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

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. On our latest installment, filmmaker and Zohran Video Guy Anthony DiMieri joins us to talk to tell us about the wild twists and turns of his career as an indie filmmaker turned key contributor to the Zohran & SubwayTakes cinematic universes, dark woke, and why everyone is obsessed with Geese. We’re removing the paywall for the next week so you can give it a listen.

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

In 2005, the music and culture critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher (RIP) began using the term hauntology — a riff on “ontology” — to describe an emergent genre in UK music, built from archival recordings from post-war England, vinyl crackle, and haunted, elegiac atmospherics. (Think: Burial, The Caretaker, and the eerie catalog of the label Ghost Box.) They borrowed the term from Jacques Derrida, who used it to describe a present haunted by futures that had never arrived; Reynolds and Fisher heard that idea vibrating through a generation of musicians excavating Britain’s cultural memory.

Fisher explored hauntology’s political dimension, rooting the movement in a longing for Britain’s pre-Thatcherite social democratic past and an affection for cultural touchstones like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Brutalist architecture, and films like The Wickerman. Reynolds, meanwhile, mapped its musical lineage—back to ’90s hauntology predecessors like Boards of Canada and Broadcast, and across the pond to J Dilla-era hip-hop and underground movements like freak folk, hypnagogic pop, and chillwave.

A recent CUJO reading group on the topic inspired us to invite Simon—the author of books like Rip It Up and Start Again, Retromania, and Futuromania (listen to our ep about it!)—to help us mark the 20th anniversary of hauntology and explore what it has to teach us about mobilizing the culture of the past in a way that feels meaningful and even forward-looking

Simon joins us to dig into the cultural factors that gave rise to hauntology, the 21st-century fetish for obsolete media, and the differences between hauntology and simple nostalgia or “retro.” We also talk about the pasts that continue to haunt us—from rave culture to Marxism—and he gives us a sneak peek at his forthcoming book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994, arriving in 2026.

Listen to our HAUNTOLOGY PLAYLIST on Apple Music and YouTube

Read more of Simon on hauntology in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past and over at ReynoldsRetro

Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblog

Follow Simon on X

Additional reading:

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993.

Mark Fisher, “October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder,” 2005.

Simon Reynolds, “Haunted Audio, a/k/a Society of the Spectral: Ghost Box, Mordant Music, and Hauntology,” director’s cut of an article in the November 2006 issue of The Wire.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, chapter 2, 2014.

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

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Hey pals. On this month’s Weather Report, we’re following up our last episode on America’s new image politics with someone who’s been there on the ground: Anthony DiMieri, one of the independent filmmakers behind Zohran Mamdani’s man-on-the-street, documentary-style visual campaign. In addition to iconic Zohran videos like “freeze the rent” and “halalfl…

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and reading group meetings — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to 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. On our latest installment, we chat with Billboard editor Katie Bain, author of a new history of Coachella, about what the festival’s 2026 line-up tells us about where culture is headed, the rise of anti-sellout discourse, and the AI industry’s nostalgic, artisanal rebrand.

Since our last episode, something historic happened: Zohran Kwame Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, marking the American left’s most significant electoral victory since the Bernie movement took off in the 2010s. While his team will credit his win to bold, populist economic policies, there’s no denying another factor at play: Zohran’s extraordinary command of images. He grew up in a film-director household, rapped as Young Cardamom before pivoting to politics, and hired a crew of indie filmmakers to create a video campaign that unfolded like a documentary love letter to the NYC of halal carts, bodega cats, and ordinary working people.

Zohran’s media fluency is also why people are calling him the Left’s answer to Trump. Which all raises some big questions: Is politics in the information economy becoming indistinguishable from theatrical world-building? And what does that mean for our offline lives?

This week’s guest, writer and artist Gideon Jacobs, has thought about these questions for years. A former creative director at Magnum Photos, child actor, and native New Yorker, Gideon has explored our cultural relationship to images in outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books, for whom he penned an excellent piece earlier this year called “Player One and Main Character,” which contends that political reality, post-Trump and post-Musk, is beginning to bend to the rules of fiction.

We talk about the aesthetic politics of the Zohran campaign and what it tells us about what successful counter-programming to MAGA’s vision of America might look like. We also discuss what Gideon’s study of the role of images in ancient cultures and religions can tell us about navigating the image world of the present, how the rise of populism (on both the left and the right) is inextricable from our current technological moment, and whether Zohran’s victory marks the start of a political future more grounded in material conditions—or the next phase of the image arms race.

Follow Gideon on Instagram

Read Gideon:

“Player One and Main Character” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Trump l’Oeil” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Thou shalt not make images—but what if AI does?” (Document Journal)

“Aliens” (The Drift)

Additional reading:

“Selling Zohran” by Corey Atad (Defector)

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For our October weather report, we’re joined by Billboard Senior Music Correspondent and CUJO’s unofficial festival analyst Katie Bain. As of this month, Katie literally wrote the book on Coachella: It’s called Desert Dreams: The Music, Style, and Allure of Coachella, and it’s an exhaustively researched cultural history of the world’s most influential m…

Just in time for Halloween, we’re hosting a virtual hauntology reading group (specifically, hauntology the music genre) at 4pm ET next Thursday, October 30. If you want to join in, sign up for a paid subscription, or toss a few bucks into our haunted tip jar, and we’ll send you the readings and a link to log into the conversation. We hope it’ll be the first of more group reading sessions to come.Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord, an online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can talk about the news of the day; 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 spend a lot of time here talking about the structural forces that turned pop culture into an endless churn of sequels, remakes, and nostalgia plays. But what if the blame for our current “creative recession” lies on more than just economics or platforms? What if our cultural values themselves have shifted in ways that make true innovation harder to sustain?That’s the focus of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, the forthcoming book from Tokyo-based culture critic W. David Marx—and probably the first major exhaustive account of the last 25 years in music, film/TV, internet culture, and fashion. He doesn’t just look at the technological, political, and economic forces that that created a winner-take-all landscape where billionaires and centi-millionaires like Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Paris Hilton, MrBeast, Jay-Z and frankly Donald Trump took up all of the cultural oxygen in the room, making it harder and harder for the next generation of innovators to break through. He zeroes in on the cultural attitudes that have led us here—and that set us apart from our 20th-century forebears—including poptimism, the valorization of entrepreneurial heroism, cultural omnivorism, and more.

In addition to Blank Space, David the author of the mega-influential books Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. He joins us to talk about the mind-boggling task of summing up the past quarter-century of culture, and why most of the coolest, most innovative outputs ended up getting pushed to the margins. We also get into what originality means in a climate of constant churn, and why he believes that fighting for it is still important, even in a postmodern landscape where “everything has already been done.”

Finally, David makes the case that building a healthier cultural ecosystem starts with changing our cultural attitudes. That means embracing and reinforcing social norms that have fallen to the wayside in the past quarter century, like normalizing giving credit to smaller artists, learning the canon so we can break it, and yes, making it lame to sell out again.

Pre-order Blank Space, which is out November 18 via Penguin Random House.

Subscribe to David’s newsletter, CULTURE: An Owner’s Manual

Follow David on X

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 — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and the Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers can now watch our video roundtable on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another with film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod cohost Drew Millard. They’ll also receive an invite to our upcoming “hauntology” reading group, which we’ll tell you more about soon. (Just so you know: We’ll also be inviting anybody kind enough to tip us a buck or two to support our work).

It’s October, and we still don’t have the September jobs report because the government shut down. But the data we do have shows a clear trend: Job growth is slowing, unemployment is ticking up, and cities like New York are seeing the weakest labor market gains in decades. If you’ve noticed more “Open to Work” badges on LinkedIn, heard stories about people applying to thousands of positions, or felt the chill in your own job search, you’re not imagining it: The job market sucks right now, and things have been headed in this direction since before Trump took office.

To wrap our head around how we got here (tariffs? offshoring? AI and automation?), we brought on the best person we could think of to explain it: Richard D. Wolff, a longtime faculty member at places like The New School and UMass Amherst, author of myriad books on economic methodology and class analysis, a founding director of Democracy at Work, and one of the most prominent Marxist economists in America. (Full disclosure: Rick’s work on class and labor were tremendously influential on Andrea’s work as a sociology student.)

In part one of our two-part conversation, Rick explains why today’s shaky job market is just the latest phase in a decades-long trend that began in the 1970s—and, in his view, a symptom of an empire (and economic system) on the verge of collapse. We also get into the flawed logic behind Trump’s tariff and immigration policies, the real reasons offshored jobs aren’t “coming back,” and why China’s working class is seeing wage growth while American workers are stuck in place.

Follow Rick’s work at Democracy at Work—and watch his Economic Update podcast.

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Thank you ock sportello, DJ Falkor / Random Rules, Tyler Foster, Yana Sosnovskaya, Ingmar Carlson, and many others for tuning in to CUJO’s first-ever live video, featuring film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod co-host drew millard. Shout out to Yuri for sparking the idea for this conversation. Full video available to paid subscribers.