our HAUNTOLOGY PLAYLIST on Apple Music and YouTube

Read more of Simon on hauntology in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Pastand over at ReynoldsRetro

Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblog

Follow Simon on X

Additional reading:

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993.

Mark Fisher, “October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder,” 2005.

Simon Reynolds, “Haunted Audio, a/k/a Society of the Spectral: Ghost Box, Mordant Music, and Hauntology,” director’s cut of an article in the November 2006 issue of The Wire.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, chapter 2, 2014.

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Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. On our latest installment, we chat with Billboard editor Katie Bain, author of a new history of Coachella, about what the festival’s 2026 line-up tells us about where culture is headed, the rise of anti-sellout discourse, and the AI industry’s nostalgic, artisanal rebrand.

Since our last episode, something historic happened: Zohran Kwame Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, marking the American left’s most significant electoral victory since the Bernie movement took off in the 2010s. While his team will credit his win to bold, populist economic policies, there’s no denying another factor at play: Zohran’s extraordinary command of images. He grew up in a film-director household, rapped as Young Cardamom before pivoting to politics, and hired a crew of indie filmmakers to create a video campaign that unfolded like a documentary love letter to the NYC of halal carts, bodega cats, and ordinary working people.

Zohran’s media fluency is also why people are calling him the Left’s answer to Trump. Which all raises some big questions: Is politics in the information economy becoming indistinguishable from theatrical world-building? And what does that mean for our offline lives?

This week’s guest, writer and artist Gideon Jacobs, has thought about these questions for years. A former creative director at Magnum Photos, child actor, and native New Yorker, Gideon has explored our cultural relationship to images in outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books, for whom he penned an excellent piece earlier this year called “Player One and Main Character,” which contends that political reality, post-Trump and post-Musk, is beginning to bend to the rules of fiction.

We talk about the aesthetic politics of the Zohran campaign and what it tells us about what successful counter-programming to MAGA’s vision of America might look like. We also discuss what Gideon’s study of the role of images in ancient cultures and religions can tell us about navigating the image world of the present, how the rise of populism (on both the left and the right) is inextricable from our current technological moment, and whether Zohran’s victory marks the start of a political future more grounded in material conditions—or the next phase of the image arms race.

Follow Gideon on Instagram

Read Gideon:

“Player One and Main Character” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Trump l’Oeil” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Thou shalt not make images—but what if AI does?” (Document Journal)

“Aliens” (The Drift)

Additional reading:

“Selling Zohran” by Corey Atad (Defector)

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Just in time for Halloween, we’re hosting a virtual hauntology reading group (specifically, hauntology the music genre) at 4pm ET next Thursday, October 30. If you want to join in, sign up for a paid subscription, or toss a few bucks into our haunted tip jar, and we’ll send you the readings and a link to log into the conversation. We hope it’ll be the first of more group reading sessions to come.Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord, an online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can talk about the news of the day; and the Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

We spend a lot of time here talking about the structural forces that turned pop culture into an endless churn of sequels, remakes, and nostalgia plays. But what if the blame for our current “creative recession” lies on more than just economics or platforms? What if our cultural values themselves have shifted in ways that make true innovation harder to sustain?That’s the focus of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, the forthcoming book from Tokyo-based culture critic W. David Marx—and probably the first major exhaustive account of the last 25 years in music, film/TV, internet culture, and fashion. He doesn’t just look at the technological, political, and economic forces that that created a winner-take-all landscape where billionaires and centi-millionaires like Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Paris Hilton, MrBeast, Jay-Z and frankly Donald Trump took up all of the cultural oxygen in the room, making it harder and harder for the next generation of innovators to break through. He zeroes in on the cultural attitudes that have led us here—and that set us apart from our 20th-century forebears—including poptimism, the valorization of entrepreneurial heroism, cultural omnivorism, and more.

In addition to Blank Space, David the author of the mega-influential books Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. He joins us to talk about the mind-boggling task of summing up the past quarter-century of culture, and why most of the coolest, most innovative outputs ended up getting pushed to the margins. We also get into what originality means in a climate of constant churn, and why he believes that fighting for it is still important, even in a postmodern landscape where “everything has already been done.”

Finally, David makes the case that building a healthier cultural ecosystem starts with changing our cultural attitudes. That means embracing and reinforcing social norms that have fallen to the wayside in the past quarter century, like normalizing giving credit to smaller artists, learning the canon so we can break it, and yes, making it lame to sell out again.

Pre-order Blank Space, which is out November 18 via Penguin Random House.

Subscribe to David’s newsletter, CULTURE: An Owner’s Manual

Follow David on X

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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and the Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers can now watch our video roundtable on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another with film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod cohost Drew Millard. They’ll also receive an invite to our upcoming “hauntology” reading group, which we’ll tell you more about soon. (Just so you know: We’ll also be inviting anybody kind enough to tip us a buck or two to support our work).

It’s October, and we still don’t have the September jobs report because the government shut down. But the data we do have shows a clear trend: Job growth is slowing, unemployment is ticking up, and cities like New York are seeing the weakest labor market gains in decades. If you’ve noticed more “Open to Work” badges on LinkedIn, heard stories about people applying to thousands of positions, or felt the chill in your own job search, you’re not imagining it: The job market sucks right now, and things have been headed in this direction since before Trump took office.

To wrap our head around how we got here (tariffs? offshoring? AI and automation?), we brought on the best person we could think of to explain it: Richard D. Wolff, a longtime faculty member at places like The New School and UMass Amherst, author of myriad books on economic methodology and class analysis, a founding director of Democracy at Work, and one of the most prominent Marxist economists in America. (Full disclosure: Rick’s work on class and labor were tremendously influential on Andrea’s work as a sociology student.)

In part one of our two-part conversation, Rick explains why today’s shaky job market is just the latest phase in a decades-long trend that began in the 1970s—and, in his view, a symptom of an empire (and economic system) on the verge of collapse. We also get into the flawed logic behind Trump’s tariff and immigration policies, the real reasons offshored jobs aren’t “coming back,” and why China’s working class is seeing wage growth while American workers are stuck in place.

Follow Rick’s work at Democracy at Work—and watch his Economic Update podcast.

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Thank you ock sportello, DJ Falkor / Random Rules, Tyler Foster, Yana Sosnovskaya, Ingmar Carlson, and many others for tuning in to CUJO’s first-ever live video, featuring film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod co-host drew millard. Shout out to Yuri for sparking the idea for this conversation. Full video available to paid subscribers.

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Hey pals. A little housekeeping: We keep full-length episodes like this one free, because we want as many people as possible to be able to hear them. But every episode we put out takes at least 20 hours to produce, from researching and booking to script writing, recording, editing, and marketing — and if you love this pod, we could use your help in keeping this project economically sustainable so we can keep churning out episodes like this one for years and years to come.

If a paid subscription ($5/month!) isn’t on the table for you right now, we’ve introduced a new tipping feature where you can throw us a couple bucks to let us know that you’re enjoying what we make. You can think of it as tipping a barista for your morning cup of coffee — only instead of a cup of coffee, you’re tipping us for an hour or more of stuff that you download into your brain.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for freedom of speech in America, from from Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and reinstatement at ABC, to Trump’s executive order labeling Antifa a domestic terror group, to right-wing doxing databases targeting private citizens for Charlie Kirk wrongspeak.

Here to help us make sense of the larger political and economic currents that have led us to this moment is Chicago-based journalist Adam Johnson, co-host of the long-running media criticism podcast Citations Needed, creator of The Column on Substack, and author of a piece for In These Times titled “The Trump admin is brazenly exploiting Charlie Kirk’s killing to silence dissent. Will Democrats take notice?”

We break down the Kimmel saga — which coincided with a deportation order against Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil — and how the Trump administration is using Kirk’s assassination to push a broader agenda to erode liberal institutions, silence political opposition, and get corporations to fall in line. We also dig into the right’s overt embrace of so-called “cancel culture” tactics, backed by the full weight of the state — and how Democrats helped set the stage for this moment failing to defend the speech rights of their left flank.

Finally, we examine how the media industry appears to be on the verge of a conservative “vibe shift,” from Bari Weiss’ rumored rise at CBS to the Ellison family’s powergrab over Paramount-Skydance and TikTok — and what standing up for free speech, and even doing one’s job as a journalist, could look like in the years to come.

For access to our monthly cultural weather report, our CUJOPLEX Discord, and other bonus perks, become a paid subscriber.

Read Adam’s piece “The Trump Admin Is Brazenly Exploiting Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Silence Dissent. Will Democrats Take Notice?” at In These Times.

Subscribe to The Columnand listen to Citations Needed.

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Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. In the latest installment, cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot joins us to wax philosophical about the Labubu craze, matcha and “performative male” discourse, and why politicians are lifting weights in public.

It’s easy to get the impression these days that the traditional media industry is abandoning cultural criticism. Over the past few months, outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune have been reassigning or letting go of veteran film, music, and theater critics, leaving some to debate what impact, if any, written criticism still has on the culture at large.

Bucking this trend (and pretty much all mainstream media logic) is The Metrograph, a new biannual print magazine about cinema from the eponymous repertory theater in New York City’s Chinatown. It’s long, proudly niche, intentionally disconnected from the news cycle, and available only in print—with the goal of offering deep film fans an experience they won’t be able to find online, while inviting a new generation of people into the culture. The recently released second issue includes a 42-page dive into Paul Morrissey’s archives, author Gary Indiana’s favorite films (RIP), a history of the Japanese pink film, a “cinemap” of Belgrade, and a comic about Jerry Lewis’s infamous lost film The Day the Clown Cried. The cover, which we’ve cropped for this episode’s artwork, features a painting by artist Louise Giovanelli inspired by Christina Ricci’s character in Buffalo ’66.

Senior editor Annabel Brady-Brown (formerly of Australia’s Fireflies Press) and editor-at-large Nick Pinkerton(film critic, screenwriter of The Sweet East, creator of the Substack Employee Picks, and a former coworker of Emilie’s at Kim’s Video) join us to discuss the past, present, and future of independent film criticism—and what it means to make a magazine for cinephiles in 2025.

We also discuss why younger people in NYC seem to be gravitating back to the movies these days, and how the hyper-IRL, videostore-centric independent film culture of 20 years ago is a good template for what that might look like in the 2020s. Finally, we shout out some of the directors, movies, and micro publications that are making right now such an exciting time for cinema in NYC — and the repertory theaters and video stores we love around the world that are keeping the old Kim’s Video spirit alive.

Issue 2 of The Metrograph is out now. Buy it here, or at an independent book or magazine store near you.Read more by our guests:”Less rock, more talk: On Paul Morrissey, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ezra Pound, ‘political’ art, and 1988’s ‘Spike of Bensonhurst’” by Nick Pinkerton (Employee Picks)

“Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows: On the subversive pleasures of Agnès Varda‘s Le Bonheur” by Annabel Brady-Brown (The Metrograph)

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Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. In the first installment, we wax philosophical about Ari Aster’s Eddington, the future of search, and the alleged returned of Butt Rock.

These days, it feels like the web is becoming… less of a web. Websites aren’t getting visitors anymore, employees are worried that they’re going to be replaced by AI agents, and the search tools we used to rely on to pull up the information we need are deliberately enshittifying themselves. It’s like the internet as we know it — fundamentally, a thing that connects people with other people — is being swallowed up by AI and smooshed down into the cramped, impersonal space of a chatbot interface, whether we like it or not.

Or, as New York Magazine tech journalist John Herrman recently put it, “The World Wide Web … has been going through something akin to ecological collapse.” John has been keeping close tabs on these developments in his excellent column “Screen Time,” where he recently reported on the emerging field of generative-engine optimization, or GEO. Think: SEO, but for the AI-consolidated internet.

We invited John on the show for a wide-ranging conversation about the strange new chapter of the internet that is materializing before our eyes—and what our experience of the web might look like a world where conversational AI becomes our main portal to the digital realm. We discuss the shift from SEO to GEO, why we’re all reading Reddit a lot more now, and what we stand to lose (and, in some cases, gain) in a world where we summon our information from chatbots.

Finally, we get into what New York Times writer Mike Isaac is calling the dawn of Silicon Valley’s “Hard Tech” era: a vibe shift away from the consumer-focused, employee-friendly, optimistic culture of the 2010s to the more cutthroat, bossist, AI and data center-obsessed tech culture of the present.

Follow John on Bluesky

Read “Screen Time” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer

More by John:

“What’s the deal with GPT-5?”

“SEO is dead. Say hello to GEO.”

“The AI boom is expanding Google’s dominance”

“Why you are reading Reddit a lot more these days”

“At work, in school, and online, it’s now AI versus AI”

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What do mullets, SpongeBob stick-and-pokes, and foil-wrapped sandwiches have in common? According to this week’s guest, London writer Clive Martin, they’re all hallmarks of a new type of food-obsessed, young urban professional that Clive calls the “defining person-type of 2025.” You know the type: people who queue up around the block for hours for a taste of the latest Instagram-viral, cartoonishly gigantic Italian sandwiches, in a neighborhood where the old school Italian sandwich shops are being displaced.

Clive calls these people “The Normans,” after a North London cafe-restaurant they frequented for its loving homages to greasy-spoon staples like chippy teas and chicken fingers. But it’s a subculture that transcends international borders, at least in the English speaking world: a distinctly bro-y strain of contemporary foodie culture fueled by viral images of oozing cheeseburgers, indie rock music, Anthony Bourdain hagiography, and upscale, farm-to-table recreations of working class and immigrant food traditions. The plan their weekends around new eateries, walk around wearing restaurant merch, and secretly wish they could they could quit their fintech job and start over as Carmy from The Bear.

Clive is a former colleague of ours from VICE, and one of our favorite observers of contemporary culture—especially when it comes to cities and gentrification. We brought him on to discuss his article for VICE, titled “Meet the Normans,” and how food supplanted music, film, and art as the dominant mode of cultural consumption among young people.

We also get into the subculture’s nature as a kind of masculine reaction to other strains of millennial yuppie food culture, how both the food internet and the bro internet are reshaping our cities, and how the rising cost of living is pushing the gentrification cycle into exurban areas like Upstate New York, Margate, and Joshua Tree. Finally, we share some of our favorite, decidedly not-Norman restaurants in London, Philly, and LA that are still hanging on.

Follow Clive on X @clive_mart1n

Read more by Clive:

“Urban sprawlers: How city folk ruined the countryside” (The Face)

“Ketamine, crime, and chaos: Life in a London party slum” (VICE)

Other relevant reads:

“Welcome to Neo New York, where everything feels old school but isn’t” by Emilie Friedlander (VICE)

“We are all foodies now” by Steven Phillips-Horst (Spike Art)

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Join us in Philly on Tuesday, 29 for a special book talk with this week’s guest, Jeff Weiss, co-presented by CUJO and Lot 49 Books. The event kicks off at 7 pm, at Fishtown’s Neon Clown Dream Lounge — and will feature Jeff in conversation with Emilie, Drew Millard, and Sadie Dupuis, followed by a book signing, a Britney-themed DJ set by Domino Dancing, and, rumor has it, Britney-themed drinks. Admission is free, but you can pre-order Jeff’s book here to support him and one of the city’s best independent bookstores.

As a younger generation obsesses over Canon PowerShots, low-rise jeans, flip phones, Von Dutch, and other relics of the Y2K era, it’s easy to forget that the 00s were actually a pretty terrible era for pop culture. And while some of that has to do with aesthetics (looking at you, Boho Amnesia Belt), it was especially true when it comes to media. Think: award-winning news anchors contemplating pop stars’ virginities and making them cry on primetime TV; reality shows about celebrities in rehab funded by commercials for dubious diet pills; supermarket check-out aisles lined with magazines asking whether your favorite actor was “hot” or “not.”

Few people got to know that world quite like music writer, friend-of-the-pod, and Passion of the Weiss founder Jeff Weiss, and he just published a book about it. It’s called Waiting For Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly, and it’s a semi-fictional account of Jeff’s years working as a young tabloid reporter in the early 2000s, roving the streets of LA with a paparazzi buddy in pursuit of the rich and famous — and the concurrent arc that saw Britney Spears go from America’s Sweetheart to Vegas party girl to conservatee.

You could call it a work of fiction, written as a memoir; a work of non-fiction in the spirit of Joseph Mitchell and the Beat poets; or, as Jeff has described it, “a one-person referendum on the impossibility of knowing the exact truth about anything — especially anything refracted and distorted through the lens of electronic media.” Either way, it’s as much about Britney as it is about the glossy, Ed Hardy-adorned last days of pre-internet media and pop culture at the turn of the millennium — and how that time set the stage for the ruthless, gossip-obsessed cultural climate of the present.

Jeff joins us to talk about his days as a gossip reporter, and why he chose this experimental format rather than a straightforward biography. We also get into how these experiences informed his understanding of the morality (and amorality) of journalism, how the tabloid era paved the way for our current moment in political media, and why a new generation of young people seems so nostalgic for the fashion and music of the early 2000s.

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. For access to paywalled episodes and an invite to our Discord, become a paid subscriber.

Buy Waiting for Britney Spears, and follow the book’s Instagram account. There’s also an official playlist.

Follow Jeff on X and check out his new podcast, The Truth Hurts.

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With a catalog full of art house favorites like The Witch, Spring Breakers, Moonlight, and Uncut Gems, it’s hard to deny that A24 occupies a unique position in the zeitgeist. In a Hollywood landscape that can feel like it’s becoming more risk-averse by the year — see our recent episode with Andrew Dewaard on his book Derivative Media — the artist-forward distributor and studio has become synonymous with a dream that, to many American cultural producers, feels increasingly remote: the conviction that one can doggedly put quality art out into the marketplace and see it actually succeed.

But is A24 singlehandedly saving American cinema, or is that just a carefully crafted illusion, more a testament to the importance of smart brand positioning than to the actual quality of the films in its catalog? We brought on the Las Vegas-based writer and critic Nicholas Russell, author of an excellent essay for Dirt called “The Popular Alternative: the State of A24,” to discuss how the company evolved from an upstart indie film distributor to a studio and lifestyle brand in the mold of Disney — albeit one for adults who pride themselves in being savvy cultural consumers.

We talk about how the company successfully commodified the idea of being “a cinephile,” the similarities between the A24 cap and the New York tote, and what Nicholas describes as the longstanding “tension between A24 the studio and A24 the startup” — one recently complicated by a $100 million cash injection from Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, a major investor in OpenAI. We also try to break down the ineffable A24 “feel” (including the aesthetic elements and political themes the company tends to foreground, and shy away from) and consider the rise of Neon — the distributor behind movies like Parasite, Anora, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline — as the “other popular alternative.”

Follow Nicholas on X and Substack

Read more by Alessandro on his website.

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What do Ticketmaster price gouging and widespread journalism layoffs and have in common? They’re both downstream consequences, at least in part, of lax antitrust enforcement. If that sounds obtuse, consider this: antitrust law — the legislation that aims to prevent monopolies from forming and keep business competition healthy — directly impacts how power is being consolidated across American society as a whole. That includes how big a given company is allowed to become, and the types of business tactics it is allowed to use.

In a world where artists’ livelihoods have become increasingly intertwined with the actions of a handful of giant tech and entertainment companies, antitrust is a useful lens for understanding why so many things feel broken and inequitable. And 2024, for all its flaws, is actually an exciting time to be talking about this. Lina Khan, the 35-year-old legal scholar currently serving as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, is on a mission to change the way we think about, and implement, antitrust law. And since she took office in 2021, she’s been updating our understanding of antitrust for the business landscape of the present, expanding beyond a decades-old focus on consumer-facing price to consider how anticompetitive practices also harm workers, communities, diversity, and the environment. Accordingly, she’s already brought big cases against some of the tech giants we regularly talk about on this show, including Amazon and Meta.

A lot of this stuff impacts creative workers, so we’ve invited on Kevin Erickson, Director of the Future of Music Coalition, to put together a little primer for us. Founded in 2000, the Future of Music Coalition is a Washington DC-based nonprofit bringing together musicians, artist advocates, technologists, and legal experts dedicated to, as they put it, “supporting a musical ecosystem where artists flourish and are compensated fairly and transparently for their work.”

We discuss why many of the problems we ascribe to the actions of private companies are actually policy problems, and why those issues aren’t a larger part of the conversation. We also dig into some of the current big policy fights that stand to materially impact the lives of creatives like journalists to musicians — including the Journalism Conservation and Preservation Act and what’s happening with Ticketmaster and other brokers right now.

Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.

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This week, we’re re-upping our episode with writer Cord Jefferson, who just won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, which he also directed. American Fiction was adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure, by writer Percival Everett. And since Sunday night, the film, and Cord’s comments about it, have been provoking a lot of interesting conversation about Black representation in Hollywood and the publishing industry—which also happens to be the subject of the film itself, and which we encourage you to dig into.

Cord, as you may know, is a former journalist and Gawker editor with very strong opinions about the economics of cultural production. Which is why we weren’t surprised when he used his acceptance speech to offer a pretty candid take about risk aversion in Hollywood—and the need for executives to take more chances on independent filmmakers. “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry. I get it. But $200 million dollar movies are also a risk,” he said. “Instead of making one $200 million dollar movie, try making twenty $10 million dollar movies, or fifty $4 million dollar movies.”

It wasn’t the first time we’d heard Cord talking about this stuff. In fact, this was one of the topics we went long on with him when we had him on the show in 2021 to mark the start of Succession’s third season. Cord was a writer for season two, in addition to working on series like The Good Place, Station Eleven, and Watchmen, for which he won an Emmy. What started as a conversation about Succession’s Roy family—and Cord’s experiences transitioning from a career in media to a career in TV and film—evolved into a deeper meditation on the struggles writers in both fields are facing in a creative economy where culture is evaluated based on numbers, where pre-visibility and remakes trump original ideas, and where what executives believe is “good for business” feels increasingly incompatible with artistic risk-taking.

We recorded this conversation long before last year’s Writer’s Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes, not to mention American Fiction itself, but the issues we discuss have become only more relevant with time. You can think of it as an extended riff on the argument he made on national TV this week—and it’s also a great look into where Cord comes from, the moral dilemmas that result when we allow algorithms to evaluate art, and perhaps some of the seeds of thoughts that inspired American Fiction.

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This week, we explore why 2024 has been such a terrible year for journalists, with so many publications announcing cuts or closures—and in such quick succession—that we can barely keep track of the carnage. Did VICE, Pitchfork, The Messenger, Sports Illustrated, Complex, Buzzfeed, Insider, and The Los Angeles Times, to give just a sample of the companies that have put writers and editors out of work, just happen to all feel the pinch at the time? Or are there wider structural forces afoot, including even a touch of media executive groupthink, that can explain what’s going on here?

On this week’s episode, which we like to think of as a sequel to a similar conversation we had last year with Ben Dietz, Semafor media reporter extraordinaire Max Tani joins us to discuss why this particular layoff season is different than others, what the future of the media biz might look like, and what it’s like to be the guy who every journalist follows to find out if they’re losing their job.

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Hey pals. In January, Condé Nast shocked the entire independent music world when it announced it was laying off most of Pitchfork’s staff and folding what remained into GQ. Emilie especially felt this one — Pitchfork was her first media job, working as an editor for their underground music sister-site Altered Zones, which made it particularly strange to hear that the publication was merging with a website for men who can pronounce “visvim.” Whatever you thought about Pitchfork during its three-decade run as a standalone music publication, the image of Anna Wintour wearing sunglasses as she informed the staff about the site’s fate pointed to a previously unthinkable reality: If the biggest music publication in the English-speaking world couldn’t survive the media bloodbath that is rapidly unfolding all around us, would we soon be living in a world with no music journalism at all?

There is no way of knowing exactly how Condé arrived at this decision. Wintour wrote a note to staff saying that “this decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company” — which doesn’t tell us much. Others have accused Condé of doing layoffs as a form of union busting. And it is also safe to say that Pitchfork, like so many digital media publications, was wrestling with many of the larger structural forces we often talk about on this show (see: Google and other distribution platforms deprioritizing news, streaming services’ monopoly on music discovery, and declining programmatic advertising revenues).

Needless to say, there are a lot of takes floating around. But one in particular — by writer, editor, music scholar, and philosopher Robin James, on her always-intriguing It’s Her Factory blog — really caught our eye, especially for the head-on way in which it dealt with the dissonance of Pitchfork being folded into a men’s publication. In a post titled “Pitchfork, ‘Bro-ified’ Alt Rock Radio, and the Structural Issues in the Financialized Media Industry” Robin frames the move as just one in a long line of examples of corporations turning to male audiences in order to “save” distressed music media properties. Which isn’t because men are actually more likely to care about music or music writing, but because it’s a logic that plays into the gendered biases of the executive and ownership class. And because in today’s heavily financialized economy, business leaders are more concerned with creating the perception of future growth than coming up with solutions that actually work.

Robin joins us to talk about what the Pitchfork news can tell us about the persistence of gendered stereotypes around music fandom and consumption, and how media’s current woes are a reflection of a larger business landscape where exponential scalability takes precedence over sustainability and even profitability. We also discuss how the financialization of everything has changed the nature of musical fame, and how the age-old poptimism/rockism binary may be increasingly obsolete as a framework for discussing power differentials in music.

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What do TikTok voice, generic “hipster coffee shop” decor, and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Super Bowl kissing photos have in common? According to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker, they’re all products of something called “filterworld,” his word for a “vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today.” His new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, zeroes in on the rise of algorithmic recommendation systems—essentially, the equations that govern the specific pieces of content that social media, streaming, and e-commerce platforms decide to show us, and in what order—and how they’re pushing us toward a kind of cultural homogeneity or sameness.

Kyle joins us to talk about how exactly algorithm recommendation systems produce this sameness, the kinds of culture that rises to the top on the contemporary internet, and the pros and cons of human gatekeeping versus algorithmic curation. Finally, we discuss tactics for escaping algorithmic culture and reclaiming some of our agency as cultural producers and consumers, both individually and collectively.

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Hey pals. Here’s a development that we never had on our 2024 bingo card: shoegaze is back, and it’s arguably bigger than ever. Andrea first got wind of this in October when she interviewed one of the architects of the genre, which dates back to the 80s and early 90s and is characterized by reverbed-out guitars, heavy feedback, and vocals that sit way back in the mix. On the heels of their fifth album, everything is alive, the U.K. quintet Slowdive is enjoying a level of success that is unprecedented in their 35-year career. They’re selling more music than ever—they recently landed their first-ever Billboard Album Sales Top 10—and their fanbase is skewing noticeably younger. As the band explained to Andrea, a lot of that has to do with one critical factor: Their music has gone viral on TikTok.

Slowdive is hardly alone. In December, the Pittsburgh-based music journalist Eli Enis published an exhaustively reported feature for Stereogum called “TikTok Has Made Shoegaze Bigger Than Ever.” While perusing Spotify, he stumbled into a clutch of new shoegaze-inspired artists he’d never heard of — see: wisp, flyingfish, quannnic, and sign crushes motorist — who were wracking up millions of streams. Digging deeper, he discovered that these artists were even more popular on TikTok. Many of them were still in their teens, making tracks on a DAW in their bedroom or between classes at school. And some of them were being offered major-label deals off the back of just a song or two.

What is it about shoegaze, a sound that originated roughly four decades ago, that is speaking so much to people in their teens and early 20s? How are platforms like TikTok changing the nature of what a career in music looks like, or what it means to be a fan, or even the sonic elements of a genre like shoegaze that get emphasized or deemphasized? And what do we gain, and lose, in a world where music dreams are made (and dashed) based on inscrutable recommendation algorithms, far removed from the physical scenes and communities that traditionally incubated these subcultural sounds?

Eli joins us to talk about what he learned while reporting on the Gen Z-driven shoegaze resurgence and talking to its central players. We also tapped the perspective of The Culture Journalists’s very own Ben Newman, who in addition to being our new audio editor (welcome, Ben!!) also happens to be the drummer in a little band called DIIV, which you probably know in the context of an earlier wave of artists processing shoegaze influences in the 2010s.

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Welcome back to the Culture Journalist. To kick off our 2024 programming, we’ve cooked up a special, New Year’s-themed episode for paid subscribers. Elliot Aronow—a fashion and music media veteran and founder of the minor genius newsletter, which focuses on helping artists unlock their “minor genius”—joins us to discuss balancing the pursuit of creative…

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Before we dip for a short end-of-year break, it’s time for a music streaming check-in. Our own “Wrapped,” if you will. There’s a lot going on.

Just last month, Spotify announced that it would stop paying artists completely for tracks with fewer than 1000 streams — just a few weeks before slashing 17 percent of its workforce (about 1500 people) in its third round of cuts this year. And those aren’t the only changes afoot in the digital music space: Back in October, Bandcamp laid off 50 percent of its staff after being acquired by music licensing company Songtrader, casting a pall of uncertainty over the fate of an important economic lifeline for underground and emerging artists. If, like us, you are confused and disheartened about what this means for independent music, fear not. We’ve got just the guy to help make sense of it all, and maybe even inspire a little hope.

His name is Tony Lashley, and not only is he just crazy smart, but he has a unique insider’s view on the machinations of Big Streaming and the intersection of economics and aesthetics, thanks to some serious stints in marketing strategy and operations at both Spotify and Frank Ocean’s Blonded. These days, he’s been busy working on an an independent music-focused streaming platform and community called Marine Snow, which he describes as an attempt to be “hypercuratorial in the age of digital abundance,’” and likens to an A24 for music.

Tony joins us for a roundtable on the past, present, and future of the musical commodity in the digital age. He breaks down the confusing economics of the streaming giants, why they keep bleeding money despite dominating the market, and what Spotify’s new royalties structure tells us about where the music internet is headed. We also discuss how our relationship with music is inextricably bound up with values like status and community, what Spotify has in common with H&M (and also mainstream radio), and why the future of music consumption may lie in niche-oriented music platforms like Marine Snow.

Follow Tony on Twittter and IG

Recommended supplemental reading from Tony:

Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, by David Marx

“Spotify: Making profits on thin profit margins” by M Value Investing Research

“Layoffs won’t solve spotify’s biggest problem” by Timothy Green

“Spotify’s big bet on podcasts is failing, Citi says” by Jessica Bursztynsky

“China antitrust: Beijing orders Tencent to end exclusive music licensing deals in a first for the country” by Yujie Xue and Iris Deng

You can also follow The Culture Journalist on Twitter and IG.

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To celebrate the release of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech by the great tech journo Brian Merchant (Buy it! Read it! It’s terrific!), we’re reupping our conversation with Brian from back in June — which, between the OpenAI shakeup, Hollywood strikes, and the growing number of Big Tech antitrust cases, has only become more relevant since then. It’s also a great complement to our previous episode on the decline of the digital third space, in which we contrast a certain prominent venture capitalist’s techno-optimist manifesto with some of the ideas from Brian’s book.

Brian joins us to discuss how the Luddites were actually an early iteration of the labor movement — not anti-tech, but anti-exploitation — the eerie similarities between the systems of automation these workers were up against and AI, and what a 2023 version of the Luddite movement might look like. Hint: It’s already happening, and it has nothing to do with smashing out phones, though you do you.

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Back in 2012, a YouTube user called @taia777 posted a 59-minute video of some dreamy white clouds obscured by thorny green vines, soundtracked by the music for Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong’s Quest. It was just another example of the popular trend of video game soundtracks on YouTube, but then something strange happened: Down in the comments section, strangers started spontaneously posting the word “checkpoint”— you know, like the “checkpoint” where a player saves their progress in a game — and anonymously sharing incredibly personal stories and updates from their lives.

By 2021, when YouTube finally took the video offline, the thread had grown to more than 25,000 comments. According to Ruby Justice Thelot, a designer, cyberethnographer, artist, and author of a new book called A Cyberarcheology of Checkpoints, this particular internet rabbit hole was a stunning reminder of the lengths that users will go to to find community on the internet — and of the fragility of these so-called “third places” on an internet dominated by a small handful of for-profit platforms. (Disclosure: Emilie helped edit the book).

Ruby joins us to discuss the story of Checkpoints, why these sorts of digital third places are so important, and the potential bigger-picture impacts of living one update or copyright claim away from our online histories being lost.

We also talk about a recent essay he published with writer Rue Yi about what they’re calling the “balkanization and babelification” of the post-Web 2.0 internet, his thoughts about a controversial “techno-optimist manifesto” written by A16z VC Marc Andreesen, and what’s lost when technologists focus on progress and forward motion at all costs.

Pre-order A Cyberarcheology of Checkpoints at https://www.irrelevantpress.com/store/pre-sale-a-cyberarchaeology-of-checkpoints-ruby-thelot

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Six months ago, Goldman Sachs published some research valuing the creator economy at $250 billion — a number they say could roughly double over the next five years. But it also found that just 4 percent of creators are considered “professionals,” meaning they pull in more than $100k per year. (Sound familiar?) As Google, Meta, and Amazon square off with regulators over their ownership of more or less everything we do online, it’s easy to forget about the little guy propping this whole thing up: the everyday users who are populating these platforms with all the content.

But not Taylor Lorenz. She’s one of the world’s biggest experts on the history of social media (maybe you’ve heard of her) and a tech and culture columnist for The Washington Post. Taylor has been covering internet culture since before it was considered a beat. Now, that beat is her book: Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet charts the rise of the online creator as a new class of creative worker, from early ‘00s mommy bloggers and MySpace “scene queens” to the Instagram influencers and TikTok stars of the present.

You can think of it as a people’s history of the creator economy, with a special focus on how platforms are shaped by the everyday people who use them — even as the aforementioned tech companies make it excruciatingly difficult for anyone else to reap the rewards. It’s a perspective that often gets lost in the mainstream technology press, which tends to give founders all of the credit for innovation.

To figure out how we got here, we invited Taylor on to join us for a little trip down memory lane, back to a time when selfies (and bangs) were more angled, the web was less aggressively commercial, and surfing the web was more about seeking out the information you needed — not just consuming whatever your timeline happened to spoon up. Pals, we’re talking about the early days of social media — and how platforms like Friendster, MySpace, and even early Facebook and Tumblr laid the foundation for the creator economy as we know it today, while shaping the youth culture of the 2000s and early 2010s.

We chat about the aesthetics of the MySpace era, the genesis of the modern creator, and the turning points in early social media that got us to where we are now. Along the way, we discuss whether it’s still possible to see social media as a democratizing force, or if it creates new winners and losers — and why, nearly 20 years after the Facebook newsfeed made everybody’s personal business public, users are retreating into closed communities again.

Buy Extremely Online

Follow Taylor on Substack, Instagram (+ good meme account!), and X (or Twitter or whatever)

Read more:

Taylor’s column at The Washington Post

“Content creators surge past legacy media as news hits a tipping point” by Taylor Lorenz

“From mommy bloggers to TikTok stars: How creators built a $250B industry” by Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz

“Millions work as content creators. In official records, they barely exist.” by Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz

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This week, TrueAnon's Liz Franczak joins us to help unravel how the girlboss became the lazy girl job while society fell apart.

What was the girlboss, and how did it evolve from a term of empowerment to something (let’s face it) extremely cringe? Emilie just got done reading Marissa Meltzer’s book on the story direct-to-consumer beauty juggernaut Glossier and its enigmatic founder Emily Weiss, and we couldn’t think of a better person to discuss it with than this week’s guest, TrueAnon co-host Liz Franczak. That’s because in addition to being one of our favorite thinkers on all things related to true conspiracies and the sinister things that rich people do, she also happens to have worked as an early employee of the vintage-to-fast fashion retailer Nasty Gal — you know, the company founded by Sophia Amoruso, the lady who wrote the original book on GirlBossing.

We discuss the specific economic, political, and technological moment that gave rise to the girl boss; its roots in pop feminist tomes like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Amoruso’s #GirlBoss; and why a movement premised on a kind of feminist version of trickle-down capitalism — and that became synonymous with a very specific group of well-heeled, mediagenic, millennial white women — was doomed to disappoint from the start.

Along the way, we explore how Glossier and its line of “no makeup makeup” embodied the strange confluence of the Obama-era optimism and digital self-commodification that would become synonymous with mainstream millennial culture, and survey some of the other visions of femininity that have been circulating in wake of the Girl Boss’s demise, from Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, to lazy girl jobs and girl math, to trad wives, and more.

Subscribe to TrueAnon

Follow Liz on Twitter (or X or whatever)

Read more

Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Glossier’s Emily Weiss, by Marissa Melzter

“Where have all the girlbosses gone?”, by Marissa Melzter

“What do we mean when we call art necessary,” by Lauren Oyler

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This week, our regular programming resumes with a survey of the state of post-pandemic nightlife, from ubiquitous Britney Spears remixes to artists griping that DJing is “embarrassing” now. Joined by Shawn Reynaldo, creator of the popular First Floor newsletter and author of a recent book of essays on the evolving nature of electronic music culture and the industry that surrounds it, Emilie and Andrea return to their music-writing roots to explore why going out feels weirdly different than it did in the before times — and the strange and subtle ways that our offline experience of electronic music is being shaped by the ways we discover and consume it on the internet.

We discuss how platforms like Instagram and Boiler Room are reshaping what club culture looks and sounds like, the rise of the DJ-as-influencer, and why the decline of the so-called “musical gatekeeper” might have actually been a bad thing for music. Finally, we try to parse the legacy of Red Bull Music Academy, the long-running electronic music incubator and publication that cemented the energy drink company as a weirdly generous patron of the arts, and also happens to be where Emilie and Shawn first met.

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If you grew up reading publications like The Village Voice and LA Weekly, you probably remember flipping through pages and pages of edgy, hyper-local journalism, concert and movie listings, and classified ads of both the romantic and non-romantic variety. But what is the role of the alt weekly in the 21st century, when a lot of these functions have been swallowed up by the internet? And, perhaps most critically, how do these publications make any money?

In today’s episode, we zoom in on the story of Hell Gate, a subscriber-funded, worker-owned digital news outlet about New York City that is boldly tackling these questions in real time. Launched by a group of five journalists who felt that the city deserved an alt-weekly style publication to fill the void left behind by the Voice, Hell Gate recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, and builds on a growing movement of worker-owned news outlets like Defector Media, Discourse Blog, Racket, and the Colorado Sun.

Hell Gate is delightfully, unapologetically, hyper-local. Stories range from meaty topics like policing, labor organizing, and the most recent bizarre utterance from mayor Eric Adams, to we’re-all-thinking-it niche fare like the confounding nuances of DMV license plate design, weed bodega aesthetics and why people keep seeing gross viral food recipes during their subway commute. There’s even a column devoted to the state of New York’s public restrooms.

Helping Hell Gate chart its path are writer-editors Adlan Jackson and Katie Way, two talented writers who cut their teeth writing for outlets like The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and VICE and are now leading the publication’s arts and culture coverage. They join us to talk about Hell Gate’s origin story, how the worker-owned model works, and what it’s like to run a daily publication about a city with a population of 8 million with just seven people.

We also discuss what happens to arts and music communities when local news organizations disappear; how the role of alternative publications has evolved in the internet era; and how local media helps us touch grass amid the digital dysfunction of city life.

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For most of the so-called “content creators” we know, marketing is a necessary evil. You make the work you want to make, then wait until the last possible moment to figure out how you’re going to get people to click on it. But what would it look like if you became super obsessed with the marketing side of the equation and let it become the driving force of the entire creative process? What if you zeroed in on a single distribution platform, spent years studying how it worked, then built an entire creative practice based entirely around the tips and tricks you knew would attract a snowballing number of eyeballs to your work?

If you’re wondering what the resulting content would look like, well… it might look something like the videos of a 25-year-old YouTuber named Jimmy Donaldson, who recently surpassed the Swedish edgelord PewDiePie to become the biggest YouTuber of all time. Even if you haven’t seen his videos, or stumbled across his chocolate brand, you’ve probably heard his YouTube moniker: MrBeast. As of this writing, he has 171 million subscribers and counting.

Donaldson owns an entire neighborhood in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, where he has dozens of employees working around the clock to produce big-budget spectacles with names like “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life” and “I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.” His videos often revolve around random acts of charity — one of his early breakouts involved him walking up to a homeless person and giving him $10,000 — and he has spoken at length about how attention-grabbing headlines and thumbnails are the engine of his success. If you know somebody who works in actual marketing, they’d probably tell you that MrBeast is the future of media.

Between the budgets, the audience numbers, and the sheer physical scale of many of these spectacles — not to mention his spin-off channels and a whole sub-economy of reaction videos and YouTube tutorials — the world of MrBeast is so big and bewildering that it takes a special kind of dedication to explain it all. Lucky for you, The New York Times Magazine recently published a delightfully brain-bending story called “How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube” by one of our favorite writers on technology and culture. His name is Max Read, and he’s a screenwriter and journalist who has a terrific newsletter on Substack called Read Max.

Max began work on the article after a MrBeast video called “1000 Blind People See for the First Time” went “bad viral” on Twitter, sparking questions about the “authenticity” of Donaldson’s super-sized brand of altruism (he paid for their glaucoma surgery) and differing generational attitudes towards the mercenary tactics he uses to pull these stunts off. He joins us to discuss what he calls the “unstoppable flywheel of charity, spectacle, and growth” that powered Donaldson’s rise, and the dystopian realities of the creator economy that his tactics lay bare. We also dig into what makes MrBeast’s relationship with his audience unique (hint: according an academic Max spoke to, it has something to do with a media studies concept called the “audience commodity”), and how even though a lot of millennials can’t stand him, there’s a little bit of MrBeast in all of us.

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With Hollywood actors and writers joining forces on the picket line for the first time in 63 years, “hot labor summer” is officially upon us — and on this week’s subscriber-only episode, Emilie and Andrea try to pinpoint the sweltering, revolutionary, distinctly Barbie-pink feeling in the air. We discuss how big labor upheavals in Hollywood are historically connected to big technological sea changes, how the shutdown is already impacting life on the ground in Los Angeles, and some of the unexpected folk heroes (like SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and “there’s-a-lot-of-ways-to-lose-your-house” Ron Perlman), who are emerging as the faces of this turbulent time.

We also get into what all this heralds for a culture that is stuck in an endless IP loop, as encapsulated in a recent New Yorker piece revealing that in addition to Barbie, there are nearly 60 movies in the pipeline right now based on toys made by Mattel.

This is a free preview of a subscriber only episode. To listen to the full thing and support our independent journalism, sign up for a paid subscription at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.

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Hello everyone. We’re interrupting our regular programming this week to bring you a taste of something different: On Monday, the journalist Max Tani reported that VICE Media paid its executives out over a million dollars in bonuses in the weeks before filing for bankruptcy — so our friends at Nersey, a new podcast that bears no relation to the VICE music vertical by the same name, convened an emergency pod to talk about it. Emilie joined hosts Trey Smith, Slava P. and boyfriend-of-The-Culture-Journalist Drew Millard to share war stories from their time at VICE and dig into a 139-page “statement of financial affairs” on file with the Southern District of New York, which reveals just how much the company was paying its top brass (among other itemized expenditures) in the months leading up to the Chapter 11 declaration.

The Culture Journalist bears no responsibility for anything that’s said herein by these guys — though Nersey touches on similar topics to ours, it’s much looser in format. But we’re sharing their episode on our channels because, well, we think you might enjoy the pod. As for TCJ, we’ll be back to business as usual starting next week.

Subscribe to Nersey here

Donate to a hardship fund started by recent TCJ guest Sara David for VICE workers who were laid off this spring but have yet to receive severance from the company.

Read Katie Way’s excellent reporting on the story for Hell Gate NYC

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In this week’s subscriber-only episode, Andrea and Emilie introduce listeners to Emilie’s concept of “jobflation,” based on her observation that more and more of the “laptop jobs” on the market now actually seem like three or four jobs rolled into one. In other words, just like with the decreased spending power of the U.S. dollar, it can feel like every task we perform at work is suddenly counting for “less.” We discuss some of the nightmarish role descriptions that have been circulating on job sites of late (want to be an “AI editor” publishing 200-250 articles a week?), the macro factors contributing to this corporate divestment in knowledge work, and how jobflation and related phenomena like “ghost jobs” and “quiet hiring” are creating a perfect storm of disfunction for workers and employment-seekers alike.

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The Culture Journalist is an independent project grounded in the belief that artists should get paid for their work. If you love this podcast, get value out of it, and believe in paying people for their work, consider supporting us by becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes, along with full essays and culture recommendations.

Hi gang. You ever notice how every generation, in every big city, seems to have a moment when the scene that defined them — the music venues, artists’ lofts, dive bars, and misfit inhabitants that collectively forged a cultural zeitgeist — is declared dead? Think: The closure of CBGB in Manhattan, the arrival of Erewhon in Silver Lake, the memeification of Berghain in Berlin. The phenomenon raises some interesting questions: Which came first, the predatory hand of late capitalism, or the generation aging into acquiescence? Are these collapses inevitable — or as fatalistic as they’re so often decried to be?

So today, we’re talking about scenes — how they start, the conditions that make them possible, and why, to the chagrin of so many successive generations of musicians and music fans, they inevitably all come to an end.

Our guest, Jesse Rifkin, actually studies this stuff for a living: He’s the founder of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, a company that gives walking tours chronicling how different New York City neighborhoods — and factors like cheap rent, geographical proximity, and changing residential and nightlife laws — gave rise to era-defining music scenes like punk, post-punk, hip-hop, disco, and ‘90s and ‘00s indie rock. Of course, he also explores how those scenes helped fuel the process of gentrification that would eventually lead to their own undoing — and what arises, or doesn’t arise, in their aftermath.

His new book, This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City (out July 11 via HarperCollins) examines how that story played out in Downtown Manhattan and North Brooklyn over a 60-year period where we see this process play out over and over again. It starts with the 1960s West Village folk scene (à la Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte Marie playing at packed coffee houses in an area of the city that is now pretty much synonymous with NYU and expensive gyms). And it ends with the 2010s Williamsburg Brooklyn scene, where our millennial-aged listeners remember frequenting venues like Death by Audio and 285 Kent. (Emilie sure does — it was her life for a while.)

In his work as an NYC music historian, Jesse noticed a pattern: New Yorkers are always complaining that the city is “over,” and if you ask them when it “ended,” they usually say that happened around the time they hit 35 or 37, precisely at the moment when most of us get a bit tired of going out to parties every night. The book, he says, is an attempt to reframe our understanding of scenes as bygone golden ages made possible by once-in-a-generation artistic geniuses. He wants us to understand that scenes are a product of the specific historical and geographical circumstances in which they arise — and, even more importantly, that of ordinary people figuring out how to tap into the unique opportunities those circumstances afford.

He joins us to discuss the geographical history of downtown NYC music, how the internet has transformed how scenes form and broadcast themselves to the world, and what the new downtown scene, centered around a couple blocks in Chinatown, tells us about the moment in New York history — and perhaps culture at large — that we’re living through now.

Follow Jesse on Instagram and Substack

Preorder This Must Be The Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City

Take a tour with Walk on the Wild Side NYC

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Hey friends. Have you ever fantasized about smashing your phone or throwing your computer into the sea? If so, you’re in good company, because today’s episode is all about the story of the Luddites, an underground network of early 19th century machinists and textile workers in England who took up arms against industrialists looking to automate them out of a job. They did this, quite literally, by smashing the machines that threatened to put downward pressure on their wages and flood the market with poorly made imitations of the goods they were producing. Sound familiar?

Their real story — and the story of how the word “Luddite” came to connote being “bad at technology,” which is the opposite of what these people were — is the subject of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech, an engrossing and exhaustively researched new book by Los Angeles Times technology columnist and Terraform co-founder Brian Merchant. It isn’t due out until September, but given all the chatter that’s been happening around tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT, we didn’t want to wait to have him on.

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This week, in response to a question from a listener, Emilie and Andrea wax philosophical about one of the most harrowing aspects of trying to make a living as a writer in today’s gnarly media economy: pitching! We discuss how this particular system for commissioning stories ended up becoming so ubiquitous in journalism (hint: it’s financially beneficial for media companies), why it so excruciatingly difficult to do well, and the larger structural forces that explain why editors can seem like the shallowest and most fickle people on earth. Along the way, we draw from our experiences on both sides of the pitching game to offer practical pointers for navigating the 2023 commissioning landscape and the looming threat of robots coming to replace us all.

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Since May 2, the Writers Guild of America has been on strike, shutting down film sets across the country and demanding a fair shake in the face of a changing Hollywood landscape that, if we’re being honest, looks a lot like the one that we’re dealing with over here in the media industry. Hint: It has a lot to do with the ways that some of the world’s biggest tech companies — including Netflix, Apple TV, and Amazon — have transformed what it looks like to make a living as a film or tv writer.

With issues like shrinking residuals — or payments writers receive when their work is re-aired — increased job insecurity, and the looming threat of automation and AI, it’s a story that brings together many of the issues we touch on this show. So we brought on two key players from the front lines to give us a candid peek into what life as a screenwriter in 2023 actually looks like: Mason Flink, a TV writer and WGA Guild Captain based in LA who has worked on shows like Minx, Special, and Love, and Sara David, a former colleague of ours from VICE who has worked at Netflix and Paramount+, and who is now the VP of online Media for the WGA East.

Mason and Sara tell us about how Hollywood labor conditions directly impact the quality of the film and television we consume (and who gets to produce it), the long history of deregulation and financialization that set the stage for this moment, and why this fight has big consequences for creative workers of all stripes — not just in the writers’ room.

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Spring is here and the outside world is beckoning. So we’re taking a break from talking about evil billionaires, digital surveillance, and shadowy financial instruments to bring you a special conversation with boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, who just published a book called How Golf Can Save Your Life.

If that sounds pretty far afield from our usual programming, it’s not: Inspired by his experiences returning to the sport after a stint in 2010s media left him with a nasty case of depression and burnout, it’s a book-length celebration of the idea that the best way to resist the worst aspects of modern society is to get to get off the internet, spend time more outdoors, and learn how to be a better human, not just when it comes to other people but also to yourself.

Emilie and Drew just got back from a golf-themed book release party they organized last week in Brooklyn, so we thought we’d bring Drew on to talk about why it seems like golf is suddenly everywhere in contemporary culture, from NYC menswear to DJ Khaled’s IG; the sport’s working-class origins; and how the book doubles as a critique of the state of digital and algorithmic media.

Buy How Golf Can Save Your Life from Bookshop.org.

Check out Drew’s work on Substack

Subscribe to Nersey, a podcast Drew just started with some former coworkers (ahem) from a certain defunct music website (ahem). They say it’s “sort of about music.”

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Between the layoffs at Buzzfeed and Insider, VICE reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy, and Elon’s multi-front war against public media and independent journalists, the past two weeks have definitely felt like a “sky …

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How did tech giants like Spotify and Meta and TikTok get so good at separating us creative workers from the value we generate with our work? According to a fascinating new book by Melbourne Law school professor Rebecca Giblin and journalist, science-fiction author, and activist Cory Doctorow, the answer lies in something called “chokepoint capitalism”: the phenomenon whereby platforms insert themselves between cultural producers and consumers and charge creators money — either explicitly or implicitly — to reach their own fans.

In other words, if you’re a creator, all your fans are on a platform, you can’t leave without losing access to your audiences, their wallets, and critical gates for exposure; most of the time, that means you just have to take the raw deal you’re being handed, ethics or the ability for you to eke out a living from your work be damned.

Cory, who also wrote a fascinating article earlier this year about the “enshittification” of TikTok, is one of our favorite critics of the contemporary internet. We invited him onto the show to discuss how chokepoints became so acute in the creative industries (hint: it’s something that fusty legacy institutions like the major labels, radio companies, and Hollywood talent agencies have also been doing for years), and how companies leverage factors like network effects, switching costs, weak anti-trust enforcement, and even copyright law itself to rig creative labor markets in their favor.

While these platforms feel impossible to leave, there’s still something we can do about it. Cory also tells us about some of the tactics creative workers can use to dismantle these chokeholds and get paid, and where the current tech downturn (and Silicon Valley Bank) fits in with all this. if there’s such a thing as a quintessential Culture Journalist conversation, we think this episode is it.

Purchase Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back

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In the hours before Silicon Valley Bank imploded last week, setting off a chain of events that would send the entire tech (and finance) world into an existential tailspin, Andrea and Emilie made the somewhat excruciating decision to watch Spotify’s annual business presentation, “Stream On” — all hour and a half of it. Between the company’s new, Tiktok-inspired interface, its Black Mirror-esque personal AI DJ tool, and the expansion of its Discovery Mode program offering artists more exposure in exchange for a lower royalty rate, the event offered plenty of food for thought about the state of cultural curation — and musical gatekeeping — in 2023.

Should we believe tech companies when they say they are democratizing cultural creation and distribution — or is all that utopian language just a smoke screen for the ways they are slowly rendering human curators (like DJs, record store clerks, A&Rs, and music critics) obsolete? How did the figure of the musical “gatekeeper” get such a bad rap in the first place? And is it time, as musician Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi) suggests in an excellent new essay for Dada Drummer, for us to consider them in a new light?

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Just a little over a year ago, everyone was talking about the Great Resignation — a trend of workers across multiple different sectors resigning from their jobs. But amid rising interest rates, inflation, stagnating wages, and layoffs in… uh…certain industries we may or may not be intimately familiar with, we seem to have entered an entirely new chapter in the history of work.

It’s not just that things feel, ahem, a bit more uncertain than they used to; for many of us, the entire experience of work feels different too, with the rise of hybrid and remote employment introducing all sorts of new challenges around office etiquette, boundaries, and the-ever elusive “work-life balance.”

We brought on UK-based business, tech, and culture journalist Anna Codrea-Rado — author of a fantastic book about freelancing, creator of the newsletter A-Mail, and co-host of Is this Working?, our all-time favorite podcast about work — to help us make sense of this strangely chaotic and confusing moment in the post-pandemic work landscape.

We discuss how the culture of work has changed since the heady glory days of the r/antiwork subreddit (remember all of those viral news stories about people quitting their jobs via text?); the dystopian surveillance mechanisms and non-stop intrusions on our time that make our experience of remote work so exhausting; and some of the darker realities lurking beneath shiny new labor paradigms like the four-day work week and DAOs. Anna also opens up her own journey with work over the years, and the meta experience of navigating self-employment while writing and podcasting about it for a living.

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This week’s episode goes out to the journalists in your life. (Or you, if you happen to be a journalist). According to one estimate, nearly 130,000 workers in tech and media have lost their job over the 12 months — and while we’ve talked about the annual ritual of media layoffs before, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re finally reaching the end of the era of digital media as we know it.

Is the current wave of layoffs and closures just more of the same, or a sign that writers and editors need to completely rethink what a career in media even looks like? How do digital publications actually make money — and what lessons can we learn, if any, from these suspiciously concurrent cuts in both tech and media?

Lucky for you, we happen to have an old colleague in our Rolodex with an intimate understanding of the economics of the business (and how they got so broken). His name is Ben Dietz, and he’s the creator of an excellent culture and technology newsletter called [SIC] Weekly. Prior to his current gig as chief strategy officer at NTWRK, he spent 16 years working upstairs from us at VICE — leading sales and business development, founding an in-house agency called VIRTUE, and just generally being the kind of ad guy who seemed to genuinely care about the work we did as journalists. Drew joins to help ask questions… and then ask Ben for money.

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Do you ever just look around and get the feeling that everything is just… worse?

This week, we’re joined by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, and Lauren Boyle, co-founder of the long-running NYC art collective DIS, to discuss how the story of the 21st century became one where consumer experiences are always getting crappier, jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, and workers are constantly being asked to do more more with less.

Putting on our finance hats, we zero in on something called the leveraged buyout, a shadowy business maneuver from the world of private equity that happens to be the subject of Syzygy, Jacob’s excellent new documentary for DIS’ streaming platform DIS.ART. Mild spoiler: The film was inspired by a supremely strange Meta commercial that aired at the 2022 Super Bowl, and takes us on a surprising and thought-provoking journey involving gaming pioneer Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and private equity giant Apollo Global Management, which acquired the kitschy pizza party chain in 2014 using this very practice.

We explore how leveraged buyouts funnel resources away from companies and ordinary Americans and into the coffers of the corporate overclass, DIS’s evolving role as a patron of video work that makes theory accessible to the people, and what it means to successfully adapt to an internet that is always changing for the worse.

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Have you ever wondered why the Silicon Valley oligarchs seem so obsessed with preparing for the end of the world? In our first episode of 2023, we join media theorist Douglas Rushkoff on an epic journey through the universe of million-dollar bunkers, libertarian island micronations, and hypothetical Mars colonies to explore why they want to get away from us so badly when the apocalypse hits — and what this says about the consequences their business practices and technologies are having on the world right now.

As a professor at Queens College and the author of 20 books spanning everything from early cyberculture to alternative currencies, Rushkoff has a knack for putting words to the abstract forces that govern our online lives. In fact, he’s the guy who popularized concepts like “viral media” and “social currency.” In this new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, he turns his attention to something he is calling “the Mindset.” “[It’s] this kind of tech-billionaire belief that with enough money and technology, they can escape the catastrophes that result from their own acquisition of money and use of technology,” he says. “It’s the belief that humanity is a problem that can be solved with technology.”

We trace the roots of this worldview back past the “Californian Ideology” of the 90s dot-com bubble to the dawn of interest-backed currencies and the rise of scientism in the era of Francis Bacon; hear a fun story about Timothy Leary and his theory that tech bros are using technology to recreate the experience of the womb; and discuss why letting go of our societal obsession with economic growth may be the only way to resist the Mindset and its extractive impact on labor, communities, and the environment. It’s a hopeful conversation, too — at the end of our time together, Rushkoff discusses what living one’s life in opposition to the technocapitalist status quo might look like.

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Hey friends. You’ve probably noticed that the art for this Substack has been a bit… surreal lately. For the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with Midjourney, an AI image generation tool and Discord bot that pulls visual data from all over the internet to generate original art images from random combinations of words. If you’re so inclined, you can even choose to render these images in the style of one of the artists whose paintings you had to memorize in Art History 101.

For our episode with Mark Redito, one of the musicians behind a 77-person “headless” band called Chaos, we gave Midjourney the prompt: “Headless chaos in the style of Giorgio de Chirico.” After some trial and error, it spat out an image of a caped, headless figure that looked, well, kind of like it had been painted by Giorgio de Chirico.

For Emilie’s recent essay about the decline of scene culture during the pandemic, we used the prompt: “Post-pandemic hipsters in the style of Salvador Dalí” — with predictably ridiculous results.

If you spend just a few minutes in the Midjourney Discord, it’s not hard to see why hundreds of thousands of people have fallen down the same rabbit hole we have since the project moved into open beta in July. Especially if you aren’t a trained artist, the ability to use words to give life to an image or idea in your head — or create a delightfully strange approximation of it — is nothing short of magical.

Midjourney isn’t the only research laboratory making tools with the potential to democratize visual image generation in this way: Unless you’ve been living under a rock this year, you’ve probably heard of DALL-E 2, a machine-learning model from AI research giant Open AI that takes a slightly different, more photorealistic approach to summoning novel images from the internet ether. DALL-E 2 has an amazing feature that allows you to explore what an image would look like — and even a famous painting like A Girl with a Pearl Earring — if you extended it beyond the frame. Separately, it’s already responsible for some of this year’s dumbest memes, like the “pugachu”: a combination of a pug and a Pikachu.

But, like all technological and creative disruptions, these tools raise big existential questions and concerns. We just told you about how we used Midjourney to create images in the style of de Chirico and Dalí, then used said images as artwork on our Substack, a project that makes its money from paid subscriptions. Those artists are no longer living. But these machine learning models source training data from all over the internet — what if we started making art in the style of a living artist, without compensating them for their work or even asking for their consent?

It’s no surprise that tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and open-source text-to-image model Stable Diffusion are creating something of a moral panic in the worlds of art, media, and design. Graphic designers and other commercial artists are worried that AI will spur companies to replace human labor with machines while exacerbating the scourge of intellectual property theft that they’ve already been dealing with on the internet for years. A photo director at New York magazine recently penned an essay asking whether DALL-E 2 was going to put her out of a job. Which all raises the question: Is AI the beginning of a more egalitarian artistic future, or the terrifying final stage of a trajectory where corporations and developers find increasingly insidious ways to extract value from the creative class?

To begin to make sense of the economic, ethical, and artistic implications of these tools, we brought on the artist, technologist, and Interdependence co-host Mat Dryhurst. You might remember him from our episode last year on NFTs and their implications for the future of independent music.

Mat and his partner, the composer Holly Herndon, have been diving headfirst into the possibilities and pitfalls posed by AI for several years now. Most recently, they launched Spawning, an organization building tools by and for artists working with AI. The idea is to give artists greater control over their AI training data by allowing them to opt in or out of these data sets, set permissions on how their style and likeness is used, and even offer their own models to the public. The goal, Mat says, is to establish a standard of consent honored by AI research companies as the tech — whether we like it or not — barrels into the future.

Mat joins us from Berlin to give a crash course in the history of text-based image generation and the specific technological developments that led to this moment — from grassroots Discord groups, to Amazon, Microsoft, and Elon Musk-funded behemoths like Open AI, to the nation-states incentivizing this growing research field on the geopolitical stage.

We discuss the possibilities and limitations of these tools as a medium for creative expression, the parallels between this moment and the advent of photography, and the changing nature of art, and perceptions of artistic value, in a world where people can create striking images at the push of a button. Finally, we get into the steps we can take now to avoid this becoming a nightmare scenario for artists — or, for the rest of us, the start of an era of really terrible art.

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Read Holly and Mat’s essay, “Infinite images and the latest camera”

Follow Mat on Twitter

Learn more about Spawning

Use Spawning’s new tool, Have I Been Trained?, to see if your work or likeness is being used as AI training data

Subscribe to Mat and Holly’s podcast, Interdependence

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Welcome to the Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture (and counterculture) in the age of platforms. For the full version of every episode, including this one — plus essays, monthly culture recommendations, and more — sign up for a paid subscription.

Today’s episode marks something of a full circle moment for this podcast.

In the spring of 2021, we recorded an interview with artist, technologist, and Interdependencehost Mat Dryhurst about a then-little-known technology called NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens. (You may have heard of them.) Seemingly out of nowhere, musicians like Grimes and Kings of Leon were netting millions of dollars by uploading their work to something called the blockchain — and we wanted to take a moment to get clear on exactly what NFTs were, and if there was a chance that they could help independent artists make a living.

Mat made a compelling case for why, despite the legitimate environmental concerns, leftist cultural creators who want to actually get paid for their work probably shouldn’t dismiss these technologies out of hand. The conversation, “What are NFTS? And can they save independent music?,” ended up being one of the most popular episodes we’ve ever recorded. It brought in a lot of new listeners for us, and one of them got in touch: Mark Redito, a Manila-born, Los Angeles-based electronic musician, vocalist, and producer who’d spent most of the 2010s touring and releasing music, both under his own name and under the moniker Spazzkid.

Like the hosts of this podcast, Mark was looking for a way out of the Web2 creator economy grind. Soon after he emailed us — and partly inspired by Mat’s words — he dove head first into the world of music NFTs, which at the time was so new that not even Mat seemed to know if the format actually made sense as a medium.

Most of you know the rest of this story: NFTs became a huge cultural meme, and the object of public derision. They’re something the mainstream cultural imaginary probably associates a lot more with scammy crypto bros who want to financialize everything than independent musicians trying to carve out more artist-friendly alternatives to Spotify and other extractive platforms. Still, even through the recent bear market, the fringe scene of artists and computer geeks that coalesced around these tools is very much alive and well. And since we last checked in, Mark has gone on to co-helm one of the most ambitious and ground-breaking projects that the music NFT space has seen so far: Chaos.

Chaos is a 77-person “headless band” — a riff on Other Internet’s “headless brand” concept — comprising musicians, visual artists, lore builders, economists, and more. Over a period of eight weeks, the group came together to create The Chaos Collection, a compilation of 45 songs that they eventually released in the form of 5,000 NFT “packs,” in the manner of a pack of Pokémon cards. Collectors can open their pack to reveal four randomized songs with original artwork, kind of like a personalized EP but on the blockchain.

Chaos is the latest project from Songcamp, which describes itself as “web3 laboratory experimenting at the edges of music and the new internet.” Not only does the music slap (listen to one of our personal favorites, by Jenn Morel, Abel Romijin, and Zach Britt, here), but it offers an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts, complete with a storyline centered around the Greek goddess of chaos, strife, and discord, Eris.

It’s somewhere between an album, an NFT collection, and a wildly utopian experiment in new forms of human coordination, artistic collaboration, and collective value generation. It’s also been strikingly successful, at least by independent music standards: Since the project went live in June, it’s generated over $500,000 in revenue, topping Billboard’s list of the highest-earning music NFT collections that month.

Needless to say, Mark seemed like the perfect person to bring on the show to ponder the same question we put to Mat, only with a year and a half of hindsight: Given how the space has evolved since the heady bull market days of 2021, could NFTs actually save independent music? Mark joins us to discuss how the world of music NFTS, at least at this early stage, is probably more of a counterculture than a mainstream revolution. We also talk about the dire importance of normalizing artistic patronage, and the political necessity of tinkering at the edges of what’s possible — not just trying to “fix” creative industries as they already exist (though that’s also important).

In addition, we get into Chaos’ inception, how they made a 77-person band even work, and the creativity unlocked by celebrating all of the different forms of labor that went into the project — even including coding and economic design — to forms of artistic expression in their own right.

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Learn more about Mark’s work

Follow Mark on Twitter

Listen to Mark on Bandcamp

Enter the world of Chaos

Learn more about Songcamp

Read up about how Chaos even happened in the first place

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If you were alive in the late ’90s, chances are there was an entire chapter of your life that was soundtracked by Eve 6’s “Inside Out” — you know, that insanely catchy, angst-filled “heart in a blender” song that, starting in 1998, was ubiquitous on the radio and during Saturday trips to the mall. Nearly 25 years later, the Southern California alt-rock giants are backin the zeitgeist, though for decidedly un-nostalgic reasons: The band’s Twitter went viral in late 2020 (possibly the only good thing to happen that year) when, seemingly out of nowhere, singer and guitarist Max Collins began using it to serve up unfiltered, hilarious cultural and political commentary.

Subsequent offerings have ranged from cold-tweeting politicians to ask them if they “like the heart in a blender song,” to razzing other late-’90s rock stars (looking at you, Stephan Jenkins and Steve Albini), to thoughtful commentary on fair pay for musicians and roasting the centrist Dems.

It’s been an unlikely hit, and in addition to releasing new music with Eve 6, Max now pens an advice column with Input Mag and has become something of a rock n roll, post-Bernie public intellectual.

We’ve been wanting to interview Max for a long time, but recently found the perfect excuse: Emilie and Max both wrote an article about John Hinckley Jr., the sexagenarian singer-songwriter who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in a bid to impress the actor Jodie Foster. He wounded four people, including the President, and was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity.

On July 15, Hinckley finally became a free man after over four decades of restrictions and court-mandated psychiatric care. Max, who is a big fan of Hinckley’s music, got him on the phone for his first interview after his unconditional release.

Around the same time, Emilie got commissioned to write an essay about the cult fandom around Hinckley and his stripped-down, romantic folk songs, which have garnered him nearly 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. She wanted to examine the fascination with Hinckley’s music in the context of the complicated legacy of “outsider music,” a term popularized by WFMU DJ Irwin Chusid in the early 2000s to describe self-taught musicians with unusual backstories (and sometimes psychological disabilities) creating outside the bounds of the traditional music industry. Think: Daniel Johnston, The Shaggs, and Wesley Willis. It’s basically the music equivalent of the (similarly othering) category of outsider art.

But then a planned series of tour dates Hinckley booked this summer sparked a bunch of controversy online — especially after The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute issued a statement condemning his return to the stage. After the shows got canceled, the piece evolved into an exploration of how the long-running Brooklyn DIY venue Market Hotel, one of the stops on Hinckley’s so-called “Redemption Tour,” became a target for the conservative media outrage machine, exemplifying the Right’s increasing embrace of the very same cancel-culture tactics it loves to accuse the left of using.

What does the controversy around Hinckley’s foray into live music tell us about the state of the discourse? Is there such a thing as forgiveness, and redemption, in the middle of a culture war? And how in the world did Eve 6, a band we all grew up watching on MTV, end up reentering the chat as one of the funniest and most influential voices on left-wing Twitter?

Much like in his column, Max is a generous and thoughtful conversationalist and was kind enough to indulge our extremely long list of questions. Along the way, he also got deep about some of his own experiences with mental health, including navigating a form of OCD, and why perhaps the appeal of so-called “outsider music” is that we all feel like outsiders in a way sometimes.

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Follow Eve 6 on Twitter

Listen to Eve 6’s latest EP, grim value. A little birdie tells us we can expect the first missive from the band’s next release in a couple of months.

Read more by Max

“John Hinckley Jr. speaks: ‘I’m trying to not dwell on the past’” (with Mark Yarm)

“The Eve 6 Guy has advice for an angry COVID long hauler”

“The Eve 6 Guy on how to cope when the world’s on fire”

“Miserable? The Eve 6 Guy offers tips for kicking depression in the ass.”

Read more by Emilie

“The no redemption tour”

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Hey pals. We’re going to kick things off today with a quote from the great Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Gramsci was describing the political situation in Italy and Europe a year into the Great Depression. But his words also sum up the subject of political scientist and friend-of-the-pod Kevin Munger’s new book: Boomers, their unceasing grip on American politics and culture, and why it’s so difficult for them to understand what us young people are going through.

His book, Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture, explores the confluence of factors that led the Baby Boomers to become the richest, the most powerful, and the most populous elder generation in American history — and how the concentration of so much power at the top of the age pyramid is shaping, or perhaps stunting, the ability of Millennials and Gen Z to come into their own as a political power base.

Borrowing a metaphor from the nautical world, he calls this phenomenon Boomer ballast. “Our ship of state has more ballast” – or weight — “than ever before,” he writes, “rendering us unusually stable or slow to adapt.” Think: The fact that members of the Boomer Generation and the Silent Generation jointly still hold more seats in Congress than any other age group. (Kevin has written an article on this). And how rare it is to see real, material progress when it comes to the problems that impact young people the most, such as climate collapse, student loan debt, and decades of stagnating wages.

Today, we’re diving deep into the Boomer generation, how their lived experience has shaped their view of the world, and the long legacy of the cultural and political currents they’ve embraced. (For example, the hippy movement of the ’60s and ’70s, segueing into the Randian individualism of the ’80s and ’90s.) We’ll be exploring why our own experiences, and priorities, are so different from theirs, and how our inability to achieve our own political aims in the face of so much entrenched institutional power — and the internet — is pushing Millennial and Gen Z political behavior into strange and surprising new shapes.

To do that, we enlisted the brains of two of our favorite thinkers on all things related to generational political self-expression: Kevin himself, an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University; and Joshua Citarella, an artist and researcher who studies political subcultures online. Josh is also the founder of Do Not Research, a Discord community, publication, and arts institution focused on documenting aesthetic culture and memetic influence on the internet.

Did you know that the Boomer generation once appeared as “the person of the year” on the cover of a certain high–profile American magazine, simply by virtue of being born? Ever wonder why some young people on the Internet seem to be politically self-identifying in ways that completely explode the left-right, Democratic-Republican binary? Want to hear the story behind “How to Plant a Meme,” Josh’s experiment in using “Capitalist Realism” memes to try to covertly steer radical meme accounts toward more productive ends? Buckle up, because we’ve got a wild show for you all.

Follow Kevin on Twitter

Buy Kevin’s book

Read Kevin’s blog

Follow Josh Citarella on Twitter

Buy Josh’s book, Politigram and the Post-Left

Read more by Do Not Research

Become a member of Do Not Research

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What do billionaire Peter Thiel, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, and edge-lordy, art-kid podcasts like Red Scare and Wet Brain have in common? According to journalist James Pogue, the author of an expansive, 9,000-word article that ran in Vanity Fair last month, they’re all part of a loose-knit constellation of fringe public intellectuals, conservative politicians, and independent media personalities that make up something called the New Right.

It’s not exactly the next wave of Trumpism, even if it occasionally looks that way: On the back of an endorsement from the former president, and funding from Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance recently won the Republican primary in the race for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. But James’ reporting suggests that the movement is a lot more ideologically heterodox, and weirder, than that. Some of the players in the movement are Marxists or former Marxists; others, including thinkers that Vance himself is taking cues from, are sketching out visions of society that, to our ears, sound an awful lot like a socially conservative dictatorship.

If you watched the third season of Succession, you might recall the episode where the Roy family travels to a stodgy conservative political conference in Virginia to vet the year’s line-up of presumptive Republican presidential candidates, and Roman ends up taking a weird liking to a young politician with thinly veiled fascist sympathies. Well, James’ article, titled “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest bets,” is kind of like what would happen if a left-wing reporter infiltrated that event, fly-on-the-wall style, and that conference was happening in real life.

The action takes place over a weekend at NatCon, an annual conference that James describes as a “big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction.” And in a manner not dissimilar from a show like Succession, he simply presents what he observes there, and quotes from the people he encounters, without much in the way of commentary or editorializing.

The piece is a deeply chilling read. But the public response to it has been arguably just as thought-provoking: Readers and commentators on the left of the culture war, including the hosts of this podcast, heralded it as a frightening account of a fringe movement that could, sooner than we think, represent an actual threat to American democracy. People on the right, including James’ own sources and post-woke antagonists like Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss, praised it for being the rare work of journalism that engaged with its sources, and their thinking, in a nuanced way. (Jeff Bezos also praised James’s article in a quote tweet of Greenwald, which was just weird.)

All in all, the piece’s existence raises important questions about the fraught business of reporting on the right in post-Trump America: What are the dangers, especially in this media climate, of giving any real estate at all to the opposition’s ideas? What are the dangers of not engaging with them, especially when half of America has already accepted many of them as fact? And perhaps most importantly, is the media’s approach to reporting on the right achieving the intended result?

There are no easy answers, but as the culture war drags on and political media begins to feel like a zero-sum game that entrenches the Right deeper into its point of view, the very fact that there aren’t easy answers feels important to examine. James joins us on today’s show to do just that, and to share his thoughts on why acquainting ourselves with the rhetorical moves these movements are making may ultimately be in the left’s best interests.

“I think that there's a huge danger for newsrooms, and indeed for our democracy, if you can't see the emotional and intellectual currents that are forming,” he says. “Because they're going to burst out and bulge in ways that will be wildly unexpected, and that our policymakers and leaders and politicians won't even be able to respond to because they don't know what's happening until it's already in their face.”

Speaking of how high-stakes these rug-pull moments can be, we also discuss the leaked Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade and what it can tell us about the “apocalyptic death match” that American politics has become (James’ words); whether there’s a case to be made for long-form literary journalism in pushing the political conversation forward; and the role, if any, that downtown Manhattan scenesters have to play in all this.

Follow James on Twitter

Read more by James

Articles by James for Harper’s

“They made a movie out of it”

Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West

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Flower crowns. Culturally appropriative costumes. Dead-eyed influencers snapping selfies in front of branded activations. If you have never been to Coachella, you probably think of it as a sum of the memes that have circulated about it online — or, at the very least, as an avatar for American youth culture at its most extravagant and, well, capitalist.

Today, we’re going to advance the somewhat controversial thesis that Coachella is actually one of the most thought-provoking cultural happenings of the year. We’re right on time, because Coachella just wrapped its first edition since the start of the pandemic, making it one of the first major music festivals to return in its wake. And Andrea was on-site to experience it.

Though DIY events like Woodstock set the blueprint, the last decade or so has seen the American music festival evolve into a cutthroat, revenue-driving business. Events like Coachella represent a significant chunk of the $20 billion global concert market, and North American corporations spend more than $1.3 billion sponsoring music events annually. Over 32 million people in the US attend music festivals each year, and a 2019 Deloitte survey of millennials found that the appetite for that kind of experiential culture is very real: 57 percent of respondents said they prioritized travel and seeing the world over owning a home.

No festival embodies that intersection of business and culture more than Coachella, which kicks off each spring in the Southern California desert city of Indio. Founded in 1999, Coachella has since blossomed into a three-day, two-weekend event that draws a total of around a quarter-million attendees every year (with a not-inconsequential environmental impact). It’s the premiere American megafest. The spectacle to end all spectacles. In 2017 — the last year Coachella released earnings info — the event grossed $114.6 million, setting a record as the first festival franchise to earn more than $100 million.

Like every year in recent memory, the 2022 lineup featured zeitgeist-defining headliners (Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and Swedish House Mafia), along with a range of major players and rising stars in EDM, electronic, hip-hop, and rock. In short, if you want to get a real who’s-who of the power players in the popular music space today, you could think of Coachella as the new Grammys.

But it’s also more than that. In drawing hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to this blank desert canvas, the event doubles as a mirror of culture and society at large, and of the bizarre ways that art, commerce, technology, and community intersect in our everyday lives. To attend Coachella is to check in with the state of American culture. It’s to step outside our humdrum workaday existence and check in with how we’re doing.

Katie and Andrea working at Coachella 2018.
That’s why Andrea, along with a tight crew of fellow music and culture journalists, has been attending and covering Coachella for ten years. Alongside her has been Katie Bain, a longtime music reporter and critic and currently the director of Billboard Dance. Today, Katie joins us to discuss how the festival has changed — or not changed — and what this year’s edition tells us about where we’re at. We also discuss Coachella’s roots in alternative music and rave culture, its tangled relationship with influencer culture, and the surreality, and joy, of reuniting at Coachella after two years of hunkering down at home.

Read festival reporting by Katie

“‘Free’ Burning Man brings 15,000 maskless partiers, vax-only orgy & dogs galore to Nevada desert”

“Forget the headliners: The real star of Coachella is spicy pie pizza”

“Bon Iver’s dad helped me discover the secret jazz history of his hometown”

“EDC 2021’s failure to launch: How a plan to bring 200,000 people to Vegas fell apart”

“Art cars, plug and play, and Playa Tech: How electronic music culture is evolving at Burning Man”

Read festival reporting by Andrea

“Me, My Mom, and Paul McCartney: From the Iron Curtain to the California Desert”

“Down the Jack Ü k-hole”

“If you hate Calvin Harris, you're missing the point”

“There Is No One on Earth Like Beyonce”

“Stagecoach Is Still America’s Biggest Party About America”

“Coachella’s new programs target sexual misconduct. Are they working?”

“I Got My Phone Stolen, Lost My Friends, and Still Believe in Desert Daze”

“Waiting For The Drop: Las Vegas’ EDM Gamble”

Correction: This post previously stated that Coachella was the first major festival to return in the wake of the pandemic, which is incorrect, because… Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo ’21.

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Hey guys,

Remember when being a music fan meant falling in love with a label and collecting every single release? Today we’re going to be talking about labels, and the special role they play in the creator economy — past, present, and future.

These days, when you hear about record labels, it’s usually in the context of a high-profile artist going on social media to speak out about being locked into a terrible deal, or some jaw-dropping headline about how the majors are generating a million dollars of streaming revenue in an hour as artists struggle to make rent.

But until relatively recently, record labels — and especially independent record labels — occupied a much more influential position in the zeitgeist. In the years before streaming became the de facto mode of discovery, one could argue that they served as a sort of organizing principle for musical knowledge, crystallizing scenes and movements under a recognizable banner that pointed listeners in the right direction and amplified artists operating outside of the commercial establishment. Think: How Dischord Records nurtured D.C.'s rich hardcore scene, or the role that Mac Dre's Thizz Entertainment played in ushering in the Bay Area Hyphy movement, or how Wax Trax! helped define the sound of Industrial music in Chicago.

In the platform era, that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself, and being able to benefit from the support of a community that has your back, can be increasingly hard to come by. Which is why Yancey Strickler, a former music journalist and the co-founder of Kickstarter and The Creative Independent, had something of a eureka moment recently while revisiting Michael Azerrad’s groundbreaking chronicle of the 1980s punk and indie scenes, Our Band Could Be Your Life: What if, instead of operating like independent economic agents, vying for our attention, streams, and clicks, artists squadded up and released work together?

Before long, Strickler had teamed up with some friends to start Metalabel, an organization that describes itself as a “growing universe of knowledge, resources, and tools that inspire creative collaboration, cooperation, and mutual support.”

The group, which includes musician Anna Bulbrook, Etsy co-creator Rob Kalin, designer Ilya Yudanov, developer Lauren Dorman, and collective internet culture expert Austin Robey, has yet to reveal what those tools consist of, or what the business model will be, beyond hinting that the project will involve blockchain in some way. (Austin told The Culture Journalist that the company has plans to become collectively owned.) But, like Other Internet’s “Squad Wealth” article and Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon’s “Interdependence” idea before it, the Metalabel concept offers some useful language for describing a paradigm shift that is clearly already underway. You can see it in how independent artists are teaming up to form DAOs, or media pundits hyping up the so-called “great rebundling.”

Naturally, we couldn’t help but want to dig deeper into the idea: Whether you’re a musician, a writer, a fashion designer, or an activist, how might reframing our creative output as releases on a label free us up from the diminishing returns of the platform economy?

Today, we’re excited to welcome Yancy and Austin — one of the brains behind the digital musicians’ cooperative Ampled, as well as Unnamed Fund and Dinner DAO — onto the show. We discuss what The Whole Earth Catalog, the creative studio MSCHF, and the centuries-old science academy The Royal Society have in common (hint: our guests say they are all examples of a metalabel), Yancey’s “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” and how trying to keep up with the constant churn of content warps our priorities and values as creative people.

Become a paid subscriber to listen to this episode in full.

Follow Yancey, Austin, and Metalabel on Twitter

Learn more

“Introducing Metalabel”

Metalabel presentation at ETHDenver 2022

“The dark forest theory of the internet” (Yancy Stickler)

“What coops and DAOs can learn from each other” (Austin Robey)

“Squad wealth” (Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti)

“Hyperstructures” (Zora’s Jacob Horne)

Episodes to peep if you like this one

Is it time for platform socialism? with James Muldoon

Is counterculture even possible on the internet? with Carly Busta

What are NFTs? And can they save independent Music? with Mat Dryhurst

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A reminder: We recently dropped the first installment of a new series called Offline Recs, a monthly compendium of the movies, music, books, meals, and other cultural ephemera that we can’t stop thinking about — regardless of where they fit in the news cycle. We’re making the March edition available to everyone, but if you sign up for a paid subscription, we’ll be sending Offline Recs straight to your inbox every month, along with full pod episodes and other goodies. Yes, you heard that right: Paid subscribers get access to the full version of every episode, including this one.

Especially in the internet age, it’s hard to say who an artist’s story belongs to. Musicians can communicate with audiences directly, fan armies rise up to defend their faves against narratives they don’t agree with, and even if we haven’t met the artist in person, we all have tales of the ways their music has touched our lives. But when veteran music journalist Paul Cantor set out to write a biography of the late, great rapper Mac Miller, an artist whose generosity and infectious kindness were as palpable on record as they were in his day-to-day life, he came up against this question in the starkest way possible.

After the artist’s tragic passing from an accidental drug overdose in 2018, at the age of 26, Paul secured the participation of a number of Mac’s closest friends and collaborators. But the musician’s family was wary about a writer with no direct personal connection to Mac writing a book about him. In fact, they circulated a statement on social media telling people not to talk to Paul: “To artists, management, & friends: There is a writer doing a Mac Miller biography that some you have been approached about or will be,” they wrote on Instagram. “This book is not authorized/approved by Mac’s family or Estate. We are not participating and prefer you don’t either if you personally knew Malcolm.”

In time, the family made it clear that they would be supporting a competing biography instead: The Book of Mac: Remembering Mac Miller, by journalist Donna-Claire Chesman, which they designated as the only authorized biography of two. But after years of research, hundreds of hours of interviews, and what Cantor’s publicist described to us as a “massive bullying campaign” that included death threats (you can read his article about the experience here), his book, Most Dope: The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller, finally hit bookstores this year. It’s an exhaustive, strikingly intimate account at the places, people, societal forces, and personal challenges that shaped Mac’s singular view of the world — even down to the history of the neighborhood in Pittsburgh where he grew up.

On today’s episode, we discuss the controversy’s impact on Paul’s experiences reporting and writing the book, and the role of the biographer in a world where artists have unprecedented control over their own narrative. We also take a look at what Mac’s story can tell us about the fraught relationship between mental health and music, and how Mac’s evolution as an artist and public figure reflected wider changes in technology, the music industry, and public discourse in the late aughts and the tens.

Purchase Most Dope: The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller

Read more by Paul

“The story of Combat Jack, hip-hop’s flagship podcaster”

“Fans were surprised to get more Gang Starr. They almost didn’t.”

“Suge Knight reflects on Doggystyle 20 years later”

“Arular 10 years later: M.I.A. reflects on globe-shaking debut”

“Roc of Ages: Dame Dash’s Second Chance at a Second Act”

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A reminder: If you sign up for a paid subscription of The Culture Journalist, you’ll get access to the full version of every episode, including this one, along with a monthly roundup of our best culture recommendations.

Hey friends,

Earlier this month, the online record store Bandcamp rocked the music internet when it announced that the heretofore-independent company had been sold to Epic Games, the North Carolina-based gaming monolith best known as the creator of Fortnite.

Two years into a pandemic that has cratered musicians’ ability to earn a living, the announcement felt like a stunning about-face from a company that people in the biz had started calling the “anti-Spotify”: the rare music platform that allowed artists to monetize their work through direct sales, as opposed to the penurious per-stream payouts that have become the industry norm. (See: our recent episode on Neil Young vs. Spotify).

Through its popular Bandcamp Fridays initiative, where the company forfeited its (already pretty artist-friendly) 10 to 15 percent cut in order to drive more funds to musicians who were stuck at home, Bandcamp established a reputation as a lifeline in an otherwise inhospitable creator economy. And though it remains to be seen if the sale will change any of the fundamentals of the way the platforms operates — Bandcamp, for its part, says it won’t — musicians reacted to the news as though something had been taken away from them, something they believed was theirs.

Damon Krukowski, half of dream pop duo Damon & Naomi and author of the excellent Dada Drummer Almanack blog, summed up the sentiment in a Tweet. “Did we just lose our independent digital record store?” he wrote, noting that Epic Games was 40 percent owned by Tencent, a Chinese technology and entertainment conglomerate that also owns a stake in Spotify.

In another Tweet, Ampled and MetaLabel co-founder Austin Robey pushed the conversation around ownership one step further: “Bandcamp should belong to the artists that made it. It should be a public utility.”

Which brings us to a question we’re going to unpack on today’s episode: Is it possible to imagine a future where the platforms that circumscribe every aspect of our online lives aren’t owned by the same handful of for-profit behemoths — companies that have come under fire time and time again for prioritizing shareholder interests and exponential growth over the economic and psychological well being of their users? Is it possible to imagine a world where these tools, from the public square of social media to streaming services and vacation rental apps, are collectively owned and governed by the people who use them?

Our guest — James Muldoon, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter in the UK and head of digital research at the thinktank Autonomy — says yes. And he’s written a fascinating new book, Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, that outlines what such a future might look like, from the formation of small-scale alternatives (think: local rideshare cooperatives instead of Uber), to users democratically voting on the algorithms that shape our experience on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. “Whoever controls the platforms, controls the future,” he writes. “The simple proposition of this book is that it should be us.”

In today’s conversation, which we recorded before the Bandcamp news, we go deep with James on why existing proposals for curbing the enormous power and influence of big tech, such as “breaking up Facebook,” fail to address the root of the problem. We also discuss how even free-to-use platforms extract value from their users; the pitfalls of heralding cryptocurrency and Web3 as the only alternative to the “rentier” relations of Web2; and why we urgently need to widen the Overton window when it comes to imagining what the internet of the future could look like so we can know which changes to agitate for in the present.

And as a special bonus for those of you who tune in: Pluto Press, the publisher of Platform Socialism, is offering a special 30 percent discount on the book just for our listeners. We’ll explain how to take advantage of the offer on the show.

Follow James on Twitter

Read more by James

“Regulating big tech is not enough. We need platform socialism.”

“Facebook is now Meta. And it wants to monetize your whole existence.”

“Web3 can’t fix the internet”

Episodes to peep if you like this one

The fight for a penny per stream, with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco

Five Days in a TikTok mansion, with Barrett Swanson

The rise of the clickbait restaurant, with Emma Kemp

The pandemic digital hustle, with Jubilee and Shruti Kumar

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Hello friends,

Welcome to season three of The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the platform age.

We’re excited to kick things off today with an episode that feels pretty damn perfect for these darkest days of winter. Think: neo-Gothic architecture, darkened libraries full of dusty old books, putting on your smartest blue blazer and rushing across a misty university quad at dawn.

Friends, we’re talking about Dark Academia, a Gen Z-centric fashion aesthetic and online subculture that centers a love of educational pursuits, classical literature, and threads that look straight out of Oxford or Cambridge in 1922. Like Cottagecore, you could chalk it up to young people eschewing the pressures of digital life to embrace a slower, more analog existence — though it’s less about sourdough starters and baby chicks, and more about yearning for a time when students dressed like characters out of Dead Poets Society and school administrators still trumpeted the virtues of learning for the sake of learning.

Though Dark Academia traces at least as far back to the Tumblr culture of the mid-10s, it probably had its biggest and buzziest moment at the start of the pandemic, when mainstream publications mostly explained its popularity as the product of young people feeling nostalgic for in-person education. But students are back at school now, and Dark Academia — with its somewhat controversial fetishization of the Western literary canon and the old-money elite — is arguably more popular than ever. In 2021, it was the most visited page on the fan-generated visual subcultures archive Aesthetics Wiki, which suggested to us that there is probably a lot more behind the trend than meets the eye.

Is Dark Academia a rejection of a world that compels us to constantly perform on social media, even if posting about your vintage book collection is part of the point? Is it a response to the decline of the liberal arts? A return to the hipster fascination with elite knowledge?

Today, we are thrilled to dive deep into the “why” of Dark Academia with writer and fashion theory wiz Biz Sherbert, co-host of the podcast Nymphet Alumni and the brain behind the popular instagram account @markfisherquotes. Along the way, we’ll discuss a few other examples of the “trad” becoming alt — such as the growing popularity of Catholic imagery in fashion and among art-school kids — the increased generational metabolism for consuming past trends, and the rise of the "aesthetic" as an organizing principle for contemporary life.

Before that happens, though, we wanted to quickly fill you in on a couple things that we’re doing differently this season. Since we started this podcast a year and a half ago, we’ve been absolutely thrilled by the number of people who have signed up for our Substack, or even reached out to say that it adds something meaningful to their life.

That said, The Culture Journalist is an independent project that is funded entirely by listeners, and in the spirit of the creator economy issues that we discuss on pretty much every episode of this podcast, we need your support in order to keep putting in all the time and hard work that goes into producing it. Starting this week, we’ll be sending out two different versions of each episode that we release: Free episodes, for our free subscribers, and full episodes, for our paid subscribers.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, we thank you and you don’t have to do a thing. Every time a new episode comes out, you’ll get access to the full thing — and as an additional token of our appreciation, we’ll be sending you a monthly round-up of the best culture recommendations we’ve got, for your reading, viewing, listening, and culinary pleasure.

If you’re a free subscriber, we still love you—you just won’t be getting to hear everything we talk about with our extremely bright and fascinating guests. Subscriptions cost $5 a month or $50 a year. But if you sign up in the next two weeks, you can get a 20 percent discount for a yearly subscription. We’ll be rolling out additional perks throughout the season.

Sincerely,

Emilie and Andrea

Follow Biz on Instagram

Listen to Nymphet Alumni, the podcast she co-hosts

Read more by Biz

“How Catholicism became alt-fashion’s saviour”

“Godposting — or: new internet esotericism”

“Slouching towards girlblogging”

Read more on Dark Academia

“The year in aesthetics, from dark academia to mcbling” (Emilie Friedlander)

“What’s dark about dark academia” (Ana Quiring)

“The ‘dark academia’ subculture offers a fantasy alternative to the neoliberal university” (Amelia Horgan)

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Hi pals,

We know we said that we were taking a pause from publishing as we cook up Season 3 of The Culture Journalist, but we couldn’t resist jumping back in for a quick one-off about a topic we just can’t shake: Neil Young (et al.) vs. Spotify.

The TL;DR is that Young, on the heels of an open letter by a cadre of scientists, medical professionals, and academics, threatened to pull his catalog from the streaming giant last week if it didn’t do more to curtail the spread of misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines. He pointedly called for the removal of one of the platform’s biggest (and most lucrative) sources of said questionable material, The Joe Rogan Experience, writing in a letter to his team: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

After Spotify chose to stand by Rogan, Young made good on his word (though he since deleted the above post from his Times-Contrarian website) and has since been directing his fans to check out his tunes on Spotify competitors like Amazon and Apple. Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, and Graham Nash pulled their music as well, and the hashtag #cancelspotify enjoyed a day or two of virality.

The situation is still unfolding, and it’s unclear what impact it will have on Spotify beyond a temporary stock price dip and anecdotal reports of users canceling their subscriptions. But the saga — shocker — proved to be a particularly spicy morsel of catnip for the culture wars, sparking arguments around free speech, censorship, and corporate responsibility that feel all the more vertiginous at a time when conservatives are attempting to ban books from school curricula and libraries across the country.

All of which is to say, we’re pretty fired up. After years of observing how Spotify and its peers have impacted the lives of artists and the music industry as a whole, it feels vindicating to finally see the company receive a bit of (mainstream) scrutiny for its controversial business practices. But it’s also been frustrating to watch the reckoning play out in this particular way — like we’re seeing society collectively fixate on the symptoms of the problem and not the fundamental brokenness of a streaming economy that reduces everything it touches to a widget in its unstoppable quest for profit and growth.

Join us as we contemplate how the fiasco feels like such a perfect storm of internet-era attentional dynamics, how crying “Ivermectin” on a podcast isn’t really that different from crying “fire” in a theater, and whether it’s time to revisit the notion that all the music in the world needs to be free and accessible to everyone, all the time. (At least, if we’re going to rely on for-profit companies to build the architecture that makes it possible).

Ps. If you have a moment to spare, we’d love it if you could help us out by answering a few questions about this podcast.

Thanks,

love earth

be well

Emilie & Andrea

Further reading and listening

“Behind Neil Young vs. Spotify, a fraught relationship with musicians” (Ben Sisaro)

“Spotify’s Joe Rogan problem isn’t going away” (Kevin Roose)

“There’s no such thing as independent music in the age of coronavirus” (Emilie Friedlander)

“How easy is it for musicians to walk away from problematic artists?” (Andrea Domanick)

“Spotify drops ‘hate content’ policy for artist promotions after controversy” (Todd Spangler)

“What is creativity worth?” (with UMAW’s Joey la Neve Defrancesco)

UMAW’s Justice at Spotify campaign

“My young mind was disturbed by a book. It changed my life.” (Viet Thanh Nguyen)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

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Hello friends,

As we hunker down for another pandemic winter, we’re closing out 2021—and the second season of this podcast—with an episode that feels like the perfect opportunity to reflect back on the year’s crypto-infused zeitgeist.

Back in September, Sotheby’s announced it was auctioning off one of 13 surviving original copies of the U.S. constitution. Given the rarity and historic significance of the document, it wasn’t surprising that it would make some headlines. But the news was quickly overshadowed by the revelation that 17,000 people on the internet were teaming up to bid on it. They did this through forming something called a DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization—basically, a kind of non-hierarchical, self-governing community that uses blockchain technology to fundraise, coordinate, and make decisions.

The operation, which came together in just a few weeks, was not particularly well thought out. Given the document’s racist legacy, a lot of people understandably found it pretty offensive that the group had chosen to rally around the Constitution at all. The energy costs associated with the crowdfund (and eventual refund) were enormous, with many small-dollar donors seeing their entire contribution wiped out by Ethereum gas fees—and there were a few too many references to the Nicholas Cage movie National Treasure for our comfort. After collectively raising more than 40 million dollars, ConstitutionDAO almost succeeded in its goal, though they lost out to a hedge fund owner and Republican donor named Ken Griffin.

Even with all the project’s baggage, it was pretty exciting to watch the auction itself go down. For one thing, there was the GameStop-era thrill of seeing a wave of pseudonymous avatars descend on the Sotheby’s live chat with exhortations of “GM.” It was though these people were staking a claim for blockchain-enabled community organizing as a tool that could be used to build a world with new rules, by purchasing the rules of the old one—or at least, that’s how friends-of-the-pod Drew Millard and Kevin Munger, who you may remember from last season, described it in a recent essay called “Imperfect Union: How ConstitutionDAO Lost Its Way.”

Writing for Friends with Benefits—another decentralized autonomous organization that happens to count Emilie as a member of its editorial team—Drew and Kevin set out to examine how ConstitutionDAO happened, where it went wrong, and why, despite bringing so many people together and raising such a jaw-dropping amount of money, it was never really able to transcend its status as a meme. We brought them back on the show to discuss why the whole saga feels so emblematic of the post-Biden zeitgeist and some of the hard lessons we learned this year about financial flash mobs and networked protest movements. We also talk about whether it feels accurate to describe the NFT and meme-stonk delirium of current moment, as some pundits have done, as the new “Roaring Twenties.”

We hope you enjoy the show, and we appreciate you tagging along with us this year. We’ve got some exciting stuff in store for 2022, so stay close. In the meantime, we’re super curious to know if there’s anything you might be interested in hearing us tackle in the future. Just leave us a comment below, or reply to this email. Onwards!

Yours,

Emilie and Andrea

Drew Millard is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Gawker, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. He is currently working on a book about golf, due out in Spring 2021 on Abrams press.

Read more by Drew

“Welcome to the new roaring twenties”

“Please, help me justify my millennial nostalgia”

“Travis Barker is a musical cockroach”

Follow Drew on Twitter

Kevin Munger is an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University and a founding co-editor of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. His book, Generation Gap: Why Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture, is available for pre-order here.

Read more by Kevin

“Facebook is other people”

“The rise and fall of the Palo Alto consensus”

Follow Kevin on Twitter

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Get ready to hide under a napkin with a fried song bird while shouting “fk off” in a thick Scottish accent, because this week we’re talking about HBO’s Succession. The third season of the acclaimed media family drama kicked off last month, and from the acting, to the writing, to the plot-twist momentum, it’s shaping up to be the series’ best yet.

There are a lot of reasons to be obsessed. Succession is, above all, an uncompromising look at where power comes from, and how it’s reproduced. And as Kendall Roy—media magnate Logan Roy’s second-eldest and most seditious child—breaks away from the fold to wrest control of a scandal-ridden Waystar Royco, the show makes fine work of capturing the crisis PR theater that corporations engage in when navigating an extinction-level threat.

“Cultural temperatures” are taken. Token women are propped up as mouthpieces. Executives mollify the public with platitudes like “We take this very seriously” while privately referring to the company’s victims as “no RPI”—“no real person involved.” And, of course, Kendall is framing his big power grab as an effort to right the company’s wrongs against women and usher the company into the 21st century, when he’s basically just a big baby in a power suit and a goofy baseball cap trying to consolidate his own position.

It’s a searingly brutal portrait of a dysfunctional family, a commentary on the corporate chokehold over media and politics, and an exercise in rich-people schadenfreude all rolled into one. For journalists, however, the show hits home for its painfully true-to-life portrayal of the forces shaping our world.

At this point, we can’t think of many colleagues who haven’t experienced their own version of season two’s infamous Vaulter scene, in which Kendall guts an entire digital media company, save for two verticals: food and weed. The fact that Kendall lays off dozens of journalists with one week of severance simply because he’s trying to impress his father is absurd enough to feel like something that might actually happen in a real-life digital media company, especially after he boasts to Vaulter’s publisher that he’d spent time studying the company because he was looking to “find the profit centers [and] keep the union off our back.”

Part of Succession’s pitch-perfect rendering of the brutal inner workings of media comes down to the fact that its creators hire people who know what they’re talking about. One of those people, on the series’ second season, was Cord Jefferson, a longtime journalist and former editor and writer at Gawker who left the media industry seven years ago to try his hand at TV writing.

Since then, he’s been one of the brains behind thought-provoking fan favorites like The Good Place, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and Watchmen—the latter of which earned him an Emmy for his work alongside co-writer Damon Lindelof. Along the way, Cord has carved out a name for himself as an advocate for journalists looking to cross into the entertainment industry, most recently teaming up with the Writer’s Guild of America to launch the Susan M. Haas Fellowship, which offers financial support and creative mentorship to journalists interested in TV writing. He’s also working on a show about the rise and fall of Gawker Media, which we can’t wait to see when it finally makes it to the screen.

To celebrate Succession’s third season, Cord joins us to discuss his experiences in the media industry and how they’ve informed his work on fictional portrayals like Succession and the Gawker series. We discuss the ways that Hollywood gets journalism right—and also sometimes terribly wrong—along with the struggles writers in both fields are facing in a creative economy increasingly governed by algorithms, risk aversion, and Waystar RoyCo-esque monoliths obsessed with growth at any cost.

Follow Cord on Twitter

Learn more about the Susan M. Haas Fellowship

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It’s 2021, which means that us millennials are in for a parade of 20-year anniversaries of things that informed our understanding of culture and the world. Y2K. September 11th. The Strokes’ Is this It?. There’s even a festival happening called Just Like Heaven, which basically packs the entire history of 2000s indie music into a single day.

Part of that strange nostalgia train includes a film we haven't been able to stop texting our friends about: Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage. The first installment in a Bill Simmons-produced HBO series called Music Box, it’s a polarizing new documentary about a festival 22 years ago that went horribly, horribly, off the rails.

Anyone who had their eyes on MTV at the time probably remembers what happened, but the short version is this: The organizers of the original Woodstock—the Woodstock that your Boomer parents maybe went to in 1969, on a pastoral upstate New York farm where Jimi Hendrix played a hair-splitting version of the National Anthem and beautiful long-haired hippies rolled around in the mud—decided to book a follow-up festival 30 years later.

The 400,000-person ‘99 edition featured a slate of nu-metal, rap-rock, and alternative acts fueling the young American id at the time, including Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Alanis Morissette. In a sharp departure from the peace-and-love ethos of the original Woodstock (or at least how the world seems to remember it), the weekend descended into a cavalcade of horrors, including rioting, vandalism, widespread dehydration, and reports of sexual assault. That was all capped off by a giant, infernal blaze on the final night after a candlelight vigil turned into an angry uprising against the festival’s organizers. They had, after all, made quite a few tactical errors, including booking the festival on an asphalt-laden former military air-field and selling water at $4 a bottle during a horrendous heatwave.

All in all, the documentary makes a pretty convincing case for Woodstock ’99 being one of the most egregious examples in pop music history of toxic white masculinity gone too far. But there was something that grated us about it: As riveting as it was as a Fyre Fest-style play-by-play—soundtracked by the testosterone-fueled hard rock of the era—we didn’t come away with much of a sense of why young people gravitated to this music in the first place, or the larger cultural context that gave rise to it.

But then Craig Jenkins—music critic at Vulture, Pulitzer finalist, and an old colleague of ours from VICE—published a piece that pretty perfectly summed up our grievances, especially when it comes to the film’s depiction of a period of music and cultural history that we lived through as teens.

It’s called “We’re Still Getting Woodstock ’99 Wrong,” and it thoughtfully nails the challenges and blindspots of how we retell and preserve cultural narratives in the era of streaming and clickbait.

“Peace, Love, and Rage is pointed in attributing blame for the carnival of horrors the weekend would entail, but light on why the dehydrated revelers wanted to go in the first place,” he writes. “Woodstock 99 attempts to trace the tributaries drizzling fuel on the festival’s inferno, but it’s more notable for being the rare music documentary that doesn’t really seem to care for much of the music it’s covering.”

Lucky for us, Craig was down to join us to discuss the documentary, the trainwreck that was Woodstock ’99, and his own memories of what he argues is a very misunderstood chapter in musical and cultural history.

Follow Craig on Twitter.

Read more by Craig:

“The Passion of Serj Tankian: System of a Down’s front man on 25 years of finding truth in political tension, even if it means within his own band.”

“Failing Britney Spears: It shouldn’t have taken ten years to realize the discourse about her had been a hurtful, unhealthy constant.”

“Nothing Is Flattening Music Like TikTok: ‘Drivers License’ is telling of the kind of music this app rewards.”

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It's summer, and what once felt like a slow, tentative return to normalcy has been accelerating at a jarring clip. Just weeks ago, many of us were trying to decide if we were finally ready to dine out. Now, hardly a day goes by without someone inviting us out for happy hour, or to some swanky, 17th century-themed rave, or to celebrate-for-Instagram somebody else's major life milestone, like a birthday or a marriage or a baby. Whatever our personal comfort/agoraphobia level, the experience economy is back.

On this week's episode of The Culture Journalist, though, we turn our attention to a phenomenon that exploded during its year-and-a-half absence—a time when any experience of adventure and escapism was necessarily a vicarious one, mediated by the billion-dollar platforms that we couldn't stop scrolling even as we privately admitted to friends that they were making us feel sick. Friends, we're talking about collab houses: The McMansion-sized influencer incubators where young social media celebrities shack up to shoot TikTok videos, churn out brand deliverables, and generally lead glamorous lives for the sake of turning those experiences into content.

Just when we thought we couldn’t read another take on the phenomenon, a contributing editor for Harper's named Barrett Swanson dropped a mammoth work of culture journalism about these Black Mirror-esque abodes. “The Anxiety of Influencers: Educating the TikTok Generation” transports readers to a wildfire-engulfed Los Angeles, where he spends five days shadowing a crew of "well-complected," college-aged collab house residents as they seek fame and fortune in the wilds of the American influencer industry.

Barrett's is the best piece we've read about the phenomenon—and not just because of its pitch-perfect detailing of a world where your every word, White Claw bender, and Macarena-simple dance move becomes a vector for hundreds of thousands of views. More than a work of cultural anthropology, it's a searing indictment of for-profit social media, one that connects the worlds of influencing, higher education, and journalism to excavate the existential anguish we all face as we negotiate how much of ourselves we want to share with the world. That is, to the extent that it is even possible to conceive of a self at all beyond the one we project for others online: Though "the angle of our pose may be different," he writes, "all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm."

Join us for a conversation about life in a TikTok mansion, navigating a world that asks us "to create [ourselves] in full view of the public," and Barrett's new book of essays, Lost in Summerland. Much like the piece, it’s an exploration of the collapse of the grand narrative in American culture and the bizarre fascinations and ideologies that are sweeping society in its wake.

Read more by Barrett Swanson

“The Anxiety of Influencers: Educating the TikTok Generation”

“Lost in Summerland: At the world’s largest gathering of psychics and mediums, two brothers confront a painful secret”

Lost in Summerland is out now via Counterpoint Press

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There are plenty of reasons to complain about music journalism these days.

If you're a music journalist, the shrinking career prospects and low wages are probably the first thing that come to mind—along with the feeling that it's becoming harder to land a pitch on an artist or developing news story if it doesn't seem destined to hit the algorithmic jackpot. If you're an artist or casual reader, you might feel, to borrow a phrase from writer Soraya Roberts, like the craft is "drowning" in a culture of sameness—endlessly litigating the fashion choices and 280-character utterances of the same handful of big pop stars at the expense of other voices and communities that need to be heard.

Or maybe you're of the mind that the writing itself leaves something to be desired. In an age of declining advertising revenue, prompting for-profit publications to cut back on headcount while prioritizing rapid-fire output and page views at all costs, this isn't necessarily writers' fault, but we can't say we always disagree. (Though seriously, if you’re looking for some gorgeous music writing, read New York Magazine critic and recent Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Jenkins. Congrats Craig!)

Which brings us to the question we want to talk about on this week's episode: Has music journalism lost its way?

Earlier this week, the debate bubbled up on music Twitter after a user named @cllnsmith posted a viral joke about Pitchfork that (understandably) made a lot of people in the music journo community pretty mad. The timing, for our own opportunistic purposes, was perfect, because we happened to be putting the finishing touches on an episode with veteran music journalist and NPR music critic Ann Powers, inspired by a Facebook post she published that offered a refreshingly nuanced take on the forces beleaguering the field.

"Here's something I think music writers might want to think/talk about," she wrote. "The rise of the quick react/hot take colliding with the unmanageable proliferation of accessible music releases and streaming platforms' algorithmic favoritism of the very few have combined to enforce media focus on pop's 1 per cent to the extreme."

Noting the extent to which underground and mid-level artists appear to have been crowded out of the conversation, she raises a thought-provoking question: "Is this a correlation to the rise of the one per cent in other aspects of the culture?”

Lucky for us, Ann was kind enough to join us to talk about how we got here. And as someone who has been chronicling American pop music and youth culture on the ground for nearly four decades, from the scrappy alt weekly scene of 1980s of San Francisco to the august halls of the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, she seemed like the perfect person to help us make sense of the shifting role of the music journalist, along with the economic, technological, and wider cultural forces that have shaped it.

There's no denying that a robust music press is crucial for the future of the industry and the artists trying to find their way within it. But it's hard to chart a path forward without getting clear on what it is we're losing when we lament music journalism's decline. What is the point of music journalism and criticism? Why did we need it in the first place? What remains—even in the era of streaming and social media—that makes it still important to have now?

Join Emilie and Andrea as we go long on these questions with Ann and compare notes on our respective journeys through the field.

Follow Ann on Twitter

Read Ann’s latest book, Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music

Check out Turning the Tables, an ongoing NPR Music series Ann spearheaded dedicated to “refocusing the canon on stories and voices that have been overlooked, marginalized or hidden in plain sight”

Read Ann’s 50-year retrospective on Joni Mitchell’s Blue

Read Ann’s 2020 year-end essay, “Diary of a Fugue Year”

Listen to Ann talk about Prince on BBC Radio 4

Read more

“On flooding: Drowning the culture in sameness” (Soraya Roberts, Longreads)

“Can music journalism transcend its access problem?” (Jeremy Gordon, CJR)

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Hey friends.

This week, you’re getting pure, unfiltered Emilie and Andrea. It's our first episode without a guest—something we've been wanting to do since we started this podcast—and we'll be digging into a phenomenon that has been on our mind a lot lately: The rise of the so-called "creator" economy, and the possibilities and perils of a model of cultural patronage grounded in a very specific type of relationship between producers and fans.

We're talking about parasocial interaction, the phenomenon whereby a cultural producer fosters a kind of illusory, (mostly) one-sided intimacy with fans—sometimes for pay on the internet. Parasocial interaction isn't a new concept, but it's par for the course in a world where it's pretty much impossible to build a career as a creative person without sharing a constant stream of thoughts, intimate confessions, and images from your life.

And these days, it's hard to ignore the extent to which it seems to be driving some of the biggest culture stories of 2021: The controversial rise of Substack as a destination for some of the media's biggest names, including particularly polarizing ones; celebrities and tech CEOs hosting virtual fireside chats on ClubHouse, a social audio app that recently introduced a tipping feature; Hollywood actors selling on-demand personalized video messages to fans on Cameo; and a pandemic-related surge in artists and musicians flocking to Patreon, often because traditional industry structures have failed them.

As is increasingly the case with these crowd-funded patronage models, consumers aren't just signing up for exclusive pieces of writing, audio, or visual art; they're paying for access to the creator or personality themselves—something we saw happen in real time last month with the unveiling of Sidechannel, a new Discord channel where readers pay a small sum of money each month to discuss the news of the day with their favorite Substack writers. (For the launch, fans were treated to a high-profile parasocial encounter in the form of a virtual fireside chat with Mark Zuckerberg, who used the opportunity to talk about some new audio features that Facebook is rolling out for creators, tools offering yet another avenue for cultural producers to capitalize on these parasocial dynamics).

On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we argue that this underexplored facet of the creative economy, however commonplace it has become, represents a seismic shift in what it means to be a creative person. Is this new parasocial landscape a great leveling of the playing field, a genuine step in the direction of more democratized culture? Or is it a system where a small number of producers will rise to the top while others perform a lot of free or under-compensated labor? In a recent piece on the creator economy for ARTnews, writer Kyle Chayka asked what is perhaps the most important question: What does a landscape where people make money through maintaining constant contact with fans and supporters mean for the future of art and creativity itself?

Come join us—parasocial style—as we air our hopes, fears and grievances. Full disclosure: We'll be sharing a bit about our experiences with Substack, and our thoughts on the platform, too.

Read more:

"In the New Digital Economy, Are Artists Creators?" (Kyle Chayka)

Excerpts from "Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance" (Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl)

"Why We're Freaking Out About Substack" (Ben Smith)

"In Queers We Trust. All Others Pay Cash" (Jude Ellison Sady Doyle)

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While scrolling on Doordash one night last year, co-host Emilie Friedlander made a strange discovery: She stumbled upon a listing for a restaurant called F*cking Good Pizza. Only, as far as she could tell, it didn't seem to actually exist.

The restaurant’s eye-catching name and uncanny photos, with menu items like “Fcking Good Pizzas” and “Fcking Good Sides,” suggested that it had a very specific audience in mind (read: millennial, gen z, and extremely online). But it didn't have a website, and she couldn't track down any concrete information about it. And while the Doordash page listed the same address as a pizzeria she knew in the North Carolina city where she currently resides, she quickly discovered that there were dozens of F*cking Good Pizzas in cities across the country, many of which appeared to share an address with an existing brick-and-mortar restaurant or ghost kitchen.

To make matters even more confusing, some of these locations seemed to be operating as many as ten of these restaurant brands at once. And as she wrote in her recent long read for VICE, “The Mysterious Case of the Fcking Good Pizza,” the names of these establishments—some of which she found in places as far flung as Australia and the United Arab Emirates—could "sometimes seem as though they were engineered expressly to invite online snark": OMG BBQ LOL. Big Hotdog Energy. Send Noods. Btch Don’t Grill My Cheese.

The piece chronicles her months-long quest to uncover the origin of this particular cluster of clickbait restaurants—a microcosm of the fast-growing trend of virtual restaurants, or online-only brands that prepare food for delivery only. We won’t spoil what she uncovered—we want you to listen to this week’s podcast!—but we'll just say that her research kept leading her back to CloudKitchens, the new company from Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick.

Along the way, she spoke to restaurant owners in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Los Angeles about their experiences cooking for these virtual brands (hint: the pandemic is a major protagonist in this story) and came across an essay by a writer who had fallen down a similar rabbit hole, 3,000 miles away: Emma Kemp, an artist and designer who teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design in L.A.

Published by Bakersfield—the research studio she founded with the filmmaker Matthew Altman Vega—“Ghost ops: Counterfeit Kitchens in the pandemic age” is a fascinating meditation on the systems of social signaling embedded in the design of these virtual brands, the phenomenon’s ties to broader trends in visual culture and advertising, and how its emphasis on "style over substance" can feel very of a piece with what it feels like to live in L.A. in this cultural moment.

On this week's show, Emma and Emilie compare their findings and join Andrea for a conversation on the dizzying world of online-only restaurants, ghost kitchens, and Big Tech’s encroachment upon what we eat.

Follow Emma on Twitter

Follow Bakersfield on Instagram

Check out more of Emma’s work, including a recent essay on the artist Joshua Citarella, via her website

For ongoing coverage of tech in food, visit Matt Newberg’s HNGRY

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In late February, Grimes and her brother Mac Boucher made $5.8 million in under 20 minutes by selling copies of two short videos on the blockchain, among other digital artworks: The roughly 30-second clips, “Earth” and “Mars,” featured a cherub floating in outer space, set to a bit of spacey music. Days before, the artist Christian Torres sold a gif of a famous cartoon cat at auction for almost $580,000—even though the meme had long been available in the form of a YouTube video, where it went viral in the way that makes things kind of belong to all of us.

Kings of Leon, an act hardly associated with the cutting edge of music and technology, followed in their footsteps on March 5, when it became the first major rock band to release an album as an NFT, or non-fungible token, which loosely translates to a kind of digital certificate of ownership that exists on a blockchain. The release, When You See Yourself, netted somewhere between $1.4 and $2 million in five days, and the auction isn’t even over yet. Tory Lanez, Mike Shinoda, Steve Aoki, and Shawn Mendes have jumped on the bandwagon, too.

For fans of independent music and culture, it’s been hard to bear witness to the NFT’s sudden eruption in the mainstream conversation without feeling a bit… queasy. Dizzy? We spent most of the first season of The Culture Journalist talking about how the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated the existing structural inequalities of the culture industry. How is the spectacle of already-popular artists making unimaginable sums of money by selling their work as speculative assets on the blockchain supposed to be anything but a reminder of the excesses of financialization and the widening gap between the rich and the poor?

At points, the frivolity almost felt like a troll: After we wrapped recording for this week’s interview, we logged online to discover that artist Ryder Ripps and his new bride-to-be, Azealia Banks, had used the technology to sell a 24-minute sex tape as an NFT, for $17,000. That many of the beneficiaries of these buzzworthy sales donated a portion of the proceeds to charity almost seemed like a tacit acknowledgement of the cupidity in the air. (Although maybe the Ryder Ripps and Azealia Banks stunt was just supposed to be some kind of commentary on that dynamic.)

Image courtesy of Mat Dryhurst.

For Emilie and Andrea, one question in particular stood out: What does the unfolding NFT craze mean for the future of music—and particularly, for independent artists? To help us make sense of this strange new chapter in the cultural economy, we enlisted Mat Dryhurst, a Berlin-based artist, technologist, and teacher who you’ve probably seen commenting on such brain-bending matters on Twitter—and who co-hosts the fantastic Interdependence podcast with Holly Herndon. He’s been exploring the possibilities of blockchain technology in his work for some time, and is a firm believer that it has the potential to rewire the economics of independent music from the ground up—just not in the way that you might expect, judging from the recent hullabaloo.

We spoke to Mat about how NFTs work, how cryptocurrency may represent a potential antidote to streaming's devaluation of musical value, and why the boom-and-bust speculation market we're seeing right now is only just the "GeoCities era" of this technology's potential.

Follow Mat on Twitter

Listen to Interdependence

Support Interdependence

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Hey everyone. We know that it’s been a couple months since we’ve been in touch—we’ve been busy planning out our next batch of episodes, performing various income-earning activities, managing our social media intake, and just generally taking a moment to recover from the hellscape that was 2020. But we’re excited to be back. And we’re especially thrilled to be kicking off our second season today with a conversation on a subject that is near and dear to hearts: counterculture.

It's a term that has been used to describe pretty much every major, music-adjacent youth movement of the 20th century, from the Beats and the hippies, to 70s hip-hop and punk, to the darkened warehouses in Detroit where techno was born. For some of us, counterculture conjures memories of specific spaces, like the smelly basement where you took in your first college noise show. For others it speaks more to the abstract idea of carving out a safer, utopian alternative to the messy, exploitative, inequitable reality we live in every day.

But is counterculture—and underground culture as a whole—even possible in the era of the Internet? Today, we'll be talking about what counterculture is, what it means, and whether it can even exist at a time when pretty much every interpersonal interaction we have takes place on social media, for everyone to see. To guide us, we've enlisted the powerful brain of Caroline Busta, a Berlin-based writer and editor and co-founder of the media aggregator and podcast New Models, which is always a source of intriguing food-for-thought on the intersection of art, cultural production, and technology.

At the top of the year, Carly published an essay on Document Journal that tapped into a feeling we'd been turning over for a long time: "To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to above all betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self," she writes. Whether you're a life-long weird music head, or a Marxist art theory nerd, or somebody who is simply having a hard time finding community inside the 280-character confines of Web 2.0, you'll probably find something to chew on in the piece, which is called "The Internet Didn't Kills Counterculture—You Just Won't Find It On Instagram." Either way, we hope you'll enjoy our conversation with Carly.

Follow Carly on Twitter

Check out the New Models website and Patreon

Some further reading on the topic, courtesy of Carly

Joshua Citarella, 20 Interviews, 2019

Joshua Citarella & Cade lectures for SimSociety: Worldbuilding & Political Identity Formation on MMORPG Earth, Feb 2020

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Princeton, 2017)

Achile Mbembe, Thoughts on the Planetary, New Frame, (Sept 2019)

Joanna Kavenna, “Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy’” The Guardian, 2019

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago Univ. Press, 2006)

Thomas R. Bates, "Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony," Journal of the History of Ideas (Apr-Jun 1975)

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

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The Culture Journalist is an independent journalism project that relies on word-of-mouth and is funded entirely by listeners. To help us get this project off the ground, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For a small monthly contribution, you'll get a shout-out on the podcast and other bonus goodies. Even if you can’t contribute, we hope you’ll tell a friend or two about it.

Hello there. Welcome to the last installment of our first ten-episode season. We’ll be taking a bit of time away from publishing new episodes to eat pumpkin pie and plot out what is shaping up to be a very exciting season two, along with some other surprises we have in store. But before that happens, we want to take a moment to reflect back on a year that has challenged pretty much everything we thought we understood about culture and the economics of being a creative person.

We started this podcast in the middle of a pandemic that has put thousands of journalists out of work; we felt like we were running out of places to tell stories about culture and labor issues in the arts right at the time that those stories were becoming more important than ever to tell. Since then, we’ve spoken to people from many different corners of the culture industry about what their experience of this year has been—and the deep-seated structural inequalities that the pandemic is bringing to the fore.

From musicians adjusting to an industry that has moved entirely online, to journalists fighting for increased workplace protections and newsroom diversity, to independent venue operators banding together to petition Congress for federal relief—it’s hard to avoid the fact that creative workers have spent this year asking American society at large, and the economic and government powers that be, to simply recognize the value of the work that they do. No one wants to live in a world without art and music. But, as we discuss in part one of this week’s episode, the events of 2020 have been a startling reminder of how far America has to go when it comes to recognizing that creative work is, well, work.

In part two, we speak with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, a member of Providence punk band Downtown Boys, about his work with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, a new coalition of artists and music professionals that has spent the past six months confronting labor challenges within the music industry. Their latest action, Justice at Spotify, which has 19,000 signatures and counting, puts a very specific premium on the work musicians do: Faced with a loss of touring revenue during the pandemic—the biggest income source for most musicians—they are asking for a penny every time someone streams their music.

We hope you enjoy the show, and thank you for joining us this season. If you have any feedback to share—or want to suggest a topic—kindly drop us a line here.

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Damn, time flies when you’re stuck at home in front of a computer. This week’s missive, our ninth, is the last you’ll be hearing from us before Election Day 2020. And because it’s pretty hard to think about anything other than the brain-melting insanity of American political discourse right now, we thought we’d bring on one of our favorite culture writers—someone who also happens to be an intrepid labor reporter and newsroom union organizer—to discuss just that.

Philly-based freelance writer Kim Kelly is a columnist at Teen Vogue, the former metal editor at Noisey, and the author of Fight Like Hell, a forthcoming book on the history of the American labor movement. She’s also one the few journalists we know who identifies openly as an anarchist and anti-fascist. This makes her the perfect person to help us wrap our mind around how those fringe utopian movements, or some misguided, fact-agnostic conception of them, ended up in the crosshairs of the American culture war this year—“terrorist” designations, “anarchist jurisdictions” and all.

We spoke to Kim about some of the basic facts that the Trump administration and the mainstream media alike are getting wrong about these movements and their activities, the challenges of being a journalist as well as an activist, and why objectivity in journalism is a false construct in the first place. She also opened up to us about the book she’s writing—and why she believes that every story is a labor story.

Follow Kim on Twitter

Read more by Kim

“We Must Sever Law Enforcement from the Labor Movement” (The Nation)

“After Eddie Van Halen’s Death, Heavy Metal Must Confront Its Mortality” (GQ)

“Care for a Cup of Satanic Camomile?” (The New York Times)

Fight Like Hell, Kim’s forthcoming history of the labor movement, is out in Fall 2022 via One Signal.

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Earlier this season, we examined the live music industry’s fight for survival in a pandemic that has put concerts indefinitely on hold. This week, we’re taking a look at what this year has been like for musicians — especially when it comes to navigating an industry that has moved almost entirely online.

Faced with a sudden loss of touring income, far and away the biggest revenue source for most musicians, artists are contending with a host of novel challenges when it comes to making a living from their music, from figuring out how to record professional-sounding music at home, to adapting to a live-stream economy that isn’t exactly lucrative for most artists. When you factor in a broken streaming revenue model and the unspoken mandate to maintain a constant presence on social media, it’s easy to see why some musicians feel like they are doing more work than ever before — for increasingly diminishing returns.

On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we discuss the pain points and possibilities of the digital hustle with two artists who are living it firsthand. New York-via-Miami DJ Jubilee, who also happens to be one of the funniest people we know on Twitter, shares what it was like to go from bringing her eclectic sensibility as a selector to festivals around the world to playing parties on Instagram and Twitch. Eventually, she decided to start her own record label, Magic City — partly out of a desire to support other musicians through this difficult time.

Los Angeles composer Shruti Kumar, host of Dublab’s Let’s Shake on Itradio show, discusses how a canceled recording session at the beginning of the pandemic prompted her to team up with some friends and launch a new social network called Sound Travels. Originally a job board for out-of-work musicians, Sound Travels has since evolved into a space where artists can swap home-recording resources and connect in the fight for a more equitable music industry.

Along the way, we discuss how this nightmarish year has also been a time of great community-building and innovation—and how as pandemic brings to light long-standing racial, gender, and economic disparities in the industry, there is probably no better time to rip it up and start again.

Follow Jubilee on Twitter

Jubilee’s forthcoming record, Are We There Yet? is out on October 23. Purchase a copy from Magic City, her new label—and join her for a virtual release party on October 24.

Follow Shruti on Instagram

Learn more about Sound Travels here

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Confused about what’s going on with TikTok? So are we. But it’s probably the most “2020” story of 2020 — a perfect storm of geopolitics, national security, social media, pop music, and of course, Donald Trump. In August, Trump issued an executive order promising to ban the platform from operating in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the platform to an American bidder by November.

It’s not implausible that the President’s distaste for TikTok began when a group of K-Pop-loving teens used it to sabotage his rally in Tulsa in June. But he’s also been framing the platform as a vehicle for Chinese espionage and propaganda — much to the chagrin of free-speech advocates and the platform’s own users, who argue that banning TikTok constitutes a violation of the First Amendment, on par with social media censorship in China.

Just this past Sunday, a Federal judge overturned Trump’s order to halt downloads in U.S. app stores. But even if conversations with prospective American buyers like Oracle and Walmart do materialize in a sale by the November 12 deadline, we’re probably going to be talking about the political ramifications of the Gen Z-focused juggernaut for some time—simply by dint of the fact that TikTok is a massively popular social media platform, with 850 million monthly active users and counting. And massively popular social media platforms tend to give rise to new forms of political behavior.

On TikTok, we’re already seeing Black Lives Matter protest memes vying for attention with output from Ted Kaczynski-obsessed anarcho-primitivists, far-right “hype houses,” and self-styled “cults.” Given this, the platform certainly appears to be a more powerful tool for political communication than millennial-generation skeptics would suspect. But is TikTok the cultural propaganda machine that conservatives are making it out to be? We hit up friend-of-the-pod Kevin Munger, an assistant professor of political science and data analytics at Penn State, to find out.

Kevin, who studies how social media and other technologies are changing political communication, recently teamed up with some colleagues to produce the first large-scale quantitative descriptive analysis of “TikTok Politics,” examining user behavior across 712,193 political TikToks from 5,295 accounts. On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we discuss why TikTok’s unusually information-dense interface—one where users consume a rapid stream of televisual information while responding with home-made videos of their own—makes it such an ideological force-multiplier. We also discuss the social signifiers embedded within its “embodied memes,” how songs like Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” drive conversations both inside and across ideological lines, and the app’s role in incubating extremely niche subcultures like “Zoomer Marxists Who Hate Golf.” Many thanks to journalist Drew Millard for coming along for the ride.

Read more from Kevin

“Fifteen Seconds of Fame: TikTok and the Democratization of Mobile Video on Social Media” (with Benjamin Guinaudeau and Fabio Votta)

“Theorizing TikTok: On the Political Implications of Lil Nas X, Tekashi 69 and Childish Gambino”

“Maybe It’s Not YouTube Algorithm That Radicalizes People” (Wired, Paris Martineau)

Follow Kevin on Twitter

Follow the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, a publication he’s launching with Eszter Hargittai and Andy Guess, on Twitter

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This week on The Culture Journalist, we’re taking a break from 2020—who doesn’t need one?—and traveling back to a time in music and culture that we’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic for. We’re talking about the halcyon days of 2013, a year that was full-to-bursting with exciting sounds from the underground, including DJ Rashad's Double Cup, Arca's mixtape &&&&&, and Deafheaven's Sunbather. It also felt like an unending onslaught of unprecedented Big Pop Moments, from Kanye West dismantling the avant-garde/pop divide with Yeezus, to Miley Cyrus sparking conversations about cultural appropriation with her hip-hop-inspired Bangerz, to Beyoncé reinventing the album cycle with the surprise-drop of her self-titled record in December.

2013 feels like another universe today (this was, after all, just the start of Obama's second term), but it also marked a sea change for the industry and music culture as a whole—one that this week's guest, veteran music journalist Larry Fitzmaurice, has been spending the past few months teasing apart in "The Year that Everything Changed," a serialized essay series for his excellent Last Donut of the Night Substack.

On this week's episode, we reflect on 2013 as a year that the Internet would transform every aspect of music as we knew it, from the way it sounded, to how it was released, to the media’s role in covering it.

Read more by Larry:

Last Donut of the Night

Tame Impala, Chillwave, and Other Dispatches from the Vibe Generation

19 Thoughts on Radiohead’s In Rainbows

We’ve Got a File on You: Thurston Moore

Follow Larry on Twitter.

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Everyone in the music industry remembers that chilly day in early March when Austin’s SXSW announced it was pulling the plug on this year’s festival. Reading the news from a distance, it felt surreal—a confirmation that an invisible menace we didn’t quite understand away was much closer than we thought, and it was going to effect all of us. Six months later, our cities are slowly opening back up, for better or for worse—but America’s live music industry is still on pause, with no clear indication of when we’ll be able to gather together in public again and feel the mysterious sensation of a bassline vibrating up through the floor.

For independent artists who rely on touring as their primary source of income, the pandemic has been financially devastating; for independent venues who host them when they come to town, it’s an extinction-level threat. Part of the problem is that nobody knows when it’ll be safe to open for business again, mostly because nobody knows when we’ll finally have access to a vaccine. But the live music industry runs on razor-thin margins to begin with, and even with no money coming through the door, the bills for mortgage, rent, utilities, and other operating expenses are still coming due.

If music is an important part of your life, the consequences are almost too upsetting to fathom: In a survey by the National Independent Venue Association, an organization uniting 2,800 entertainment establishments and promoters from across the U.S. in the fight to save America’s stages, some 90 percent of independent venues reported that they will be forced to shutter permanently in a few months without relief from the Federal government.

James Moody, owner of beloved Austin venue The Mohawk, was on the ground the day the city became ground zero for the pandemic in the music industry. On this week’s episode, he takes us behind the scenes to describe what the past six months have been like for the people who work tirelessly to bring music to our cities every night of the week—and what the pandemic means for the Austin scene and the communities that depend on it. We also talk with Audrey Fix Schaefer, director of communications at NIVA and Washington D.C.’s iconic 9:30 Club, about why the fate of live music in this country rests in part on an upcoming vote in Congress regarding two pieces of legislation, the RESTART Act and the Save Our Stages Act—and how the crisis has brought a notoriously competitive corner of the music industry together.

Read more about NIVA:

Under threat of closure, famed music venues unite to lobby Congress

How to Help Save Our Stages

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These days, it’s getting harder to imagine a future where America is home to a robust local media. Part of that comes down to a punishing financial climate for local news, compounded by the ravages of corporate consolidation and private equity and venture capital ownership: In a 2018 report, the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Media and Journalism found that more than one out of every five newspapers had closed over the preceding 15 years, and that some 1,300 communities across the country had no newspaper at all.

Equally disturbing, though, is how local coverage seems to be shifting: In a study of 100 communities located outside of major news markets from that same year, Duke University found that only 17 percent of local news articles in circulation were region-specific—and that more than half of the stories published were syndicated from elsewhere. As the need for up-to-the-minute public health information amid the coronavirus pandemic drives an uptick in local news subscriptions, the scale has likely tipped at least slightly in favor of journalists producing more original and localized news. Still, as long as the media industry remains beholden to a broken ad-revenue model—one predicated on capturing as many eyeballs as possible, on social media platforms that are largely agnostic of geography, for infinitesimal returns—it’s hard to imagine a major course-correction any time soon.

Of course, the crisis isn’t unique to small towns. This week’s guest, Los Angeles native Jeff Weiss, is no stranger to the heartbreak of watching the newspaper the shaped your understanding of the city where you grew up, and the people and institutions within it that are worth fighting for, become a shell of its former self. Three years ago, when a group of Republican-donor investors purchased the LA Weekly and laid off almost the entirety of its editorial staff, the writer and editor was so rattled by the gutting of his favorite alternative weekly that he organized a boycott of the publication. Then he teamed up with a group of local journalists and editors—many of them, like Jeff himself, former contributors of the alternative culture bible—to start a print magazine called The LAnd.

Focused on telling local culture and politics stories from a distinctively Los Angeles perspective, the publication is celebrating the release of its third issue this summer. Fittingly with the events that birthed it, the theme this go-around is the future of Los Angeles. Jeff, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, wrote over 6,000 words about how a corrupt and racist police force, vampiric real-estate developers, and a bloated and ineffectual local bureaucracy prevent the city for actually living up to his reputation as one of the most progressive cities in the world; The Culture Journalist’s Andrea Domanick, another former LA Weekly contributor, reported a series of interviews with local venue owners about what a post-pandemic Los Angeles nightlife might look like. And there’s also a great piece about the future of the city’s dim sum scene.

Over the past 15 years, Jeff has developed something of a cult following for his imagistic writing style and tireless advocacy of indigenous Los Angeles culture—both through his rap-centric POW site, which he has expanded to include a record label since he started it in 2005, and through writing for places like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, and The Ringer. On this week’s episode, we talk about the stories that don’t get told when local media disappears, Weiss’ ongoing coverage of rapper Drakeo the Ruler’s legal battle, and why the place where you live will always be a much better source of meaning and inspiration than the Internet.

Read more by Jeff

“Policy of Truth”

“What I Saw at the Revolution: A First-person Account of the L.A. Protests”

“The Age of (Not That) Innocence”

Follow Jeff on Twitter

Join Jeff and Andrea this coming Wednesday, September 9 at 6pm PST for a LAnd-hosted panel discussion about the future of the music industry in Los Angeles, with Kyambo "Hip-Hop" Joshua, Cypress Moreno, and Rosencrans Vic. It’s on Zoom, so you don’t have to actually be in Los Angeles.

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Back in April, The New York Times reported that an estimated 36,000 U.S. media workers had been laid off or furloughed—or taken pay cuts—in the first month of the pandemic alone. One of them was this week’s guest and friend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, a North Carolina-born journalist who got his start writing about hip-hop at VICE’s Noisey and has spent the past few years writing about things like golf, politics, and Hustler founder Larry Flynt.

Drew was working as a features editor at The Outline until early April, when he logged in to a Friday-morning meeting and received the news that the beloved tech, politics, and culture site was ceasing publication immediately—less than three-and-a-half-years into its existence, and a year after its acquisition by Bustle Media. (Read Jeremy Gordon’s heartfelt post-mortem here). That day, Drew joined the ranks of hundreds of independent journalists and critics—our co-hosts Andrea Domanick and Emilie Friedlander included—faced with charting a meaningful path forward within a culture media landscape that, even before the coronavirus hit, seemed to be teetering on the brink of financial collapse.

This week’s episode of The Culture Journalist hits extremely close to home—not least because Drew indulged our request to walk us through what it was like to lose his job in the middle of a pandemic, triggering memories of our own lay-off experiences (are you really a journalist if you haven’t been laid off?). Mostly, though, we chew over some of the tricker, more existential questions that are coming up for us as we navigate this strange new chapter in culture journalism: How do we maintain our passion for reporting stories and writing criticism when it feels like the industry is crumbling around us? What even is the role of a culture journalist in this moment of economic and political turmoil—and when the artists and industries we cover are struggling for survival themselves? And is Drew playing too much online poker?

Read more by Drew Millard

“How Online Poker Became My Pandemic Self-Care”

“Well, At Least There’s Golf”

“Oh My God, It’s Dababy”

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Earlier this Summer, The Culture Journalist’s Emilie Friedlander and independent journalist Joy Crane published a 10,000-word investigation about a self-proclaimed “cult” that emerged out of the irony-obsessed Weird Facebook scene of the mid-00s. The piece, titled “Inside the Social Media Cult that Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything,” follows the story of a musician named Matthew who meets two strangers on the Internet during his sophomore year in college, then leaves his life behind to join them in building an online spiritual community called Tumple.

What seems at first like a utopian art project rooted in themes of racial and economic justice devolves over time into a tangled web of financial, emotional, and sexual control—especially after the organization evolves into a roving live-in community called the DayLife Army, which conscripts a small group of idealistic young people into a life of homelessness, punishing content and revenue quotas, and total personal sacrifice.

It’s a story that is as heavy as it is multi-layered, at once a harrowing look at life inside a high-control group and an examination of the strange new forms these relational systems can take within the specific context of millennial Internet culture. On this episode, we go behind the scenes with Emilie and Joy to discuss the year they spent reporting this story together; the group’s complicated relationship with social media, influencer culture, and contemporary social justice movements; and the challenges of navigating investigative reporting projects as a freelancer.

Joy Crane is a journalist who writes at the intersection of science, tech, and society.

Read more by Joy

Do You Really Know What Bitcoin Is?

Scientists Behind “Puppy Dog Eyes” Study Explain the Evolution of Cuteness

Follow Joy on Twitter.

Emilie Friedlander is an independent culture journalist and co-host of The Culture Journalist podcast.

Read more by Emilie

There's No Such Thing as Independent Music in the Age of Coronavirus

Alice Waters' Fascinating and Infuriating Quest for Perfection

Follow Emilie on Twitter.

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The Culture Journalist is a podcast about the wild west of culture, counterculture, and media in the year 2020. Think of it as your guide to understanding the arts, politics, and the anxieties of everyday life through the lens of culture reporting—hosted by Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick, two freelance journalists from opposite sides of the country.

We’re kicking off the pod this week with VICE senior writer Kristin Corry, a New York-based culture journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of music and race. When protests against police violence and institutional racism erupted across the country earlier this Spring, Kristin wrote a powerful essay called “The Music Industry Fails Black People Every Day,” dissecting the ways in which majority-white institutions profit off of Black culture while under-compensating Black creatives and “valuing us as entertainment instead of people.” We spoke to Kristin about the overt and covert ways that systemic racism makes itself felt across the industry, the role of music in the protest movement, and how underrepresentation in newsrooms has shaped her approach to covering Black music.

Read more by Kristin

Breland’s Ambitious Country Rap is More than a Trend

The 2010s Were the Decade When Black Protest Music Went Mainstream

Kristin does not have a Twitter (smart!), but you can keep up with her writing here.

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Welcome to The Culture Journalist, a podcast about the wild west of culture, counterculture, and the media in the year 2020. Think of it as your guide to understanding the arts, politics, and the anxieties of everyday life through the lens of culture reporting—hosted by Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick, two freelance journalists from opposite sides of the country.

Culture doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are the artists who create it, and then there are the people who help us find it, love it, and make meaning of it. If you've ever loved a song or a novel, how did you find out about it? That's where culture journalists come in—the critics, reporters, and storytellers who help parse the content on your feed, unearth stories, and take a first pass at history.

We’re living history right now: Over the past few months, venues and movie theaters and record stores have shuttered across the country, leaving thousands of creative workers out of a job. Young people have been taking the streets in cities across the United States, demanding justice for victims of racist police violence and a more equitable future for all. Technology is producing sweeping shifts in the production and distribution of creative work, and the cultural conversation is evolving faster than we can keep up.

But as publications fold and journalists are laid off in record numbers, it can feel like our little corner of the media industry is collapsing at the very moment when America needs it the most. So we started this podcast to spotlight the people that are helping us make sense of where culture and counterculture are going—and, in a way, since art is a reflection of life, where the world is going too.

On each episode of The Culture Journalist, we’ll be bringing you conversations with our favorite reporters and critics—as well as artists, academics, creatives, and organizers—about their lives, their work, and the stories that we can't stop thinking about. Be sure to stick around until the end, when we answer questions from listeners seeking advice or a second opinion on all things culture journalism-related—you can email us one, too.

The Culture Journalist is an independent journalism project that relies on word-of-mouth and is entirely self-funded. To help us get this project off the ground and assist us in covering production, music, and labor costs, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For a small monthly contribution, you'll get access to episodes in full after the first two months, a shout-out on the podcast, and other bonus goodies.

If you can’t chip in but like what you’re hearing, we hope you’ll tell a couple of friends about it.

Talk soon,

Emilie and Andrea

Special thanks to Mark Donica of S U R V I V E for composing our theme music.

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