NM GREENROOM

Made possible by the New Models Community
See: https://newmodels.io and https://linktr.ee/newmodels_io for more.

VOLUME II
OCT 2020 -->
EPISODES 31 -->

New Models Podcast VOL II

NM Talkcore

NM Reads

Before there was Instagram, there was Mark Hunter, AKA, THE COBRA SNAKE, who made his name photographing the alt party scene of the ‘00s and relaying this coverage to his blog before people’s hangovers could even hit. In turn, thecobrasnake.com, along with American Apparel and Vice, became canon for high hipsterdom. For older Millens, it also came to represent an era when signs, language, and social protocol operated quite differently than they do in the ‘20s. With Mark now making a book from his early-Y2Ks archive—Cobrasnake: All Yesterday's Parties (forthcoming from Rizzoli in 2022)—New Models chatted with him about his work past and present and the changing terms of “social" media.

For more: 
@thecobrasnake 
https:// thecobrasnake.com 
Book pre-order: https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/cobrasnake-all-yesterdays-parties

Subscribe to patreon.com/newmodels for advance access to the New Models podcast, all 62+ episodes of NM Topsoil, and entry to the New Models Discord server.

EP 34: LET THERE BE LIGHT (The Cobra Snake)

"HELLO DARKNESS" is an essay by New York-based writer DEAN KISSICK about the changing social media and media landscape of 2021. It is presented as part of "Shadowlands," Season 1 of Stolbun Institute.

https://stolbun.institute/seasons/shadowlands/hello-darkness

Dean Kissick is the New York Editor of Spike Art Magazine. 
https://twitter.com/deankissick
https://instagram.com/deankissick

Stolbun Institute is a new initiative by Seth Stolbun & the Stolbun Collection aimed at coordinating content across outlets in the face of an increasingly atomized media landscape. https://stolbun.institute/

Sound design: @LILINTERNET
Text read by: Dean Kissick

NM Reads: Dean Kissick's "Hello Darkness" (2021)

Writer and researcher Sam Moore speaks about his new book, with Alex Roberts, THE RISE of ECOFASCISM: 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 @12rulesforwhat and leads the Collapsology group that meets weekly via the New Models Discord and publishes to http://collapsology.substack.com/

Twitter: https//twitter.com/sammoorewrites
Pod: https://www.patreon.com/12rulesforwhat/
Substack: http://collapsology.substack.com/
Book: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-rise-of-ecofascism-climate-change-and-the-far-right--9781509545377
Book: https://dogsection.org/press/pifr/

New Models Podcast

EP 41: ECO-TOMORROW (w/ Sam Moore)

Trained in the twilight of legacy media and skilled in the dark arts of the extremely online, BEN DITTO bridges communication systems and cultural logics of the 90s-00s-10s and 20s. In advance of launching his new channel, Ditto Nation, the London-based creative-director/artist /cultural-analyst speaks to NM about the physical limits of the self and the technology that defines it, platform death-tripping, ML trend consulting, and the new magick of natural language spellcasting.

Initial release to NM: 8 SEP 2022

For more:
IG: @ben_ditto 
IG: @ben_ditto_resurrections 
TikTok: @ben_ditto_actual
https://linktr.ee/ben_ditto

Unlocked | GPT-Ditto w/ Ben Ditto (NM49)

First released: 14 Oct 2022 | To join New Models & receive full stream in real time, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com

In Berlin with parallel shows at Galerie Sprüth Magers and Schinkel Pavillon, artist JON RAFMAN joins NM to speak about collective memory, the fractured self, embracing the cringe of new consumer tech, and post-net art’s post-lockdown resurgence.

For more:
jonrafman.com
IG: @jonrafman

Unlocked | Mallhammer 40k w/ artist Jon Rafman (NM52)

What exists beyond America’s blue-checkmark core? Journalist JAMES POGUE (Harper’s, New Yorker, American Conservative, plus author of the 2022 Vanity Fair chartbuster “Inside the New Right: Where Peter Thiel is Placing His Biggest Bets,” as well as his 2018 book, Chosen Country) joins NM just before the 2022 midterm elections to sketch out the emergent USA he sees. Along the way, we talk localism v. globalism vis-a-vis 18th-century politics, 20th-century media, and the likelihood of 21st-century American civil war.

Ep released to subscribers: 9 Nov 2022

For more: 
@jhensonpogue
https:// jameshensonpogue.com

Unlocked | Damn Nation w/ journalist James Pogue (NM54)

First released: 11 Feb 2023 | To join New Models, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com

Artist Cory Arcangel joins New Models to chat about his practice at large during the closing days of his Kunstverein Hamburg show, “Flying Foxes.” The conversation originally aired as live video via the Kunstverein, with an intro by the show’s curator, Nicholas Tammens. 

The audio has been adapted by Lil Internet for the NM Audio Metaverse™.

For more:
https://coryarcangel.com
Cory Arcangel, “Flying Foxes,” Kunstverein Hamburg

Unlocked | Public Access w/ artist Cory Arcangel (NM58)

Olivia Kan-Sperling reads her non-linear fashion noir, “The Perfect Glove” from Heavy Traffic II

"Although a whole day has passed since opening, the plushy carpet shows no footprints. This must be the oft-reported death of retail, which reminds Leo of the death of movies, which reminds him of his own death. Then again—he cheers up—dead or no, neither—stores nor movies—ever seem to go away. [...]"

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) as well as 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.

Note: 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.

https://heavytrafficmagazine.com

See also:

NM60 | Olivia Kan-Sperling on the programming logic of style
https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/code-couture-olivia-kan-sperling-nm60

NM75 | Heavy Traffic magazine w/ editor/publisher Patrick McGraw
https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/mcgraw-heavytraffic-nm75/s-VB0sQZYweL0

Unlocked | NM x Heavy Traffic: Olivia Kan-Sperling, “The Perfect Glove”

Full episode released to subscribers: 20 Jun 2024 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io
_

Hallucinating Sense in the Era of Infinity Content
Written & read by Caroline Busta
Document Journal SS24

https://www.documentjournal.com/2024/05/technical-images-film01-angelicism-art-showtime-true-detective-shein/

What if, in a time of infinity content, a meta-reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill?

What if we thought about generative AI more as an expression of an epochal shift in human communication than a root cause?

More than transmitting specific information, “content”—whether a mukbang video or this 3600 word essay—is now foremost a conductor of “vibes.”

"Hallucinating Sense in the Era of Infinity Content" was written in early 2024 by Caroline Busta for Document Journal SS 2024.

Editors: Drew Zeiba & Camille Sojit Pechat 

Audio production: Lil Internet

In the training data: Vilém Flusser, Kevin Munger, K Allado McDowell, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Jon Rafman, Dean Kissick, Theo Anthony, Lola Jusidman, Film01, Bernard Stiegler, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Chris Blohm, Niklas Bildstein Zaar, Andreas Grill, Anna Uddenberg, Simon Denny, Trevor Paglen, Joshua Citarella, Jak Ritger, Hari Kunzru, Loretta Fahrenholz, Dorian Electra, Michael Franz, Kolja Reichart, Shein, Lil Internet & the NM Discord. <3

Image: Shein "Chicago 1893" shirt procured and worn by Jan Kostanjevec of GIA (General Intelligence Agency), Ljubljana.

NM Reads: Caroline Busta, "Hallucinating Sense in the Era of Infinity Content" (Document, 2024)

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 14 Dec 2024 | Subscribe --> 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 and 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 legacy cultural systems with this particular future.

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)

Preview | Artists Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst on a new paradigm of artmaking (NM86)

On the occasion of Loretta Fahrenholz’s exhibition “A Coin From Thin Air” at Amant in Brooklyn, Carly Busta and artist/writer Jak Ritger discuss art making, AI, and value in a time of infinite content.

02:45 - Intro by Amant chief curator, Tobi Maier 
05:00 - Carly gives context on Fahrenholz’s practice
15:00 - Jak x Carly discuss the show’s works & themes 
36:50 - 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” 
https://dcld85wa7rf0u.cloudfront.net/api/file/5ZatFCPRhKKTUQjpYsxP

Watch: Loretta Fahrenholz, Trash The Musical (2023, HD, 37 min)
https://vimeo.com/1046803248
Courtesy of Reena Spaulings Fine Art

This talk took place on Saturday, January 4, 2025 at Amant. 
https://www.amant.org/exhibitions/95-loretta-fahrenholz-a-coin-from-thin-air
The exhibition remains on view through February 16, 2025. 
Episode image: courtesy K8 Howl

NM Live | Busta x Ritger on Loretta Fahrenholz @ Amant, NYC 2025

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 29 Jan 2024 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io

// 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) https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/prvw-nm82-james-pogue-on-american-futures

NM54: Damn Nation w/ James Pogue (2022)
https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/damn-nation-james-pogue-nm54

Preview | James Pogue & Ellie Holbrook on Turbo America (NM87) 2025

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 9 Feb 2025 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io 
_
Ville Haimala & Martti Kalliala of the experimental music duo @amnesia-scanner & regular collaborator Freeka Tet join NM to discuss AS HOAX (@pan_hq 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: HOAX (PAN, 2024)
https://p-a-n.org/product/amnesia-scanner-freeka-tet-hoax-pan-148/

Related: 
Joshua Citarella, Doomscroll: Trevor Paglen: Mind Hacking, AI and Psyops Capitalism,” 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--0kYOwOoDQ
Joshua Citarella, Doomscroll: Matty Healy: Pop Culture in the 21st Century, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdCdpnz0wDU&t=1732s

Preview | NM Greenroom: Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet, Pt. 1 (2025)

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 13 Feb 2025 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io

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 (released 9 Feb 2025) AS's Ville Haimala & Martti Kalliala, together with regular collaborator Freeka Tet speak about their most recent release, AS HOAX (PAN, 2024) and the project's innovations within the post-streaming subcultural industrial complex.

For more:  @amensiascanner @freekatet @villehaimala (IG)
https://p-a-n.org/product/amnesia-scanner-freeka-tet-hoax-pan-148/

Preview | NM Greenroom: Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet, Pt. 2 (2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe. | https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com
_

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: 
https://markleckey.com 
https://www.nts.live/shows/mark-leckey
https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/13694/3-songs-from-the-liver/installation-views

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

Preview | NM Greenroom: Mark Leckey (2025)

Unlocked (first released to subscribers 19 March 2024) --> 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 & X) 
“Designing Neural Media” (2023), Gropius Bau Journal
https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropius-bau/programm/journal/2023/k-allado-mcdowell-designing-neural-media
"Am I slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth" (2025), The Long Now
https://longnow.org/ideas/identity-neural-media-ai/

Unlocked | K Allado-McDowell on Neural Media (NM76) 2024

First published in Heavy Traffic V (Fall 2024), Mark Leckey's kaleidoscopic, transhistorical sojourn into the Eikonomachia (the 'image struggle') is presented here in radio play form w/ sound design and production also by Leckey.

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. https://heavytrafficmagazine.com

See also: 
📹 "Enter Through Medieval Wounds" video version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyi-ZRJj7mI
🔉NM Greenroom | Mark Leckey (2025)
https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/preview-nm-greenroom-mark-leckey-2025?
🔉NM75 | w/ Heavy Traffic editor/publisher Patrick McGraw
https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/mcgraw-heavytraffic-nm75/s-VB0sQZYweL0
🖼️ 3 Songs from the Liver,” Gladstone Gallery, NYC (2024-25)
https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/13694/3-songs-from-the-liver/installation-views




Unlocked | NM x Heavy Traffic: Mark Leckey, “Enter Through Medieval Wounds” radio play

Unlocked (first released to subscribers 17 March 2025) --> https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com  https://newmodels.io

Lil Internet purges his Musk Derangement Syndrome one last time in a monologue that could have been titled “Ket, Lies, and Video Games”—until a decades-long shift in base reality is revealed by dice in a Hong Kong bar.

-
[Excerpt from monologue]:  
“A very brief review of what everyone knows but might not think about all at once: Elon Musk bought Twitter, the most influential social media platform in the world, and promised to make it ”politically neutral.” He then renamed it X, which, in mathematics and logic stands for any arbitrary thing you want, and turned the entire platform towards boosting far right parties across the globe. He controls what does and doesn’t appear on your feed, what does or doesn’t get fact checked, and bans users on a whim. He owns Starlink, a satellite ISP that allows him to monitor traffic or sever a home’s entire internet connection at any time. He owns SpaceX, which is building a classified satellite network called Starshield for the National Reconnaissance Office of the US Military that will allow 24/7, real-time images and AI-powered intelligence gathering across the entire surface of the planet. He owns xAI, which is building the world’s most powerful supercomputer to achieve AGI and have it run the US government. He owns Tesla, which sells cars that he can control, shut down, or render permanently inoperable via satellite, and builds humanoid robots explicitly for replacing human jobs. And then there’s Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company that is literally implanting thought-reading microchips in people’s brains.

This is all basic public knowledge, and yet people who swore Bill Gates was putting 5G microchips in the vaccines seem to be totally fine with an even richer guy controlling their social media, internet access, and car while building robots to replace their jobs, putting every square inch of Earth under 24/7 surveillance, and implanting microchips in people’s brains.

Elon Musk has openly, transparently, turned every conspiracy theory trope into a business he directly owns. He is openly, transparently, every dystopian fear embodied within a single man. Yet the paranoid and the conspiratorial are most likely to support him. Why? I think it’s because transparency has replaced truth and trust in society, and with Elon transparently the most dangerous man to ever exist, truth and trust have become irrelevant.”

Hallucinator's Dice

Unlocked | NM Dispatch: Hallucinator’s Dice – Lil Internet (Mar 2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

Gideon Jacobs joins NM to discuss his latest piece for the LA Review of Books, “Player One and Main Character,” which explores the logic of power in a time when some of its key agents are no longer operating in base reality.

Related: Lil Internet’s “Hallucinator’s Dice” (unlocked) https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/hallucinators-dice

See also:  
"Player One and Main Character" (LARB, Apr 2025)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/player-one-and-main-character/
“Trump l’Oeil,” (LARB, Nov 2024) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-loeil/

NM Talkcore w/ Gideon Jacobs on Trump as Image (Nov 2024)
https://on.soundcloud.com/kC8NzddUcGynZyZj6

Episode image adapted from photo by Daniel Arnold for Document Journal of Gideon Jacobs as the character Father Bartholomew Mary, 2025.

Preview | NM Talkcore: Gideon Jacobs on Musk, Trump & Fiction (2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io or https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

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

Preview | NM Talkcore: Dean Kissick (2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

On this ep, NM is joined by filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko, who you may know as the director of films such as 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, which is to say empty, a site of projection for viewers-turned-users. We talk about The Code on this episode and about the industry, about virality, idenity, authoritarianism, slop, empathy. comedy, and success.

For more: https://www.instagram.com/madabouteug (IG) 
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/directorscommentary
Site: https://www.everybodyloves.me  
Watch “The Code”
MUBI: https://mubi.com/en/de/films/the-code-2024
LA: https://lumierecinemala.com/film-the-code-2024/
NYC: https://www.roxycinemanewyork.com/screenings/the-code-3-2-3-2/

Preview | NM Greenroom: Filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko (2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.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 that 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: https://orithalpern.net 

“Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Markets & Machines“
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/on-models/519993/financializing-intelligence-on-the-integration-of-machines-and-markets/

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

Counter-Practices and The Image of Thought https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251335679

Planetary Infrastructure
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-38128-8_1-1

-
Episode image adapted from: Marco Zorzanello photo of the installation TERMS AND CONDITIONS by Transsolar, Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne at La Biennale di Venezia, 2025

Preview | Orit Halpern on Agentic Imaginaries (NM88) 2025

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

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


Preview | Douglas Rushkoff, from Meta to Soma (NM89) 2025

This is an unlocked episode (first aired 07/17/2025) — for all NM audio, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

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 @FrostChildren join NM to talk about making music in a memetically driven age.

For more: https://frostchildren.xyz 
https://frostchildren.ffm.to/sister
https://instagram.com/thefrostchildren

Names cited: Above & Beyond, Adam Curtis, Addison Rae, Afrojack, All Time Low, 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, The 1975, True Panther, Vans Warped Tour, Virtual Riot, Vivaldi

Unlocked | NM Greenroom: Frost Children (2025)

This is an unlocked episode (first aired 08/25/2025) — for all NM audio, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

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.  

https://becoming.press/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-(2025)-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trillo

Authors: Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo
https://www.marekpoliks.com/
https://robertoalonsotrillo.com/
https://open.spotify.com/show/4AcGAXHIdRu1toaZYnK3kB

Foreward: Charles Mudede
Afterward: Alex Quicho
Art & Design: Palais Sinclaire
Illustrations: Avocado Ibuprofen

Names cited:
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

Unlocked | Exocapitalism, the Book - Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo (NM90) 2025

Gavin Brown, Caroline Busta, Joshua Citarella, Ben Davis, Jason Farago, Tobias Spichtig and Lloyd Wise read their contributions to “What Is Contemporary Art For Today?" (Perić Collection, 2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode (released 08/13/2025), including a conversation with the book's editors, Matt Moravec, Eleonore Hugendubel, and Dean Kissick, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels newmodels.substack.com

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 monthly event, known as the Seaport Talks, took place 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.

For more: https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/product/what-contemporary-art-today

NM Reads: Excerpts from "What Is Contemporary Art For Today?" (Perić, 2025)

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. [https://www.nts.live/shows/mark-leckey]

“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.

SUBSCRIBE to New Models to access:
* Lil Internet’s Three Rules of Gencore
* Download link to high quality file of the pure mix (w/out NM intro/outro) 

https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

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®

https://newmodels.io



NM Presents: ILLEGAL GENERATION Vol. 2 by LIL INTERNET (2025) xx

This is a preview — for the full episode (released: Sept 24, 2025), subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

Writer Gideon Jacobs joins 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, Kevin Munger, Elon Musk, Eric Davis, Grok, Felix Guattari, Jay Springet, Jesus Christ, 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: 
https://www.instagram.com/gideon___jacobs
NM Talkcore: Gideon Jacobs on Trump as Image (Nov 2024)
NM Talkcore:  Gideon Jacobs on Musk, Trump, and Fiction (2025) 

Gideon Jacobs, “Player One and Main Character,” (Apr. 2025)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/player-one-and-main-character/
Gideon Jacobs, “Trump l’Oeil,” (LARB, Nov 2024)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-loeil/

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

https://newmodels.io

Preview | NM Talkcore: Gideon Jacobs on Media, Politics, and Ketaphysics (2025)

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: 
https://kevinmunger.com
https:// kevinmunger.substack.com

Watch: Kevin Munger on Vilém Flusser’s “Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations” https://youtu.be/EpVTEoqUCbs?si=e-bh0ewGRsbnzRMq

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)

Unlocked | NM Talkcore: Kevin Munger on Spiraling (2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

Olivia Kan-Sperling joins to talk about 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 + 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/  
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Little-Pink-Book/Olivia-Kan-Sperling/9781648230417

Also feat. Olivia:
NM60: https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/code-couture-olivia-kan-sperling-nm60
Heavy Traffic x New Models: https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/heavy-traffic-olivia-kan-sperling-perfect-glove

Preview | NM Greenroom: Olivia Kan-Sperling on "Little Pink Book" (2025)

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com

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 organoids and agent behavior simulation in MIT’s Antikythera journal.

For more: @jennnital @felstead.daniel
Welcome to Jankspace, Babes
https://dis.art/welcome-to-jankspace

Maya B. Kronic speaking at London College of Fashion, January 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfZm7zTQwbE

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

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? 

Chat with an Oct 2025 draft Jay’s book’s here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68d150abe8008191b27383697808eed9-slop-machines

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

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

Preview | NM Talkcore: Jay Springett on "Slop Machines of Loving Grace" (2025)

"A CONEY ISLAND OF THE VIRUS: COVID-19 IN NEW YORK" is an essay by the New York-based, Argentinean writer REINALDO LADDAGA, excerpted from a book he is writing about Covid-19 & NYC. The essay tells of physical geography, strategic cartography, and one city's urban planning as death machine on the generational timescale. 

https://newmodels.io/proprietary/coney-island-of-the-virus-reinaldo-laddaga

For more: 
https://rladdaga.net/
https://adrianahidalgo.es/author-book/laddaga-reinaldo/

Sound design: @LILINTERNET
Text read by: Carly Busta

NM Reads: Reinaldo Laddaga's "A Coney Island of the Virus" (2020)

This is the free/public New Models channel 
For full episodes, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels | https://newmodels.substack.com 

Art, tech, media theory, culture ... networked tech's impact on life 
Hosts: Caroline Busta & Lil Internet 
https://newmodels.io  

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