The Culture Journalist

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

It’s 2021, which means that us millennials are in for a parade of 20-year anniversaries of things that informed our understanding of culture and the world. Y2K. September 11th. The Strokes’ Is this It?. There’s even a festival happening called Just Like Heaven, which basically packs the entire history of 2000s indie music into a single day.Part of that strange nostalgia train includes a film we haven't been able to stop texting our friends about: Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage. The first installment in a Bill Simmons-produced HBO series called Music Box, it’s a polarizing new documentary about a festival 22 years ago that descended into a cavalcade of horrors, including rioting, vandalism, widespread dehydration, an infernal blaze, and reports of sexual assault. All in all, the documentary makes a pretty convincing case for Woodstock ’99 being one of the most egregious examples in pop music history of toxic white masculinity gone too far. But there was something that grated us about it: As riveting as it was as a Fyre Fest-style play-by-play—soundtracked by the testosterone-fueled hard rock of the era—we didn’t come away with much of a sense of why young people gravitated to this music in the first place, or the larger cultural context that gave rise to it. But then Craig Jenkins—music critic at Vulture, Pulitzer finalist, and an old colleague of ours from VICE—published a piece that pretty perfectly summed up our grievances, especially when it comes to the film’s depiction of a period of music and cultural history that we lived through as teens. It’s called “We’re Still Getting Woodstock ’99 Wrong,” and it thoughtfully nails the challenges and blindspots of how we retell and preserve cultural narratives in the era of streaming and clickbait. “Peace, Love, and Rage is pointed in attributing blame for the carnival of horrors the weekend would entail, but light on why the dehydrated revelers wanted to go in the first place,” he writes. “Woodstock 99 attempts to trace the tributaries drizzling fuel on the festival’s inferno, but it’s more notable for being the rare music documentary that doesn’t really seem to care for much of the music it’s covering.”Lucky for us, Craig was down to join us to discuss the documentary, the trainwreck that was Woodstock ’99, and his own memories of what he argues is a very misunderstood chapter in musical and cultural history.  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

On this week's episode of The Culture Journalist, we talk about collab houses: The McMansion-sized influencer incubators where young social media celebrities shack up to shoot TikTok videos, churn out brand deliverables, and generally lead glamorous lives for the sake of turning those experiences into content. Just when we thought we couldn’t read another take on the phenomenon, a contributing editor for Harper's named Barrett Swanson dropped a mammoth work of culture journalism about these Black Mirror-esque abodes. “The Anxiety of Influencers: Educating the TikTok Generation” transports readers to a wildfire-engulfed Los Angeles, where he spends five days shadowing a crew of "well-complected," college-aged collab house residents as they seek fame and fortune in the wilds of the American influencer industry. Barrett's is the best piece we've read about the phenomenon—and not just because of its pitch-perfect detailing of a world where your every word, White Claw bender, and Macarena-simple dance move becomes a vector for hundreds of thousands of views. More than a work of cultural anthropology, it's a searing indictment of for-profit social media, one that connects the worlds of influencing, higher education, and journalism to excavate the existential anguish we all face as we negotiate how much of ourselves we want to share with the world. That is, to the extent that it is even possible to conceive of a self at all beyond the one we project for others online: Though "the angle of our pose may be different," he writes, "all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm."Join us for a conversation about life in a TikTok mansion, navigating a world that asks us "to create [ourselves] in full view of the public," and Barrett's new book of essays, Lost in Summerland. Much like the piece, it’s an exploration of the collapse of the grand narrative in American culture and the bizarre fascinations and ideologies that are sweeping society in its wake.  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

Has music journalism lost its way? Earlier this week, the debate bubbled up on music Twitter after a user named @cllnsmith posted a viral joke about Pitchfork that (understandably) made a lot of people in the music journo community pretty mad. The timing, for our own opportunistic purposes, was perfect, because we happened to be putting the finishing touches on an episode with veteran music journalist and NPR music critic Ann Powers, inspired by a Facebook post she published that offered a refreshingly nuanced take on the forces beleaguering the field. "Here's something I think music writers might want to think/talk about," she wrote. "The rise of the quick react/hot take colliding with the unmanageable proliferation of accessible music releases and streaming platforms'  algorithmic favoritism of the very few have combined to enforce media focus on pop's 1 per cent to the extreme."Noting the extent to which underground and mid-level artists appear to have been crowded out of the conversation, she raises a thought-provoking question: "Is this a correlation to the rise of the one per cent in other aspects of the culture?”Lucky for us, Ann was kind enough to join us to talk about how we got here. And as someone who has been chronicling American pop music and youth culture on the ground for nearly four decades, from the scrappy alt weekly scene of 1980s of San Francisco to the august halls of the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, she seemed like the perfect person to help us make sense of the shifting role of the music journalist, along with the economic, technological, and wider cultural forces that have shaped it. What is the point of music journalism and criticism? Why did we need it in the first place? What remains—even in the era of streaming and social media—that makes it still important to have now? Join Emilie and Andrea as we go long on these questions with Ann and compare notes on our respective journeys through the field.  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, we'll be digging into a phenomenon that has been on our mind a lot lately: The rise of the so-called "creator" economy, and the possibilities and perils of a model of cultural patronage grounded in a very specific type of relationship between producers and fans. Friends, we're talking about parasocial interaction, the phenomenon whereby a cultural producer fosters a kind of illusory, (mostly) one-sided intimacy with fans—sometimes for pay on the internet. Parasocial interaction isn't a new concept, but it's par for the course in a world where it's pretty much impossible to build a career as a creative person without sharing a constant stream of thoughts, intimate confessions, and images from your life. On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we argue that this underexplored facet of the creative economy represents a seismic shift in what it means to be a creative person. Is this new parasocial landscape a great leveling of the playing field, a genuine step in the direction of more democratized culture? Or is it a system where a small number of producers will rise to the top while others perform a lot of free or under-compensated labor? Come join us—parasocial style—as we air our hopes, fears and grievances. Full disclosure: We'll be sharing a bit about our experiences with Substack, and our thoughts on the platform, too.  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

While scrolling on Doordash one night last year, co-host Emilie Friedlander made a strange discovery: She stumbled upon a listing for a restaurant called F*cking Good Pizza. Only, as far as she could tell, it didn't seem to actually exist. Her recent long read for VICE, “The Mysterious Case of the F*cking Good Pizza,” chronicles her months-long investigation of a ring of mysterious restaurants with uncanny photos and attention-baiting names — a microcosm of the fast-growing trend of virtual restaurants, or online-only brands that prepare food for delivery only. We won’t spoil what she uncovered—we want you to listen to this week’s podcast!—but we'll just say that her research kept leading her back to CloudKitchens, the new company from Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick. Along the way, she spoke to restaurant owners in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Los Angeles about their experiences cooking for these virtual brands (hint: the pandemic is a major protagonist in this story) and came across an essay by a writer who had fallen down a similar rabbit hole, 3,000 miles away: Emma Kemp, an artist and designer who teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design in L.A.Published by Bakersfield—the research studio she founded with the filmmaker Matthew Altman Vega—“Ghost ops: Counterfeit Kitchens in the pandemic age” is a fascinating meditation on the systems of social signaling embedded in the design of these virtual brands, the phenomenon’s ties to broader trends in visual culture and advertising, and how its emphasis on "style over substance" can feel very of a piece with what it feels like to live in L.A. in this cultural moment. On this week's show, Emma and Emilie compare their findings and join Andrea for a conversation on the dizzying world of online-only restaurants, ghost kitchens, and Big Tech’s encroachment upon what we eat.  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 does the unfolding NFT craze mean for the future of music—and particularly, for independent artists? To help us make sense of this strange new chapter in the cultural economy, we enlisted Mat Dryhurst, a Berlin-based artist, technologist, and teacher who you’ve probably seen commenting on such brain-bending matters on Twitter—and who co-hosts the fantastic Interdependence podcast with Holly Herndon. He’s been exploring the possibilities of blockchain technology in his work for some time, and is a firm believer that it has the potential to rewire the economics of independent music from the ground up—just not in the way that you might expect, judging from the recent hullabaloo.We spoke to Mat about how NFTs work, how cryptocurrency may represent a potential antidote to streaming's devaluation of musical value, and why the boom-and-bust speculation market we're seeing right now is only just the "GeoCities era" of this technology's potential.  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 everyone. We’re excited to kick off our second season today with a conversation on a subject that is near and dear to hearts: counterculture.It's a term that has been used to describe pretty much every major, music-adjacent youth movement of the 20th century, from the Beats and the hippies, to 70s hip-hop and punk, to the darkened warehouses in Detroit where techno was born. For some of us, counterculture conjures memories of specific spaces, like the smelly basement where you took in your first college noise show. For others it speaks more to the abstract idea of carving out a safer, utopian alternative to the messy, exploitative, inequitable reality we live in every day.But is counterculture—and underground culture as a whole—even possible in the era of the Internet? Today, we'll be talking about what counterculture is, what it means, and whether it can even exist at a time when pretty much every interpersonal interaction we have takes place on social media, for everyone to see. To guide us, we've enlisted the powerful brain of Caroline Busta, a Berlin-based writer and editor and co-founder of the media aggregator and podcast New Models, which is always a source of intriguing food-for-thought on the intersection of art, cultural production, and technology. At the top of the year, Carly published an essay on Document Journal that tapped into a feeling we'd been turning over for a long time: "To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to above all betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self," she writes. Whether you're a life-long weird music head, or a Marxist art theory nerd, or somebody who is simply having a hard time finding community inside the 280-character confines of Web 2.0, you'll probably find something to chew on in the piece, which is called "The Internet Didn't Kills Counterculture—You Just Won't Find It On Instagram." Either way, we hope you'll enjoy our conversation with Carly.  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

Hello there. Welcome to the last installment of our first season. From musicians adjusting to an industry that has moved entirely online, to journalists fighting for increased workplace protections and newsroom diversity, to independent venue operators banding together to petition Congress for federal relief—it’s hard to avoid the fact that creative workers have spent this year asking American society at large, and the economic and government powers that be, to simply recognize the value of the work that they do. No one wants to live in a world without art and music. But, as we discuss in part one of this week’s episode, the events of 2020 have been a startling reminder of how far America has to go when it comes to recognizing that creative work is, well, work. In part two, we speak with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, a member of Providence punk band Downtown Boys, about his work with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, a new coalition of artists and music professionals that has spent the past six months confronting labor challenges within the music industry. Their latest action, Justice at Spotify, which has 19,000 signatures and counting, puts a very specific premium on the work musicians do: Faced with a loss of touring revenue during the pandemic—the biggest income source for most musicians—they are asking for a penny every time someone streams their music.We hope you enjoy the show, and thank you for joining us this season. If you have any feedback to share—or want to suggest a topic—kindly drop us a line here.  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