The Culture Journalist

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comIn the hours before Silicon Valley Bank imploded last week, setting off a chain of events that would send the entire tech (and finance) world into an existential tailspin, Andrea and Emilie made the somewhat excruciating decision to watch Spotify’s annual business presentation, “Stream On” — all hour and a half of it. Between the company’s new, Tiktok-inspired interface, its Black Mirror-esque personal AI DJ tool, and the expansion of its Discovery Mode program offering artists more exposure in exchange for a lower royalty rate, the event offered plenty of food for thought about the state of cultural curation — and musical gatekeeping — in 2023.Should we believe tech companies when they say they are democratizing cultural creation and distribution — or is all that utopian language just a smoke screen for the ways they are slowly rendering human curators (like DJs, record store clerks, A&Rs, and music critics) obsolete? How did the figure of the musical “gatekeeper” get such a bad rap in the first place? And is it time, as musician Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi) suggests in an excellent new essay for Dada Drummer, for us to consider them in a new light?

Just a little over a year ago, everyone was talking about the Great Resignation — a trend of workers across multiple different sectors resigning from their jobs. But amid rising interest rates, inflation, stagnating wages, and layoffs in… uh…certain industries we may or may not be intimately familiar with, we seem to have entered an entirely new chapter in the history of work. It’s not just that things feel, ahem, a bit more uncertain than they used to; for many of us, the entire experience of work feels different too, with the rise of hybrid and remote employment introducing all sorts of new challenges around office etiquette, boundaries, and the-ever elusive “work-life balance.” We brought on UK-based business, tech, and culture journalist Anna Codrea-Rado — author of a fantastic book about freelancing, creator of the newsletter A-Mail, and co-host of Is this Working?, our all-time favorite podcast about work — to help us make sense of this strangely chaotic and confusing moment in the post-pandemic work landscape.We discuss how the culture of work has changed since the heady glory days of the r/antiwork subreddit (remember all of those viral news stories about people quitting their jobs via text?); the dystopian surveillance mechanisms and non-stop intrusions on our time that make our experience of remote work so exhausting; and some of the darker realities lurking beneath shiny new labor paradigms like the four-day work week and DAOs. Anna also opens up her own journey with work over the years, and the meta experience of navigating self-employment while writing and podcasting about it for a living.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s episode goes out to the journalists in your life. (Or you, if you happen to be a journalist). According to one estimate, nearly 130,000 workers in tech and media have lost their job over the 12 months — and while we’ve talked about the annual ritual of media layoffs before, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re finally reaching the end of the era of digital media as we know it. Is the current wave of layoffs and closures just more of the same, or a sign that writers and editors need to completely rethink what a career in media even looks like? How do digital publications actually make money — and what lessons can we learn, if any, from these suspiciously concurrent cuts in both tech and media? Lucky for you, we happen to have an old colleague in our Rolodex with an intimate understanding of the economics of the business (and how they got so broken). His name is Ben Dietz, and he’s the creator of an excellent culture and technology newsletter called [SIC] Weekly. Prior to his current gig as chief strategy officer at NTWRK, he spent 16 years working upstairs from us at VICE — leading sales and business development, founding an in-house agency called VIRTUE, and just generally being the kind of ad guy who seemed to genuinely care about the work we did as journalists. Drew joins to help ask questions… and then ask Ben for money.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Do you ever just look around and get the feeling that everything is just… worse? This week, we’re joined by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, and Lauren Boyle, co-founder of the long-running NYC art collective DIS, to discuss how the story of the 21st century became one where consumer experiences are always getting crappier, jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, and workers are constantly being asked to do more more with less. Putting on our finance hats, we zero in on something called the leveraged buyout, a shadowy business maneuver from the world of private equity that happens to be the subject of Syzygy, Jacob’s excellent new documentary for DIS’ streaming platform DIS.ART. Mild spoiler: The film was inspired by a supremely strange Meta commercial that aired at the 2022 Super Bowl, and takes us on a surprising and thought-provoking journey involving gaming pioneer Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and private equity giant Apollo Global Management, which acquired the kitschy pizza party chain in 2014 using this very practice.We explore how leveraged buyouts funnel resources away from companies and ordinary Americans and into the coffers of the corporate overclass, DIS’s evolving role as a patron of video work that makes theory accessible to the people, and what it means to successfully adapt to an internet that is always changing for the worse.To watch Syzygy and check out more from the episode, head to theculturejournalist.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Have you ever wondered why the Silicon Valley oligarchs seem so obsessed with preparing for the end of the world? In our first episode of 2023, we join media theorist Douglas Rushkoff on an epic journey through the universe of million-dollar bunkers, libertarian island micronations, and hypothetical Mars colonies to explore why they want to get away from us so badly when the apocalypse hits — and what this says about the consequences their business practices and technologies are having on the world right now. As a professor at Queens College and the author of 20 books spanning everything from early cyberculture to alternative currencies, Rushkoff has a knack for putting words to the abstract forces that govern our online lives. In fact, he’s the guy who popularized concepts like “viral media” and “social currency.” In this new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, he turns his attention to something he is calling “the Mindset.” “[It’s] this kind of tech-billionaire belief that with enough money and technology, they can escape the catastrophes that result from their own acquisition of money and use of technology,” he says. “It’s the belief that humanity is a problem that can be solved with technology.”We trace the roots of this worldview back past the “Californian Ideology” of the 90s dot-com bubble to the dawn of interest-backed currencies and the rise of scientism in the era of Francis Bacon; hear a fun story about Timothy Leary and his theory that tech bros are using technology to recreate the experience of the womb; and discuss why letting go of our societal obsession with economic growth may be the only way to resist the Mindset and its extractive impact on labor, communities, and the environment. It’s a hopeful conversation, too — at the end of our time together, Rushkoff discusses what living one’s life in opposition to the technocapitalist status quo might look like.   This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

AI image-generation tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are creating something of a moral panic in the worlds of art, media, and design. And for good reason: Graphic designers and other commercial artists are worried that AI will spur companies to replace human labor with machines while exacerbating the scourge of intellectual property theft that they’ve already been dealing with on the internet for years. A photo director at New York magazine recently penned an essay asking whether DALL-E 2 was going to put her out of a job. Which all raises the question: Is AI the beginning of a more egalitarian artistic future, or the terrifying final stage of a trajectory where corporations and developers find increasingly insidious ways to extract value from the creative class? To begin to make sense of the economic, ethical, and artistic implications of these tools, we brought on the artist, technologist, and Interdependence co-host Mat Dryhurst. You might remember him from our episode last year on NFTs and their implications for the future of independent music. Mat and his partner, the composer Holly Herndon, have been diving headfirst into the possibilities and pitfalls posed by AI for several years now. Most recently, they launched Spawning, an organization building tools by and for artists working with AI. The idea is to give artists greater control over their AI training data by allowing them to opt in or out of these data sets, set permissions on how their style and likeness is used, and even offer their own models to the public. The goal, Mat says, is to establish a standard of consent honored by AI research companies as the tech — whether we like it or not — barrels into the future. Mat joins us from Berlin to give a crash course in the history of text-based image generation and the specific technological developments that led to this moment — from grassroots Discord groups, to Amazon, Microsoft, and Elon Musk-funded behemoths like Open AI, to the nation-states incentivizing this growing research field on the geopolitical stage. We discuss the possibilities and limitations of these tools as a medium for creative expression, the parallels between this moment and the advent of photography, and the changing nature of art, and perceptions of artistic value, in a world where people can create striking images at the push of a button. Finally, we get into the steps we can take now to avoid this becoming a nightmare scenario for artists — or, for the rest of us, the start of an era of really terrible art. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

In the spring of 2021, we recorded an interview with artist, technologist, and Interdependence host Mat Dryhurst about a then-little-known technology called NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens. (You may have heard of them.) Seemingly out of nowhere, musicians like Grimes and Kings of Leon were netting millions of dollars by uploading their work to something called the blockchain — and we wanted to take a moment to get clear on exactly what NFTs were, and if there was a chance that they could help independent artists make a living. Mat made a compelling case for why, despite the legitimate environmental concerns, leftist cultural creators who want to actually get paid for their work probably shouldn’t dismiss these technologies out of hand. The conversation, “What are NFTS? And can they save independent music?,” ended up being one of the most popular episodes we’ve ever recorded. It brought in a lot of new listeners for us, and one of them got in touch: Mark Redito, a Manila-born, Los Angeles-based electronic musician, vocalist, and producer who’d spent most of the 2010s touring and releasing music. Like the hosts of this podcast, Mark was looking for a way out of the Web2 creator economy grind. Soon after he emailed us — and partly inspired by Mat’s words — he dove head first into the world of music NFTs, which at the time was so new that not even Mat seemed to know if the format actually made sense as a medium. Most of you know the rest of this story: NFTs became a huge cultural meme, and the object of public derision. They’re something the mainstream cultural imaginary probably associates a lot more with scammy crypto bros who want to financialize everything than independent musicians trying to carve out more artist-friendly alternatives to Spotify and other extractive platforms. Still, even through the recent bear market, the fringe scene of artists and computer geeks that coalesced around these tools is very much alive and well. And since we last checked in, Mark has gone on to co-helm one of the most ambitious and ground-breaking projects that the music NFT space has seen so far: Chaos. Chaos is a 77-person “headless band” — a riff on Other Internet’s “headless brand” concept — comprising musicians, visual artists, lore builders, economists, and more. Over a period of eight weeks, the group came together to create The Chaos Collection, a compilation of 45 songs that they eventually released in the form of 5,000 NFT “packs,” in the manner of a pack of Pokémon cards. Collectors can open their pack to reveal four randomized songs with original artwork, kind of like a personalized EP but on the blockchain. Chaos is the latest project from Songcamp, which describes itself as “web3 laboratory experimenting at the edges of music and the new internet.” Not only does the music slap (listen to one of our personal favorites, by Jenn Morel, Abel Romijin, and Zach Britt, here), but it offers an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts, complete with a storyline centered around the Greek goddess of chaos, strife, and discord, Eris. It’s somewhere between an album, an NFT collection, and a wildly utopian experiment in new forms of human coordination, artistic collaboration, and collective value generation. It’s also been strikingly successful, at least by independent music standards: Since the project went live in June, it’s generated over $500,000 in revenue, topping Billboard’s list of the highest-earning music NFT collections that month. Needless to say, Mark seemed like the perfect person to bring on the show to ponder the same question we put to Mat, only with a year and a half of hindsight: Given how the space has evolved since the heady bull market days of 2021, could NFTs *actually* save independent music? Mark joins us to discuss how the world of music NFTS, at least at this early stage, is probably more of a counterculture than a mainstream revolution. We also talk about the dire importance of normalizing artistic patronage, and the political necessity of tinkering at the edges of what’s possible — not just trying to “fix” creative industries as they already exist (though that’s also important). In addition, we get into Chaos’ inception, how they made a 77-person band even work, and the creativity unlocked by celebrating all of the different forms of labor that went into the project  — even including coding and economic design — to forms of artistic expression in their own right.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

If you were alive in the late ’90s, chances are there was an entire chapter of your life that was soundtracked by Eve 6’s “Inside Out” — you know, that insanely catchy, angst-filled “heart in a blender” song that, starting in 1998, was ubiquitous on the radio and during Saturday trips to the mall. Nearly 25 years later, the Southern California alt-rock giants are back in the zeitgeist, though for decidedly un-nostalgic reasons: The band’s Twitter went viral in late 2020 (possibly the only good thing to happen that year) when, seemingly out of nowhere, singer and guitarist Max Collins began using it to serve up unfiltered, hilarious cultural and political commentary.Subsequent offerings have ranged from cold-tweeting politicians to ask them if they “like the heart in a blender song,” to razzing other late-’90s rock stars (looking at you, Stephan Jenkins and Steve Albini), to thoughtful commentary on fair pay for musicians and roasting the centrist Dems.  It’s been an unlikely hit, and in addition to releasing new music with Eve 6, Max now pens an advice column with Input Mag and has become something of a rock n roll, post-Bernie public intellectual.We’ve been wanting to interview Max for a long time, but recently found the perfect excuse: Emilie and Max both wrote an article about John Hinckley Jr., the sexagenarian singer-songwriter who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in a bid to impress the actor Jodie Foster. He wounded four people, including the President, and was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity.On July 15, Hinckley finally became a free man after over four decades of restrictions and court-mandated psychiatric care. Max, who is a big fan of Hinckley’s music, got him on the phone for his first interview after his unconditional release. Around the same time, Emilie got commissioned to write an essay about the cult fandom around Hinckley and his stripped-down, romantic folk songs, which have garnered him nearly 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. She wanted to examine the fascination with Hinckley’s music in the context of the complicated legacy of “outsider music,” a term popularized by WFMU DJ Irwin Chusid in the early 2000s to describe self-taught musicians with unusual backstories (and sometimes psychological disabilities) creating outside the bounds of the traditional music industry. Think: Daniel Johnston, The Shaggs, and Wesley Willis. It’s basically the music equivalent of the (similarly othering) category of outsider art.But then a planned series of tour dates Hinckley booked this summer sparked a bunch of controversy online — especially after The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute issued a statement condemning his return to the stage. After the shows got canceled, the piece evolved into an exploration of how the long-running Brooklyn DIY venue Market Hotel, one of the stops on Hinckley’s so-called “Redemption Tour,” became a target for the conservative media outrage machine, exemplifying the Right’s increasing embrace of the very same cancel-culture tactics it loves to accuse the left of using. What does the controversy around Hinckley’s foray into live music tell us about the state of the discourse? Is there such a thing as forgiveness, and redemption, in the middle of a culture war? And how in the world did Eve 6, a band we all grew up watching on MTV, end up reentering the chat as one of the funniest and most influential voices on left-wing Twitter? Much like in his column, Max is a generous and thoughtful conversationalist and was kind enough to indulge our extremely long list of questions. Along the way, he also got deep about some of his own experiences with mental health, including navigating a form of OCD, and why perhaps the appeal of so-called “outsider music” is that we all feel like outsiders in a way sometimes.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Hey pals. We’re going to kick things off today with a quote from the great Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”Gramsci was describing the political situation in Italy and Europe a year into the Great Depression. But his words also sum up the subject of political scientist and friend-of-the-pod Kevin Munger’s new book: Boomers, their unceasing grip on American politics and culture, and why it’s so difficult for them to understand what us young people are going through. His book, Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture, explores the confluence of factors that led the Baby Boomers to become the richest, the most powerful, and the most populous elder generation in American history — and how the concentration of so much power at the top of the age pyramid is shaping, or perhaps stunting, the ability of Millennials and Gen Z to come into their own as a political power base. Borrowing a metaphor from the nautical world, he calls this phenomenon Boomer ballast. “Our ship of state has more ballast” — or weight  — “than ever before,” he writes, “rendering us unusually stable or slow to adapt.” Think: The fact that members of the Boomer Generation and the Silent Generation jointly still hold more seats in Congress than any other age group. (Kevin has written an article on this). And how rare it is to see real, material progress when it comes to the problems that impact young people the most, such as climate collapse, student loan debt, and decades of stagnating wages. Today, we’re diving deep into the Boomer generation, how their lived experience has shaped their view of the world, and the long legacy of the cultural and political currents they’ve embraced, from the hippy movement of the ’60s and ’70s to the Randian individualism of the ’80s and ’90s. We’ll be exploring why our own experiences, and priorities, are so different from theirs, and how our inability to achieve our own political aims in the face of so much entrenched institutional power — and the internet — is pushing Millennial and Gen Z political behavior into strange and surprising new shapes. To do that, we enlisted the brains of two of our favorite thinkers on all things related to generational political self-expression: Kevin himself, an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University; and Joshua Citarella, an artist and researcher who studies political subcultures online. Josh is also the founder of Do Not Research, a Discord community, publication, and arts institution focused on documenting aesthetic culture and memetic influence on the internet. Did you know that the Boomer generation once appeared as “the person of the year” on the cover of a certain high–profile American magazine, simply by virtue of being born? Ever wonder why some young people on the Internet seem to be politically self-identifying in ways that completely explode the left-right, Democratic-Republican binary? Want to hear the story behind “How to Plant a Meme,” Josh’s experiment in using “Capitalist Realism” memes to try to covertly steer radical meme accounts toward more productive ends? Buckle up, because we’ve got a wild show for you all.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

What do billionaire Peter Thiel, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, and edge-lordy, art-kid podcasts like Red Scare and Wet Brain have in common? According to journalist James Pogue, the author of an expansive, 9,000-word article that ran in Vanity Fair last month, they’re all part of a loose-knit constellation of fringe public intellectuals, conservative politicians, and independent media personalities that make up something called the New Right. It’s not exactly the next wave of Trumpism, even if it occasionally looks that way: On the back of an endorsement from the former president, and funding from Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance recently won the Republican primary in the race for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. But James’ reporting suggests that the movement is a lot more ideologically heterodox, and weirder, than that. Some of the players in the movement are Marxists or former Marxists; others, including thinkers that Vance himself is taking cues from, are sketching out visions of society that, to our ears, sound an awful lot like a socially conservative dictatorship.James’ article, titled “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest bets,” is a deeply chilling read. But the public response to it has been arguably just as thought-provoking: Readers and commentators on the left of the culture war, including the hosts of this podcast, heralded it as a frightening account of a fringe movement that could, sooner than we think, represent an actual threat to American democracy. People on the right, including James’ own sources and post-woke antagonists like Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss, praised it for being the rare work of journalism that engaged with its sources, and their thinking, in a nuanced way. (Jeff Bezos also praised James’s article in a quote tweet of Greenwald, which was just weird.)The piece important questions about the fraught business of reporting on the right in post-Trump America: What are the dangers, especially in this media climate, of giving any real estate at all to the opposition’s ideas? What are the dangers of not engaging with them, especially when half of America has already accepted many of them as fact? And perhaps most importantly, is the media’s approach to reporting on the right achieving the intended result?James joins us on today’s show to discuss why acquainting ourselves with the rhetorical moves these movements are making may ultimately be in the left’s best interests; whether there’s a case to be made for long-form literary journalism in pushing the political conversation forward; and the role, if any, that downtown Manhattan scenesters have to play in all this. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe