New Models

NM Greenroom | VICE Magazine’s Ben Ditto & Kevin Lee Kharas (2026) After the imperial collapse (40 global offices, thousands of employees, bankruptcy), @vice magazine is now run by a lean, London-based team — and it is making one of the best culture publications currently in circulation. @ben_ditto (Vice global editorial director; founder of @ditto_nation ; creative dir. @yaya_labs_ ; founding creative dir. @dazedbeauty ) and @kevinleekharas (Vice editor-in-chief and co-founder of the electronic duo @real_lies_ ) come on New Models to discuss their current “Not The Photo Issue” (feat. Dean Kissick x Adam Curtis, Bertie Brandes, Mat Dryhurst, Günseli Yalcinkaya, Duncan Wilson, and others) and their media philosophy at large.

NM 93 | Daniël de Zeeuw & Sal Hagen on the post-discursive web (2026) We’re joined by media scholars Daniël de Zeeuw & Sal Hagen, who have been closely tracking the weirder end of the internet for over a decade—their research and analysis of 4chan has made them low-key legends within internet studies. As 4chan’s logic is now pervasive across the social web, Daniël and Sal, together with their colleagues at the Amsterdam-based OILab, have been modeling novel ways of thinking about our current communication space that travel well beyond the network media / public sphere template to something far stranger — and more accurate.

NM 92 | Scholar Peli Grietzer updates his 2017 “Theory of a Vibe” (2026) We speak often in the New Model sphere about scanning and sensing rather than reading—communication through vibes. @peligrietzer is a comparative literature PhD (Harvard) who has spent over a decade developing a rigorous theory of what a “vibe” actually is, how we increasingly follow ineffable cues to navigate our world and these, taken together, in fact exist as empirical objects in mathematical space. On this episode, Peli joins NM to talk about his work for a more general audience.

NM Greenroom | Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff on New Theater Hollywood (2026) Back in Berlin to show their new film work “The End of Theater” @isabellabortolozzi gallery, artists @callahead_ & @kuenstlersozialkasse drop by New Models to chat about that film’s primary set: @newtheaterhollywood , the DIY theater they opened on Santa Monica Boulevard after decamping to LA in 2023. We discuss their layered process — creating a space that generates a scene, which produces its own art and dedicated star-system while also serving as source material, location, and cast for all that Max and Calla make in parallel — as a distinctly contemporary protocol for artmaking today. We also talk about the return of theater itself at a time when every physical place now feels like a potential set, whether for a vlog or an ICE raid, and performance online is constant? Does theater hit different in our neo-oral era? Does LA?

NM Reads | Gideon Jacobs, “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” LA Review of Books (2026) @gideon___jacobs returns to NM with his third essay in a trilogy for the @lareviewofbooks that tracks, in real-time, the American Political machine’s delamination from everyday life through runaway story-drive. In “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” Gideon shows US politics both left and right as having become a read-write medium for collective creative expression more than material governance—a kind of kayfabe where ‘democracy’ takes the form of citizens co-creating storyline with their elected officials and everyone in office has an IMDB profile. Carly & Lil Internet intro this ep with a short conversation drawing out themes across this trilogy that feel particularly NM Canon. Audio production by @lilinternet

NM Dispatch | America Diaries - Winter 2026 @lilinternet “I no longer saw the highway, I felt it, viscerally, overwhelmed by the colossal, conquering thrust of capital. The velocity of the vehicles became tangible, massive aggregations of steel, plastic, glass, rubber, precision electronics, combustion engines and gasoline in violently accelerating streams of headlights and taillights...” A psyche-delic meditation by Lil Internet on what it means to live among multiple competing intelligences—and the urgent need to develop new rituals for engaging with them before capital-mind fentafies us all into extinction.

NM Talkcore | Jay Springett on “Slop Machines of Loving Grace” (2025) You’ve heard us reference the work of @thejaymo on nearly every pod this year — so with his new book Slop Machines of Loving Grace near completion, we invited Jay on the show to chat through some of its themes. The book takes 2008 as a breaking point, a moment where the late-20th century financial system imploded and, in its place, society was given a new operating system: one optimized for exocapitalism and shaped by “smartness,” a forceful symbiosis of finance and software. On the ep, we discuss the rise of American “code-spaces” (e.g., apps, platforms, etc) and hyper-fragmented “data subjects” taking the place of the modern “individual.” “What happens,” Lil Internet asks, “when AI agents become not just tools but inhabitants of the world of human culture?

NM 91 | Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung on Jankspace With their latest video essay, Welcome to Jankspace, Babes (2025) now streaming on @dis .art, @felstead.daniel & @jennnital come on the show to speak about what happens to the world and critically, all of us, our bodies, as capitalism lifts off from the human layer. Daniel Felstead leads the MA Fashion Media & Communications program at the London College of Fashion. Jenn Leung, also a lecturer at the University of Arts London, is a researcher and simulation developer. She has recently published papers on UE interfaces for brain organoids and agent behavior simulation in MIT’s Antikythera journal.

NM Greenroom: Olivia Kan-Sperling on “Little Pink Book” (2025) @dianadiagram on her recent work, Little Pink Book: A Bad Bad Novel (@archwayeditions 2025). “It’s like girl, China, sex, postmodernism, conceptual romance—a book that sells itself to you over and over and over again as you read it,” she remarks. Published in parallel English/Chinese, the novel was originally written to accompany a piece by Diane Severin Nguyen show at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. It now circulates as a kind of Reena Spaulings (the novel) for the Exocapitalism era, testing the limits of what fiction now is and what content could be. Based in NYC, Olivia is the author of the Kendall Jenner x Lil Peep fanfic, Island Time (Expat Press, 2022) as well as an associate editor and regular contributor to The Paris Review. Her words have also appeared and been channeled through outlets such as Heavy Traffic, Viscose, Kaleidoscope, n+1, and Montez Press Radio, among others.

Unlocked 📹 | Exocapitalism launch w/ Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo @ Trust Berlin [6 Oct 2025] now streaming on YouTube @/NewModelsTV In Partnership With @becoming.press @trust.support @dis.integrator

𝗡𝗠 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 | 𝗞𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗻 𝗠𝘂𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 (𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱) Are we entering a neo-oral age? For centuries, linear, text-based media has organized human communication, creating a shared reality, a shared sense of linear time. But as political Scientist KEVIN MUNGER discusses on this ep of NM Talkcore, that ontological structure is rapidly coming undone. Photo: Stafford Beer, 1975 Keywords: accelerationism, Actionists (Viennese), anti-memetics, apparatus, artificial intelligence, bios level, cartesian dualism, chatbots, Communicology, content level, cybernetics, cyberspace, CyberSyn (project), EA (effective altruism), externalities, fanficification, feedback loop, 4chan, game theory, generation gap, large language models (LLMs), Less Wrong, linear media, management cybernetics, media apparatus, media theory, memes, mimetic, mnemonic, mukbang, ontological stability, oral society/orality, platonism, prehension, process philosophy, protocol level, rationalism, recommendation algorithm, recursion, renaissance paintings, secondary orality, singularity, social media, spiral/spiraling, sycophancy, Taylorist management, textual society, video games, whirlpool, World War III (information warfare)

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