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New Models

Aggregating a scene from outside the stacks

Broadcasting 200+ episodes Members only

Essence

A podcast-and-community platform theorizing internet culture in real time — a native institution of the post-social-media condition.

Caroline Busta · Lil Internet · Daniel Keller

01 Motifs

  • The podcast-and-community as native institution
  • Theorizing internet culture in real time
  • The post-social-media condition
  • The token-gated channel as membership

02 Memetic forces

  • Naming and framing internet culture as it happens gave listeners a sense-making community amid overload.
  • A token-gated channel created belonging and skin-in-the-game.
  • The founders' downtown-art credibility lent authority to the analysis.

03 Mediums

  • The podcast
  • The community channel (Telegram / Discord)
  • The essay
  • The token

The brief

New Models began in 2018 in Berlin as a deliberately anti-algorithmic website: a hand-curated set of links about art, technology, and networked culture, laid out (by Jon Lucas, with a logo by Eric Wrenn) in conscious homage to the stubbornly unglamorous, Web-1.0 aesthetic of the Drudge Report.

Founders Caroline Busta, an art-world editor steeped in Artforum and Texte zur Kunst, and Lil Internet (Julian Wadsworth), an artist and music producer, joined by Daniel Keller, built the project to address what their "About" page calls "the emergent effects of networked technology on life" — not by adding another feed to the social stacks, but by aggregating a "scene" from outside them.

Over several years the project migrated from static portal to a 200-plus-episode subscription podcast, a Patreon/Discord membership community, and short-lived crypto experiments (a channel.xyz "s0" token), becoming a recognizable node for theorizing the shift from visible, platform-legible counterculture to what Busta called the internet's "dark forest."

Close detail of Otto Piene's kinetic light sculpture "Silberne Frequenz" — a dense silver grid of perforated metal glinting under directed light.
Signal, gridded: detail of the light sculpture “Silberne Frequenz” (Otto Piene, 1970/71, redesign 2012/14), LWL Museum for Art and Culture, Münster, Germany. Photograph Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source on Wikimedia Commons.

Unifying principle

Internet culture needs institutions native to it; a podcast plus a member community can theorize the networked, post-social-media present in real time and organize a scene around that sense-making.

Convergent engines · what pulls it together

  1. The podcast as shared organ.
  2. A token-gated member community (Telegram / Discord).
  3. The founders' art-world and internet credibility.

Divergent engines · what pulls it apart

  1. Dependence on a few founders' voices.
  2. The volatility of internet attention and crypto tooling.
  3. The small scale of a niche theory-scene.

The dark forest

A podcast plus a gated community acting as a native institution for theorizing the internet as it unfolds.

— scenius signature

  • Internal dynamics. A small founder-led media-and-community platform blending podcast, member channels, and essays into a native institution of online culture.
  • Society impact. A prototype of the creator-era intellectual institution — media plus token-gated community — and an influential real-time theorization of post-internet culture.
  • Archetypes. The Invisible College · The Catalog / Index.
Figures Caroline Busta Lil Internet Daniel Keller
Archetypes The Invisible College The Catalog / Index
Mediums the podcast the community channel the essay the token
Coordinates Berlin / online 2018 – present Lab & Studio network

Fate

Living; an emblem of how post-social-media scenes build their own small, member-funded institutions.