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

    6D AGO

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

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

    17 min
  2. NM Reads: Neo-Orality 1 (Jacqueline Fendt)

    12/06/2025

    NM Reads: Neo-Orality 1 (Jacqueline Fendt)

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

    31 min
  3. Unlocked | Exocapitalism, the Book - Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo (NM90) 2025

    10/01/2025

    Unlocked | Exocapitalism, the Book - Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo (NM90) 2025

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

    1h 26m
4.8
out of 5
135 Ratings

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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