NM Greenroom | VICE magazine’s Ben Ditto & Kevin Lee Kharas (2026)

"Anyone that claims they understand the world — this immediately marks them out as a fraud." — Kevin Lee Kharas

After the imperial collapse (40 global offices, thousands of employees, bankruptcy), VICE magazine is now run by a lean, London-based team — and it is making one of the best culture publications currently in circulation. Ben Ditto (Vice global editorial director; founder of Ditto Nation; creative dir. Yaya Labs; founding creative dir. Dazed Beauty) and Kevin Lee Kharas (Vice editor-in-chief and co-founder of the electronic duo Real Lies) come on New Models to discuss their current “Not The Photo Issue” (feat. Dean Kissick x Adam Curtis, Bertie Brandes, Mat Dryhurst, Günseli Yalcinkaya, Duncan Wilson, and others) and their media philosophy at large. 

Subscribe to VICE: “Not The Photo Issue”

For more: NM49 | GPT Ditto w/ Ben Ditto

We’re joined by media scholars Daniël de Zeeuw & Sal Hagen, who have been closely tracking the weirder end of the internet for over a decade—their research and analysis of 4chan has made them low-key legends within internet studies. As 4chan’s logic is now pervasive across the social web, Daniël and Sal, together with their colleagues at the Amsterdam-based OILab, have been modeling novel ways of thinking about our current communication space that travel well beyond the network media / public sphere template to something far stranger — and more accurate.

To access this episode in full plus 100s more, become a paid subscriber 🫶

For more: Hagen, S., de Zeeuw, D., & Venturini, T. (2025). Digital Rhythmanalysis: Studying Memetic and Affective Rhythms on the Post-Viral Web. Platforms & Society, 2.

de Zeeuw, D., Birchall, C., & Knight, P. (2025). On Psyop Realism. Cultural Politics, 21(2), 240-257

Hagen, S. (2024) Reactionary Rhythm: Quali-quantitative studies of 4chan/pol/. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam

Hagen, S., & de Zeeuw, D. (2023). Based and confused: Tracing the political connotations of a memetic phrase across the web. Big Data & Society, 10(1)

We speak often in the New Model sphere about scanning and sensing rather than reading—communication through vibes. Peli Grietzer is a comparative literature PhD (Harvard) who has spent over a decade developing a rigorous theory of what a “vibe” actually is, how we increasingly follow ineffable cues to navigate our world and these, taken together, in fact exist as empirical objects in mathematical space. On this episode, Peli joins NM to talk about his work for a more general audience.

For more: @peligrietzer (x)

Substack: Second Balcony

Theory of a Vibe ’25

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3 KEY POINTS (summarized by New Models) …

Back in Berlin to show their new film work “The End of Theater” at Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, artists Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff drop by New Models to chat about that film’s primary set: New Theater Hollywood, the DIY theater they opened on Santa Monica Boulevard after decamping to LA in 2023. We discuss their layered process — creating a space that generates a scene, which produces its own art and dedicated star-system while also serving as source material, location, and cast for all that Max and Calla make in parallel — as a distinctly contemporary protocol for artmaking today. We also talk about the return of theater itself at a time when every physical place now feels like a potential set, whether for a vlog or an ICE raid, and performance online is constant. Does theater hit different in our neo-oral era? Does LA?

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For more: www.newtheaterhollywood.com & @newtheaterhollywood

See also: Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Verso, 1990)

Thom Anderson, LA Plays Itself (2003)

NM Podcast | Mise-en-TV w/ Calla Henkel (2022)

NM 77 | Calla Henkel on Art, Industry, and “Scrap” (2024)

NM Reads | Gideon Jacobs, “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” LA Review of Books (2026)Gideon Jacobs returns to NM with his third essay in a trilogy for the LA Review of Books that tracks, in real-time, the American Political machine’s delamination from everyday life. In “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” Gideon shows US politics both left and right as having become a read-write medium for collective creative expression more than material governance—a kind of kayfabe where ‘democracy’ takes the form of citizens co-creating storyline with their elected officials and everyone in office has an IMDB profile. Carly & Lil Internet intro this ep with a short conversation drawing out themes across this trilogy that feel particularly NM Canon. 

“Of course, long before any advanced communication technologies, humans had been drawn not just to stories but also to the possibility of living as characters within them. Story’s appeal had always been precisely that it’s not like reality. […] a dream of existing free from the pesky flaws intrinsic to reality: uncontrollability, unpredictability, vulnerability, mundanity, complexity, incoherence, confusion, pain.”

For more:Gideon Jacobs, “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” (Jan 2026)Gideon Jacobs, “Player One and Main Character,” (Apr 2025)Gideon Jacobs, “Trump l’Oeil,” (Nov 2024)

You’ve heard us reference the work of Jay Springett (aka @thejaymo) on nearly every pod this year — so with his new book Slop Machines of Loving Grace near completion, we invited Jay on the show to chat through some of its themes. The book takes 2008 as a breaking point, a moment where the late-20th century financial system imploded and, in its place, society was given a new operating system: one optimized for exocapitalism and shaped by “smartness,” a forceful symbiosis of finance and software.

On the ep, we discuss the rise of American “code-spaces” (e.g., apps, platforms, etc) and hyper-fragmented “data subjects” taking the place of the modern “individual.” “What happens,” Lil Internet asks, “when AI agents become not just tools but inhabitants of the world of human culture?

Subscribe to New Models as a paying member to unlock this episode plus hundreds more…

Chat with an Oct 2025 draft Jay’s book’s here.

Follow/subscribe/listen to more of Jay’s work at thejaymo.net

See also: NM85 | Jay Springett on “Worlds” as Medium (2024)

“Neo-orality” has been an important term in the New Models zone this year — but what exactly do we mean by it? 

With this two-part episode of NM Reads, we bring you two papers by the scholar Jacqueline Fendt, who is Emeritus Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at ESCP Business School in Paris, and — to the best of our knowledge — the first to define “neo-oral” in the way that we’ve come to use it.*  She also, as a Swiss corporate executive in her 70s, happens to have a lot to say about “vibes” and what she observes to be a titanic shift in human communication from democracy to, as she puts it, “vibrocacy.”

For Part 1 (this post), Lil Internet reads excerpts from: Jacqueline Fendt, “Democracy, Neo-Orality, and the Unraveling of Political Norms: What Can We Social and Political Scholars Do?” Open Journal of Political Science, Vol. 15, No. 3, (May 31, 2025) [Copyright: CC BY 4.0]

For Part 2 (forthcoming), Lil Internet reads excerpts from: Jacqueline Fendt, “Beyond Wicked: Vibocratic Problems in the Post-Truth Era” International Journal of Social Science Studies, Vo. 13, No. 2, (Redfame, Jun 27, 2025)

These papers have been vital to our thinking this fall. In the spirit of the neo-oral we’re sharing them with you here as Lil Internet produced audio with the hope that they will be as big of an unlock for you as they have been for us. 

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* Media theorist Walter J. Ong wrote about a “second orality” in 1971, and then more extensively in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, describing it as “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print.” Fendt cites Ong’s writing but goes much further, showing how the rise of “neo-orality” is fundamentally re-ordering human society: “By Neo-orality, we mean not just a return to oral habits,” Fendt writes, “but a deeper epistemic shift. It privileges immediacy over reflection, presence over argument, and shared emotional resonance over detached verification. Unlike classic orality, which relied on embodied presence, neo-orality travels across screens, memes, and livestreams.”

NM 91 | Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung on Jankspace (2025)

With their latest video essay, Welcome to Jankspace, Babes (2025) now streaming on DIS.art, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung come on the show to speak about what happens to the world and critically, all of us, our bodies, as capitalism lifts off from the human layer. 

Daniel Felstead leads the MA Fashion Media & Communications program at the London College of Fashion. Jenn Leung, also a lecturer at the University of Arts London, is a researcher and simulation developer. She has recently published papers on UE interfaces for brain organdies and agent behavior simulation in MIT’s Antikythera journal.

For more: @jennnital @felstead.daniel

Maya B. Kronic speaking at London College of Fashion, January 2025

Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace” October 100, Spring 2002

Olivia Kan-Sperling on her recent work, Little Pink Book: A Bad Bad Novel (Archway Editions, 2025). “It’s like girl, China, sex, postmodernism, conceptual romance—a book that sells itself to you over and over and over again as you read it,” she remarks. Published in parallel English/Chinese, the novel was originally written to accompany a piece by Diane Severin Nguyen show at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. It now circulates as a kind of Reena Spaulings (the novel) for the Exocapitalism era, testing the limits of what fiction now is and what content could be. 

Based in NYC, Olivia is the author of the Kendall Jenner x Lil Peep fanfic, Island Time (Expat Press, 2022) as well as an associate editor and regular contributor to The Paris Review. Her words have also appeared and been channeled through outlets such as Heavy Traffic, Viscose, Kaleidoscope, n+1, and Montez Press Radio, among others.

For more: @dianadiagram & https://oliviaks.page/ Also feat. Olivia:

NM60: Code Couture w/ Olivia Kan-Sperling (2023)

NM x Heavy Traffic: Olivia Kan-Sperling reads "The Perfect Glove" (2024)

Earlier this month, New Models, together with Becoming Press, hosted the Berlin launch of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo’s Exocapitalism: Economies with absolutely no limits at Trust in Berlin.

In lieu of a regular episode this week, we bring you a video-essay version of the talk Marek & Roberto delivered live that evening (Oct. 6, 2025) edited by Lil Internet.

Subscribers can access it early here: https://youtu.be/144afKgO5Eg

Are we entering a neo-oral age? For centuries, linear, text-based media has organized human communication, creating a shared reality, a shared sense of linear time. But as political scientist Kevin Munger discusses on this ep of NM Talkcore, that ontological structure is rapidly coming undone.

For more: kevinmunger.com

Watch: Kevin Munger on Vilém Flusser’s “Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations”

Keywords: accelerationism, Actionists (Viennese), anti-memetics, apparatus, artificial intelligence, bios level, cartesian dualism, chatbots, Communicology, content level, cybernetics, cyberspace, CyberSyn (project), EA (effective altruism), externalities, fanficification, feedback loop, 4chan, game theory, generation gap, large language models (LLMs), Less Wrong, linear media, management cybernetics, media apparatus, media theory, memes, mimetic, mnemonic, mukbang, ontological stability, oral society/orality, platonism, prehension, process philosophy, protocol level, rationalism, recommendation algorithm, recursion, renaissance paintings, secondary orality, singularity, social media, spiral/spiraling, sycophancy, Taylorist management, textual society, video games, whirlpool, World War III (information warfare)

Writer Gideon Jacobs comes on the show to discuss ontological literacy among other things in the wake of the assassination of American Christian Nationalist Charlie Kirk, which in our assessment was not actually a political assassination.

Names cited: Alexander Dugan, Amanda Askell, Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Becoming Press, Byung-Chul Han, CERN, Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eric Davis, Grok, Felix Guattari, Jay Springet, Jesus, Jezebel, Keith Johnstone, Kamala Harris, Larry Ellison, Luigi Mangione, Marshall McLuhan, Mara McKevitt, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Carroll, Vladamir Putin, RFK Jr., René Girard, Theo Anthony, Tyler Robinson, UnitedHealthcare, Walter Ong

See also:

NM Talkcore: Gideon Jacobs on Musk, Trump, and Fiction (Apr 2025)NM Talkcore: Gideon Jacobs on Trump as Image (Nov 2024)

Gideon Jacobs, “Player One and Main Character,” (Apr 2025)Gideon Jacobs, “Trump l’Oeil,” (LARB, Nov 2024)

Jay Springett: https://thejaymo.net/permanentlymoved/

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In the US, quality of life means quality of imagined life — past, present, and future shot, reshot, edited, and color-corrected into user-generated reality…

Every summer, we return to the land of our youth, the Mid-Atlantic USA and, as has become tradition, relay our impressions of it to you. With this episode, Lil In…

A follow up to his 2024 mixtape, Illegal Generation Vol. 1, Lil Internet brings you Vol. 2 — a new hour of fresh “gencore,” which aired today on Mark Leckey’s monthly NTS radio show.

“Compared to Volume 1,” Lil Internet writes, “Volume 2 feels closer to a truly functional example of what AI generated music might offer outside of joke songs and the emulation of styles that already exist—it’s also more deranged.”

“Both, however, are made in the tradition of sample-based, breakbeat driven dance music,” Lil Internet points out, which is to say music that “has always been made using the latest technology and stolen data (uncleared samples).” In this sense, Gencore is part of the natural evolution of what music critic Simon Reynolds named the “hardcore continuum.” Could one even argue that the big AI companies — sampling everything we type, everything we upload, everything we do — follow the same protocol? Perhaps the “hardcore continuum” has expanded from something we listen to into something we are living through.

To access Lil Internet’s 3 Rules of Gencore, become a paying subscriber:

LIL INTERNET, "ILLEGAL GENERATION VOL. 2" TRACKLIST

00:00 - SHENZHEN CONFIDENTIAL®02:46 - FIND A WHEY®05:13 - THE LOCUST COMMUNITY®08:22 - FLOOD DOSE®12:51 - EARTH VICTORY®18:04 - VIOLENCE AGAINST MEN®22:52 - SPRING BROKERS®26:09 - SEASTEADIN’®31:25 - PEPTIDE PSYCHOSIS®36:26 - CHEMISTRY FAIRE / INN XL®41:46 - IBOGA DRIFT®46:59 - LAST NIGHT OF DUBAI®51:51 - ESCHATOLOGY BOP®56:16 - CONSCIOUSNESS, INTERRUPTED®

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• Lil Internet’s Three Rules of Gencore

• Download link to high quality file of the pure mix (w/out NM intro/outro)

Theorists Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo (co-hosts of the Dis.integrator pod) come on New Models to talk us through their highly anticipated new book, Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits, which is out this month from Becoming Press. Through their radical rethinking of capitalism — its indifference to human scale, its endless appetite for complexity, its rapacious transformation of everything into betting surfaces — Marek and Roberto relieve us of old Leftist frameworks, supplying a decoder ring for the growing incoherence of everyday contemporary life.

Exocapitalism: Economies With Absolutely No Limits (Becoming Press, 2025)Authors: Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso TrilloForeward: Charles MudedeAfterward: Alex QuichoArt & Design: Palais SinclaireIllustrations: Avocado Ibuprofen

Names cited, this ep: AMD, Amazon/AWS, Amanda Askell, American Express, BlackRock, Bogna Konior, Charles Mudede, ChatGPT, Citadel, Cortical Labs, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, David Graeber, DraftKings, Dunkin', SNAP (US food stamps), Elena Esposito, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, GUS (Global University Systems), Helen Hester & Nick Srnicek, Hilton Worldwide, Jürgen Habermas, K Allado-McDowell, Karl Marx, Kraft Singles, Luciana Parisi, Luigi Mangione, Nick Land, Nvidia, OpenAI, Ray Brassier, René Benko, Robinhood, Salesforce, Silvia Federici, SpaceX, Starbucks, TSMC

See also: NM 81: Marek Poliks on Exocapitalism, Lift, and Non-Player Dynamics (2024)

Marek Poliks on the concept of lift:

"Lift is the idea that capitalism doesn’t want to deal with the physical world. Physical things are slow, predictable, and expensive. […]

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From January 2023 to January 2024, the Perić Collection funded a series of informal, highly attended talks about the state of Contemporary Art. Hosted by Dean Kissick and coordinated & commissioned by Eleonore Hugendubel and Matt Moravec, the event, known as the Seaport Talks, took place monthly in Downtown Manhattan. As a kind of coda to this series, Matt, Eleonore, and Dean created a correlating reader (likewise supported by Perić) featuring texts by 25 contributors who have spent some significant part of their life in the art world. Each writer was asked to briefly respond to the book’s titular question: “What is contemporary art for Today? And what should it be for, if anything?”

For this special episode, we bring you a selection of the answers including words by Ben Davis, Gavin Brown, Jason Farago, Tobias Spichtig, Joshua Citarella, Lloyd Wise, and Carly. Preceding the readings, we are joined by Dean, Matt, and Eleonore who reflect on the project at large.

For more: What Is Contemporary Art For Today? (McNally Jackson)

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Transcript of Intro excerpt (Carly):

Preparing this intro, I can’t help but think about the story of contemporary art over these past few decades as one that’s tied to the arc of Western — and in particular US American media — and also the aging of America’s physical infrastructure more broadly. It’s a thought that was set into relief as Lil Internet and I travelled with our toddler these past two weeks visiting family — hence the delay in getting this episode out — along the US East Coast riding Amtrak, America’s national passenger rail.

Founded in 1971, Amtrak’s initial development paralleled the country’s deindustrialization. Two decades before the internet, its launch allowed information and the bodies that possessed it to efficiently travel between Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and even network while in transit. Ferrying this new class of white-collar elite, Amtrak unified the country’s northeast commercial corridor into a continuous circuit of financial, political, and media power. In turn, it was critical to America constructing, funding, and art directing an ideal image of itself — one that it could then broadcast so convincingly through its linear media channels that to see outside of the illusion was all but impossible.

In part this was because, unlike GDR or Soviet run media, America’s was a synergistic image — one in which a young news host could ask the president whether he wore boxers of briefs, one that prized Gen-X slackercore as much as the type-A meticulousness of Martha Stewart, and one that could narrativize an art scene rooted in immaterial gestures into highly lucrative stardom.

Eras cycle naturally and so the dissolution of “contemporary art” as it was known from, let’s say, the 1980s to the early 2010s was of course to be expected. But there are two factors that make this particular transition unique: For one, the aspirational grandeur of the artworld in the public’s perception during that period — very much due to the aforementioned media/financial/political apparatus that backed it. And two, this time, unlike so many previous cultural transitions, there was no reliable narrator to convey the shift. Imagine the cultural revolution of the 1960s without Rolling Stone, Playboy, or Esquire, or without Cahiers du Cinéma; or imagine what our perception of ’90s pop culture would be without Wired magazine and MTV? Although all the legacy outlets tried — whether ArtReview and its Power 100, Artforum and its December Top Tens, or the countless Biennial-style surveys — these formats, reduced to mere online content by the mid-2010s, no longer swayed readers and viewers the way they once had. Instead audiences were captivated by the controversies at the management level of these outlets and in, turn the boldfaced (or rather, hashtagged and @-ed) names were no longer the artists but the accusers, protesters, and alleged wrongdoers.

Perhaps this is, in part, what Dean is getting at in his intro to the What Is Contemporary Art For Today? Book, when he writes, quite directly, “We need to talk about art. Rather than focusing on the reasons why things are the way they are, I believe it’s more important to speak about art itself, not the artists that make it, not the subjects and themes it alludes to, but the specific qualities of art in the early 2020s, and the functions, meanings and types of value that are ascribed to it.”

As media hollowed out in the 2010s and everything went remote, Amtrak — a system for moving bodies across physical geographical space — also started coming undone. While both Obama and Biden (two presidents visibly aligned with legacy media structures) promised the rail line billions in new funding, it’s not surprising that the current administration has frozen much of that budget. The divestment means a weakening of Amtrak’s power, which, though not the cause, parallels the dissolution of American legacy cultural power - and so much more - into an atomized realm of extractive abstraction.

Fittingly, when Lil Internet and I reach the line’s terminus in Norfolk Virginia, we find the station’s parking lot has been raised to make room for a casino, so we roll our bags and our daughter to an area under a highway overpass to load everything into his family’s car.

Of course there is plenty of creative activity elsewhere — Hideo Kojima’s new Death Stranding 2, Glenn Marten’s Margiela couture debut, perhaps even the rise of Addison Rae — although none would conventionally be called “Contemporary Art”. As we — you, me, our friends — inherit the sprawling, decreasingly functional cultural apparatus formerly called the art world, there is a real question of what to do with it all, and how we might possibly retool it or scavange its remains to build a fast train for the next generation. […]

In advance of their new album SISTER—out Sept 12 via True Panther and Dirty Hit— EDM emo pop punk crunkcore electroclash dubstep screamo trance DJs, producers, and siblings Angel and Lulu aka the Frost Children join NM to talk about making music in a memetically driven age.

For more: frostchildren.xyz & @thefrostchildren

Names cited: Above & Beyond, Adam Curtis, Addison Rae, Afrojack, All Time Low, Beyoncé, Blood on the Dance Floor, Breathe Carolina, BryanStars, Brokencyde, Celine, Charli XCX, Fall Out Boy, Gerard Way, Gracie Abrams, Harmony Korine, I Set My Friends on Fire, Isabella Rossellini, Jane Remover, Jimmy Buffett, Kate Bush, Kim Petras, Lana Del Rey, Mac DeMarco, Marc Jacobs, margø, The Medic Droid, Mission of Burma, Miu Miu, Model/Actriz, Monstercat, Montez Press Radio, MTV Cribs, My Chemical Romance, Nirvana, Oklou, Olivia Rodrigo, Owsla, Panic! At the Disco, Paper Magazine, Peter Gabriel, Pitbull, Porter Robinson, Sabrina Carpenter, Skrillex, The Smashing Pumpkins, Spring Breakers, The Sound, Stüssy, Taylor Swift, The 1975, True Panther, Vans Warped Tour, Virtual Riot, Vivaldi

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INTRO (LIL INTERNET)

Welcome to New Models Greenroom. On this episode we’re joined by siblings Angel and Lulu Prost who DJ and perform as Frost Children.

We first saw Frost Children a few years ago in New York, at a party for Montez Press Radio at an ice skating rink in Bushwick. They were standing behind the DJ booth, long stringy hair framing young, ghostly faces haloed by fur from the hoods of their matching parkas, playing music I can best describe as an SAT analogy question: Soundcloud Rap is to Rap as Frost Children EDM is to EDM.

But what I immediately intuited is that Frost Children represented a scene, a scene that I imagined as a continuation of the scene I remember in Brooklyn fifteen years ago, a mixed reality scene devirtualized from internet native subculture.

Angel and Lulu are skilled and prolific musicians, with a new album, Sister, dropping September 12th on the label True Panther. Sister is a maximalist work of pop EDM. It has big, juicy, emo hooks that Carly and I are too old to appreciate, and it manifests an overdriven imaginary of post-2008 financial crisis festival culture that Angel and Lulu are too young to have experienced.

Hauntology, anemoia, yeah, yeah… our conversation takes a different approach: that of human context windows, of the memetic nature of genres, of a bygone, crass scene filtered through a present sincerity, and of melodies able to transcend it all. I’m Lil Internet joined by my co-host Carly Busta, our guests are Angel and Lulu of the Frost Children. Let’s get into it.

Our guest is American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. He is the author of such seminal books on digital culture and networked communication as Cyberia (1994), Media Virus (1995), and Coercion (1999) and numerous further titles including, Program or Be Programmed (2010/2025) and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). He is also the host of Team Human and a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics as CUNY/Queens.

On this episode, Doug speaks with us about the evolution (and devolution) of digital culture across web 1, 2, 3, and beyond via a synthesis of media theory, psychedelic thinking, and practical wisdom for navigating our contemporary networks.

Names cited: Adam Curtis, Alex Garland, Allan Kaprow, Amazon, Art Bell, AT&T, Bernie Madoff, CNN, Cyberia, CVS, Dan Rather, Daniel Dennett, David Bowie, David Hershkovitz, David Lynch, Donna Haraway, Douglas Rushkoff, Elon Musk, Emmanuel Levinas, Francis Bacon, Genesis P-Orridge, Jake Tapper, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jesse Armstrong, Joe Rogan, John Brockman, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Chaikin, Kamala Harris, Lauren Sanchez, Louis Rossetto, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Madonna, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Media Virus, Michael Jackson, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Neil Simon, New Models, New York Times, Norbert Wiener, Orit Halpern, Paper Magazine, Peter Thiel, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Present Shock, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Dawkins, Robert Anton Wilson, Ross Douthat, Skinny Puppy, Spinoza, Star Trek, Team Human, Temple of Psychic Youth, The Long Boom, The Process Church, The Simpsons, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs, Wired Magazine

For more: rushkoff.com & rushkoff.substack.com

Our guest is Orit Halpern: co-author of The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023); author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014); and Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden.

Often in discussions about machine learning and smartness, AI is presented as the natural path of human progress, an evolutionary – almost biological – development that emerged out of human communication systems and that has the potential to far exceed them. But as Orit argues, these technologies are neither inevitable nor inhuman. Rather they are the result of a particular intersection of neoliberal theory, psychology, and computer science, which generated the economic incentives, political will, and public desire for AI to exist in the specific form we have now.

On this episode, Orit animates the technological imaginary that gave rise to our culture of AI, asking, among other things, how a highly adaptive, machine-learning enabled world changes the terms of political possibility and human revolution.

For more: orithalpern.net

“Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Markets & Machines,“ e-flux, March 2023

“Futures of Cybernetic Urbanism” in Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective catalogue of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale (2025)

On this ep, NM is joined by filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko, who you may know as the director of 0s and 1s, Wobble Palace, Spree, and most recently, The Code, which stars Peter Vack & Dasha Nekrasova and is currently streaming on Mubi.

Like much of Eugene’s work, The Code understands itself both as entertainment and as cinema — cinema-in-a-time-when everyone is an editor, cinema-in-a-time-when content has become infinite, empty, a site of projection for viewers-turned-users. We talk about The Code on this episode and about the industry, about virality and authoritarianism, slop, identity, empathy. comedy, and success.

For more: @madabouteug (IG)

Patreon: @directorscommentary

Site: www.everybodyloves.me

Watch: “The Code” on MUBILA: @ Lumiere Cinema NYC: @ The Roxy

In town for an event with Matt Copson at Berlin’s KW, Dean Kissick stops by the show to talk about art, criticism, and self-performance as well as fire punks, AI monsters, vulgarity, Ye, and the death of the hot take.

Now based in London following a decade-long tenure in Downtown New York, Dean is a writer with recent and forthcoming work in Spike, Heavy Traffic, and Civilization. His essay, “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art” appeared in the December 2024 issue of Harper’s.

For more: @deankissick IG & X

Writer and Nymphet Alumni co-host Biz Sherbert joins NM following the launch of her newsletter, American Style. Its premise is simple—travel around the country and talk to people about what they are wearing and why. On the show we chat with Biz about the transmission of style today, particularly in the USA, and whether personal aesthetic transformations may be a stand-in for pursuing the erstwhile American Dream.

For more@Biz SherbertAmerican Style newsletterNymphet Alumni pod

See also“What Does Beauty Look Like in the Age of Trump?” AnOther (Feb 2025)“On the Fashion Philosophy of the Crypto Bro,” Zora (June 2023)Biz Sherbert x Emma Chamberlain, The Face (Sept 2024)

Intro excerpt (Caroline Busta):

This reading is part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features pieces from the magazine read aloud by their authors. Heavy Traffic V of is out now.

To unlock more New Models, upgrade to Paid

See also:

🔉NM Greenroom | Mark Leckey (2025)

📹 "Enter Through Medieval Wounds" video version

🔉NM75 | w/ Heavy Traffic editor/publisher Patrick McGraw

🖼️ 3 Songs from the Liver,” Gladstone Gallery, NYC (2024-25)

heavytrafficmagazine.com

NM Greenroom: Mark Leckey (2025) + “3 Songs from the Liver” radio play

British artist Mark Leckey — creator of famed club culture docu-hallucination, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), winner of the 2008 Turner Prize, and longtime NTS Radio host — discusses the terms of art-making in our technological present and our increasingly medieval relationship to representation. His show “3 Songs from the Liver” was on view at Gladstone Gallery, NY, Nov 2024 - Feb 2025.

“AI outputs are not “images” as we know them. And if we try to understand them in that way, then we’re really…. f*cked, you know?” 

Following this conversation, keep listening for “Enter Through Medieval Wounds” a radio play by Mark Leckey, which first appeared in essay form in Heavy Traffic V (Fall 2024). 

For more: markleckey.com/ & NTS 

Episode image adapted from Mark Leckey, Carry Me into The Wilderness (Icon), 2022 

Part 2 of this NM Greenroom features Amnesia Scanner’s Ville Haimala & French artist Freeka Tet discussing the work they do in parallel to their AS collaboration. For Ville, this includes developing scores and sound design with Anne Imhof for her monumental performance-installations, while Freeka discusses his recent music video for The Weeknd.

In Part 1…

NM Greenroom: Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet (Part 1)

Ville Haimala & Martti Kalliala of the experimental music duo Amnesia Scanner & regular collaborator Freeka Tet join NM to discuss AS HOAX (PAN, 2024) — both the making-of and the world into which the dual record project was released. 

This is Part 1 of 2. It focuses on the Amnesia + Freeka project and its innovations within the post-streaming subcultural industrial complex.

Part 2 (coming soon) expands to Ville & Freeka’s activity outside of Amnesia Scanner, including recent work with artists Anne Imhof and The Weeknd.  

Recorded at the end of 2024, the conversation presciently channels the noise, distortion, and attentional overload that has quickly come to characterize the info-sphere of 2025.

For more: @amensiascanner (IG)

Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet, HOAX (PAN, 2024)

📹 AS Over (dir. Freeka Tet), 2024📹 ICAROS (dir. Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet), 2024📹 AS Disco (dir. Amnesia Scanner, text Jaakko Pallasvuo, graphics PWR), 2024

Related:Joshua Citarella, Doomscroll: Trevor Paglen: Mind Hacking, AI and Psyops Capitalism,” 2024Joshua Citarella, Doomscroll: Matty Healy: Pop Culture in the 21st Century, 2024

One week after the 2025 US presidential inauguration and less than a month since fires devastated LA, American journalist James Pogue and energy specialist Ellie Holbrook talk us through the current political terrain. James has been covering the New Right since the early 2010s. His back-to-back features this month on the Republican party’s uneasy Tech/MAGA alliance (NYTimes) and the demise of the Dems (Vanity Fair) are, together, an essential primer for how power works today. With literal power (fuel) being part of this equation, Ellie shares her knowledge on the energy trade and LNG markets in particular. What follows in an orientation for our strange new real.

See also: @hellholbrook (IG) & @jhenseonpogue (x)

Forthcoming: James Pogue, The Natural Division (Pantheon) is “a first-person journey deep into a region at the epicenter of both America’s megafires and militia politics, told through California’s far-flung northern State of Jefferson.”

NM82: James Pogue on American Futures (2024)

NM54: Damn Nation w/ James Pogue (2022)

02:45 - Intro by Amant chief curator, Tobi Maier05:00 - Carly gives context on Fahrenholz’s practice15:00 - Jak x Carly discuss the show’s works & themes36:50 - Q&A feat. Joshua Citarella, Dena Yago, Gideon Jacobs, Anika Jade Levy, Brian Droitcour, Dru Ritger, and Peter Fend, among others

Exhibition Guide: Loretta Fahrenholz “A Coin From Thin Air”

Watch: Loretta Fahrenholz, Trash The Musical (2023, HD, 37 min)Vimeo password: LF_TTMCourtesy Reena Spaulings Fine Art

This talk took place on Saturday, January 4, 2025 at Amant. The exhibition remains on view through February 16, 2025. Episode image: courtesy K8 Howl. | https://newmodels.io

In part due to the rise of AI-enabled systems, we are witnessing a shift in where and how the creative act takes place. It is a phenomenon that artists Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst have been grappling with for more than a decade through their music and their work with machine learning and its governance. With their exhibition “The Call” on view at the Serpentine in London through February 2nd and their book All Media is Training Data out this week, Holly and Mat join NM to talk about a new paradigm of artmaking and artist subject. We also discuss a new kind of collector and the tech-literate gallerists that are bridging them with legacy cultural systems.

For more:

herndondryhurst.studio

@hollyherndon & @matdryhurst 

Source.Plus public diffusion model

Spawning.ai data governance for generative AI

"The Call" Serpentine North Gallery, London

All Media is Training Data (Serpentine, König, 2024)

Remilia Corporation, founded in 2021 by Charlotte Fang, describes itself as an institution, a lifestyle brand, and an artist’s colony, among other things. As the group behind the influential and infamous Milady NFT project, Remilia also exemplifies a particularly contemporary artistic practice—one in which an online swarm algorithm-hacks certain language, images, and aesthetics into relevance, thereby generating their own market. Earlier this year, Remilia released issue one of Remilia Quarterly, a “literary magazine and critical journal for the New Net Art.” Joining us on this episode is the journal’s editor, L.B. Dobis.

Remilia is a manifesto. Remilia is an institution. Remilia is a self-organization. Remilia is a lifestyle brand. Remilia is a master-planned community. Remilia is an investment fund. Remilia is an artist's colony. Remilia is a crowdfunded video game. Remilia is an autonomous smart contract. Remilia is an independent record label. Remilia is a community center for the digital village. Remilia will save the internet. […]

For more: Remilia Quarterly @RemiQuarterly remilia.org 

This NM Dispatch is not about a physical place but a region of the internet—the increasingly adversarial realm of online shopping.

As an accompaniment, we are also posting this Product Shortlist (The Baby Edit), which we hope those new to (or curious about) early parenthood might appreciate.

https://newmodels.io

A few weeks ago, artist and friend of New Models, Bjarne Melgaard reached out with an episode proposal. He'd become close with actor and artist Paz de la Huerta, whose debut solo show had just closed at Rutkowski;68 Gallery in Paris. Bjarne had been painting Paz for a new series of work and she was interested in speaking to us together with him about that collaboration, her own art, and their shared healing. With this episode we give you an edit of the resulting conversation — one that is as much about friendship, trauma, and healing as it is about media, image-making, and power.

Bjarne and Paz are planning to present new material in Berlin this fall (2024). Details TBC.

For more: 

Paz de la Huerta at Ruttkowski;68 (Paris)

Gallery VI, VII (Oslo)

bjarnemelgaard.no & @bjarnemelgaard (IG)

Also see:

NM Topsoil 20: Collective Paranoia w/ Bjarne Melgaard (Nov 2019)

NM Shorts: Bjarne Melgaard’s Cryptoverse (Jan 2022)

From AI to global power alignments to domestic political sentiments in the US and EU, 2024 is shaping up to be a frontier zone year of an era to come. Joining us on this episode is journalist James Pogue who is no stranger to the edges of the political present and uncommonly adept at anticipating where they lead. When Pogue last came on the show in 2022, his piece on America’s New Right for Vanity Fair had just gone viral. More recently, he’s been penning a three-part series for Granta magazine on the turbulent power games in the resource rich Sahel region, where he spent the better part of last year. We discuss both on this episode, unmooring ideations of what ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ now mean.

For more:@jameshensonpogue (X)

“Gold Fever in the Coup Belt: The Mines of Mauritania,” Granta, 2024

“Wagner in Africa,” Granta, 2024

“Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, 2022

NM54 | Damn Nation w/ journalist James Pogue (Nov. 2022)

Olivia Kan-Sperling’s “The Perfect Glove” is a holographic short essay set between LA and NYC, the 20th c. and today. It was first published in Heavy Traffic II. Based in NYC, Olivia is the author of the Kendall Jenner x Lil Peep fanfic, Island Time (Expat Press, 2022) and is an assistant editor + regular contributor to The Paris Review. Her writing has also appeared in Interview, Praxis, Kaleidoscope, n+1, and Cabinet, among other publications and venues.

For maximum impact, we recommend listening to this episode in stereo.

Editing and mixing by Lil Internet. 

This reading is part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features pieces from the magazine read aloud by their authors. Heavy Traffic IV of is out now.

See also:

NM60 | Olivia Kan-Sperling on the programming logic of style

NM75 | Heavy Traffic magazine w/ editor/publisher Patrick McGraw

https://newmodels.io

How does media actually work in 2024, which is to say in a time of omnipresent AI? And what kind of subject is this era of media producing? On this ep, we speak with K Allado-McDowell—the author, with GPT-3, of Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint, and founder of the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI—about how media is evolving.

Specifically, we ask about rise of “neural media,” which K has theorized as developing out of network media in the mid-2010s amid increasing human-AI interaction. Hearing K describe neural media's mechanics, it seems inevitable that our ideas of individuality and identity formation, even what it means to communicate as a human (among other living beings) are about to be majorly recalibrated.

For more:@kalladomcdowell (IG)@kalladomcdowell (X)“Designing Neural Media” (2023), Gropius Bau journal 

“For millennia one had measured oneself against the cycles of the seasons and the heavens, or against changing social mores and geopolitical configurations. To now be compelled to measure one’s life against the pace of machine time invited madness.”  

In this long-form essay by Seth Price, a “cultured middle aged artist from New York” attends a winter solstice party at an “open-air, tropical-Modern” island villa hosted by a man named Trader, “tanned, with a graying mane, khakis, trainers, and a billowing linen Oxford.” The real drama of this story, however, is arguably the “practice of divesting and reinvesting meaning” in our world of signs, a world whose semiotic layer is undergoing an epochal shift .. or so it seems. // This ep is part 1 of 2.

“Machine Time” by Seth Price was first published in Heavy Traffic I (2022).  We bring you this reading as part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features essays from the magazine read aloud by their authors. 

For a conversation with Heavy Traffic publisher, Patrick McGraw, see NM75. 

For more information and to pre-order copies of Heavy Traffic issue IV, see heavytrafficmagazine.com (note: issues, I, II, III are sold out).

https://newmodels.io

The occasion for this conversation is the publication of a zine and card game that the Crude Futures group — which started in the New Models Discord server and also includes Mina Miller, Jack Tarpey, phm, Matīss Groskaufmanis, Jon Benjamin Talleräs, Cat MacGregor, T.M. Wilson, and Marcelino Llano — created over the past two years and released this July. 

Printing of the zine and card game was made possible through proceeds from the NM Codex Y2K20, and proceeds from the Crude Futures sales will go toward production of whatever NM-sphere initiative emerges next. The zine and card game are available at shop.newmodels.io as well as select bookshops in London and Berlin.

For updates on the Crude Futures project, follow IG @crudefutures and:

See also: NM 41 | Eco-Tomorrow w/ Sam Moore (aka Richard Hames)

https://newmodels.io

In a conversation ranging from new baselines for Art to the future terms of IP and the horizons of identity and ownership, Mat and Holly share frameworks and neologisms unlocking a fresh framework for thinking about the AI-enhanced culture to come.

For more:Tw: @matdryhurst & @hollyherndon Interdependence podcast spawning.ai

https://newmodels.io

Upon its release, the movie was widely panned and, due to its negative, violent depictions of young black men, the Magic Johnson Theater chain even refused to screen it. But 25 years later, Belly stands as a resonant distillation of its time, both stylistically and sociologically. 

New Models selected Belly for the monthly NM x Trust Kino night in Berlin last week. And for this event Lil Internet, a video director himself (Beyoncé, “No Angel,” 2013; Diplo, “Express Yourself,” 2012; Iggy Azalea, “Mo Bounce,” 2017) put together some contextualizing thoughts on Belly, which he read IRL before the screening. He’s adapted his notes for this NM Short.   

For more:Lil Internet's "DMX Prayer Monument Ambient Mix," for Dazed Digital

https://newmodels.io

For more:@chronopictures https://neonrated.com/films/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline

https://newmodels.io

Many thanks to Shumon Basar and Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum 16 “Predicting the Present” for making this trip possible. 

At the conference Carly & Julian presented a talk titled, “Predicting Media,” followed by discussion with Shumon. We'll update this post with links to the session when it exists in some shareable form.For more:Shumon Basar, “The Magic Kingdom: How Not to Think about Dubai,” (Bidoun, 2007)

https://newmodels.io

For more: https://oliviaks.page/IG @dianadiagram & Tw @diamonddustpaw lucky-jewel.com

Music for this ep: Cocteau Twins, "Know Who You Are at Every Age"

https://newmodels.io

For more:https://coryarcangel.comCory Arcangel, “Flying Foxes,” Kunstverein Hamburg (Nov 2022 - Feb 2023)

https://newmodels.io

Kevin is the author of Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (Columbia U. Press, 2022). And on this new ep, he discusses media technology’s role in the migration of big organizing concepts such as conservative, liberal, autonomy, and progress; as well as how technological change, which is inevitable, impacts the very foundations of literate/liberal culture.

Bonus: Excerpt from Vilém Flusser's 1986-92 Artforum column, "Curie’s Children" 

For more: http://www.kevinmunger.com/“Why I am (Still) a Conservative (For Now)” (Jan 2023)“Why I am (Still) a Liberal (For Now)” (Jul 2022)NM46: Boomacracy w/ Kevin Munger (Jun 2022)

https://newmodels.io

As Paradigm’s second release, “Man vs. Machine” is largely set in Berlin and features contributions from several denizens of the New Models sphere, we invited Kat to come on the podcast to discuss the ideas—on the state of fashion & media, machine learning, creative agency, and our neo-anthroposophic age—that underpin the issue's concept.

For more: https://paradigmtrilogy.comBonus: NMTV goes behind the scenes of Paradigm's "Man" shoot in Berlin, May 2022

https://newmodels.io

For more:Dena Yago, “Content Industrial Complex,” e-flux #89 (2018)Tw: @khole_dena / IG: @denayags

Joshua Citarella patreon.com/joshuacitarellaTw @JoshuaCitarella / IG: @JoshuaCitarella

Bundeskunsthalle Bonn "Future of Critique" Congress, 18 Nov. 2022“Memes vs. Museums” Panel: Joshua Citarella, Dena Yago, Cem A. (@freeze_magazine), mod. Gregor Quack // “Do You Know Where You Live” Keynote: Caroline Busta & Lil Internet

https://newmodels.io

For more:@jhensonpoguejameshensonpogue.com

https://newmodels.io

With the cops on his tail and a hot wallet in his hand, tough-talking Ricky needs some space to think — so he ducks into a wildly repurposed dead-mall. There, he meets Phalene, a savvy quad with some shocking alpha on the deep internet history of his client, Xerxes and past trend-profile subject, the wheeling dealing “Charlie Chips.” Thanks to some help from a NEOM refugee, Ricky might make it out alive…

This concludes the 3-part series of Ricky Backtrace, Private Trend Consultant by Lil Internet. Stay tuned for more Hard Future to come.

Ricky Pt 1.Ricky Pt 2.For more: https://lilinter.net

For more: rossin.co/ IG: @rachelrossin & @joshuacitarella patreon.com/joshuacitarella joshuacitarella.substack.com

Joshua Citarella, along with New Models and Interdependence (Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon), is part of the channel.xyz network.

Plus: self-mythologizing, LA lobotomizing, and the cringe self-help book secretly powering Berlin’s writing renaissance.

For more:IG: @callahead_ TV Bar: http://www.t-v.city/Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff: Bortolozzi Gallery

On this episode, we hear three distinct takes on this year’s show (the ruangrupa-curated documenta 15) from as many voices — artist/critic Paige K. Bradley, designer and Outlier founder @abe1x, and Berlin-based writer/researcher Felix Ansmann — to help us think through what this mass public art exhibition offers in 2022.

For more:https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/@guiltgroupe (IG)@abe1x (IG)@felix.ansmann (IG)

Kevin demystifies the hippie-to-yuppie pipeline, sheds light on the changing intergenerational contract, explains the origins of the concept of “generations,” and considers what may happen when Boomers’ outsize influence wanes.

For more:Twitter: @kmmunger Substack: Never Met a ScienceGeneration Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022). 

Subscribe to unlock Episode 2

From 4chan to Kali/acc, Charlotte Fang to Ryder Ripps, we bring you this niche history so you can judge for yourself how the social web is re-aligning in 2022. Plus: new aesthetics, young girls, and Urbit x No Agency devirtualized in NYC.

For more:See Holly’s essay “The Rise and Fall of Kali/acc” in the NM Codex Y2K20 (2021)

Parallel to institutional network culture were the proto-dark-forest communities of BBS networks and other pre-www systems. From FidoNet to De Digitale Stad (DDS) Netherlands, Kevin maps out this early territory, with a brief history of the French Minitel system along the way. 

Through his work, Kevin asks us to consider what it really means to be “autonomous” online and what alternate conceptions of “the internet” might be possible when we consider the broader origin story of the digital social sphere.

For more:kevindriscoll.info/mitpress.mit.edu/books/minitelyalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248142/modem-world/

Along the way, we note the accelerating pace of decades, revisit Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 mass-media glow-up, log a veritable dictionary of neologisms, consider whether the art market as we know is a historically bound concept, and ask if we’ve possibly reached the end of clear-cut, market-ready “generations.” Also: mid-ification, zentrism, eNFT portals, and adult drainers.Gen 1, History 2, and Sex 3 with masters @deankissick and @shumonbasar on New Models Ep. 43.

For more:Basar, Coupland, Obrist’s The Extreme Self (Penguin, 2021)Dean interviewing Shuman, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, about The Age of Earthquakes (Penguin, 2015) for Vice.

Dean’s monthly column for Spike Art Magazine, The Downward SpiralDean’s 2021 essay for New Models & The Stolbun Institute, “Hello Darkness”

On this episode, Svitlana, who is also the co-author of Cyberwar & Revolution: Digital Subterfuge of Global Capitalism (U. Minnesota Press, 2020) gives an expanded definition of “cybernetic warfare” and what she calls “communicative militarism”; connects psychological-operations with the post-war “commercial seduction of the subject”; reveals present-day strategies of “audience production,” and unpacks the post-digital terms of mutually assured destruction.

For more:https://twitter.com/svitlanax https://networkcultures.org/blog/author/svitlana/https://www.sfu.ca/communication/team/faculty/svitlana-matviyenko.html

Twitter: @dancesNew Release: Repopulate Mars presents The Arrival (8 Apr 2022)

Writer and researcher Sam Moore speaks about his new book, with Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofscism: Climate Change and the Far Right (Polity, 2022), which finds, in the dissolution of pre-millennial frameworks for climate, capital, and governance, conditions that are ripe for the re-emergence of fascist formulations of power.

We talk to Sam about:- the interface between humans and the natural world- the return of trad values- and strategies for climate change mitigation that short-circuit the instrumentalization of nature as a tool for capitalist expansion and/or a race-based ordering of the world.

Sam is also a co-host of the podcast 12 Rules For What and leads the Collapsology group that meets weekly via the New Models Discord and publishes to the Collapsology Substack.

For more:Twitter: @sammoorewritesBook: The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (Polity, 2022)Book: Post Internet Far Right (Dog Section Press, 2021)