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. Catch last month’s episode, where we dig into the rise of “waiting-in-line culture” in cities across America, the Spotify vs. Kalshi saga, Lebron James’ post-factual free agency, and more.

Here at CUJO, we love ourselves a good topical film. And as far as hot-button topics are concerned, Our Hero, Balthazar, a new movie from Oscar Boyson and Ricky Camilleri, has it all: coastal elite vs. red state class antagonism, the performance of self on the internet, gun violence, toxic masculinity, MLMs, designer drugs, and more. Written during the internet-addled lockdown days of the pandemic, it follows Balthazar (Jaeden Martell), a wealthy private school teen and online “cryfluencer” from New York City who becomes a obsessed with Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a working-class internet troll he suspects is planning a school shooting, and travels to Texas to stop him.

It’s a crazy premise for a film, but what transpires ends up being a deeply believable exploration of what happens when you bring social media and the attention economy into one of the most challenging phases of life: adolescence. And while the subject matter isn’t funny at all, the film, surprisingly, very much is.

Balthazar hits streaming on Apple TV on August 11, so we’re thrilled to have Oscar, who directed the film, and Ricky, who co-wrote and produced it alongside Oscar, on today’s episode. You might know Oscar from his work as a producer on 2010s indie classics like Frances Ha, Good Time, Uncut Gems, along with the show Chillin Island, and Ricky from his work as a film commentator and video talk show host for media companies like HuffPost, but the pair have known each other since meeting at film nerd camp in their teens. We talk about how they came back together later in life to write Balthazar; why they chose to frame the movie, somewhat controversially, around the specter of a school shooting; and its unsparing examination of what it is like to come of age in a world where attention is currency.

Plus: We get into the challenges they faced making a dark topical indie satire during a period of extreme risk-aversion in the film industry, the story behind the film’s amazing Iceage needledrop, and how they drew inspiration from idiosyncratic coming-of-age films from the turn of the millennium like Larry Clark’s Bully.

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. Catch last month’s episode with Callahan & Witscher’s Jack Callahan, where we dig into the Fenix Flexin saga and the future of AI-assisted music, the recent hipster discourse, and more.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “the marketplace of ideas”: the classical liberal belief that when ideas compete freely in the public square, the best ones will always rise to the top. But what does that “marketplace” look like in the media landscape of the 2020s, where ideas are distributed via personalized algorithmic feeds and the public sphere has fragmented into clusters of charismatic content creators with cult followings?

That’s the question that Doomscroll’s Joshua Citarella and New Models’ Carly Busta and Lil Internet tackle in “The Online Marketplace of Ideas,” an installation they put together for Strange Rules, a group show currently on display at the Palazzo Diedo at Berggruen Arts & Culture in Venice, curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herdon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Adriana Rispoli. Hint: It’s a room packed with over 400 t-shirts, hats, books, and other “dropship basics” from the personalities that have dominated the discourse in the 2020s, ranging from Joe Rogan and Call Your Daddy to Chapo Trap House, “Abundists” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Andreas Malm, Curvis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and Byung-Chul Han.

We brought on Josh and Carly to walk us through the exhibition, what bringing together all these objects reveals about the larger economic and geopolitical shifts this apparent ideological diversity obscures, the increasingly blurred line between being a content creator and being a politician, and our transition from the age of linear media into a neo-oral one. Plus: a cameo appearance from New Models co-founder Lil Internet, discussing his theory that this wild profusion of internet ideologies has become America’s primary cultural export.

Strange Rules is on display at the Palazzo Diedo in Venice until November 22, 2026

Subscribe to New Models on Substack or Patreon

Subscribe to Doomscroll on Substack and YouTube

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For our cultural predictions roundup back in January, the musician and technologist Trevor McFedries predicted that 2026 was going to be a really good year—professionally speaking—for people with good taste. The jury’s still out, but it’s definitely turning into a big year for talking about taste. And for the first time in history, the tech world seems to be leading the charge, from engineers penning essays about how “personal taste” is the new moat, to startups promising us more aesthetically discerning AI, to the Palantir chore coat and tech billionaires sitting front row at Fashion Week.

To make sense of why taste has become such a Silicon Valley buzzword—and what that tells us about the changing meaning and role of taste more broadly–we brought on Drew Austin, a writer and urban planner who runs the excellent Substack, Kneeling Bus, where he recently penned a piece called “Tastecore and the Enclosure of the Commons.” We discuss Drew’s research on the tech world’s changing relationship to fashion in the post-pandemic era, the growing epidemic of “tasteslop,” and how the current discourse frames taste as something less about personal distinction and more about gaining a competitive edge. Plus, we tap Pierre Bourdieu to try to parse the evolving function of taste in society over time—and what the tech industry’s taste obsession can tell us about the shifting landscape of class and class antagonism.

Follow Drew at Kneeling Bus on Substack.

Read Drew on taste:

“Tastecore and the enclosure of the commons”

“Worn out: Tech elites’ supposed indifference to fashion is a contempt for the commons” (Real Life)

“Here comes a regular: Taste is obsolete & gatekeeping is code for what the internet took from us”

“Bots in the beerlight: Sometimes embodiment is all you’ve really got”“Lo-fi beats for studying: How to push more through the human attention bottleneck”

Additional references:

“Taste is Eating Silicon Valley” by Anu Atluru (Working Theories)

“Personal Taste is the Moat” by Wang Cong

“Tasteslop: Notes on technological anxiety” by Emily Segal (Nemesis)

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, from Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick. You can learn more about it here.

For fans of independent music, the Geese psyop allegations earlier this year raised an anxiety-provoking question: How much of our taste is our own, and how much of it is just a function of the music industry using a range of tactics (from the mundane, to the shadowy, to the straight-up fraudulent) to manufacture consent?  

We held back from commenting on the story at the time because we were cooking up a longer response that we finally unveiled this week: a deeply researched, centuries-spanning history of the art and science of musical taste manipulation, spanning Tin Pan Alley sheet music scams, chart manipulation, streaming farms, the modern clipping economy, viral “trend simulation,” and more. Our hope was that shedding light on these historical persuasion tactics — and the psychological mechanisms that underpin them, from the mere-exposure effect to René Girard’s mimetic theory of desire — would help our listeners make sense of a present where it can feel like everything on the internet is fake.

The episode, titled “Free Clout for Sale,” is part of an exciting collaborative podcast project called Tranche that came out this week on Metalabel. Tranche is the brainchild of friend of the pod and Nothing But Respect cohost Harry Krinsky, who you may remember from our episode on the psychology of the modern Knick fan a few weeks back. As Harry describes it, it’s basically a literary magazine, but instead of articles, you get podcast episodes.

Listen to today’s episode for an interview with Harry about the project and an excerpt from our contribution to it — and please consider supporting our work by purchasing Tranche 001, which gets you five episodes for just $5. Other entries include a history of the word “based” (from Naomi Zeichner and Eamon Whalen), a meditation on Eddington and the fate of the Western in the 2020s (with Nate Fisher and Eddie Averill), an aesthetic analysis of Praxis and the Palantir chore coat (featuring past CUJO guest Sam Venis), and a cross-generational analysis of major life milestones with CUJO regular Ben Dietz and friends. All proceeds will be split among contributors.

Something we loved this week: This fascinating episode by the excellent podcast No Such Thing on the history of different corporate management styles and the problem of micromanaging at work, featuring The Drift editor and Harvard historian Erik Baker, author of the book Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

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.

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…