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

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. As special treat, you can now listen to our 2025 retrospective with Ruby Justice Thelot for free.

Hey pals. Welcome to our first annual cultural predictions episode. To kick off 2026, we asked some of our favorite culture critics, media theorists, filmmakers, technologists, journalists, fashion bloggers and more to send us a voice note with their best guess about where the zeitgeist will take us this year. To our surprise and delight, 34 people got back to us with their predictions. Plus, Andrea predicts the return of club culture (think: film clubs and salons, not dance parties) in response to attention economy fatigue, and Emilie goes long on “elite midcult” in music and movies as a culture-industry counter-reaction to poptimism.

Topics range from writer and podcaster Steven Phillips-Horst talking the end of bright white lighting and a return to warmer, yellower hues, to New York Mag tech columnist John Herrman talking about how prediction markets are coming for politics and political media, to New Models co-host Carly Busta talking about the rise of a neo-oral culture. You’ll find the full list of contributors (with time stamps) below. Sound design and music by Andrea.

Arts & culture (10:30)

Drew Millard on the return of the buzzband

Sam Valenti on no longer complaining that nobody is making good music and listening to music instead

Biz Sherbert on the rise of the beautiful white boy rapper

Tony Lashley on the West London rapper Slew

Mano Sundaresan on the inevitability of somebody releasing an AI-generated or assisted song that gets critical acclaim

Philip Sherburne on the coming mass streaming exodus

W. David Marx on a return to organic and analog aesthetics

Jaime Brooks on the rise of “techno nihilism” as an aesthetic movement

Ruby Justice Thelot on Timothée Chalamet winning an Oscar — and ushering in the era of “theater kid energy”

Javier Cabral on how 2026 will be the year of heirloom corn tortillas — in all the colors of the rainbow

Technology (21:20)

Taylor Lorenz on the coming mass cultural revolt against technology

Lil Internet on how the escalating theological conflict between luddites and AI true believers could spin out into something resembling the 30 Years War

Yuri Rybak on the vertical integration of everything and prediction market traders becoming religious oracles

Rachel Meade Smith on how 2026 will be the year where writers find out if the robots are really coming for their jobs

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman on a shift in AI discourse toward military and surveillance applications

Mike Pepi on a renewed societal yearning for trad media institutions

Trevor McFedries on how AI advances may actually lead to more opportunities for people with good taste

Carly Busta on the rise of a neo-oral culture

Media (33:15)

Ock Sportello on the death of Twitter as a cultural force

Anthony Di Mieri on the end of the era of shortform vertical video

Matt Pearce on a shift from individualism to collectivism among independent content creators

Harry Krinsky on 2026 as the year of the (antimemetic) stunt

Ben Dietz on the return of low-cost ephemera (zines, stickers, promo CDs) in marketing

T.M. Brown on journalists fleeing Substack

Joshua Rivera on the rise of hyper-niche media and courting “security through obscurity”

John Herrman on how prediction marks will transform political media—and eventually politics

Society (49:27)

Steven Phillips-Horst on the end of bright white lighting

Carolina Miranda on “the trollification of governance”

Devon Hansen on a coming vogue for esoteric spirituality, the paranormal, and the occult

Kieran Press-Reynolds on the inevitable confrontation between Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump

Kevin Munger on the Left finally grappling with the political consequences of declining birth rates

Douglas Rushkoff on how things are going to get weird — in a good way

Gideon Jacobs on how 2026 will be our rock-bottom moment as a species

Luke O’Neil on one single good day

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. Stay tuned for our 2025 retrospective in late December with Ruby Justice Thelot.

You’ll also get an invite to our second reading group meet-up: a discussion of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s seminal 1995 essay, “The Californian Ideology,” and Fred Turner’s recent article for The Baffler, “The Texan Ideology.” That’s going down on Sunday, January 11.

Between the looming menace of automation and job search platforms that feel even less effective than dating apps, you’ve probably heard that trying to find work right now is brutal. And while there’s no shortage of speculation about why the labor market is so broken (see our recent episode with economist Richard D. Wolff), there’s far less (public) chatter about what the experience of searching for gainful employment in late 2025 actually looks and feels like.

Rachel Meade Smith, creator of the wildly popular weekly job search newsletter Words of Mouth, wants to change that. Her forthcoming book Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt (out April 7, 2026 via OR Books!) draws on contributions from 30 voices sourced from the WoM community to explore how job searching is actually one of the most existentially significant experiences we can have. And while the book zooms in on the more difficult emotions that can come up when we perform “search work” — her term for the unique labor associated with finding a job — it also captures how the process can be a vector for desire, inspiration, and even joy.

We discuss how the newsletter grew out of her own experiences with search work, including the strange emotional contortions that go into trying on different possible futures and having most of them vanish into the ether. We also discuss what sets this era apart from past eras of search work, the difficulties of squaring our identities and aspirations with the opportunities that are actually available to us, and how navigating the contemporary labor market means accepting that our careers may look less like ladders and more like waves.

Pre-order Search Work now exclusively through OR Books and get 15% off.

Explore and subscribe to Words of Mouth

Check out more of Rachel’s work here

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe