EP 38: UNIVERSAL BASIC PLANETARY SERVICES (Benjamin Bratton)

Full Ep released to subscribers: 08 Mar 2024 | To join New Models, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com // One of the most compelling examples, so far, of media made using AI content generation is the video that artist Jon Rafman created for Kanye West’s new album with Ty Dolla $ign, "Vultures." Rather than aiming for maximum realism in these clips, Rafman leans into visual incoherence, moments where the software experiences a collapse of distinction. This, coupled with prompts that could have gone something like “gang members in balaclavas imploding like the Pruitt-Igoe housing project demolition 1971” with style tags “cult horror, VHS, America 1986, Norwegian black metal” meant the video also conveyed a sense of what we thought might be a Witch House revival. So we called up cultural savant and 2010s historian Dean Kissick to discuss. But Witch House did not remain the central thread of our conversation. Instead, all paths lead back to something more fundamental—the struggle for iconicity in a time of infinitely available content. // For more: https://twitter.com/deankissick (X) // NOTE: Dean will be helping New Models resident Patrick McGraw to stage a very special Heavy Traffic reading at EARTH, 29 Orchard Street, New York City, on Easter Sunday, March 31st.

Released to subscribers: 25 Nov 2023 | For full episode, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com _ The Girlstack w/ theorist Alex Quicho (NM74) A conversation with cultural theorist Alex Quicho. Building on the ideas of Tiqqun’s 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chu’s Females and Bogna Konior’s work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the “Girlstack,” which, to borrow her words, models the “ultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girl’s natural habitat.” Quicho talks with us about it here. [To be clear… we’re speaking of not actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl . . . girl as a vehicle for selling a product, girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, girl as living currency, girl as desiring machine.] For more: https://amfq.xyz/ 
 Alex Quicho, “Everyone Is a Girl Online,” Wired (September 2023) Alex Quicho, Small Gods: Perspectives on the Drone (Zer0 Books, 2021)

Released to subscribers: 17 Apr 2023 | For full episode, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com National Art Critic for artnet News and the author, most recently, of Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket, 2022), Ben Davis speaks to New Models about his recent essay “How We Ended Up in the Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste.” For more: benadavis.com twitter.com/benadavis news.artnet.com/opinion/quantitat…esthetics-2276351 Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket, 2022) 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket, 2013) [episode image: Butch McCartney / dogphotographer.eth.co]

First released: 27 Feb 2023 | To join New Models & receive our full stream in real time, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com This episode is nominally about the state of style but ultimately is about the changing media paradigm that underpins how we signal through sartorial codes in 2023. New York-based writer Olivia Kan-Sperling is our guest. She is an assistant editor and regular contributor to The Paris Review and her work has appeared in publications such as Interview, Praxis, Heavy Traffic, and Cabinet. Last year she published a book of Kendall Jenner x Lil Peep fanfic titled Island Time (Expat Press, 2022), an excerpt of which she shares here. The conversation is NYC-centric but, more so, generationally specific, pushing us to shift our viewpoint to unfamiliar angles. For more: https://oliviaks.page/ IG @dianadiagram & Tw @diamonddustpaw lucky-jewel.com Music for this ep: Cocteau Twins, "Know Who You Are at Every Age"

First released: 31 Aug 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com On Sunday (27 Aug 2023), climate activists blocked the road to Burning Man, demanding that the festival—which was founded on principles of decommodification, radical self-reliance, and civic responsibility—ban single-use plastics and private jets. While the protest delayed a relatively small amount of physical traffic for less than an hour, it seized swathes of the online space for days given the action's adjacency to so many memetic themes, incl.: #climate, #collapse, #decarbonization, #privilege, #indigenous (land), #police and ofc the punching bag that is #burningman. Much of the initial drama played out on the Instagram and X accounts of gonzo journalist Michelle Lhooq (Rave New World) who broke the story while on assignment for The Guardian. On Monday, Michelle joined New Models from Reno to discuss what she witnessed as well as the changing nature of activism’s stage both online and off.
 For more: IG: @michellelhooq X: @MichelleLhooq https://ravenewworld.substack.com https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/28/burning-man-protest-climate-change-environment

First released: 08 Apr 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com Adapting climate scholar Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021, Verso) for the silver screen, Daniel Goldhaber has transformed Malm’s non-fiction manifesto into “one of the most original American thrillers in years" (Roger Ebert). As it sees its US theatrical release this week, Daniel joins NM to speak about the film, the state of indie filmmaking, and the terms of politically engaged creative production in our over-mediatized, performatively politicized age. For more: https://neonrated.com/films/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline

First released: 25 Aug 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com Three members of the Collapsology / Crude Futures group — Richard Hames (co-author of The Rise of Ecofascism, Polity, 2022), Washington-state based writer Beau-Caprice Vetch, and UK-based producer/writer/DJ Jake Colvin (NKC) — discuss the idea of collapse, its historical role in consolidating power, its geopolitical vs. biopolitical registers, its relationship to spirituality, and frameworks for approaching adaptation to the worlds revealed in its wake. The occasion for this conversation is the publication of a zine and card game that the Crude Futures group — which started in the New Models Discord server and also includes members Mina Miller, Jack Tarpey, phm, Matīss Groskaufmanis, Jon Benjamin Talleräs, Cat MacGregor, T.M. Wilson, and Marcelino Llano — created over the past two years and released this July. Printing of the zine and card game was made possible through proceeds from the NM Codex Y2K20, and initial proceeds from the Crude Futures sales will go toward production of whatever NM-sphere initiative emerges next. The zine and card game are available at https://shop.newmodels.io as well as select bookshops in London and Berlin. For updates on the Crude Futures project, follow https://crudefutures.substack.com and IG: @crudefutures See also: NM 41 | Eco-Tomorrow w/ Sam Moore https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/nm-pod-41-eco-tomorrow-w-sam-moore?

First released: 23 Jun 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com NYC has always been a scene superconductor, replete with an infinite supply of ambitious young bodies and a world class media machine to document it all. But over the past few years, a new strain of #downtown has emerged that incessantly flickers between the physical and online realms. On this episode, NM is joined by three denizens of this New York sphere — novelist and co-founder of Forever Magazine, Madeline Cash; artist chloé waifmaterial; and full stack engineer slash man-about-town David Yoakum — to recap a cluster of events that transpired during Praxis Week, including the premier of Angelicism’s Film01, a reading at the new VC-backed Lower East Side event space Sovereign House, and the sudden onset of a climate event that amplified it all. For more: @davidy____ waifmaterial.com & @waifmaterial madelinecash.com & @madelinecash Related writing from NM sphere: - Madeline Cash reviews Angelicism’s Film01 for Spike Art Magazine - Paige K. Bradley reviews Angelicism’s Film01 for Artforum

First released: 13 June 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, journalist, and technology activist who’s been thinking publicly about the industrial capture of creative labor markets since the ‘90s. In Berlin last week touring his newest book, the NYTimes bestselling, anti-finance finance thriller Red Team Blues (Tor Books, 2023) and to present at the re:publica conference with his Chokepoint Capitalism (Beacon, 2022) co-author Rebecca Giblin, Doctorow generously made time to speak with New Models about the entrenched, corrosive models driving what we’ll shorthand here as corporate cannibalism. For more: Tw: @doctorow Blog/newsletter: https://pluralistic.net Site & pod: https://craphound.com Recent books: Red Team Blues (Tor Books, 2023) https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/redteamblues Chokepoint Capitalism (Beacon, 2022) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/

First released: 24 May 2023 | To join New Models, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com Joining this episode is Ben Solomon aka King Solomon aka KSER IRAK. Born and raised in downtown New York, Ben is an artist, filmmaker, and part of the legendary graffiti crew IRAK, which is to say a legendary part of the history of the city itself. We’ve wanted to have Ben on the show forever (in part because he and Lil Internet have known each other forever) but also because few besides Ben are better positioned to share stories about the social media that IS New York—both pre- and post-internet—and how it changed the way the downtown NYC works. (photo: Ilya Lipkin) For more: bensolomon.nyc Tw & IG: @KINGS0L0M0N