No cultural phenomenon — and yes, it’s a phenomenon — has been dominating the discourse more these past few weeks than the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And in addition to seeming like a dark Hollywood thriller come to life — down to alleged killer Luigi Mangione’s brooding good looks and a literal backpack full of Monopoly money — the story has been raising a lot of important and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the evolving politics of the United States in the 2020s.

What does it tell us about the decline of the American project — and Americans’ faith in everything from the healthcare industry to our legal system — that people on both sides of the aisle have been responding not only with compassion for Luigi, but in some cases celebration and thirst? What are Luigi’s actual politics, and why do so many people think he is a left-wing vigilante when his interests seem far closer to certain center-right, grey tribe, effective altruism-adjacent ideologies endemic to Silicon Valley? And why — between this story, the Trump fist pump, and the New Jersey drones — does it feel like reality is increasingly taking cues from fiction?

To get into it, we invited back Joshua Citarella, an artist and researcher who has spent the past decade studying how the internet and social media are shaping youth political identification and behavior. (You might remember him from our episode on the Boomer Ballast Effect, with the academic Kevin Munger). In addition to launching an excellent new podcast called Doomscroll (check it out!), Joshua recently published an essay called “CEO Murder & the Dark Enlightenment,” where he explores the assassination and its ensuing response in context of the broader social and political shifts (and realignments) that characterize this moment.

We discuss the apparent ideological “buffet” of Luigi’s politics, why the public’s trust in the law — and Democratic institutions more generally — has been eroded to such a degree that it seems to view the killer as the lesser of two evils, and the greater truths that these sort of “stranger than fiction” moments seem to reveal.

Follow Joshua on Substack and check out Doomscroll.

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An AI Agent that can do your shopping for you (or, maybe one day, your job). Driver-less Waymo cars that take you to work. A notetaking app that can attend multiple meetings for you at the same time. These days, it can seem like our obsession with using technology to be more efficient (whatever that really means) has reached a fever pitch.

But who’s in control here? The humans using these tools, or the tech itself?

And when we use these tools to become more productive, who’s actually benefiting?

Ten years ago, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (who you might remember from our episode on the escapist fantasies of Silicon Valley oligarchs) published a book called Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for the Digital Age, an examination of how the internet was going to reconfigure the daily fabric of our existence. His discussion of the various affordances of digital technology and how they were poised to transform reality in their own image wasn’t just prescient (think: how digital technologies are biased, away from the local and towards the universal, and how the digital realm is biased towards the discrete – that is, leaving out the things we haven’t yet chosen or noticed, and forcing choices when none need to be made). It was a plea for everyday internet users to become more literate in the ways that digital technologies were “programming” us, so we could learn how to take back control.

10 Commands for the Digital Age, which is modeled after the 10 Commandments, are still as relevant today as they were a decade ago. One, for example, tells us to refuse to “always be on” — that is, to choose to whom and what we want to be available, and when. Another reminds us not to conflate having access to information and data with the ability to discern and contextualize it. But as we exit the long 2010s and enter a new era of technology increasingly oriented around the promise, real or imaginary, of artificial intelligence, its central question — of how to preserve human agency in a world where technology threatens to override and supplant it — feels more urgent than ever.

Rushkoff recently decided to reissue the book, with a new (and surprisingly hopeful) afterword where he contemplates what all that looks like in the age of AI. And it’s also why we asked him back onto the pod for a long chat about it one afternoon in September, which happened to be the day after the 2024 presidential debate. We’re excited to finally share that conversation with you today.

We get into the new 11-commandment edition of the book, the bizarre new world of digital second brains and driverless cars it foreshadowed, and the limits of what AI and other so-called productivity tools can ultimately do for us — that is, what aspects of humanity it can and can’t replace, and the importance of considering why we need to replace them in the first place, and what we are replacing them with.

Order the new edition of Program Or Be Programmed via ORBooks (and follow them @OR_books to support independent publishing!).

Follow Douglas on Substack.

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By now, you’ve all already heard the news: After coming in hot with Brat memes and aligning itself with Wall Street and Liz Cheney, the Kamala Harris campaign suffered a historic and existentially unsettling defeat—delivering America straight into the hands of what the Democrats warned us was the worst outcome possible, which was another four years of Donald Trump. Here to help us make sense of it in terms of longer-tail shifts in American class dynamics and political consciousness is Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine and author of the book Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against The Professional Managerial Class.

The book’s polemic against an elite class of contemporary knowledge workers— think: the corporate managers, cable news pundits, political consultants, credentialed experts, and arts and entertainment power players who can’t get enough of signaling their own virtue, even as their work often functions to shore up an unequal status quo — goes a long way to explaining how America became so culturally divided.

And we also think it’s a useful tool for understanding how the election played out — from the Democrats’ failure to meaningfully engage with bread-and-butter issues and Gaza, to the party’s decision to shift right instead of listening to its own base, to its tone-deaf insistence on joy in the face of widespread economic insecurity and despair. (We should note that we, too, are members of the professional managerial class, as are many of our listeners, which is part of why we feel that talking about this stuff is so important). 

Catherine joins us to discuss how the PMC became so deeply alienated from the working class, the differences between Trump’s brand of right-wing populism and actual economic populism, and where the Democrats, and the Left, go from here. Plus, we touch on what cultural opposition looks like in a world where the Left has so clearly lost the meme war. (Sorry, Charli.)

Subscribe to The Culture Journalist

Follow Catherine on Substack and X.

Read Virtue Hoarders via University of Minnesota Press.

Read Catherine’s article, “Postmodern Liberalism and the Democratic Party”

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What’s it like when a song you wrote more than half a decade ago goes viral on TikTok? Well, that’s exactly what happened to Massachusetts indie band Vundabar with their 2015 track “Alien Blues”—to the tune of 83,000 TikTok videos and 600 million Spotify streams. This week, frontman Brandon Hagen joins us to talk about the experience of navigating a sud…

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. After disappearing into a black hole of summertime sadness, inflationary headwinds, and soul searching in Eastern Europe, we are back with a fresh batch of episodes and bonus content, so buckle up.

Also, this podcast recently turned four years old. To celebrate, between now and Friday, November 8, we are offering 50% off on all annual paid subscriptions.

Paid subscribers get access to the entire CUJO Cinematic Universe, including 1-2 monthly bonus episodes, an invite to our private Discord server, and our eternal parasocial friendship. Sign up at The Culture Journalist.

What is it about life in the 2020s that makes us feel so anxious about what tomorrow will bring? In her book The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, the writer, filmmaker, and organizer Astra Taylor looks at how insecurity — both as an emotional phenomenon and a material one — can help us make sense of the myriad stressors and challenges of modern life.

It’s not just worrying about the election. It’s not just high prices and the difficulty so many people are having finding a stable job. It’s not just climate change, or how social media makes us feel like our skin isn’t smooth enough. These days, it seems like everyone feels insecure — even (maybe especially?) the billionaires. 

On this week’s episode, Astra joins us to talk about how insecurity differs from inequality, and how examining the psychic dimension of precarity can help us explain why things feel hard for so many people right now — even in the face of an ostensibly “strong” economy and labor market. We also get into the story of how the enclosure of the Commons in feudal England was the original sin that paved the way for our current “insecure” mode of capitalism. Finally, Astra tells us about her work as co-founder of the Debt Collective, the first union for debtors — and how returning to the ancient idea of the right to the Commons can help us organize in the face of decades of neoliberal austerity and a decaying social safety net.

Follow Astra on X

Purchase The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.

Watch Astra’s CBC Massey Lectures on the book.

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Today, we dive into the strange story of the California Journalism Preservation Act, a groundbreaking bill promising to making tech giants like Google and Facebook compensate news organizations with a small portion of the money they bring in when they host stories by California journalists on their platforms—and pointing to a potential path forward for a U.S. news industry on the brink of collapse. Today, Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant joins us to discuss how a weird backroom meeting between Google, legislators, and major publishers transformed the legislation into a shadow of what it once was, including the proposed creation of a vague "AI accelerator." We dig into what this means for the future of the media industry, and how the deals publications have been striking with AI companies (and AI more generally) stand to impact journalists.

Subscribe to The Culture Journalist to listen to the whole thing.

Read Brian’s article, “How a bill meant to save journalism from big tech ended up boosting AI and bailing out Google instead”

Order Blood in the Machine

Subscribe to Brian’s Substack

Follow Brian on X

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What can electronic music tell us about our past, present, and future? Today, we take a walk through the annals of electronic music history with Simon Reynolds, one of our music critic heroes and author of a new book called Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today. 

Encompassing over two dozen essays and interviews, Futuromania offers a chronological narrative of machine-music spanning the 1970s to the present—with a special focus on music that, in its moment, seemed to presage the future, from Autotune and Giorgio Moroder to Amnesia Scanner and Jlin. You can think of it as a future-focused counterpart to Simon’s canonical 2011 book, Retromania, where he explored how pop culture and pop music had become addicted to its own past. 

We dig into the differences between retromania and Futuromania, the deeply human appeal of music that sounds distinctly inhuman and machine-like, and how music that sounds like “the future,” much like sci-fi, can help us process our complicated feelings about technology and the world. We also discuss the role of retrofuturism in the genre’s history, the cycling back into fashion of decades-old electronic music styles like gabber and hardcore techno, and the changing meaning of musical “newness” in a world where electronic music itself is now nearly half a century old.

Get access to bonus episodes and the CUJOPLEX Discord server by becoming a paid subscriber.

Grab a copy of Futuromania.

Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblog

Follow Simon on X

Can Brat memes propel Kamala to a victory in November? In this week’s episode, we dig into the groundswell of online enthusiasm surrounding Kamala Harris’ campaign announcement — and how a viral endorsement from Charli xcx, who cheekily dubbed the vice president “Brat,” unexpectedly transformed this year’s presidential race into an exercise in meme warfare. This week, we’re joined by cyberethnographer and designer Ruby Justice Thelot, along with culture writer and boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, who have both written thought-provoking articles on all this — Ruby on his Substack, and Drew on his new internet culture blog Media Events.

We discuss the history of font memes in music (and the role of the Charlie’s vomit-green Brat marketing campaign within in it), the strange incongruence between Kamala’s public image and Brat’s distinctly messy brand of femme empowerment, and why conflating the meme-ification of a candidate with actual voter sentiment shows a misunderstanding of how memes actually work (and how Gen Z relate to them).

Join us on Substack as we uncover the economic and technological forces percolating beneath the surface of contemporary culture.

Follow Drew on X, and pay a dollar to read his font meme piece on Media Events

Follow Ruby on IG, and subscribe to being-on-line

Recommended Reading

“On ‘Brat’ and the phenomenon of font memes” by Drew Millard

“Can memes win an election?” by Ruby Justice Thelot (available on IG here)

“The crisis of legibility” by Ruby Justice Thelot

Can jokes bring down governments? by Metahaven

The image: A guide to pseudo events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin

The new typography by Jan Tschichold

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In the second installment of our Kim’s Video series, Emilie Friedlander reads a 2014 essay she wrote about her experiences working as a teenaged video clerk at the beloved film and music emporium’s Saint Mark’s location. In it, she explores the cultural significance of the figure of the “music snob” in the …

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Living in a city like New York is a constant exercise in seeing the things that you love go away. And for independent culture fans in the city, one of the most devastating losses of this century was that of Kim’s Video, a hybrid video and record store with a flagship location on Saint Marks Place in the East Village and clerks who were both revered and feared for their encyclopedic knowledge of film and music.

Kim’s Video holds a special place in Emilie’s heart — she worked her first job out of high school there. And for many decades, it was home to one of the largest and most comprehensive video rental collections in the world, with a wealth of cinematic obscurities and hard-to-find gems that earned it a cult following among both local cinephiles and art-house legends like Quentin Tarantino, Chloë Sevigny, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Coen brothers. So when the shop’s enigmatic impresario, Mr. Kim, announced that Kim’s Video was closing up shop, and it came out that the store’s 55,000-work collection had ended up in a small Italian town called Salemi, a lot of people were understandably very upset and confused.

Lucky for us, two filmmakers and Kim’s Video devotees — David Redmon and Ashley Sabin — decided to track down the collection. But when they arrived in Salemi and discovered the archives in a state of disarray, they found themselves in the middle of a cross-continental mystery that took them from Sicily, to South Korea, to Mr. Kim’s New Jersey home, and that ran much deeper than a simple case of streaming supplanting your local video rental place. That story, and the resulting fate of the Kim’s Video collection, are captured in David and Ashley’s fascinating and often baffling feature documentary, Kim’s Video. 

Today, David joins us to talk about the story of Kim’s Video and Yong-man Kim, who famously started selling videos out of a dry cleaning shop after emigrating to New York from South Korea. We also explore the particular era in underground culture, and in the history of the East Village, of which Kim’s was such an important part; what we lose when our consumption of media loses its connection to physical objects; and whether the current interest in the Kim’s collection, which the directors helped return to its current location at Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Manhattan, is symptomatic of a larger yearning for a more tangible experience of culture.

PS. Later this month, we’ll be releasing a special subscriber-only bonus episode where Emilie reads an essay she wrote on her experiences working as a clerk. Sign up for a paid subscription to get it straight to your inbox.

Watch Kim’s Video on Apple TV or Prime Video.

Follow Kim's Video (the film) on Instagram.

Follow Kim’s Video (the collection) on Instagram.

Check out more of David and Ashley’s work at Carnivalesque Films.