The Culture Journalist

Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out cultural products that are derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop?According to Andrew DeWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it's because of Wall Street. In his brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, more insidious way: it's private equity buying up entire song catalogs, activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, and the cultural industries getting consumed wholesale by the financial sector — actual derivatives trading included.That wave of financialization is having an increasingly palpable effect on what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix — not just in terms of the kinds of works that get funded, but increasingly, in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit that “the stock exchange has become embedded within the media text.”Andrew joins us to talk about how finance-world strategies impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it — and how they result in an entertainment landscape that is increasingly inhospitable to taking big risks. And we get into how the logic of the derivative has become embedded in media products themselves, from Jay Z turning lyrical wordplay into a champagne empire, to the White Lotus casting K-pop star LISA.Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and all our bonus episodes), sign up for a paid subscription.Order a copy of Derivative Media — or download an open-access PDF for free.Read more by Andrew:The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape (Columbia University Press)“Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)” (Popular Music and Society) 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

Since Trump took office in January, you may have picked up on a certain, shall we say, visual vibe. Think: AI slop memes, gilded neoclassical decor, men clad in dark suits and red ties, women decked out in high heels and flowing hair—not to mention an ambiguous blend of plastic surgery and contoured make-up that the Hollywood Reporter recently dubbed “Mar-A-Lago Face.”If you've noticed some of these recurring themes, you're not alone. The arts journalist and critic Carolina Miranda has been keeping tabs on the intersection of visual culture, society, and politics for years, and she recently came up with a name for the look and feel of the current administration: Trump Trad. Her recent column for the Washington Post, “Welcome to the Era of Trump Trad,” is worth a read—and it's the first in a monthly series providing an ongoing aesthetic analysis of the Trump era, which is among her new endeavors since taking a buyout from her longtime role at the LA Times last year. (She also writes the Arts Insider newsletter for KCRW, which Andrea edits.)Carolina joins us to explain the three core pillars of Trump Trad: a yearning for the past (architecturally and otherwise), traditional gender roles, and—fascinatingly—professional wrestling. We also get into how to reconcile all the trad-ness with this administration's simultaneous embrace of Silicon Valley and AI, whether or not Biden or Kamala aesthetics exist, and how Trump's obsession with taking control of the programming at the Kennedy Center and issuing executive orders about architecture fits in with his politics of resentment against so-called “cultural elites.”Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and all our bonus episodes), sign up for a paid subscription.Sign up for Carolina's KCRW newsletterRead more from Carolina:“How Silicon Valley boys came to rule politics” (WaPo)“Influencer Jenny69 calls herself a ‘buchona.' How a narco-inspired style came to rule social media” (LA Times) 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

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where independent culture fans who like talking about things like creative economies, media theory, current events, and the future of entertainment and journalism can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day.Today we explore how many of the habits and customs we associate with American bourgeois life — religiously reading the Sunday Times, buying organic produce, building your entire identify around excelling at a career you love, etc. — stem from one generation in particular. Friends, we're talking about the yuppies, that notoriously status-obsessed, hyper-educated cohort of young urban professionals who came to cultural prominence in the '80s and '90s, setting off a series of transformations in our cities, media, and consumer culture that we're still witnessing to this day.It's easy to see the Boomer worldview as a reflection of the fact that they had it much easier than us Millennials, economically speaking. But a new book called Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation, by Philadelphia journalist and author Tom McGrath, subtly challenges that idea, reframing the yuppie obsession with money, achievement, and unimpeachable good taste as a response to the rough economic headwinds of the 1970s and '80s. Along the way, it explores how yuppiedom was equally a reaction to suburban post-war monoculture — and perhaps most perplexingly, a kind of impossible attempt to reconcile a newfound love of capitalism with the egalitarian values of the hippie era.Tom joins us to discuss the yuppie origin story and the historical factors that rerouted a generation from protesting the Vietnam War to working on Wall Street. We get into who — and what — the yuppies were rebelling against, and how their emphasis on not just consumption, but consuming the right things, laid the blueprint for everything from urban gentrification, to contemporary food culture, to the news and television we consume.We also talk about whether or not the yuppie still exists — perhaps in the form of Millennials? — and, of course, where Trump, then and now, fits into all of this.Purchase Triumph of the Yuppies. Follow Tom on Substack. 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

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where independent culture fans who like talking about things like creative economies, media theory, current events, and the future of entertainment and journalism can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day.Climate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires in January and Hurricane Helene last fall aren't just laying bare the realities of global warming; they're exposing the hidden dynamics of another kind of ecosystem: Media and information.From journalists compiling mutual aid spreadsheets to country music radio shows that became community message boards when the internet went out, these calamities are shining a spotlight on the evolving role of journalism and how we access information. They're also raising new questions about what that information should be, whose responsibility it is to vet and disseminate it, and what the media of the future might look like — you know, as climate disaster becomes a more regular feature of life.There's a lot to unpack here. So we've tagged in two media experts who, like Andrea, are based in LA and have had to confront climate disasters firsthand. Matt Pearce is a former Los Angeles Times reporter (and co-founder of its first union) with experience covering everything from hurricanes to internet culture; these days, he writes a Substack newsletter on the state of local news and media policy and is a senior policy advisor for the nonpartisan think tank Rebuild Local News.Longtime listeners might remember Emma Kemp from one of our earliest episodes on ghost kitchens. She's a researcher and writer and assistant professor at the Otis College of Art and Design who specializes in environmental media studies, and co-founder of the non-profit land conservation coalition No Canyon Hills.Matt and Emma join us to talk about their experiences on the ground as both media consumers and producers during the wildfires; the sources of information that became essential, and the sources of information that just sort of fell away; the limitations (and opportunities) of AI in a crisis; and how climate disasters will transform what both traditional and non-traditional media look like.Follow Matt on Substack and X. Check out his pieces on Watch Duty and on AI use during the wildfires.Check out more from Emma on her website and at No Canyon Hills. She also sells chickens, eggs, and coop supplies over at Party Fowl. The cover of “California Dreaming” by Jarvis Cocker featured in this episode was purchased from the LA fire benefit compilation Los Angeles Rising. Check it out, along with a collection of other compilations released to fundraise for wildfire relief, 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comFrom AI song generators like SUNO and Udio to “knob-free,” browser-based DAWs like BandLab, a rash of new music production apps and software is wooing creators with the promise of shortcutting the time and elbow grease it traditionally takes to make music. But is quicker and more effortless necessarily better? Montreal-based writer and musician Devon Ha…

Folks, it finally happened. After years of trying to “optimize” nearly every aspect of everyday life, from work to fitness to music, Silicon Valley has finally set its sights on the federal government. If you missed the bombshell story in Wired, Elon Musk is currently leading a platoon of quirked up zoomer web developers as they sift through institutional data and use AI to weed out inefficiencies like unnecessary spending, alleged corruption, and confirmed wokeness.It's easy to forget how we got here. For decades, the prevailing public attitude towards tech innovation has been one of near-blind optimism and acceptance — a perception of digital tech as neutral, transparent tools that are always leading us somewhere better than we are now.The logic tends to follow that somewhere along the way, the tools themselves took a wrong turn, or just ended up in the wrong hands. But what if this perception — that emerging tech is, by default, beneficial to society — has been misguided from the start?Writer and technologist Mike Pepi has some thoughts on that. His new book Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia pulls back the curtain on techno-utopianism, which he defines as “the idea that technology, and technology alone, will create a more egalitarian, democratic society.' He makes the case that emerging technologies and platforms aren't some kind of Platonic ideal, but in fact charged with assumptions and collateral consequences — a.k.a., ideology.It's not the tech that's the problem — it's the things we believe about it, and the ways that we've allowed that belief to overshadow, and at times completely blind us to, the actual conditions of contemporary life. The issue, Mike argues, is the impossible superpowers we reflexively attach to emerging tech and platforms — ranging from the idea that data can always point us to an objective truth, to Silicon Valley's tone-deaf insistence that shiny new tools like AI and blockchain can solve decades-in-the-making social problems.Mike joins us to talk about what techno-utopianism is, how it came to be the dominant mindset not just in Silicon Valley but in Western society itself, and how it both capitalizes on and fuels institutional decline. We also get into how we are seeing it play out in real time at DOGE, the disturbing phenomenon of tech companies bending the knee to Trump, the differences between platforms and institutions, and why something he calls “techno-progressivism” could be our way out of this mess.Buy Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia.Read Mike's follow-up essay “The Institutional Membrane” and follow his work on Substack. 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comAre algorithms actually making culture boring? It's easy to point to the Spotifys and Instagrams the world and blame them for what we perceive to be stagnant cultural production, flattened tastes, and generally bad vibes. But, in a recent piece for the Atlantic titled “The Technology That Actually Runs Our World,” journalist T.M. Brown argues that the a…

Let's take a step back in time to the halcyon days of late 2011, back when a little Swedish music app called Spotify landed in our app stores.Its arrival, alongside the rise of early smartphones and “public square” platforms like Twitter, seemed to herald the utopian ideals of a democratizing tech future just on the horizon. Here was an app that professed to level the playing field for music fans and artists alike via what Spotify imagined to be a “data-driven democracy”: For fans, it put pretty much any music you wanted at your fingertips, anytime. On the artist side, it promised to replace industry gatekeepers with a system where anyone who wrote a good enough song could land a viral hit — while also righting the compensatory wrongs of technological predecessors like Napster.That's…. not exactly how it's played out.Today, Spotify's myth of meritocracy has been supplanted by a system where major labels make millions of dollars a day from streaming while artists make less than a penny per stream; where AI DJs do the choosing for you within an algorithmic echo chamber; and where “vibe”-oriented playlists are filled with music by ghost artists designed to keep you listening longer while paying attention less.How all of this came to pass — and its far-reaching ripple effects on everything from cultural taste and aesthetics to the very meaning of being an “independent” artist — is the subject of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, a new book by independent music journalist Liz Pelly. The work culminates a decade of dogged reporting covering Spotify's rise from democratizing platform to corporate behemoth, and how, in the process, it has eroded the vast majority of artist's ability to make a living off of their work.Liz joins us to discuss how independent artists got swept up in a system that was clearly never built with them in mind, and how it managed to devalue their work to almost nothing. We also get into Spotify's flattening impact on music, in both an aesthetic and economic sense. And we break down the platform's push towards “lean-back” listening — you know, beats to study and chill to — and how it's reshaped the very meaning of being a fan.Follow Liz on Instagram.Get Mood Machine and check out more of Liz's work here.Read an excerpt, "The Ghosts in the Machine," at Harper's 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

On the surface, Zyn seems like just another post-cigarette nicotine push from Big Tobacco. But look a little closer, and you'll find that these little white nicotine pouches have taken on an entire life and culture of their own, complete with political connotations, subcultural slang, and even social media “Zynfluencers.” You can count Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and even “Joe Rogan of the Left” Hasan Piker among Zyn's highest-profile enthusiasts. It's become a symbol of American masculinity in the age of the bro-coded YouTube podcast, the digital equivalent of whipping out a tin of dip in the frat house.To find out about how Zyn became both a new symbol of American masculinity and a political lightning rod, journalist T.M. Brown published a deep dive for the New York Times, just before the November election. So we decided to have him on for a brief cultural and social history of Zyn.We get into why Zyn resonates with male consumers in particular — despite initially being much more popular among women in the product's home country of Sweden — its bizarre trajectory across national borders and party lines, and its multifaceted nature as a social signifier that somehow manages to encompass such seemingly contradictory impulses as indulgence and health, working class culture and internet hustle culture, and individualism and brotherly love.Follow T.M., aka Teddy, on X and SubstackRead more by Teddy:“What's that in your mouth bro?”“Burn, memory”“Hidden in a Fire Island house, the soundtrack of love and loss” 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

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. 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

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. 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

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 JournalistFollow Catherine on Substack and X.Read Virtue Hoarders via University of Minnesota Press.Read Catherine's article, “Postmodern Liberalism and the Democratic Party” 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comWhat'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 XPurchase The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.Watch Astra's CBC Massey Lectures on the book. 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comToday, 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

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 blissblogFollow Simon 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

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 EventsFollow Ruby on IG, and subscribe to being-on-lineRecommended 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 ThelotCan jokes bring down governments? by MetahavenThe image: A guide to pseudo events in America by Daniel J. BoorstinThe new typography by Jan Tschichold 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comIn 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 …

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. 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

Like most people on the internet, we here at the CuJo love a good food-centric social media account. But our arguable favorite at the moment is Snaxshot, a Substack, Instagram, and online community run by journalist and snack oracle Andrea Hernández. Through analyzing products like Graza olive oil and adaptogenic cookie dough and the bold colors and chunky fonts that make every new food brand look vaguely the same, Andrea probes the vast culinary zeitgeist in search of what it tells us about both our generation and this moment in culture. This week, she joins us to crack open the fascinating and often disorienting cultural politics of what she calls “gentrification food.” We get into the culinary and aesthetic hallmarks of this genre of food and beverage, what we millennials are broadcasting about ourselves when we consume it, and how our consumption choices became a form of status signaling in the first place.  We also talk about the differences between how Millennials and Gen-Z relate to food (and how it's marketed to them accordingly); how artisanality became a mass-market concept; and why chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Cheesecake Factory are having a moment among young people. Join us as we uncover the economic and technological forces percolating beneath the surface of contemporary culture.Subscribe to Snaxshot on Substack Follow Snaxshot on IGRecommended reads by Andrea“American Snaxboi” “Millennial Metamucil”“For the love of chains” 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comThis week, we're traveling back in time to explore a facet of the pandemic-era crypto goldrush that all but entirely escaped the attention of the mainstream media: The rise of the “Marxist VC.” This was, if you're unaware, the strange blip in recent history where a contingent of uber-capitalist investors, founders, and other Web3 evangelists leveraged pseudo-Marxist and pro-labor rhetoric (along with cogent critiques of Big Tech) to induct artists and leftists into the world of NFTs and DAOs. Technology and music journalist Eli Zeger, author of a recent essay called “Owner's Remorse” for the publication Strange Matters, joins to discuss how the capitalist class hijacked the discussion around building a more democratically owned and governed internet, the plutocratic realities that buzzwords like “squad wealth” and “the ownership economy” obscure, and what it's actually like to work for a DAO (Hint: In most cases, it's more like working for Uber than a co-op). 

Hey pals. We're back with the first of five new free episodes that we've cooked up for your listening pleasure. If you want to keep getting episodes whenever we take a pause from publishing the free stuff, you can sign up for a paid subscription, which gets you 1-2 paywalled episodes a month, whether or not we're on break. Once you sign up, you'll also get an invite to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. To sweeten the deal, we're also offering 30 percent off on annual subscriptions until June 13. That means you pay $35 instead of the usual $50. Today, we're diving into The Living Wage for Musicians Act, a new bill circulating through Congress aimed at increasing the amount of money musicians make when fans stream their music online. Introduced in March by reps Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman and created in partnership with the United Musicians and Allied Workers, it proposes the creation of a new streaming royalty just for musicians, separate from what streamers are already paying out to labels and other rights holders. All of which is to say, the streaming industry, with its long-broken and winner-take-all system of compensation for artists, may finally be getting regulated. Among those leading the charge is UMAW organizer and former Galaxie 500 drummer Damon Krukowski, who you may know as one half of the psych-folk duo Damon & Naomi as well as the creator of the excellent Dada Drummer Almanach Substack. Damon joins us to give us a crash course in the history of digital music royalties, and why the current system makes it so incredibly difficult for most artists to see any meaningful revenue from their recorded music. We also get into what challenges the bill currently faces, its radical mechanism for redistributing wealth from the most popular streaming artists to their less-streamed counterparts, and whether we're headed for a future where some independent musicians may choose to opt out of streaming altogether — Cindy Lee style.The song featured in today's episode is “$$$” by Vundabar. Support them on Bandcamp.Learn more about the Living Wage for Musicians Act Follow UMAW on IGFollow Damon on XRead more by Damon “How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream?”“Anti-viral sounds”“Four hours of music: Taylor Swift and Cindy Lee”“Musicking” 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comThis week, we are joined by music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds, author of a recent Pitchfork feature about a current in music he is calling “Shitpost Modernism,” emblematized by auteurist hip-hip absurdists like RXK Nephew and TisaKorean, bathroom humor-loving jazz ensembles like Spilly Cave, various SpongeBob-imitating MCs, and, of course, 100 Gecs…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comHey pals. The 23rd edition of Coachalla wrapped up last weekend, and you know what that means: It's time for The Culture Journalist's annual Coachella Report, where co-host Andrea Domanick returns from Indio, CA ready to dish on all the trends in fashion, music, and media she spotted on the ground. You can think of it as a little capsule review of the 2…

The problem with talking about hipsterism is that the term is almost impossible to define. Hipsters, whether they can still be said to exist as a subculture at all at this point, famously like denying that they are hipsters. And while you could say that the figure of the hipster has become a sort of nebulous catch-all for everything we love to hate about the 21st century, liberal-arts educated, neighborhood-gentrifying creative class (see: Brad Troemel's excellent “Hipster Report” for more on that tip), you can't really study a group that doesn't identify as such. That's part of why Alessandro Gerosa, a researcher in cultural sociology at the University of Milan, wrote a book examining hipsterism from a different, potentially more use angle. It's called The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism, and it's a fascinating (and open source!) look at hipsterism as an economic phenomenon — one oriented around the consumption and production of cultural goods that stand out for their authenticity and distinctiveness, and in the process, sort of magically endow their owner with those same qualities.Far from being “over,” he argues, the “hipster economy” has become dominant “aesthetic regime of consumption” in our time. But the book also goes deeper, drawing on Alessandro's study of cocktail bar owners, food truck restaurateurs, and other neo-craft entrepreneurs to show how at bottom, the hipster economy is driven by a centuries-old impulse to carve out spaces of autonomy and self-determination within industrial capitalism. He joins us from Milan to discuss the surprisingly long history of our cultural obsession with the idea of authenticity, and how hipster taste is a complex interplay between authenticity and kitsch. We also get into how the hipster economy grew out of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, the impact of the hipster economy on cities, and how hipsterism isn't just a reaction to the dominant culture, but also a reaction to the state of work.   This podcast was edited by Ben Newman.Download The Hipster Economy for free via UCL Press. (But also, if you are in Europe, you can pre-order a hard copy. U.S. readers will be able purchase the book starting in August, via The University of Chicago Press.Follow Alessandro on Instagram and the platform formerly known as Twitter. Read more by Alessandro on his 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

What do Ticketmaster price gouging and widespread journalism layoffs and have in common? They're both downstream consequences, at least in part, of lax antitrust enforcement. If that sounds obtuse, consider this: antitrust law — the legislation that aims to prevent monopolies from forming and keep business competition healthy — directly impacts how power is being consolidated across American society as a whole. That includes how big a given company is allowed to become, and the types of business tactics it is allowed to use.In a world where artists' livelihoods have become increasingly intertwined with the actions of a handful of giant tech and entertainment companies, antitrust is a useful lens for understanding why so many things feel broken and inequitable. And 2024, for all its flaws, is actually an exciting time to be talking about this. Lina Khan, the 35-year-old legal scholar currently serving as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, is on a mission to change the way we think about, and implement, antitrust law. And since she took office in 2021, she's been updating our understanding of antitrust for the business landscape of the present, expanding beyond a decades-old focus on consumer-facing price to consider how anticompetitive practices also harm workers, communities, diversity, and the environment. Accordingly, she's already brought big cases against some of the tech giants we regularly talk about on this show, including Amazon and Meta. A lot of this stuff impacts creative workers, so we've invited on Kevin Erickson, Director of the Future of Music Coalition, to put together a little primer for us. Founded in 2000, the Future of Music Coalition is a Washington DC-based nonprofit bringing together musicians, artist advocates, technologists, and legal experts dedicated to, as they put it, “supporting a musical ecosystem where artists flourish and are compensated fairly and transparently for their work.” We discuss why many of the problems we ascribe to the actions of private companies are actually policy problems, and why those issues aren't a larger part of the conversation. We also dig into some of the current big policy fights that stand to materially impact the lives of creatives like journalists to musicians — including the Journalism Conservation and Preservation Act and what's happening with Ticketmaster and other brokers right now.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on X and IG. 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

This week, we're re-upping our episode with writer Cord Jefferson, who just won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, which he also directed. American Fiction was adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure, by writer Percival Everett. And since Sunday night, the film, and Cord's comments about it, have been provoking a lot of interesting conversation about Black representation in Hollywood and the publishing industry—which also happens to be the subject of the film itself, and which we encourage you to dig into.  Cord, as you may know, is a former journalist and Gawker editor with very strong opinions about the economics of cultural production. Which is why we weren't surprised when he used his acceptance speech to offer a pretty candid take about risk aversion in Hollywood—and the need for executives to take more chances on independent filmmakers. “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry. I get it. But $200 million dollar movies are also a risk,” he said. “Instead of making one $200 million dollar movie, try making twenty $10 million dollar movies, or fifty $4 million dollar movies.”   It wasn't the first time we'd heard Cord talking about this stuff. In fact, this was one of the topics we went long on with him when we had him on the show in 2021 to mark the start of Succession's third season. Cord was a writer for season two, in addition to working on series like The Good Place, Station Eleven, and Watchmen, for which he won an Emmy. What started as a conversation about Succession's Roy family—and Cord's experiences transitioning from a career in media to a career in TV and film—evolved into a deeper meditation on the struggles writers in both fields are facing in a creative economy where culture is evaluated based on numbers, where pre-visibility and remakes trump original ideas, and where what executives believe is “good for business” feels increasingly incompatible with artistic risk-taking.  We recorded this conversation long before last year's Writer's Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes, not to mention American Fiction itself, but the issues we discuss have become only more relevant with time. You can think of it as an extended riff on the argument he made on national TV this week—and it's also a great look into where Cord comes from, the moral dilemmas that result when we allow algorithms to evaluate art, and perhaps some of the seeds of thoughts that inspired American Fiction. Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on X and IG. 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comNote: If you are a media worker who has lost work or been laid off, email us at theculturejournalist@substack.com and we'll send you the full episode for free.This week, we explore why 2024 has been such a terrible year for journalists, with so many publications announcing cuts or closures—and in such quick succession—that we can barely keep track of the carnage. Did VICE, Pitchfork, The Messenger, Sports Illustrated, Complex, Buzzfeed, Insider, and The Los Angeles Times, to give just a sample of the companies that have put writers and editors out of work, just happen to all feel the pinch at the time? Or are there wider structural forces afoot, including even a touch of media executive groupthink, that can explain what's going on here? On this week's episode, which we like to think of as a sequel to a similar conversation we had last year with Ben Dietz, Semafor media reporter extraordinaire Max Tani joins us to discuss why this particular layoff season is different than others, what the future of the media biz might look like, and what it's like to be the guy who every journalist follows to find out if they're losing their job.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on X and IG.

Hey pals. In January, Condé Nast shocked the entire independent music world when it announced it was laying off most of Pitchfork's staff and folding what remained into GQ. Emilie especially felt this one — Pitchfork was her first media job, working as an editor for their underground music sister-site Altered Zones, which made it particularly strange to hear that the publication was merging with a website for men who can pronounce “visvim.” Whatever you thought about Pitchfork during its three-decade run as a standalone music publication, the image of Anna Wintour wearing sunglasses as she informed the staff about the site's fate pointed to a previously unthinkable reality: If the biggest music publication in the English-speaking world couldn't survive the media bloodbath that is rapidly unfolding all around us, would we soon be living in a world with no music journalism at all?There is no way of knowing exactly how Condé arrived at this decision. Wintour wrote a note to staff saying that “this decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork's performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company” — which doesn't tell us much. Others have accused Condé of doing layoffs as a form of union busting. And it is also safe to say that Pitchfork, like so many digital media publications, was wrestling with many of the larger structural forces we often talk about on this show (see: Google and other distribution platforms deprioritizing news, streaming services' monopoly on music discovery, and declining programmatic advertising revenues).Needless to say, there are a lot of takes floating around. But one in particular — by writer, editor, music scholar, and philosopher Robin James, on her always-intriguing It's Her Factory blog — really caught our eye, especially for the head-on way in which it dealt with the dissonance of Pitchfork being folded into a men's publication. In a post titled “Pitchfork, ‘Bro-ified' Alt Rock Radio, and the Structural Issues in the Financialized Media Industry” Robin frames the move as just one in a long line of examples of corporations turning to male audiences in order to “save” distressed music media properties. Which isn't because men are actually more likely to care about music or music writing, but because it's a logic that plays into the gendered biases of the executive and ownership class. And because in today's heavily financialized economy, business leaders are more concerned with creating the perception of future growth than coming up with solutions that actually work. Robin joins us to talk about what the Pitchfork news can tell us about the persistence of gendered stereotypes around music fandom and consumption, and how media's current woes are a reflection of a larger business landscape where exponential scalability takes precedence over sustainability and even profitability. We also discuss how the financialization of everything has changed the nature of musical fame, and how the age-old poptimism/rockism binary may be increasingly obsolete as a framework for discussing power differentials in music.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on X and IG. 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

What do TikTok voice, generic “hipster coffee shop” decor, and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Super Bowl kissing photos have in common? According to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker, they're all products of something called “filterworld,” his word for a “vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today.” His new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, zeroes in on the rise of algorithmic recommendation systems—essentially, the equations that govern the specific pieces of content that social media, streaming, and e-commerce platforms decide to show us, and in what order—and how they're pushing us toward a kind of cultural homogeneity or sameness.Kyle joins us to talk about how exactly algorithm recommendation systems produce this sameness, the kinds of culture that rises to the top on the contemporary internet, and the pros and cons of human gatekeeping versus algorithmic curation. Finally, we discuss tactics for escaping algorithmic culture and reclaiming some of our agency as cultural producers and consumers, both individually and collectively.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on Twitter and IG. 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

Hey pals. Here's a development that we never had on our 2024 bingo card: shoegaze is back, and it's arguably bigger than ever. Andrea first got wind of this in October when she interviewed one of the architects of the genre, which dates back to the 80s and early 90s and is characterized by reverbed-out guitars, heavy feedback, and vocals that sit way back in the mix. On the heels of their fifth album, everything is alive, the U.K. quintet Slowdive is enjoying a level of success that is unprecedented in their 35-year career. They're selling more music than ever—they recently landed their first-ever Billboard Album Sales Top 10—and their fanbase is skewing noticeably younger. As the band explained to Andrea, a lot of that has to do with one critical factor: Their music has gone viral on TikTok. Slowdive is hardly alone. In December, the Pittsburgh-based music journalist Eli Enis published an exhaustively reported feature for Stereogum called “TikTok Has Made Shoegaze Bigger Than Ever.” While perusing Spotify, he stumbled into a clutch of new shoegaze-inspired artists he'd never heard of — see: wisp, flyingfish, quannnic, and sign crushes motorist — who were wracking up millions of streams. Digging deeper, he discovered that these artists were even more popular on TikTok. Many of them were still in their teens, making tracks on a DAW in their bedroom or between classes at school. And some of them were being offered major-label deals off the back of just a song or two. What is it about shoegaze, a sound that originated roughly four decades ago, that is speaking so much to people in their teens and early 20s? How are platforms like TikTok changing the nature of what a career in music looks like, or what it means to be a fan, or even the sonic elements of a genre like shoegaze that get emphasized or deemphasized? And what do we gain, and lose, in a world where music dreams are made (and dashed) based on inscrutable recommendation algorithms, far removed from the physical scenes and communities that traditionally incubated these subcultural sounds? Eli joins us to talk about what he learned while reporting on the Gen Z-driven shoegaze resurgence and talking to its central players. We also tapped the perspective of The Culture Journalists's very own Ben Newman, who in addition to being our new audio editor (welcome, Ben!!) also happens to be the drummer in a little band called DIIV, which you probably know in the context of an earlier wave of artists processing shoegaze influences in the 2010s.  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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comWelcome back to the Culture Journalist. To kick off our 2024 programming, we've cooked up a special, New Year's-themed episode for paid subscribers. Elliot Aronow—a fashion and music media veteran and founder of the minor genius newsletter, which focuses on helping artists unlock their “minor genius”—joins us to discuss balancing the pursuit of creative…

Before we dip for a short end-of-year break, it's time for a music streaming check-in. Our own “Wrapped,” if you will. There's a lot going on. Just last month, Spotify announced that it would stop paying artists completely for tracks with fewer than 1000 streams — just a few weeks before slashing 17 percent of its workforce (about 1500 people) in its third round of cuts this year. And those aren't the only changes afoot in the digital music space: Back in October, Bandcamp laid off 50 percent of its staff after being acquired by music licensing company Songtrader, casting a pall of uncertainty over the fate of an important economic lifeline for underground and emerging artists. If, like us, you are confused and disheartened about what this means for independent music, fear not. We've got just the guy to help make sense of it all, and maybe even inspire a little hope. His name is Tony Lashley, and not only is he just crazy smart, but he has a unique insider's view on the machinations of Big Streaming and the intersection of economics and aesthetics, thanks to some serious stints in marketing strategy and operations at both Spotify and Frank Ocean's Blonded. These days, he's been busy working on an an independent music-focused streaming platform and community called Marine Snow, which he describes as an attempt to be “hypercuratorial in the age of digital abundance,'” and likens to an A24 for music.Tony joins us for a roundtable on the past, present, and future of the musical commodity in the digital age. He breaks down the confusing economics of the streaming giants, why they keep bleeding money despite dominating the market, and what Spotify's new royalties structure tells us about where the music internet is headed. We also discuss how our relationship with music is inextricably bound up with values like status and community, what Spotify has in common with H&M (and also mainstream radio), and why the future of music consumption may lie in niche-oriented music platforms like Marine Snow.Follow Tony on Twittter and IGSign up for the Marine Snow waitlistRecommended supplemental reading from Tony:Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, by David Marx “Spotify: Making profits on thin profit margins” by M Value Investing Research“Layoffs won't solve spotify's biggest problem” by Timothy Green“Spotify's big bet on podcasts is failing, Citi says” by Jessica Bursztynsky“China antitrust: Beijing orders Tencent to end exclusive music licensing deals in a first for the country” by Yujie Xue and Iris DengSupport our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on Twitter and IG. 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

To celebrate the release of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech by the great tech journo Brian Merchant (Buy it! Read it! It's terrific!), we're reupping our conversation with Brian from back in June — which, between the OpenAI shakeup, Hollywood strikes, and the growing number of Big Tech antitrust cases, has only become more relevant since then. It's also a great complement to our previous episode on the decline of the digital third space, in which we contrast a certain prominent venture capitalist's techno-optimist manifesto with some of the ideas from Brian's book.Brian joins us to discuss how the Luddites were actually an early iteration of the labor movement — not anti-tech, but anti-exploitation — the eerie similarities between the systems of automation these workers were up against and AI, and what a 2023 version of the Luddite movement might look like. Hint: It's already happening, and it has nothing to do with smashing out phones, though you do you.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on 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

Back in 2012, a YouTube user called @taia777 posted a 59-minute video of some dreamy white clouds obscured by thorny green vines, soundtracked by the music for Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest. It was just another example of the popular trend of video game soundtracks on YouTube, but then something strange happened: Down in the comments section, strangers started spontaneously posting the word “checkpoint”— you know, like the “checkpoint” where a player saves their progress in a game — and anonymously sharing incredibly personal stories and updates from their lives. By 2021, when YouTube finally took the video offline, the thread had grown to more than 25,000 comments. According to Ruby Justice Thelot, a designer, cyberethnographer, artist, and author of a new book called A Cyberarcheology of Checkpoints, this particular internet rabbit hole was a stunning reminder of the lengths that users will go to to find community on the internet — and of the fragility of these so-called “third places” on an internet dominated by a small handful of for-profit platforms. (Disclosure: Emilie helped edit the book).Ruby joins us to discuss the story of Checkpoints, why these sorts of digital third places are so important, and the potential bigger-picture impacts of living one update or copyright claim away from our online histories being lost.We also talk about a recent essay he published with writer Rue Yi about what they're calling the “balkanization and babelification” of the post-Web 2.0 internet, his thoughts about a controversial “techno-optimist manifesto” written by A16z VC Marc Andreesen, and what's lost when technologists focus on progress and forward motion at all costs.Pre-order A Cyberarcheology of Checkpoints at https://www.irrelevantpress.com/store/pre-sale-a-cyberarchaeology-of-checkpoints-ruby-thelotSubscribe to The Culture Journalist at theculturejournalist.substack.com 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

Six months ago, Goldman Sachs published some research valuing the creator economy at $250 billion — a number they say could roughly double over the next five years. But it also found that just 4 percent of creators are considered “professionals,” meaning they pull in more than $100k per year. (Sound familiar?) As Google, Meta, and Amazon square off with regulators over their ownership of more or less everything we do online, it's easy to forget about the little guy propping this whole thing up: the everyday users who are populating these platforms with all the content.But not Taylor Lorenz. She's one of the world's biggest experts on the history of social media (maybe you've heard of her) and a tech and culture columnist for The Washington Post. Taylor has been covering internet culture since before it was considered a beat. Now, that beat is her book: Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet charts the rise of the online creator as a new class of creative worker, from early ‘00s mommy bloggers and MySpace “scene queens” to the Instagram influencers and TikTok stars of the present.You can think of it as a people's history of the creator economy, with a special focus on how platforms are shaped by the everyday people who use them — even as the aforementioned tech companies make it excruciatingly difficult for anyone else to reap the rewards. It's a perspective that often gets lost in the mainstream technology press, which tends to give founders all of the credit for innovation.To figure out how we got here, we invited Taylor on to join us for a little trip down memory lane, back to a time when selfies (and bangs) were more angled, the web was less aggressively commercial, and surfing the web was more about seeking out the information you needed — not just consuming whatever your timeline happened to spoon up. Pals, we're talking about the early days of social media — and how platforms like Friendster, MySpace, and even early Facebook and Tumblr laid the foundation for the creator economy as we know it today, while shaping the youth culture of the 2000s and early 2010s.We chat about the aesthetics of the MySpace era, the genesis of the modern creator, and the turning points in early social media that got us to where we are now. Along the way, we discuss whether it's still possible to see social media as a democratizing force, or if it creates new winners and losers — and why, nearly 20 years after the Facebook newsfeed made everybody's personal business public, users are retreating into closed communities again.Buy Extremely OnlineFollow Taylor on Substack, Instagram (+ good meme account!), and X (or Twitter or whatever)Read more:Taylor's column at The Washington Post“Content creators surge past legacy media as news hits a tipping point” by Taylor Lorenz“From mommy bloggers to TikTok stars: How creators built a $250B industry” by Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz“Millions work as content creators. In official records, they barely exist.” by Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz 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

This week, TrueAnon's Liz Franczak joins us to help unravel how the girlboss became the lazy girl job while society fell apart.What was the girlboss, and how did it evolve from a term of empowerment to something (let's face it) extremely cringe? Emilie just got done reading Marissa Meltzer's book on the story direct-to-consumer beauty juggernaut Glossier and its enigmatic founder Emily Weiss, and we couldn't think of a better person to discuss it with than this week's guest, TrueAnon co-host Liz Franczak. That's because in addition to being one of our favorite thinkers on all things related to true conspiracies and the sinister things that rich people do, she also happens to have worked as an early employee of the vintage-to-fast fashion retailer Nasty Gal — you know, the company founded by Sophia Amoruso, the lady who wrote the original book on GirlBossing.We discuss the specific economic, political, and technological moment that gave rise to the girl boss; its roots in pop feminist tomes like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and Amoruso's #GirlBoss; and why a movement premised on a kind of feminist version of trickle-down capitalism — and that became synonymous with a very specific group of well-heeled, mediagenic, millennial white women — was doomed to disappoint from the start.Along the way, we explore how Glossier and its line of “no makeup makeup” embodied the strange confluence of the Obama-era optimism and digital self-commodification that would become synonymous with mainstream millennial culture, and survey some of the other visions of femininity that have been circulating in wake of the Girl Boss's demise, from Greta Gerwig's Barbie, to lazy girl jobs and girl math, to trad wives, and more. Subscribe to TrueAnonFollow Liz on Twitter (or X or whatever)Read moreGlossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Glossier's Emily Weiss, by Marissa Melzter“Where have all the girlbosses gone?”, by Marissa Melzter“What do we mean when we call art necessary,” by Lauren Oyler 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

This week, our regular programming resumes with a survey of the state of post-pandemic nightlife, from ubiquitous Britney Spears remixes to artists griping that DJing is “embarrassing” now. Joined by Shawn Reynaldo, creator of the popular First Floor newsletter and author of a recent book of essays on the evolving nature of electronic music culture and the industry that surrounds it, Emilie and Andrea return to their music-writing roots to explore why going out feels weirdly different than it did in the before times — and the strange and subtle ways that our offline experience of electronic music is being shaped by the ways we discover and consume it on the internet. We discuss how platforms like Instagram and Boiler Room are reshaping what club culture looks and sounds like, the rise of the DJ-as-influencer, and why the decline of the so-called “musical gatekeeper” might have actually been a bad thing for music. Finally, we try to parse the legacy of Red Bull Music Academy, the long-running electronic music incubator and publication that cemented the energy drink company as a weirdly generous patron of the arts, and also happens to be where Emilie and Shawn first met. 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

If you grew up reading publications like The Village Voice and LA Weekly, you probably remember flipping through pages and pages of edgy, hyper-local journalism, concert and movie listings, and classified ads of both the romantic and non-romantic variety. But what is the role of the alt weekly in the 21st century, when a lot of these functions have been swallowed up by the internet? And, perhaps most critically, how do these publications make any money? In today's episode, we zoom in on the story of Hell Gate, a subscriber-funded, worker-owned digital news outlet about New York City that is boldly tackling these questions in real time. Launched by a group of five journalists who felt that the city deserved an alt-weekly style publication to fill the void left behind by the Voice, Hell Gate recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, and builds on a growing movement of worker-owned news outlets like Defector Media, Discourse Blog, Racket, and the Colorado Sun. Hell Gate is delightfully, unapologetically, hyper-local. Stories range from meaty topics like policing, labor organizing, and the most recent bizarre utterance from mayor Eric Adams, to we're-all-thinking-it niche fare like the confounding nuances of DMV license plate design, weed bodega aesthetics and why people keep seeing gross viral food recipes during their subway commute. There's even a column devoted to the state of New York's public restrooms. Helping Hell Gate chart its path are writer-editors Adlan Jackson and Katie Way, two talented writers who cut their teeth writing for outlets like The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and VICE and are now leading the publication's arts and culture coverage. They join us to talk about Hell Gate's origin story, how the worker-owned model works, and what it's like to run a daily publication about a city with a population of 8 million with just seven people. We also discuss what happens to arts and music communities when local news organizations disappear; how the role of alternative publications has evolved in the internet era; and how local media helps us touch grass amid the digital dysfunction of city life.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on 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

For most of the so-called “content creators” we know, marketing is a necessary evil. You make the work you want to make, then wait until the last possible moment to figure out how you're going to get people to click on it. But what would it look like if you became super obsessed with the marketing side of the equation and let it become the driving force of the entire creative process? What if you zeroed in on a single distribution platform, spent years studying how it worked, then built an entire creative practice based entirely around the tips and tricks you knew would attract a snowballing number of eyeballs to your work?If you're wondering what the resulting content would look like, well… it might look something like the videos of a 25-year-old YouTuber named Jimmy Donaldson, who recently surpassed the Swedish edgelord PewDiePie to become the biggest YouTuber of all time. Even if you haven't seen his videos, or stumbled across his chocolate brand, you've probably heard his YouTube moniker: MrBeast. As of this writing, he has 171 million subscribers and counting.Donaldson owns an entire neighborhood in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, where he has dozens of employees working around the clock to produce big-budget spectacles with names like “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life” and “I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.” His videos often revolve around random acts of charity — one of his early breakouts involved him walking up to a homeless person and giving him $10,000 — and he has spoken at length about how attention-grabbing headlines and thumbnails are the engine of his success. If you know somebody who works in actual marketing, they'd probably tell you that MrBeast is the future of media. Between the budgets, the audience numbers, and the sheer physical scale of many of these spectacles — not to mention his spin-off channels and a whole sub-economy of reaction videos and YouTube tutorials — the world of MrBeast is so big and bewildering that it takes a special kind of dedication to explain it all. Lucky for you, The New York Times Magazine recently published a delightfully brain-bending story called “How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube” by one of our favorite writers on technology and culture. His name is Max Read, and he's a screenwriter and journalist who has a terrific newsletter on Substack called Read Max. Max began work on the article after a MrBeast video called “1000 Blind People See for the First Time” went “bad viral” on Twitter, sparking questions about the “authenticity” of Donaldson's super-sized brand of altruism (he paid for their glaucoma surgery) and differing generational attitudes towards the mercenary tactics he uses to pull these stunts off. He joins us to discuss what he calls the “unstoppable flywheel of charity, spectacle, and growth” that powered Donaldson's rise, and the dystopian realities of the creator economy that his tactics lay bare. We also dig into what makes MrBeast's relationship with his audience unique (hint: according an academic Max spoke to, it has something to do with a media studies concept called the “audience commodity”), and how even though a lot of millennials can't stand him, there's a little bit of MrBeast in all of us. Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comWith Hollywood actors and writers joining forces on the picket line for the first time in 63 years, “hot labor summer” is officially upon us — and on this week's subscriber-only episode, Emilie and Andrea try to pinpoint the sweltering, revolutionary, distinctly Barbie-pink feeling in the air. We discuss how big labor upheavals in Hollywood are historically connected to big technological sea changes, how the shutdown is already impacting life on the ground in Los Angeles, and some of the unexpected folk heroes (like SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and “there's-a-lot-of-ways-to-lose-your-house” Ron Perlman), who are emerging as the faces of this turbulent time.We also get into what all this heralds for a culture that is stuck in an endless IP loop, as encapsulated in a recent New Yorker piece revealing that in addition to Barbie, there are nearly 60 movies in the pipeline right now based on toys made by Mattel.This is a free preview of a subscriber only episode. To listen to the full thing and support our independent journalism, sign up for a paid subscription at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram.

Hello everyone. We're interrupting our regular programming this week to bring you a taste of something different: On Monday, the journalist Max Tani reported that VICE Media paid its executives out over a million dollars in bonuses in the weeks before filing for bankruptcy — so our friends at Nersey, a new podcast that bears no relation to the VICE music vertical by the same name, convened an emergency pod to talk about it. Emilie joined hosts Trey Smith, Slava P. and boyfriend-of-The-Culture-Journalist Drew Millard to share war stories from their time at VICE and dig into a 139-page “statement of financial affairs” on file with the Southern District of New York, which reveals just how much the company was paying its top brass (among other itemized expenditures) in the months leading up to the Chapter 11 declaration. The Culture Journalist bears no responsibility for anything that's said herein by these guys — though Nersey touches on similar topics to ours, it's much looser in format. But we're sharing their episode on our channels because, well, we think you might enjoy the pod. As for TCJ, we'll be back to business as usual starting next week. Subscribe to Nersey hereDonate to a hardship fund started by recent TCJ guest Sara David for VICE workers who were laid off this spring but have yet to receive severance from the company. Read Katie Way's excellent reporting on the story for Hell Gate NYC 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comIn this week's subscriber-only episode, Andrea and Emilie introduce listeners to Emilie's concept of “jobflation,” based on her observation that more and more of the “laptop jobs” on the market now actually seem like three or four jobs rolled into one. In other words, just like with the decreased spending power of the U.S. dollar, it can feel like every task we perform at work is suddenly counting for “less.” We discuss some of the nightmarish role descriptions that have been circulating on job sites of late (want to be an “AI editor” publishing 200-250 articles a week?), the macro factors contributing to this corporate divestment in knowledge work, and how jobflation and related phenomena like “ghost jobs” and “quiet hiring” are creating a perfect storm of disfunction for workers and employment-seekers alike.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram.

Hi gang. You ever notice how every generation, in every big city, seems to have a moment when the scene that defined them — the music venues, artists' lofts, dive bars, and misfit inhabitants that collectively forged a cultural zeitgeist — is declared dead? Think: The closure of CBGB in Manhattan, the arrival of Erewhon in Silver Lake, the memeification of Berghain in Berlin. The phenomenon raises some interesting questions: Which came first, the predatory hand of late capitalism, or the generation aging into acquiescence? Are these collapses inevitable, and if so, are they truly as dire as people say they are?So today, we're talking about scenes — how they start, the conditions that make them possible, and why, to the chagrin of so many successive generations of musicians and music fans, they inevitably all come to an end. Our guest, Jesse Rifkin, actually studies this stuff for a living: He's the founder of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, a company that gives walking tours chronicling how different New York City neighborhoods — and factors like cheap rent, geographical proximity, and changing residential and nightlife laws — gave rise to era-defining music scenes like punk, post-punk, hip-hop, disco, and ‘90s and ‘00s indie rock. Of course, he also explores how those scenes helped fuel the process of gentrification that would eventually lead to their own undoing — and what arises, or doesn't arise, in their aftermath.His new book, This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City (out July 11 via HarperCollins) examines how that story played out in Downtown Manhattan and North Brooklyn over a 60-year period where we see this process play out over and over again. It starts with the 1960s West Village folk scene (à la Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte Marie playing at packed coffee houses in an area of the city that is now pretty much synonymous with NYU and expensive gyms). And it ends with the 2010s Williamsburg Brooklyn scene, where our millennial-aged listeners remember frequenting venues like Death by Audio and 285 Kent. (Emilie sure does — it was her life for a while.) In his work as an NYC music historian, Jesse noticed a pattern: New Yorkers are always complaining that the city is “over,” and if you ask them when it “ended,” they usually say that happened around the time they hit 35 or 37, precisely at the moment when most of us get a bit tired of going out to parties every night. The book, he says, is an attempt to reframe our understanding of scenes as bygone golden ages made possible by once-in-a-generation artistic geniuses. He wants us to understand that scenes are a product of the specific historical and geographical circumstances in which they arise — and, even more importantly, that of ordinary people figuring out how to tap into the unique opportunities those circumstances afford. He joins us to discuss the geographical history of downtown NYC music, how the internet has transformed how scenes form and broadcast themselves to the world, and what the new downtown scene, centered around a couple blocks in Chinatown, tells us about the moment in New York history — and perhaps culture at large — that we're living through now.  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

Hey friends. Have you ever fantasized about smashing your phone or throwing your computer into the sea? If so, you're in good company, because today's episode is all about the story of the Luddites, an underground network of early 19th century machinists and textile workers in England who took up arms against industrialists looking to automate them out of a job. They did this, quite literally, by smashing the machines that threatened to put downward pressure on their wages and flood the market with poorly made imitations of the goods they were producing. Sound familiar?  Their real story — and the story of how the word “Luddite” came to connote being “bad at technology,” which is the opposite of what these people were — is the subject of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech, an engrossing and exhaustively researched new book by Los Angeles Times technology columnist and Terraform co-founder Brian Merchant. It isn't due out until September, but given all the chatter that's been happening around tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT, we didn't want to wait to have him on.Brian joins us to discuss how the Luddites were actually an early iteration of the labor movement — not anti-tech, but anti-exploitation — the eerie similarities between the systems of automation these workers were up against and AI, and what a 2023 version of the Luddite movement might look like. Hint: It's already happening, and it has nothing to do with smashing out phones, though you do you.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comThis week, in response to a question from a listener, Emilie and Andrea wax philosophical about one of the most harrowing aspects of trying to make a living as a writer in today's gnarly media economy: pitching! We discuss how this particular system for commissioning stories ended up becoming so ubiquitous in journalism (hint: it's financially beneficial for media companies), why it so excruciatingly difficult to do well, and the larger structural forces that explain why editors can seem like the shallowest and most fickle people on earth. Along the way, we draw from our experiences on both sides of the pitching game to offer practical pointers for navigating the 2023 commissioning landscape and the looming threat of robots coming to replace us all.This is a free preview of this episode. You can hear the full thing and support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Note: If you are a media worker who has lost work or been laid off, reply to this email and we will send you this episode for free.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram.

Since May 2, the Writers Guild of America has been on strike, shutting down film sets across the country and demanding a fair shake in the face of a changing Hollywood landscape that, if we're being honest, looks a lot like the one that we're dealing with over here in the media industry. Hint: It has a lot to do with the ways that some of the world's biggest tech companies — including Netflix, Apple TV, and Amazon — have transformed what it looks like to make a living as a film or tv writer. With issues like shrinking residuals — or payments writers receive when their work is re-aired  — increased job insecurity, and the looming threat of automation and AI, it's a story that brings together many of the issues we touch on this show. So we brought on two key players from the front lines to give us a candid peek into what life as a screenwriter in 2023 actually looks like: Mason Flink, a TV writer and WGA Guild Captain based in LA who has worked on shows like Minx, Special, and Love, and Sara David, a former colleague of ours from VICE who has worked at Netflix and Paramount+, and who is now the VP of online Media for the WGA East. Mason and Sara tell us about how Hollywood labor conditions directly impact the quality of the film and television we consume (and who gets to produce it), the long history of deregulation and financialization that set the stage for this moment, and why this fight has big consequences for creative workers of all stripes — not just in the writers' room.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on 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

Spring is here and the outside world is beckoning. So we're taking a break from talking about evil billionaires, digital surveillance, and shadowy financial instruments to bring you a special conversation with boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, who just published a book called How Golf Can Save Your Life.If that sounds pretty far afield from our usual programming, it's not: Inspired by his experiences returning to the sport after a stint in 2010s media left him with a nasty case of depression and burnout, it's a book-length celebration of the idea that the best way to resist the worst aspects of modern society is to get to get off the internet, spend time more outdoors, and learn how to be a better human, not just when it comes to other people but also to yourself.Emilie and Drew just got back from a golf-themed book release party they organized last week in Brooklyn, so we thought we'd bring Drew on to talk about why it seems like golf is suddenly everywhere in contemporary culture, from NYC menswear to DJ Khaled's IG; the sport's working-class origins; and how the book doubles as a critique of the state of digital and algorithmic media.Buy How Golf Can Save Your Life from Bookshop.org.Check out Drew's work on SubstackSubscribe to Nersey, a podcast Drew just started with some former coworkers (ahem) from a certain defunct music website (ahem). They say it's “sort of about music.” 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comNote: If you are a media worker who has lost work or been laid off, reply to this email and we will send you this episode for free.Between the layoffs at Buzzfeed and Insider, VICE reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy, and Elon's multi-front war against public media and independent journalists, the past two weeks have definitely felt like a “sky …

How did tech giants like Spotify and Meta and TikTok get so good at separating us creative workers from the value we generate with our work? According to a fascinating new book by Melbourne Law school professor Rebecca Giblin and journalist, science-fiction author, and activist Cory Doctorow, the answer lies in something called “chokepoint capitalism”: the phenomenon whereby platforms insert themselves between cultural producers and consumers and charge creators money — either explicitly or implicitly — to reach their own fans.In other words, if you're a creator, all your fans are on a platform, you can't leave without losing access to your audiences, their wallets, and critical gates for exposure; most of the time, that means you just have to take the raw deal you're being handed, ethics or the ability for you to eke out a living from your work be damned.Cory, who also wrote a fascinating article earlier this year about the “enshittification” of TikTok, is one of our favorite critics of the contemporary internet. We invited him onto the show to discuss how chokepoints became so acute in the creative industries (hint: it's something that fusty legacy institutions like the major labels, radio companies, and Hollywood talent agencies have also been doing for years), and how companies leverage factors like network effects, switching costs, weak anti-trust enforcement, and even copyright law itself to rig creative labor markets in their favor.While these platforms feel impossible to leave, there's still something we can do about it. Cory also tells us about some of the tactics creative workers can use to dismantle these chokeholds and get paid, and where the current tech downturn (and Silicon Valley Bank) fits in with all this. if there's such a thing as a quintessential Culture Journalist conversation, we think this episode is it.Purchase Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them BackSupport our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comIn the hours before Silicon Valley Bank imploded last week, setting off a chain of events that would send the entire tech (and finance) world into an existential tailspin, Andrea and Emilie made the somewhat excruciating decision to watch Spotify's annual business presentation, “Stream On” — all hour and a half of it. Between the company's new, Tiktok-inspired interface, its Black Mirror-esque personal AI DJ tool, and the expansion of its Discovery Mode program offering artists more exposure in exchange for a lower royalty rate, the event offered plenty of food for thought about the state of cultural curation — and musical gatekeeping — in 2023.Should we believe tech companies when they say they are democratizing cultural creation and distribution — or is all that utopian language just a smoke screen for the ways they are slowly rendering human curators (like DJs, record store clerks, A&Rs, and music critics) obsolete? How did the figure of the musical “gatekeeper” get such a bad rap in the first place? And is it time, as musician Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi) suggests in an excellent new essay for Dada Drummer, for us to consider them in a new light?