CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

What does it take to chronicle contemporary culture through the ancient medium of theater, and what new insights can it unlock about the present? On this episode, we talk with playwright, author, and critic Matthew Gasda about his recent staging of The Last Days of Downtown, the third and final installment of his “Dimes Square” trilogy, which chronicles the aspirations, anxieties, attentional antics, and creative rivalries of New York’s post-pandemic downtown scene.

Matthew joins us to discuss his role leading a resurgence of DIY theater in NYC — including as the founder of an institution called Brooklyn Center for Theater Research — and how he’s used the medium to capture subcultures in real time, before they’ve even had a chance to register their place in history. We talk about the downtown’s scene’s polarizing legacy and where it fits within previous eras of NYC counterculture, what happens when you and your work become part of the story you’re trying to tell, and how the world of the trilogy acted as a harbinger of culture in the decade to come.

Visit the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research for upcoming plays from Matthew

Follow Matthew on Substack

Read Matthew’s novels and plays

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

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

If you were on the music internet at all during the 2010s, you’re probably familiar with vaporwave. You know, that archival-obsessed musical microgenre based on synthy, hypnotic samples paired with aesthetics like classical sculptures, retro corporate imagery, and Japanese kanji.

It’s almost a meme at this point, but vaporwave was one the first internet-born genres and art movements created entirely using digital tools, plundered from online archives. And beneath the placid, detached surface of vaporwave—somehow both nostalgic and ironic—there was a passionate community of musicians and fans creating something that in retrospect was actually quite political and subversive—if not in subject matter, then in form.

A new documentary called Nobody Here: The Story of Vaporwave captures the evolution and cultural impact of vaporwave, told from the perspective of more than 50 artists, producers, and other key figures from across the scene, including Daniel Lopatin, 猫 シ Corp. (Cat System Corp.), Luxury Elite, George Clanton, Saint Pepsi. In keeping with the spirit of the movement, you can watch it for free on YouTube.

Director Christian Britten and producer and artist Enzo Van Baelen, who’s also co-founder of the label My Pet Flamingo, join us to talk about the genre’s origins, including as an outgrowth of noise music, the role of anonymity in the scene, and how its use of meme-able visual iconography foreshadowed visual communication on the internet today. Plus, we discuss what we can learn from the story of a musical movement that was by definition unmonetizable (unless you’re creating your own samples, that is).

Watch Nobody Here: The Story of Vaporwave for free on YouTube.

Download the film here.

Check out the Nobody Here companion sampler over at Bandcamp.

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

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

We are making a film about Mark Fisher. Or at least, that’s what artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter say we are doing by interviewing them about We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher, an experimental documentary about the late British intellectual Mark Fisher that is currently making its way in decentralized fashion through cities across the globe. (You can set up a screening in your town if you want). They made the film with the help of over 70 pro bono collaborators and produced it entirely via Instagram, with no budget, studio, or institutional support. We’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Fisher was a political and cultural theorist, music critic, and philosopher who first gained notoriety blogging under the alias K-punk in the early 2000s, before becoming known for penning some of this century’s most clear-eyed and affecting analyses of capitalism, popular culture, and our collective political future (or lack thereof). That includes his wildly influential 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, which explores the idea that capitalism has become so dominant we struggle to even imagine alternatives.

Fisher has been a big influence on us, so we decided to invited Sophie and Simon on the show to tell us about the film and offer us a little primer on his ideas. We dig in to concepts that were central to Fisher’s work, including hauntology, hyperstition, and capitalist realism; why his work seems to be having a moment right now, especially among Gen Z; and how it reflected both the utopian promise of the internet and its eventual descent into today’s commoditized, culture-war nightmare.

We also discuss how Fisher’s working-class background and refusal to accept hierarchies between fields like critical theory and music blogging shaped his unique perspective on the world—and how this “decapitalized film,” and the larger art project of which it is part, doubles as an invitation to gather offline and imagine new artistic and political futures together.

Follow the project on Instagram, or attend a screening near you

Check out more of Sophie and Simon’s work at Close and Remote

Listen to our Hauntology retrospective with Simon Reynolds, Fisher’s friend and contemporary

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

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

Andrea just got back from Coachella, so it’s time for our annual report where we use the festival as a crystal ball for talking about where contemporary culture is going. And this year was particularly interesting — not just because of Justin Bieber and his laptop, but also because of Coachella’s marked transformation into a mass televisual couch spectator event.

Joining us for the debrief is Billboard editor Andrew Unterberger, who was in the trenches with Andrea for Weekend 1 and hosts the Greatest Pop Stars podcast. (He also moonlights as a basketball guy) We talk about how Coachella is actually three festivals now — Weekend 1, Weekend 2, and the livestream — and how the latter is transforming everything from the festival’s booking strategy, the performances, to what the experience feels like on the ground.

We also get into an overall aesthetic shift from influencer polish to rawness and imperfection, how the Bieber’s set functioned as a metacommentary on how YouTube is TV now, and how the Strokes’ performance visuals on Weekend 2 — which featured imagery of the wars in Gaza and Iran — touched a third rail in what was otherwise a surprisingly apolitical scene. Listen to the end for Andrea’s dispatch on this year’s style highs and lows, including the fate of the infamous boho circle belt.

Follow Andrew on Bluesky

Listen to his Coachella episode of Greatest Pop Stars

Read Andrea’s L.A. Times column “Inside Coachella’s fractured world: Weekend 1, Weekend 2 and the livestream that changed everything”

Read Andrea’s L.A. Times story about how people are affording Coachella

Check out Andrea’s full style report over at Biz Sherbert’s American Style

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

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

It sounds strange to say it, but the notion of the recording artist seems to be becoming increasingly a thing of the past. Artists are still releasing albums, sure, but our experience as music fans and the industry as a whole seems to be increasingly centered around live music — at least in terms of where people are actually spending their money. Today’s guest, writer and musician Jaime Brooks (you may remember her from our episode on the geopolitics of pop culture), joins us to discuss what that means for artists and the future of music itself. We dig into Jaime’s recent viral essay, “Why do so many big artists hate touring?,” which draws on her own touring experiences as part of the electronic duo Elite Gymnastics to explore how the music business seems to be in the midst of an experience economy arms race. Artists are risking serious money on ever-bigger spectacles, ticket prices keep climbing, and all roads — even for indie artists — seem to lead to Live Nation and AEG. Meanwhile, the psychological tolls of life on the road, combined with the near-constant surveillance of being a celebrity in 2026, has led to a growing wave of cancellations and burnout. All leading Jaime to ask: Is it time to let go of the idea of pop stars (or at least human ones) entirely?

We dig into why touring seems to become more stressful for artists as they become more successful, what happens when scarcity pivots from music recordings to tickets, and how even early and mid-career artists are feeling the pressure to manufacture the illusion of endless growth. Jaime also raises a spicy possibility: If the music industry continues down this path, the future of pop stardom might belong more to animated or AI-generated performers in the mold of K-Pop Demon Hunters than real people.

Read “Why Do So Many Big Artists Hate Touring?”

Subscribe to Jaime’s Substack, The Seat of Loss

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As the weather warms up and Live Nation avoids a forced breakup with Ticketmaster, we connect the growing consolidation of the culture industries with a renewed interest in DIY, outsider music scenes and their associated anti-market mentalities. Andrea recounts attending a free, word-of-mouth gathering by Southern California’s Salton Sea called the Bomb…

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

Hi pals. In 2022, we did an episode with artist, technologist, and friend-of-the-pod Mat Dryhurst to discuss a question that now feels almost quaint: Is AI good or bad for art? This was back in the days (pre-ChatGPT) when everybody was freaking out about text-to-image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney, and we discussed what they might mean for working artists. Obviously, a lot has happened since then, so it felt like time to check back in with Mat.

Mat is the rare artist and leftist we know who’s also an outspoken proponent of AI tools, if not the broader economic structures shaping their creation and deployment. While we don’t agree on everything, we share a core perspective: This tech isn’t going away, and artists and creative people need to understand it if they want to have a say in what the future will look like.

Having worked with AI in his practice for over a decade alongside his partner Holly Herndon — they’ve even co-authored a book about AI and cultural production — Mat brings a deeply informed perspective to the ethical implications and creative possibilities of these tools. Given that conversations about AI tend to fall into polarized culture war-style faceoffs, we wanted to dig into the fine print of what’s actually going on, where the AI industry is heading, and where creative workers should be focusing their attention.

Mat talks with us about what running a start-up focused on giving artists more power over their training data taught him about the limits of current copyright debates, and whether slop is as big as a problem for culture as people are making it out to be. We also get into why blanket bans of AI-generated art and music are not only impractical, but bad for artists. Plus, we discuss why Mat thinks open models are critical to creative control in a landscape that is increasingly consolidated around a handful of powerful companies.

Follow Mat on Instagram and X

Subscribe to Mat’s Substack, Token dump

Check out works and events by Mat and Holly on their studio website

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! Emilie here. For most of my adult life, Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In the Bathroom has been the only definitive book about the New York music scene of my youth. The trouble is that a lot of important stuff happened alongside and after that, particularly across the river in Brooklyn. So, thank God for Ronen Givony. The founder of longtime concert series Wordless Music and former Le Poisson Rouge booker braved the wilds of the publishing industry to bring us the first comprehensive history of the Brooklyn music scene: Us vs. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (out now via Abrams).

Us vs. Them traces the years 2004 to 2014 and a wide cast of artists and other characters, some familiar, many not. But part of the point is to look past the usual suspects to talk about the lesser-known artists and promoters who built the scene, often with their very own hands. The book traces how Bush-era political dissatisfaction, cheap rents, and digital technology gave rise to one of those uniquely fertile cultural moments in music history that only come around every so often—you know, where great gigs felt endless, scenes felt possible, and you and your friends were the ones making it happen.

Ronen joins us to discuss what it was like to chronicle a scene that, unlike the Manhattan scene of the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol, was geographically far-flung and features a lot of characters who never became household names or whose careers have been lost to time. We also get into what conditions made it possible for north Brooklyn to become home to a creative ecosystem that, in Ronen’s words, “existed for a reason other than profit” and its complicated relationship to commerce, the media, and selling out. And we talk about what this history teaches us about how we might go about fostering culture in New York—and cities like it—today.

Ronen was also kind enough to make us a playlist featuring artists from the book. Cue it up for a great companion listen to the episode.

Buy Us vs. Them

Follow Us vs. Them on Substack and 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

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

Besides the Bad Bunny vs. Kid Rock faceoff, arguably the biggest headline to come out of Superbowl LX was the sheer volume of money being traded on prediction markets, online exchanges where anyone 18 and older can bet on event outcomes. Fans exchanged a whopping $1.5 billion on the winning team alone through prediction platforms like Kalshi and PolyMarket. But these markets aren’t just limited to sports: During the game itself, more than $100 million changed hands every three minutes over which song Bad Bunny would drop first in the halftime show.

John Herrman, New York Magazine tech columnist and our guest on last year’s episode about the future of the internet, has been all over how prediction markets are creeping into just about every area of life. And in our 2026 culture predictions episode (with zero dollars on the line), he forecast that politics is next — bringing all the sponsorship, gamification, and corruption risks we’ve already seen with the rise sports betting.

John joins us to discuss how, in his words, prediction markets serve as “a new way to narrativize the world.” We explore what prediction markets have in store for politics and the historical conditions that have converged to make prediction markets so popular, from young people’s flatlining economic prospects to having a former casino owner as our president; why prediction market true believers see markets as the most effective way of adjudicating reality, and how the prediction market “sharp” — or whale — became an aspirational career path for young people in the 2020s, not unlike Wall Street traders in the '1980s or the influencer in the 2010s.

Follow John on Bluesky

Read “Screen Time” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer

More by John:

“Gambling Ate Sports Media. Is Politics Next?”

“What Good Are Prediction Markets If Nobody Can Agree on What Happened?”

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

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

Hey guys. Following our 2026 predictions episode (thanks to everyone for all the love), we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. And speaking of things we think everybody should be paying attention to this year, today we’re talking about network states.

Popularized by Twitter-famous VC philosopher and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, the network state is basically what happens when a bunch of crypto bros and entrepreneurs pool their money, buy land, negotiate regulatory exceptions, and attempt to start a new nation-state around an ideology or practice, like life-extension research or the keto diet.

Until recently, network states felt like a fringe libertarian concern—a kind of 2020s remix of seasteading, super-charged by crypto and AI tooling. But especially since finding a receptive ear in the second Trump administration, the movement and its guiding ideas have quietly mutated into an influential ideological force in American politics, both domestically and abroad.

To help us get a grip on the whole thing, we brought on fellow culture journo Sam Venis, who’s been reporting on it for places like The Guardian, Playboy, The Guardian, The Point, and Mars Review of Books. He takes us inside his travels documenting network-state experiments across the globe, from the medical research enclave of Próspera in Honduras, to a hacker house full of urbit engineers hanging in Bukele’s inner circle in El Salvador, to Trump’s vision of deregulated “Freedom Cities” on “unused” federal land in the US.

We discuss why someone would want to found or join a network state in the first place — i.e., how much of it is ideological, and how much of it is tax evasion — what life is actually like at places like Próspera on the ground, and how the network state movement represents both a mechanism of American imperialism under Trump and a possible blueprint for the US economy’s next phase.

Sign up for Sam’s Substack, Technical Personae

Read Sam:

“Could new countries be started – on the internet?” (The Guardian)

“The island of eternal Life” (The Mars Review of Books)

“Turbo America” (The Point)

“Waiting for the End of the World In El Salvador” (Playboy)

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