Episodes
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In his new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, writer Malcom Harris examines what is probably our most pressing existential paradox: Both individually and as a society, we’re all so caught up in the struggle to survive under capitalism that we’ve become incapable of taking decisive action to reduce our reliance on carbon and ensure our collective survival. Fortunately, as Malcom sees it, our fate isn’t sealed just yet. And What’s Left lays out, clearly and accessibly, what he sees as the three remaining options for saving the world.
Malcolm joins us to talk about those strategies — which he calls marketcraft, public power, and communism — and why solving the climate crisis requires people from across the left pursuing all three of them in tandem. We also get into why more mainstream political philosophies — like the notion of “Abundance,” popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and championed by centrist Democrats like Cory Booker — won’t help, largely because of a failure to engage with class politics.
Finally, we zoom out to contemplate what political opposition even looks like in our increasingly inhospitable environment for free speech. Will the left will remain fragmented between Boomers shouting “Hands off NATO” at public protests while college students get arrested for peacefully protesting the atrocities in Gaza? Or is a broader coalition possible?
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Order What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis
Follow Malcolm on X
Read more by Malcolm:
“What’s the matter with Abundance?” (The Baffler)
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During the pandemic, it seemed like the internet, and specifically TikTok, was coughing up one fringe aesthetic after the next: Cottagecore! Trad Cath Coquette! Old Money! Coastal Grandmother! And of course, our personal fave, Dark Academia. We even did a whole episode on it, as part of a larger examinatin of post-pandemic aesthetics.
Fast forward to today, and the churn of social media-born aesthetics seems to have slowed somewhat, leaving behind a landscape that feels more fragmented and difficult to parse. So we’ve brought back our guest for that episode — style writer, trend forecaster, and bonafide Cool Girl Biz Sherbert — to give us a lay of the sartorial land. Along with continuing to co-host the influential fashion and culture podcast Nymphet Alumni, and writing for places like The Face and AnOther Magazine, Biz recently launched a new publication called American Style on Substack (subscribe!), which she says is about “what people are really wearing and why.”
If you’re a CUJO subscriber, you already got a little taste via our Coachella collab with American Style a couple weeks ago. Either way, you’re in for a treat: Biz joins us to talk about American Style’s origin story and what’s she’s learned from documenting what young people are wearing out in the real world, at places ranging from a Deftones concert in Atlanta, to Disney World in Orlando, to a rave in North London. We also get into the state of countercultural and subcultural fashion in 2025; why men and boys seem, for the first time in a long time, to be leading the style conversation; the role that festivals like Coachella play in the wider image-making ecosystem; and the strange staying power of the festival cowgirl.
Subscribe to American Style and follow Biz on Instagram (fka @marcfisherquotes). Listen to Nymphet Alumni on your pod platform of choice.
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Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out content that is derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop?
According to Andrew deWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it’s because of Wall Street. In his brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, more insidious way: it’s private equity buying up entire song catalogs, activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, and the cultural industries getting consumed wholesale by the financial sector — actual derivatives trading included.
That wave of financialization is having an increasingly palpable effect on what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix — not just in terms of the kinds of works that get funded, but increasingly, in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit that “the stock exchange has been embedded within the media text.”
Andrew joins us to talk about how finance-world strategies impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it — and how they result in an entertainment landscape that is increasingly inhospitable to taking big risks. And we get into how the logic of the derivative has become embedded in media products themselves, from Jay Z turning lyrical wordplay into a champagne empire, to The White Lotus casting K-pop star LISA.
Order a copy of Derivative Media — or download an open-access PDF for free.
Read more by Andrew:
The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape (Columbia University Press)
“Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)” (Popular Music and Society)
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Since Trump took office in January, you may have picked up on a certain, shall we say, visual vibe. Think: AI slop memes, gilded neoclassical decor, men clad in dark suits and red ties, women decked out in high heels and flowing hair—not to mention an ambiguous blend of plastic surgery and contoured make-up that the Hollywood Reporter recently dubbed “Mar-A-Lago Face.”
If you’ve noticed some of these recurring themes, you’re not alone. The arts journalist and critic Carolina Miranda has been keeping tabs on the intersection of visual culture, society, and politics for years, and she recently came up with a name for the look and feel of the current administration: Trump Trad. Her recent column for the Washington Post, “Welcome to the Era of Trump Trad,” is worth a read—and it’s the first in a monthly series providing an ongoing aesthetic analysis of the Trump era, which is among her new endeavors since taking a buyout from her longtime role at the LA Times last year. (She also writes the Arts Insider newsletter for KCRW, which Andrea edits.)
Carolina joins us to explain the three core pillars of Trump Trad: a yearning for the past (architecturally and otherwise), traditional gender roles, and—fascinatingly—professional wrestling. We also get into how to reconcile all the trad-ness with this administration’s simultaneous embrace of Silicon Valley and AI, whether or not Biden or Kamala aesthetics exist, and how Trump’s obsession with taking control of the programming at the Kennedy Center and issuing executive orders about architecture fits in with his politics of resentment against so-called “cultural elites.”
Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and all our bonus episodes), sign up for a paid subscription.
Sign up for Carolina’s KCRW newsletter
Read more from Carolina:
“How Silicon Valley boys came to rule politics” (WaPo)
“Influencer Jenny69 calls herself a ‘buchona.’ How a narco-inspired style came to rule social media” (LA Times)
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Today we explore how many of the habits and customs we associate with American bourgeois life — religiously reading the Sunday Times, buying organic produce, building your entire identify around excelling at a career you love, etc. — stem from one generation in particular. Friends, we’re talking about the yuppies, that notoriously status-obsessed, hyper-educated cohort of young urban professionals who came to cultural prominence in the ’80s and ’90s, setting off a series of transformations in our cities, media, and consumer culture that we’re still witnessing to this day.
It’s easy to see the Boomer worldview as a reflection of the fact that they had it much easier than us Millennials, economically speaking. But a new book called Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation, by Philadelphia journalist and author Tom McGrath, subtly challenges that idea, reframing the yuppie obsession with money, achievement, and unimpeachable good taste as a response to the rough economic headwinds of the 1970s and ’80s. Along the way, it explores how yuppiedom was equally a reaction to suburban post-war monoculture — and perhaps most perplexingly, a kind of impossible attempt to reconcile a newfound love of capitalism with the egalitarian values of the hippie era.
Tom joins us to discuss the yuppie origin story and the historical factors that rerouted a generation from protesting the Vietnam War to working on Wall Street. We get into who — and what — the yuppies were rebelling against, and how their emphasis on not just consumption, but consuming the right things, laid the blueprint for everything from urban gentrification, to contemporary food culture, to the news and television we consume.
We also talk about whether or not the yuppie still exists — perhaps in the form of Millennials? — and, of course, where Trump, then and now, fits into all of this.
Purchase Triumph of the Yuppies.
Follow Tom on Substack.
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The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.
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Climate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires in January and Hurricane Helene last fall aren’t just laying bare the realities of global warming; they’re exposing the hidden dynamics of another kind of ecosystem: Media and information.
From journalists compiling mutual aid spreadsheets to country music radio shows that became community message boards when the internet went out, these calamities are shining a spotlight on the evolving role of journalism and how we access information. They’re also raising new questions about what that information should be, whose responsibility it is to vet and disseminate it, and what the media of the future might look like — you know, as climate disaster becomes a more regular feature of life.
There’s a lot to unpack here. So we’ve tagged in two media experts who, like Andrea, are based in LA and have had to confront climate disasters firsthand. Matt Pearce is a former Los Angeles Times reporter (and co-founder of its first union) with experience covering everything from hurricanes to internet culture; these days, he writes a Substack newsletter on the state of local news and media policy and is a senior policy advisor for the nonpartisan think tank Rebuild Local News.
Longtime listeners might remember Emma Kemp from one of our earliest episodes on ghost kitchens. She’s a researcher and writer and assistant professor at the Otis College of Art and Design who specializes in environmental media studies, and co-founder of the non-profit land conservation coalition No Canyon Hills.
Matt and Emma join us to talk about their experiences on the ground as both media consumers and producers during the wildfires; the sources of information that became essential, and the sources of information that just sort of fell away; the limitations (and opportunities) of AI in a crisis; and how climate disasters will transform what both traditional and non-traditional media look like.
Follow Matt on Substack and X. Check out his pieces on Watch Duty and on AI use during the wildfires.
Check out more from Emma on her website and at No Canyon Hills. She also sells chickens, eggs, and coop supplies over at Party Fowl.
The cover of “California Dreaming” by Jarvis Cocker featured in this episode was purchased from the LA fire benefit compilation Los Angeles Rising. Check it out, along with a collection of other compilations released to fundraise for wildfire relief, here.
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From AI song generators like SUNO and Udio to “knob-free,” browser-based DAWs like BandLab, a rash of new music production apps and software is wooing creators with the promise of shortcutting the time and elbow grease it traditionally takes to make music. But is quicker and more effortless necessarily better? Montreal-based writer and musician Devon Ha…
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Folks, it finally happened. After years of trying to “optimize” nearly every aspect of everyday life, from work to fitness to music, Silicon Valley has finally set its sights on the federal government. If you missed the bombshell story in Wired, Elon Musk is currently leading a platoon of quirked up zoomer web developers as they sift through institutional data and use AI to weed out inefficiencies like unnecessary spending, alleged corruption, and confirmed wokeness.
It’s easy to forget how we got here. For decades, the prevailing public attitude towards tech innovation has been one of near-blind optimism and acceptance — a perception of digital tech as neutral, transparent tools that are always leading us somewhere better than we are now.
The logic tends to follow that somewhere along the way, the tools themselves took a wrong turn, or just ended up in the wrong hands. But what if this perception — that emerging tech is, by default, beneficial to society — has been misguided from the start?
Writer and technologist Mike Pepi has some thoughts on that. His new book Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia pulls back the curtain on techno-utopianism, which he defines as “the idea that technology, and technology alone, will create a more egalitarian, democratic society.’ He makes the case that emerging technologies and platforms aren’t some kind of Platonic ideal, but in fact charged with assumptions and collateral consequences — a.k.a., ideology.
It’s not the tech that’s the problem — it’s the things we believe about it, and the ways that we’ve allowed that belief to overshadow, and at times completely blind us to, the actual conditions of contemporary life. The issue, Mike argues, is the impossible superpowers we reflexively attach to emerging tech and platforms — ranging from the idea that data can always point us to an objective truth, to Silicon Valley’s tone-deaf insistence that shiny new tools like AI and blockchain can solve decades-in-the-making social problems.
Mike joins us to talk about what techno-utopianism is, how it came to be the dominant mindset not just in Silicon Valley but in Western society itself, and how it both capitalizes on and fuels institutional decline. We also get into how we are seeing it play out in real time at DOGE, the disturbing phenomenon of tech companies bending the knee to Trump, the differences between platforms and institutions, and why something he calls “techno-progressivism” could be our way out of this mess.
Buy Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia.
Read Mike’s follow-up essay “The Institutional Membrane” and follow his work on Substack.
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Are algorithms actually making culture boring? It’s easy to point to the Spotifys and Instagrams the world and blame them for what we perceive to be stagnant cultural production, flattened tastes, and generally bad vibes. But, in a recent piece for the Atlantic titled “The Technology That Actually Runs Our World,” journalist T.M. Brown argues that the a…
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Let’s take a step back in time to the halcyon days of late 2011, back when a little Swedish music app called Spotify landed in our app stores.
Its arrival, alongside the rise of early smartphones and “public square” platforms like Twitter, seemed to herald the utopian ideals of a democratizing tech future just on the horizon. Here was an app that professed to level the playing field for music fans and artists alike via what Spotify imagined to be a “data-driven democracy”: For fans, it put pretty much any music you wanted at your fingertips, anytime. On the artist side, it promised to replace industry gatekeepers with a system where anyone who wrote a good enough song could land a viral hit — while also righting the compensatory wrongs of technological predecessors like Napster.
That’s…. not exactly how it’s played out.
Today, Spotify’s myth of meritocracy has been supplanted by a system where major labels make millions of dollars a day from streaming while artists make less than a penny per stream; where AI DJs do the choosing for you within an algorithmic echo chamber; and where “vibe”-oriented playlists are filled with music by ghost artists designed to keep you listening longer while paying attention less.
How all of this came to pass — and its far-reaching ripple effects on everything from cultural taste and aesthetics to the very meaning of being an “independent” artist — is the subject of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, a new book by independent music journalist Liz Pelly. The work culminates a decade of dogged reporting covering Spotify’s rise from democratizing platform to corporate behemoth, and how, in the process, it has eroded the vast majority of artist’s ability to make a living off of their work.
Liz joins us to discuss how independent artists got swept up in a system that was clearly never built with them in mind, and how it managed to devalue their work to almost nothing. We also get into Spotify’s flattening impact on music, in both an aesthetic and economic sense. And we break down the platform’s push towards “lean-back” listening — you know, beats to study and chill to — and how it’s reshaped the very meaning of being a fan.
Follow Liz on Instagram.
Get Mood Machine and check out more of Liz’s work here.
Read an excerpt, "The Ghosts in the Machine," at Harper's
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On the surface, Zyn seems like just another post-cigarette nicotine push from Big Tobacco. But look a little closer, and you’ll find that these little white nicotine pouches have taken on an entire life and culture of their own, complete with political connotations, subcultural slang, and even social media “Zynfluencers.” You can count Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and even “Joe Rogan of the Left” Hasan Piker among Zyn’s highest-profile enthusiasts. It’s become a symbol of American masculinity in the age of the bro-coded YouTube podcast, the digital equivalent of whipping out a tin of dip in the frat house.
To find out about how Zyn became both a new symbol of American masculinity and a political lightning rod, journalist T.M. Brown published a deep dive for the New York Times, just before the November election. So we decided to have him on for a brief cultural and social history of Zyn.
We get into why Zyn resonates with male consumers in particular — despite initially being much more popular among women in the product’s home country of Sweden — its bizarre trajectory across national borders and party lines, and its multifaceted nature as a social signifier that somehow manages to encompass such seemingly contradictory impulses as indulgence and health, working class culture and internet hustle culture, and individualism and brotherly love.
Follow T.M., aka Teddy, on X and Substack
Read more by Teddy:
“What’s that in your mouth bro?”
“Burn, memory”
“Hidden in a Fire Island house, the soundtrack of love and loss”
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No cultural phenomenon — and yes, it’s a phenomenon — has been dominating the discourse more these past few weeks than the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And in addition to seeming like a dark Hollywood thriller come to life — down to alleged killer Luigi Mangione’s brooding good looks and a literal backpack full of Monopoly money — the story has been raising a lot of important and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the evolving politics of the United States in the 2020s.
What does it tell us about the decline of the American project — and Americans’ faith in everything from the healthcare industry to our legal system — that people on both sides of the aisle have been responding not only with compassion for Luigi, but in some cases celebration and thirst? What are Luigi’s actual politics, and why do so many people think he is a left-wing vigilante when his interests seem far closer to certain center-right, grey tribe, effective altruism-adjacent ideologies endemic to Silicon Valley? And why — between this story, the Trump fist pump, and the New Jersey drones — does it feel like reality is increasingly taking cues from fiction?
To get into it, we invited back Joshua Citarella, an artist and researcher who has spent the past decade studying how the internet and social media are shaping youth political identification and behavior. (You might remember him from our episode on the Boomer Ballast Effect, with the academic Kevin Munger). In addition to launching an excellent new podcast called Doomscroll (check it out!), Joshua recently published an essay called “CEO Murder & the Dark Enlightenment,” where he explores the assassination and its ensuing response in context of the broader social and political shifts (and realignments) that characterize this moment.
We discuss the apparent ideological “buffet” of Luigi’s politics, why the public’s trust in the law — and Democratic institutions more generally — has been eroded to such a degree that it seems to view the killer as the lesser of two evils, and the greater truths that these sort of “stranger than fiction” moments seem to reveal.
Follow Joshua on Substack and check out Doomscroll.
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An AI Agent that can do your shopping for you (or, maybe one day, your job). Driver-less Waymo cars that take you to work. A notetaking app that can attend multiple meetings for you at the same time. These days, it can seem like our obsession with using technology to be more efficient (whatever that really means) has reached a fever pitch.
But who’s in control here? The humans using these tools, or the tech itself?
And when we use these tools to become more productive, who’s actually benefiting?
Ten years ago, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (who you might remember from our episode on the escapist fantasies of Silicon Valley oligarchs) published a book called Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for the Digital Age, an examination of how the internet was going to reconfigure the daily fabric of our existence. His discussion of the various affordances of digital technology and how they were poised to transform reality in their own image wasn’t just prescient (think: how digital technologies are biased, away from the local and towards the universal, and how the digital realm is biased towards the discrete – that is, leaving out the things we haven’t yet chosen or noticed, and forcing choices when none need to be made). It was a plea for everyday internet users to become more literate in the ways that digital technologies were “programming” us, so we could learn how to take back control.
10 Commands for the Digital Age, which is modeled after the 10 Commandments, are still as relevant today as they were a decade ago. One, for example, tells us to refuse to “always be on” — that is, to choose to whom and what we want to be available, and when. Another reminds us not to conflate having access to information and data with the ability to discern and contextualize it. But as we exit the long 2010s and enter a new era of technology increasingly oriented around the promise, real or imaginary, of artificial intelligence, its central question — of how to preserve human agency in a world where technology threatens to override and supplant it — feels more urgent than ever.
Rushkoff recently decided to reissue the book, with a new (and surprisingly hopeful) afterword where he contemplates what all that looks like in the age of AI. And it’s also why we asked him back onto the pod for a long chat about it one afternoon in September, which happened to be the day after the 2024 presidential debate. We’re excited to finally share that conversation with you today.
We get into the new 11-commandment edition of the book, the bizarre new world of digital second brains and driverless cars it foreshadowed, and the limits of what AI and other so-called productivity tools can ultimately do for us — that is, what aspects of humanity it can and can’t replace, and the importance of considering why we need to replace them in the first place, and what we are replacing them with.
Order the new edition of Program Or Be Programmed via ORBooks (and follow them @OR_books to support independent publishing!).
Follow Douglas on Substack.
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By now, you’ve all already heard the news: After coming in hot with Brat memes and aligning itself with Wall Street and Liz Cheney, the Kamala Harris campaign suffered a historic and existentially unsettling defeat—delivering America straight into the hands of what the Democrats warned us was the worst outcome possible, which was another four years of Donald Trump. Here to help us make sense of it in terms of longer-tail shifts in American class dynamics and political consciousness is Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine and author of the book Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against The Professional Managerial Class.
The book’s polemic against an elite class of contemporary knowledge workers— think: the corporate managers, cable news pundits, political consultants, credentialed experts, and arts and entertainment power players who can’t get enough of signaling their own virtue, even as their work often functions to shore up an unequal status quo — goes a long way to explaining how America became so culturally divided.
And we also think it’s a useful tool for understanding how the election played out — from the Democrats’ failure to meaningfully engage with bread-and-butter issues and Gaza, to the party’s decision to shift right instead of listening to its own base, to its tone-deaf insistence on joy in the face of widespread economic insecurity and despair. (We should note that we, too, are members of the professional managerial class, as are many of our listeners, which is part of why we feel that talking about this stuff is so important).
Catherine joins us to discuss how the PMC became so deeply alienated from the working class, the differences between Trump’s brand of right-wing populism and actual economic populism, and where the Democrats, and the Left, go from here. Plus, we touch on what cultural opposition looks like in a world where the Left has so clearly lost the meme war. (Sorry, Charli.)
Subscribe to The Culture Journalist
Follow Catherine on Substack and X.
Read Virtue Hoarders via University of Minnesota Press.
Read Catherine’s article, “Postmodern Liberalism and the Democratic Party”
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What’s it like when a song you wrote more than half a decade ago goes viral on TikTok? Well, that’s exactly what happened to Massachusetts indie band Vundabar with their 2015 track “Alien Blues”—to the tune of 83,000 TikTok videos and 600 million Spotify streams. This week, frontman Brandon Hagen joins us to talk about the experience of navigating a sud…
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The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. After disappearing into a black hole of summertime sadness, inflationary headwinds, and soul searching in Eastern Europe, we are back with a fresh batch of episodes and bonus content, so buckle up.
Also, this podcast recently turned four years old. To celebrate, between now and Friday, November 8, we are offering 50% off on all annual paid subscriptions.
Paid subscribers get access to the entire CUJO Cinematic Universe, including 1-2 monthly bonus episodes, an invite to our private Discord server, and our eternal parasocial friendship. Sign up at The Culture Journalist.
What is it about life in the 2020s that makes us feel so anxious about what tomorrow will bring? In her book The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, the writer, filmmaker, and organizer Astra Taylor looks at how insecurity — both as an emotional phenomenon and a material one — can help us make sense of the myriad stressors and challenges of modern life.
It’s not just worrying about the election. It’s not just high prices and the difficulty so many people are having finding a stable job. It’s not just climate change, or how social media makes us feel like our skin isn’t smooth enough. These days, it seems like everyone feels insecure — even (maybe especially?) the billionaires.
On this week’s episode, Astra joins us to talk about how insecurity differs from inequality, and how examining the psychic dimension of precarity can help us explain why things feel hard for so many people right now — even in the face of an ostensibly “strong” economy and labor market. We also get into the story of how the enclosure of the Commons in feudal England was the original sin that paved the way for our current “insecure” mode of capitalism. Finally, Astra tells us about her work as co-founder of the Debt Collective, the first union for debtors — and how returning to the ancient idea of the right to the Commons can help us organize in the face of decades of neoliberal austerity and a decaying social safety net.
Follow Astra on X
Purchase The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.
Watch Astra’s CBC Massey Lectures on the book.
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Today, we dive into the strange story of the California Journalism Preservation Act, a groundbreaking bill promising to making tech giants like Google and Facebook compensate news organizations with a small portion of the money they bring in when they host stories by California journalists on their platforms—and pointing to a potential path forward for a U.S. news industry on the brink of collapse. Today, Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant joins us to discuss how a weird backroom meeting between Google, legislators, and major publishers transformed the legislation into a shadow of what it once was, including the proposed creation of a vague "AI accelerator." We dig into what this means for the future of the media industry, and how the deals publications have been striking with AI companies (and AI more generally) stand to impact journalists.
Subscribe to The Culture Journalist to listen to the whole thing.
Read Brian’s article, “How a bill meant to save journalism from big tech ended up boosting AI and bailing out Google instead”
Order Blood in the Machine
Subscribe to Brian’s Substack
Follow Brian on X
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What can electronic music tell us about our past, present, and future? Today, we take a walk through the annals of electronic music history with Simon Reynolds, one of our music critic heroes and author of a new book called Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today.
Encompassing over two dozen essays and interviews, Futuromania offers a chronological narrative of machine-music spanning the 1970s to the present—with a special focus on music that, in its moment, seemed to presage the future, from Autotune and Giorgio Moroder to Amnesia Scanner and Jlin. You can think of it as a future-focused counterpart to Simon’s canonical 2011 book, Retromania, where he explored how pop culture and pop music had become addicted to its own past.
We dig into the differences between retromania and Futuromania, the deeply human appeal of music that sounds distinctly inhuman and machine-like, and how music that sounds like “the future,” much like sci-fi, can help us process our complicated feelings about technology and the world. We also discuss the role of retrofuturism in the genre’s history, the cycling back into fashion of decades-old electronic music styles like gabber and hardcore techno, and the changing meaning of musical “newness” in a world where electronic music itself is now nearly half a century old.
Get access to bonus episodes and the CUJOPLEX Discord server by becoming a paid subscriber.
Grab a copy of Futuromania.
Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblog
Follow Simon on X
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In the second installment of our Kim’s Video series, Emilie Friedlander reads a 2014 essay she wrote about her experiences working as a teenaged video clerk at the beloved film and music emporium’s Saint Mark’s location. In it, she explores the cultural significance of the figure of the “music snob” in the …
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Living in a city like New York is a constant exercise in seeing the things that you love go away. And for independent culture fans in the city, one of the most devastating losses of this century was that of Kim’s Video, a hybrid video and record store with a flagship location on Saint Marks Place in the East Village and clerks who were both revered and feared for their encyclopedic knowledge of film and music.
Kim’s Video holds a special place in Emilie’s heart — she worked her first job out of high school there. And for many decades, it was home to one of the largest and most comprehensive video rental collections in the world, with a wealth of cinematic obscurities and hard-to-find gems that earned it a cult following among both local cinephiles and art-house legends like Quentin Tarantino, Chloë Sevigny, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Coen brothers. So when the shop’s enigmatic impresario, Mr. Kim, announced that Kim’s Video was closing up shop, and it came out that the store’s 55,000-work collection had ended up in a small Italian town called Salemi, a lot of people were understandably very upset and confused.
Lucky for us, two filmmakers and Kim’s Video devotees — David Redmon and Ashley Sabin — decided to track down the collection. But when they arrived in Salemi and discovered the archives in a state of disarray, they found themselves in the middle of a cross-continental mystery that took them from Sicily, to South Korea, to Mr. Kim’s New Jersey home, and that ran much deeper than a simple case of streaming supplanting your local video rental place. That story, and the resulting fate of the Kim’s Video collection, are captured in David and Ashley’s fascinating and often baffling feature documentary, Kim’s Video.
Today, David joins us to talk about the story of Kim’s Video and Yong-man Kim, who famously started selling videos out of a dry cleaning shop after emigrating to New York from South Korea. We also explore the particular era in underground culture, and in the history of the East Village, of which Kim’s was such an important part; what we lose when our consumption of media loses its connection to physical objects; and whether the current interest in the Kim’s collection, which the directors helped return to its current location at Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Manhattan, is symptomatic of a larger yearning for a more tangible experience of culture.
PS. Later this month, we’ll be releasing a special subscriber-only bonus episode where Emilie reads an essay she wrote on her experiences working as a clerk. Sign up for a paid subscription to get it straight to your inbox.
Watch Kim’s Video on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Follow Kim's Video (the film) on Instagram.
Follow Kim’s Video (the collection) on Instagram.
Check out more of David and Ashley’s work at Carnivalesque Films.
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