New Models

New Models

This is the free/public New Models channel For full episodes, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels | https://newmodels.substack.com Art, tech, media theory, culture ... networked tech's impact on life Hosts: Caroline Busta & Lil Internet https://newmodels.io Follow: @newmodels_io Est. 2018 Berlin ( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ°)ʖ ͡°)

  1. Preview | NM Content Today: Taste (2026)

    16 hr ago

    Preview | NM Content Today: Taste (2026)

    This is a preview | For full audio and show notes plus extras, subscribe via https://patreon.com/newmodels or https://newmodels.substack.com _ When Enlightenment-era scholars taxonomized humankind, they chose homo sapiens, in part because of what they observed as a uniquely human aptitude for “taste.” [“Taste” comes from the Latin taxare (to handle, to assess) – an intensive form of tangere (to touch). It is a term that via vulgar Latin blended with gustare (to taste, to try) to express the act of appraising something by physically handling or even consuming it. In proper Latin, there is the related term sapere, which carries a double meaning of “to taste” and “to be wise.” To taste, in the sense of sapere, is to possess wisdom through tangible experience.] It’s remarkable that in recent years, and intensely in recent months, the idea of “taste”—“having taste,” “deploying taste,” “taste agents,” “integrating a taste layer,” “taste as a core skill,” “taste as moat”—has become an ultra-present concern in tech circles. Isn’t having taste (wherever one falls along the taste spectrum) an inherent quality of being human? To be sure, there’s already a lot of writing on this phenomenon: “Tasteslop” by NEMESIS‘s Emily Segal and “Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed With Taste” by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker being among the best takes. The most confounding, in our opinion being Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham’s “Taste for Makers” (Feb 2002, but highly cited this year). There is also “Against Taste,” by Will Manidis, which makes some good points (patrons used to fund art for a higher power or at least public display whereas contemporary collectors tend to buy art for their own private use) but in its theory-of-everything aspiration, feels LLM-ish and contextually ahistorical. So in pure “Content Today” form, we are adding to the pile-on with our own fashionably late, probably factually botched but definitely human, free-associative conversation about taste.

    17 min
  2. Unlocked | NM Reads: Gideon Jacobs, "MAGA as Fan Fiction," LA Review of Books (2026)

    20 Feb

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

    This is an unlocked episode of New Models (originally released 01/31/2026) — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels newmodels.substack.com -- Gideon Jacobs returns to NM with his third essay in a trilogy for the LA Review of Books that tracks, in real-time, the American Political machine’s delamination from everyday life through runaway story-drive. In “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” Gideon shows US politics both left and right as having become a read-write medium for collective creative expression more than material governance—a kind of kayfabe where ‘democracy’ takes the form of citizens co-creating storyline with their elected officials and everyone in office has an IMDB profile. Carly & Lil Internet intro this ep with a short conversation drawing out themes across this trilogy that feel particularly NM Canon. “Of course, long before any advanced communication technologies, humans had been drawn not just to stories but also to the possibility of living as characters within them. Story’s appeal had always been precisely that it’s not like reality. […] a dream of existing free from the pesky flaws intrinsic to reality: uncontrollability, unpredictability, vulnerability, mundanity, complexity, incoherence, confusion, pain.” Audio production: Lil Internet For more:
gideon.works/ Gideon Jacobs, “MAGA as Fan Fiction,” (Jan 2026)
lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-e…l-maga-reality/ Gideon Jacobs, “Player One and Main Character,” (Apr 2025)
lareviewofbooks.org/article/player-…main-character/ Gideon Jacobs, “Trump l’Oeil,” (Nov 2024) lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-loeil/

    53 min

About

This is the free/public New Models channel For full episodes, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels | https://newmodels.substack.com Art, tech, media theory, culture ... networked tech's impact on life Hosts: Caroline Busta & Lil Internet https://newmodels.io Follow: @newmodels_io Est. 2018 Berlin ( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ°)ʖ ͡°)

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