Every summer, we return to the land of our youth, the Mid-Atlantic USA and, as has become tradition, relay our impressions of it to you. With this episode, @Lilinternet unpacks the 36 hours he spent just trying to get to the States, navigating a labyrinth of apps, regulations, platforms, self-ordering kiosks, loyalty programs, waitlists, dynamic pricing, seat assignments, Star Alliances and accelerating arches in an atmosphere defined by algorithms.

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Artist Simon Denny returns to New Models to discuss the American defense tech sector's newfound dedication to aesthetics.

Distilling the branding languages of companies like a16z, Palantir, and Anduril—which draw heavily on Italian Futurism, return-to-order neoclassicism, and the graphic idiom of modernist institutions—Denny shows techno-libertarian leaders to be positioning themselves as a progressive counter-elite, priming the public to receive its revanchist turn toward miltarism as natural, just, and inevitable.

"Why is Andreessen reaching for art and culture? He doesn't have to reach for culture... What is useful for him in reaching back toward Futurism… ?"

This conversation builds on “Epic Fury: the Dark Art of Defense Tech” Simon’s feature for the May 2026 issue of Artforum; as well as his installation “Monsters Between Worlds” with Venkatesh Rao, which is on view in Venice as part of Palazzo Diedo’s “Strange Rules” exhibition (through Nov. 21); and “Rules Based Order” in Munich, his solo show at Gallery Kraupa-Tuskany-Ziedler.

https://simondenny.net/

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When Enlightenment-era scholars taxonomized humankind, they chose homo sapiens, in part because of what they observed as a uniquely human aptitude for “taste.”

[“Taste” comes from the Latin taxare (to handle, to assess) – an intensive form of tangere (to touch). It is a term that via vulgar Latin blended with gustare (to taste, to try) to express the act of appraising something by physically handling or even consuming it. In proper Latin, there is the related term sapere, which carries a double meaning of “to taste” and “to be wise.” To taste, in the sense of sapere, is to possess wisdom through tangible experience.]

It’s remarkable that in recent years, and intensely in recent months, the idea of “taste”—“having taste,” “deploying taste,” “taste agents,” “integrating a taste layer,” “taste as a core skill,” “taste as moat”—has become an ultra-present concern in tech circles. Isn’t having taste (wherever one falls along the taste spectrum) an inherent quality of being human?

To be sure, there’s already a lot of writing on this phenomenon: “Tasteslop” by NEMESIS‘s Emily Segal and “Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed With Taste” by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker being among the best takes. The most confounding, in our opinion being Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham’s “Taste for Makers” (Feb 2002, but highly cited this year).

There is also “Against Taste,” by Will Manidis, which makes some good points (patrons used to fund art for a higher power or at least public display whereas contemporary collectors tend to buy art for their own private use) but in its theory-of-everything aspiration, feels LLM-ish and contextually ahistorical. So in pure “Content Today” form, we are adding to the pile-on with our own fashionably late, probably factually botched but definitely human, free-associative conversation about taste.

This is a public post. For all New Models, subscribe!

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

In recent episodes, you’ve heard us mention the project we created this spring with Joshua Citarella, together with the spatial design studio sub, for “Strange Rules” at Palazzo Diedo, Venice. On this episode, we chat with Josh about this work. The exhibition, which was curated by Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli, presents practices that engage with the "protocol layer” — in other words, the rules that determine how culture is created, transmitted, remembered.

For more text & images:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/online-of-ideas-160600874

https://substack.com/home/post/p-201216984

Joshua Citarella / Doomscroll: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4pEm3-yshBWa7nH3sQIKHQ

This is preview (full ep released to subscribers 06/03/2026) — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com

We talk a lot on this show about the “content” layer being compromised; how, given the physics of the feed, the creative act increasingly happens at the protocol level. While this is true, good books and films and records are, in fact, still being made. On this ep, friend of New Models Steven Warwick comes by on the occasion of his two new albums — "Live at Café Oto" (P-A-N) and, from his new band with Iván Brito, GUSH, "Splash of Milk" (Huntleys + Palmers) — to chat about making music, touring, and putting out albums in 2026.

https://p-a-n.org/product/steven-warwi…iveatcafeoto-pan163/

https://huntleyspalmers.bandcamp.com/album/gush…of-milk-lp

For more:

https://instagram.com/ohmygushhhhh

https://instagram.com/sweetie_darling_bebe

https://stevenwarwick.info

This is preview (full ep released to subscribers 04/17/2026) — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

"Anyone that claims they understand the world — this immediately marks them out as a fraud."

— Kevin Lee Kharas

After the imperial collapse (40 global offices, thousands of employees, bankruptcy), VICE magazine is now run by a lean, London-based team — and it is making one of the best culture publications currently in circulation. Ben Ditto (Vice global editorial director; founder of Ditto Nation; creative dir. Yaya Labs; founding creative dir. Dazed Beauty) and Kevin Lee Kharas (Vice editor-in-chief and co-founder of the electronic duo @real_lies ) come on New Models to discuss their current “Not The Photo Issue” (feat. Dean Kissick x Adam Curtis, Bertie Brandes, Mat Dryhurst, Günseli Yalcinkaya, Duncan Wilson, and others) and their media philosophy at large.

Subscribe to VICE:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/introducing-the-not-the-photo-issue-of-vice-magazine-pre-order-now/

For more:

NM49 | GPT Ditto w/ Ben Ditto: https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/gpt-ditto-w-ben-ditto-nm49

This is preview — to access full episode and all New Models' content, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com

We’re joined by media scholars Daniël de Zeeuw & Sal Hagen, who have been closely tracking the weirder end of the internet for over a decade—their research and analysis of 4chan has made them low-key legends within internet studies. As 4chan’s logic is now pervasive across the social web, Daniël and Sal, together with their colleagues at the Amsterdam-based OILab, have been modeling novel ways of thinking about our current communication space that travel well beyond the network media / public sphere template to something far stranger — and more accurate.

For more:

https://oilab.eu/

https://salhagen.nl/

https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/z/e/d.dezeeuw/d.dezeeuw.html

Hagen, S., de Zeeuw, D., & Venturini, T. (2025). Digital Rhythmanalysis: Studying Memetic and Affective Rhythms on the Post-Viral Web. Platforms & Society, 2.

de Zeeuw, D., Birchall, C., & Knight, P. (2025). On Psyop Realism. Cultural Politics, 21(2), 240-257

Hagen, S. (2024) Reactionary Rhythm: Quali-quantitative studies of 4chan/pol/. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam


Hagen, S., & de Zeeuw, D. (2023). Based and confused: Tracing the political connotations of a memetic phrase across the web. Big Data & Society, 10(1)

Nepost

This is an unlocked epdisode first released to subscribers 03/02/2026 — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

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We speak often in the New Model sphere about scanning and sensing rather than reading—communication through vibes. Peli Grietzer is a comparative literature PhD (Harvard) who has spent over a decade developing a rigorous theory of what a “vibe" actually is, how we increasingly follow ineffable cues to navigate our world and these, taken together, in fact exist as empirical objects in mathematical space. On this episode, Peli joins NM to talk about his work for a more general audience.

For more: @peligrietzer (X & IG)


Substack: Second Balcony
(https://peligrietzer.substack.com/)

Theory of a Vibe (https://www.glass-bead.org/wp-content/uploads/GB_Site-1_Peli-Grietzer_Eng.pdf)

Theory of a Vibe ’25 (https://peligrietzer.substack.com/p/theory-of-vibe-25)

This is preview (full ep released to subscribers 02/15/2026) — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com

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Back in Berlin to show their new film work “The End of Theater” at Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, artists Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff drop by New Models to chat about that film’s primary set: New Theater Hollywood, the DIY theater they opened on Santa Monica Boulevard after decamping to LA in 2023. We discuss their layered process — creating a space that generates a scene, which produces its own art and dedicated star-system while also serving as source material, location, and cast for all that Max and Calla make in parallel — as a distinctly contemporary protocol for artmaking today. We also talk about the return of theater itself at a time when every physical place now feels like a potential set, whether for a vlog or an ICE raid, and performance online is constant? Does theater hit different in our neo-oral era? Does LA?

For more: www.newtheaterhollywood.com & @newtheaterhollywood

See also: 


Mike Davis, "City of Quartz" (Verso, 1990)

Thom Anderson, "LA Plays Itself" (2003)

NM Podcast | Mise-en-TV w/ Calla Henkel (2022)

NM 77 | Calla Henkel on Art, Industry, and “Scrap” (2024)

This is an unlocked episode of New Models (originally released 01/31/2026) — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels newmodels.substack.com

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Gideon Jacobs returns to NM with his third essay in a trilogy for the LA Review of Books that tracks, in real-time, the American Political machine’s delamination from everyday life through runaway story-drive. In “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” Gideon shows US politics both left and right as having become a read-write medium for collective creative expression more than material governance—a kind of kayfabe where ‘democracy’ takes the form of citizens co-creating storyline with their elected officials and everyone in office has an IMDB profile. Carly & Lil Internet intro this ep with a short conversation drawing out themes across this trilogy that feel particularly NM Canon.

“Of course, long before any advanced communication technologies, humans had been drawn not just to stories but also to the possibility of living as characters within them. Story’s appeal had always been precisely that it’s not like reality. […] a dream of existing free from the pesky flaws intrinsic to reality: uncontrollability, unpredictability, vulnerability, mundanity, complexity, incoherence, confusion, pain.”

Audio production: Lil Internet

For more:
gideon.works/

Gideon Jacobs, “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” (Jan 2026)
lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-e…l-maga-reality/

Gideon Jacobs, “Player One and Main Character,” (Apr 2025)
lareviewofbooks.org/article/player-…main-character/

Gideon Jacobs, “Trump l’Oeil,” (Nov 2024) lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-loeil/