The Culture Journalist

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

Flower crowns. Culturally appropriative costumes. Dead-eyed influencers snapping selfies in front of branded activations. If you have never been to Coachella, you probably think of it as a sum of the memes that have circulated about it online — or, at the very least, as an avatar for American youth culture at its most extravagant and, well, capitalist. Today, we’re going to advance the somewhat controversial thesis that Coachella is actually one of the most thought-provoking cultural happenings of the year. And we’re right on time, because Coachella just wrapped its first edition since the start of the pandemic, making it one of the first major music festivals to return in its wake. Andrea was on-site to experience it, joined by her good friend Katie Bain, a longtime music reporter and critic and currently the director of Billboard Dance.Today, Katie joins us to discuss how the festival has changed — or not changed — and what this year’s edition tells us about where we’re at. We also discuss Coachella’s roots in alternative music and rave culture, its tangled relationship with influencer culture, and the surreality, and joy, of reuniting at Coachella after two years of hunkering down at home.  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

Former music journalist Yancey Strickler explores the idea of artists collaborating through Metalabel. They discuss the shift towards collective creativity, the impact of metalabels on societal applications, challenges in the creator economy, and the evolution of group identities online.

Especially in the internet age, it’s hard to say who an artist’s story belongs to. Musicians can communicate with audiences directly, fan armies rise up to defend their faves against narratives they don’t agree with, and even if we haven’t met the artist in person, we all have tales of the ways their music has touched our lives. But when veteran music journalist Paul Cantor set out to write a biography of the late, great rapper Mac Miller, an artist whose generosity and infectious kindness were as palpable on record as they were in his day-to-day life, he came up against this question in the starkest way possible. After the artist’s tragic passing from an accidental drug overdose in 2018, at the age of 26, Paul secured the participation of a number of Mac’s closest friends and collaborators. But the musician’s family was wary about a writer with no direct personal connection to Mac writing a book about him. In fact, they circulated a statement on social media telling people not to talk to Paul: “To artists, management, & friends: There is a writer doing a Mac Miller biography that some you have been approached about or will be,” they wrote on Instagram. “This book is not authorized/approved by Mac’s family or Estate. We are not participating and prefer you don’t either if you personally knew Malcolm.” In time, the family made it clear that they would be supporting a competing biography instead: The Book of Mac: Remembering Mac Miller, by journalist Donna-Claire Chesman, which they designated as the only authorized biography of two. But after years of research, hundreds of hours of interviews, and what Cantor’s publicist described to us as a “massive bullying campaign” that included death threats (you can read his article about the experience here), his book, Most Dope: The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller, finally hit bookstores this year. It’s an exhaustive, strikingly intimate account at the places, people, societal forces, and personal challenges that shaped Mac’s singular view of the world — even down to the history of the neighborhood in Pittsburgh where he grew up. On today’s episode, we discuss the controversy’s impact on Paul’s experiences reporting and writing the book, and the role of the biographer in a world where artists have unprecedented control over their own narrative. We also take a look at what Mac’s story can tell us about the fraught relationship between mental health and music, and how Mac’s evolution as an artist and public figure reflected wider changes in technology, the music industry, and public discourse in the late aughts and the tens.  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

Is it possible to imagine a future where the platforms that circumscribe every aspect of our online lives *aren’t* owned by the same handful of for-profit behemoths — companies that have come under fire time and time again for prioritizing shareholder interests and exponential growth over the economic and psychological well being of their users? Could we ever live in a world where these tools, from the public square of social media to streaming services and vacation rental apps, are collectively owned and governed by the people who use them? Our guest — James Muldoon, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter in the UK and head of digital research at the thinktank Autonomy — says yes. And he’s written a fascinating new book, Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, that outlines what such a future might look like, from the formation of small-scale alternatives (think: local rideshare cooperatives instead of Uber), to users democratically voting on the algorithms that shape our experience on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. “Whoever controls the platforms, controls the future,” he writes. “The simple proposition of this book is that it should be us.” In today’s conversation, which we recorded before the Bandcamp news, we go deep with James on why existing proposals for curbing the enormous power and influence of big tech, such as “breaking up Facebook,” fail to address the root of the problem. We also discuss how even free-to-use platforms extract value from their users; the pitfalls of heralding cryptocurrency and Web3 as the only alternative to the “rentier” relations of Web2; and why we urgently need to widen the Overton window when it comes to imagining what the internet of the future could look like so we can know which changes to agitate for in the present.  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

Welcome to season three of The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. We’re excited to kick things off today with an episode that feels pretty damn perfect for these darkest days of winter. Think: neo-Gothic architecture, darkened libraries full of dusty old books, putting on your smartest blue blazer and rushing across a misty university quad at dawn.Friends, we’re talking about Dark Academia, a Gen Z-centric fashion aesthetic and online subculture that centers a love of educational pursuits, classical literature, and threads that look straight out of Oxford or Cambridge in 1922. Like Cottagecore, you could chalk it up to young people eschewing the pressures of digital life to embrace a slower, more analog existence — though it’s less about sourdough starters and baby chicks, and more about yearning for a time when students dressed like characters out of Dead Poets Society and school administrators still trumpeted the virtues of learning for the sake of learning. Is Dark Academia a rejection of a world that compels us to constantly perform on social media, even if posting about your vintage book collection is part of the point? Is it a response to the decline of the liberal arts? A return to the hipster fascination with elite knowledge?Today, we are thrilled to dive deep into the “why” of Dark Academia with writer and fashion theory wiz Biz Sherbert, co-host of the podcast Nymphet Alumni and the brain behind the popular instagram account @markfisherquotes. Along the way, we’ll discuss a few other examples of the “trad” becoming alt — such as the growing popularity of Catholic imagery in fashion and among art-school kids — the increased generational metabolism for consuming past trends, and the rise of the "aesthetic" as an organizing principle for contemporary life. 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

We know we said that we were taking a pause from publishing as we cook up Season 3 of The Culture Journalist, but we couldn’t resist jumping back in for a quick one-off about a topic we just can’t shake: Neil Young (et al.) vs. Spotify. The TL;DR is that Young, on the heels of an open letter by a cadre of scientists, medical professionals, and academics, threatened to pull his catalog from the streaming giant last week if it didn’t do more to curtail the spread of misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines. He pointedly called for the removal of one of the platform’s biggest (and most lucrative) sources of said questionable material, The Joe Rogan Experience, writing in a letter to his team: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.” After Spotify chose to stand by Rogan, Young made good on his word (though he since deleted the above post from his Times-Contrarian website) and has since been directing his fans to check out his tunes on Spotify competitors like Amazon and Apple. Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, and Graham Nash pulled their music as well, and the hashtag #cancelspotify enjoyed a day or two of virality. The situation is still unfolding, and it’s unclear what impact it will have on Spotify beyond a temporary stock price dip and anecdotal reports of users canceling their subscriptions. But the saga — shocker — proved to be a particularly spicy morsel of catnip for the culture wars, sparking arguments around free speech, censorship, and corporate responsibility that feel all the more vertiginous at a time when conservatives are attempting to ban books from school curricula and libraries across the country.All of which is to say, we’re pretty fired up. After years of observing how Spotify and its peers have impacted the lives of artists and the music industry as a whole, it feels vindicating to finally see the company receive a bit of (mainstream) scrutiny for its controversial business practices. But it’s also been frustrating to watch the reckoning play out in this particular way — like we’re seeing society collectively fixate on the symptoms of the problem and not the fundamental brokenness of a streaming economy that reduces everything it touches to a widget in its unstoppable quest for profit and growth. Join us as we contemplate how the fiasco feels like such a perfect storm of internet-era attentional dynamics, how crying “Ivermectin” on a podcast isn’t really that different from crying “fire” in a theater, and whether it’s time to revisit the notion that all the music in the world needs to be free and accessible to everyone, all the time. (At least, if we’re going to rely on for-profit companies to build the architecture that makes it possible). 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

Back in September, Sotheby’s announced it was auctioning off one of 13 surviving original copies of the U.S. constitution. Given the rarity and historic significance of the document, it wasn’t surprising that it would make some headlines. But the news was quickly overshadowed by the revelation that 17,000 people on the internet were teaming up to bid on it. They did this through forming something called a DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization—basically, a kind of non-hierarchical, self-governing community that uses blockchain technology to fundraise, coordinate, and make decisions.The operation, which came together in just a few weeks, was not particularly well thought out. Given the document’s racist legacy, a lot of people understandably found it pretty offensive that the group had chosen to rally around the Constitution at all. The energy costs associated with the crowdfund (and eventual refund) were enormous, with many small-dollar donors seeing their entire contribution wiped out by Ethereum gas fees—and there were a few too many references to the Nicholas Cage movie National Treasure for our comfort. After collectively raising more than 40 million dollars, ConstitutionDAO almost succeeded in its goal, though they lost out to a hedge fund owner and Republican donor named Ken Griffin. Even with all the project’s baggage, it was pretty exciting to watch the auction itself go down. For one thing, there was the GameStop-era thrill of seeing a wave of pseudonymous avatars descend on the Sotheby’s live chat with exhortations of “GM.” It was though these people were staking a claim for blockchain-enabled community organizing as a tool that could be used to build a world with new rules, by purchasing the rules of the old one—or at least, that’s how friends-of-the-pod Drew Millard and Kevin Munger, who you may remember from last season, described it in a recent essay called “Imperfect Union: How ConstitutionDAO Lost Its Way.” Writing for Friends with Benefits—another decentralized autonomous organization that happens to count Emilie as a member of its editorial team—Drew and Kevin set out to examine how ConstitutionDAO happened, where it went wrong, and why, despite bringing so many people together and raising such a jaw-dropping amount of money, it was never really able to transcend its status as a meme. We brought them back on the show to discuss why the whole saga feels so emblematic of the post-Biden zeitgeist and some of the hard lessons we learned this year about financial flash mobs and networked protest movements. We also talk about whether it feels accurate to describe the NFT and meme-stonk delirium of current moment, as some pundits have done, as the new “Roaring Twenties.” 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

Get ready to hide under a napkin with a fried song bird while shouting “f**k off” in a thick Scottish accent, because this week we’re talking about HBO’s Succession. The third season of the acclaimed media family drama kicked off last month, and from the acting, to the writing, to the plot-twist momentum, it’s shaping up to be the series’ best yet. Part of Succession’s pitch-perfect rendering of the brutal inner workings of media comes down to the fact that its creators hire people who know what they’re talking about. One of those people, on the series’ second season, was Cord Jefferson, a longtime journalist and former editor and writer at Gawker who left the media industry seven years ago to try his hand at TV writing. Since then, he’s been one of the brains behind thought-provoking fan favorites like The Good Place, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and Watchmen—the latter of which earned him an Emmy for his work alongside co-writer Damon Lindelof. Along the way, Cord has carved out a name for himself as an advocate for journalists looking to cross into the entertainment industry, most recently teaming up with the Writer’s Guild of America to launch the Susan M. Haas Fellowship, which offers financial support and creative mentorship to journalists interested in TV writing. He’s also working on a show about the rise and fall of Gawker Media, which we can’t wait to see when it finally makes it to the screen.To celebrate Succession’s third season, Cord joins us to discuss his experiences in the media industry and how they’ve informed his work on fictional portrayals like Succession and the Gawker series. We discuss the ways that Hollywood gets journalism right—and also sometimes terribly wrong—along with the struggles writers in both fields are facing in a creative economy increasingly governed by algorithms, risk aversion, and Waystar RoyCo-esque monoliths obsessed with growth at any cost. 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