Preview | NM Reads: Gideon Jacobs, "MAGA as Fan Fiction," LA Review of Books (2026)

Gideon Jacobs returns to NM with his third essay in a trilogy for the LA Review of Books that tracks, in real-time, the American Political machine’s delamination from everyday life through runaway story-drive. In “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” Gideon shows US politics both left and right as having become a read-write medium for collective creative expression more than material governance—a kind of kayfabe where ‘democracy’ takes the form of citizens co-creating storyline with their elected officials and everyone in office has an IMDB profile. Carly & Lil Internet intro this ep with a short conversation drawing out themes across this trilogy that feel particularly NM Canon. “Of course, long before any advanced communication technologies, humans had been drawn not just to stories but also to the possibility of living as characters within them. Story’s appeal had always been precisely that it’s not like reality. […] a dream of existing free from the pesky flaws intrinsic to reality: uncontrollability, unpredictability, vulnerability, mundanity, complexity, incoherence, confusion, pain.” Audio production: Lil Internet For more:
https://gideon.works/ Gideon Jacobs, “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” (Jan 2026)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-elon-musk-image-patel-maga-reality/ Gideon Jacobs, “Player One and Main Character,” (Apr 2025)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/player-one-and-main-character/ Gideon Jacobs, “Trump l’Oeil,” (Nov 2024) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-loeil/

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com A psyche-delic meditation by Lil Internet on what it means to live among multiple competing intelligences—and the urgent need to develop new rituals for engaging with them before capital-mind fentafies us all into extinction. "I no longer saw the highway, I felt it, viscerally, overwhelmed by the colossal, conquering thrust of capital. The velocity of the vehicles became tangible, massive aggregations of steel, plastic, glass, rubber, precision electronics, combustion engines and gasoline in violently accelerating streams of headlights and taillights..."

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com You’ve heard us reference the work of Jay Springett (aka @thejaymo) on nearly every pod this year — so with his new book Slop Machines of Loving Grace near completion, we invited Jay on the show to chat through some of its themes. The book takes 2008 as a breaking point, a moment where the late-20th century financial system imploded and, in its place, society was given a new operating system: one optimized for exocapitalism and shaped by “smartness,” a forceful symbiosis of finance and software. On the ep, we discuss the rise of American “code-spaces” (e.g., apps, platforms, etc) and hyper-fragmented “data subjects” taking the place of the modern “individual.” "What happens,” Lil Internet asks, “when AI agents become not just tools but inhabitants of the world of human culture? Chat with an Oct 2025 draft Jay’s book’s here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68d150abe8008191b27383697808eed9-slop-machines Follow/subscribe/listen to more of Jay’s work at https://thejaymo.net See also: NM85 | Jay Springett on “Worlds” as Medium (2024)

“Neo-orality” has been an important term in the New Models zone this year—but what exactly do we mean by it?  With this two-part episode of NM Reads, we bring you two papers by the scholar Jacqueline Fendt, who is Emeritus Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at ESCP Business School in Paris, and—to the best of our knowledge—the first to define “neo-oral” in the way that we’ve come to use it.*  She also, as a Swiss corporate executive in her 70s, happens to have a lot to say about “vibes” and what she observes to be a titanic shift in human communication from democracy to, as she puts it, “vibrocacy.” For Part 1 (this post), Lil Internet reads excerpts from: Jacqueline Fendt, “Democracy, Neo-Orality, and the Unraveling of Political Norms: What Can We Social and Political Scholars Do?” Open Journal of Political Science, Vol. 15, No. 3, (May 31, 2025) [Copyright: CC BY 4.0] For Part 2 (forthcoming), Lil Internet reads excerpts from: Jacqueline Fendt, “Beyond Wicked: Vibocratic Problems in the Post-Truth Era” International Journal of Social Science Studies, Vo. 13, No. 2, (Redfame, Jun 27, 2025) These papers have been vital to our thinking this fall. In the spirit of the neo-oral we’re sharing them with you here as Lil Internet produced audio with the hope that they will be as big of an unlock for you as they have been for us. _ * Media theorist Walter J. Ong wrote about a “second orality” in 1971, and then more extensively in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, describing it as “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print.” Fendt cites Ong’s writing but goes much further, showing how the rise of “neo-orality” is fundamentally re-ordering human society: “By Neo-orality, we mean not just a return to oral habits,” Fendt writes, “but a deeper epistemic shift. It privileges immediacy over reflection, presence over argument, and shared emotional resonance over detached verification. Unlike classic orality, which relied on embodied presence, neo-orality travels across screens, memes, and livestreams.”

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com With their latest video essay, Welcome to Jankspace, Babes (2025) now streaming on DIS.art, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung come on the show to speak about what happens to the world and critically, all of us, our bodies, as capitalism lifts off from the human layer. Daniel Felstead leads the MA Fashion Media & Communications program at the London College of Fashion. Jenn Leung, also a lecturer at the University of Arts London, is a researcher and simulation developer. She has recently published papers on UE interfaces for brain organoids and agent behavior simulation in MIT’s Antikythera journal. For more: @jennnital @felstead.daniel Welcome to Jankspace, Babes https://dis.art/welcome-to-jankspace Maya B. Kronic speaking at London College of Fashion, January 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfZm7zTQwbE

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Olivia Kan-Sperling joins to talk about her recent work, "Little Pink Book: A Bad Bad Novel" (Archway Editions, 2025). "It’s like girl, China, sex, postmodernism, conceptual romance—a book that sells itself to you over and over and over again as you read it,” she remarks. Published in parallel English/Chinese, the novel was originally written to accompany a piece by Diane Severin Nguyen show at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. It now circulates as a kind of Reena Spaulings (the novel) for the Exocapitalism era, testing the limits of what fiction now is and what content could be. Based in NYC, Olivia is the author of the Kendall Jenner x Lil Peep fanfic, Island Time (Expat Press, 2022) as well as an associate editor + regular contributor to The Paris Review. Her words have also appeared and been channeled through outlets such as Heavy Traffic, Viscose, Kaleidoscope, n+1, and Montez Press Radio, among others. For more: @dianadiagram https://oliviaks.page/ 
 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Little-Pink-Book/Olivia-Kan-Sperling/9781648230417 Also feat. Olivia: NM60: https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/code-couture-olivia-kan-sperling-nm60 Heavy Traffic x New Models: https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/heavy-traffic-olivia-kan-sperling-perfect-glove

This is a preview — for the full episode (released: Oct 15, 2025), subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Are we entering a neo-oral age? For centuries, linear, text-based media has organized human communication, creating a shared reality, a shared sense of linear time. But as political Scientist Kevin Munger discusses on this ep of NM Talkcore, that ontological structure is rapidly coming undone. For more: https://kevinmunger.com https:// kevinmunger.substack.com Watch: Kevin Munger on Vilém Flusser’s “Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations” https://youtu.be/EpVTEoqUCbs?si=e-bh0ewGRsbnzRMq Image: Stafford Beer, 1975 Keywords: accelerationism, Actionists (Viennese), anti-memetics, apparatus, artificial intelligence, bios level, cartesian dualism, chatbots, Communicology, content level, cybernetics, cyberspace, CyberSyn (project), EA (effective altruism), externalities, fanficification, feedback loop, 4chan, game theory, generation gap, large language models (LLMs), Less Wrong, linear media, management cybernetics, media apparatus, media theory, memes, mimetic, mnemonic, mukbang, ontological stability, oral society/orality, platonism, prehension, process philosophy, protocol level, rationalism, recommendation algorithm, recursion, renaissance paintings, secondary orality, singularity, social media, spiral/spiraling, sycophancy, Taylorist management, textual society, video games, whirlpool, World War III (information warfare)

Are we entering a neo-oral age? For centuries, linear, text-based media has organized human communication, creating a shared reality, a shared sense of linear time. But as political Scientist Kevin Munger discusses on this ep of NM Talkcore, that ontological structure is rapidly coming undone. For more: https://kevinmunger.com https:// kevinmunger.substack.com Watch: Kevin Munger on Vilém Flusser’s “Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations” https://youtu.be/EpVTEoqUCbs?si=e-bh0ewGRsbnzRMq Keywords: accelerationism, Actionists (Viennese), anti-memetics, apparatus, artificial intelligence, bios level, cartesian dualism, chatbots, Communicology, content level, cybernetics, cyberspace, CyberSyn (project), EA (effective altruism), externalities, fanficification, feedback loop, 4chan, game theory, generation gap, large language models (LLMs), Less Wrong, linear media, management cybernetics, media apparatus, media theory, memes, mimetic, mnemonic, mukbang, ontological stability, oral society/orality, platonism, prehension, process philosophy, protocol level, rationalism, recommendation algorithm, recursion, renaissance paintings, secondary orality, singularity, social media, spiral/spiraling, sycophancy, Taylorist management, textual society, video games, whirlpool, World War III (information warfare)

This is an unlocked episode (first aired 08/25/2025) — for all NM audio, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Theorists Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo (co-hosts of the Dis.integrator pod) come on New Models to talk us through their highly anticipated new book, Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits, which is out this month from Becoming Press. Through their radical rethinking of capitalism — its indifference to human scale, its endless appetite for complexity, its rapacious transformation of everything into betting surfaces — Marek and Roberto relieve us of old Leftist frameworks, supplying a decoder ring for the growing incoherence of everyday contemporary life. https://becoming.press/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-(2025)-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trillo Authors: Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo https://www.marekpoliks.com/ https://robertoalonsotrillo.com/ https://open.spotify.com/show/4AcGAXHIdRu1toaZYnK3kB Foreward: Charles Mudede Afterward: Alex Quicho Art & Design: Palais Sinclaire Illustrations: Avocado Ibuprofen Names cited: AMD, Amazon/AWS, Amanda Askell, American Express, BlackRock, Bogna Konior, Charles Mudede, ChatGPT, Citadel, Cortical Labs, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, David Graeber, DraftKings, Dunkin', SNAP (US food stamps), Elena Esposito, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, GUS (Global University Systems), Helen Hester & Nick Srnicek, Hilton Worldwide, Jürgen Habermas, K Allado-McDowell, Karl Marx, Kraft Singles, Luciana Parisi, Luigi Mangione, Nick Land, Nvidia, OpenAI, Ray Brassier, René Benko, Robinhood, Salesforce, Silvia Federici, SpaceX, Starbucks, TSMC

This is an unlocked episode (first aired 07/17/2025) — for all NM audio, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com In advance of their new album SISTER—out Sept 12 via True Panther and Dirty Hit—EDM emo pop punk crunkcore electroclash dubstep screamo trance DJs, producers, and siblings Angel and Lulu AKA the @FrostChildren join NM to talk about making music in a memetically driven age. For more: https://frostchildren.xyz https://frostchildren.ffm.to/sister https://instagram.com/thefrostchildren Names cited: Above & Beyond, Adam Curtis, Addison Rae, Afrojack, All Time Low, Blood on the Dance Floor, Breathe Carolina, BryanStars, Brokencyde, Celine, Charli XCX, Fall Out Boy, Gerard Way, Gracie Abrams, Harmony Korine, I Set My Friends on Fire, Isabella Rossellini, Jane Remover, Jimmy Buffett, Kate Bush, Kim Petras, Lana Del Rey, Mac DeMarco, Marc Jacobs, margø, The Medic Droid, Mission of Burma, Miu Miu, Model/Actriz, Monstercat, Montez Press Radio, MTV Cribs, My Chemical Romance, Nirvana, Oklou, Olivia Rodrigo, Owsla, Panic! At the Disco, Paper Magazine, Peter Gabriel, Pitbull, Porter Robinson, Sabrina Carpenter, Skrillex, The Smashing Pumpkins, Spring Breakers, The Sound, Stüssy, The 1975, True Panther, Vans Warped Tour, Virtual Riot, Vivaldi