New Models

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Gideon Jacobs joins NM to discuss his latest piece for the LA Review of Books, “Player One and Main Character,” which explores the logic of power in a time when some of its key agents are no longer operating in base reality. Related: Lil Internet’s “Hallucinator’s Dice” (unlocked) https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/hallucinators-dice See also: "Player One and Main Character" (LARB, Apr 2025) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/player-one-and-main-character/ “Trump l’Oeil,” (LARB, Nov 2024) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-loeil/ NM Talkcore w/ Gideon Jacobs on Trump as Image (Nov 2024) https://on.soundcloud.com/kC8NzddUcGynZyZj6 Episode image adapted from photo by Daniel Arnold for Document Journal of Gideon Jacobs as the character Father Bartholomew Mary, 2025.

Unlocked (first released to subscribers 17 March 2025) --> https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com https://newmodels.io Lil Internet purges his Musk Derangement Syndrome one last time in a monologue that could have been titled “Ket, Lies, and Video Games”—until a decades-long shift in base reality is revealed by dice in a Hong Kong bar. - [Excerpt from monologue]: “A very brief review of what everyone knows but might not think about all at once: Elon Musk bought Twitter, the most influential social media platform in the world, and promised to make it ”politically neutral.” He then renamed it X, which, in mathematics and logic stands for any arbitrary thing you want, and turned the entire platform towards boosting far right parties across the globe. He controls what does and doesn’t appear on your feed, what does or doesn’t get fact checked, and bans users on a whim. He owns Starlink, a satellite ISP that allows him to monitor traffic or sever a home’s entire internet connection at any time. He owns SpaceX, which is building a classified satellite network called Starshield for the National Reconnaissance Office of the US Military that will allow 24/7, real-time images and AI-powered intelligence gathering across the entire surface of the planet. He owns xAI, which is building the world’s most powerful supercomputer to achieve AGI and have it run the US government. He owns Tesla, which sells cars that he can control, shut down, or render permanently inoperable via satellite, and builds humanoid robots explicitly for replacing human jobs. And then there’s Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company that is literally implanting thought-reading microchips in people’s brains. This is all basic public knowledge, and yet people who swore Bill Gates was putting 5G microchips in the vaccines seem to be totally fine with an even richer guy controlling their social media, internet access, and car while building robots to replace their jobs, putting every square inch of Earth under 24/7 surveillance, and implanting microchips in people’s brains. Elon Musk has openly, transparently, turned every conspiracy theory trope into a business he directly owns. He is openly, transparently, every dystopian fear embodied within a single man. Yet the paranoid and the conspiratorial are most likely to support him. Why? I think it’s because transparency has replaced truth and trust in society, and with Elon transparently the most dangerous man to ever exist, truth and trust have become irrelevant.”

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe | https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com - Writer and Nymphet Alumni co-host Biz Sherbert joins NM following the launch of her newsletter, American Style. Its premise is simple — travel around the country and talk to people about what they are wearing and why. On the show, we chat with Biz about the transmission of style today, particularly in the USA, and whether personal aesthetic transformations may be a stand-in for pursuing the erstwhile American Dream. For more: https://instagram.com/bizsherbert https://bizsherbert.substack.com/about Nymphet Alumni Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/65CYBeAlLNevYAdW0YgyD1 See also: “What Does Beauty Look Like in the Age of Trump?” AnOther (Feb 2025) https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/16218/what-does-beauty-look-like-in-the-trump-era-anna-claire-howland-addison-rae “On the Fashion Philosophy of the Crypto Bro,” Zora (June 2023) https://zine.zora.co/biz-sherbert-crypto-style Biz Sherbert x Emma Chamberlain, The Face (Sept 2024) https://theface.com/culture/emma-chamberlain-style-voice-of-a-generation-young-people-social-media-famous Nicole Kidman shot by Petra Collins for Time Woman of the Year, 2025 https://time.com/7216403/nicole-kidman-interview/

First published in Heavy Traffic V (Fall 2024), Mark Leckey's kaleidoscopic, transhistorical sojourn into the Eikonomachia (the 'image struggle') is presented here in radio play form w/ sound design and production also by Leckey. This reading is part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features pieces from the magazine read aloud by their authors. Heavy Traffic V of is out now. https://heavytrafficmagazine.com See also:  📹 "Enter Through Medieval Wounds" video version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyi-ZRJj7mI 🔉NM Greenroom | Mark Leckey (2025) https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/preview-nm-greenroom-mark-leckey-2025? 🔉NM75 | w/ Heavy Traffic editor/publisher Patrick McGraw https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/mcgraw-heavytraffic-nm75/s-VB0sQZYweL0 🖼️ 3 Songs from the Liver,” Gladstone Gallery, NYC (2024-25) https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/13694/3-songs-from-the-liver/installation-views

Unlocked (first released to subscribers 19 March 2024) --> https://newmodels.io _ How does media actually work in 2024, which is to say in a time of omnipresent AI? And what kind of subject is this era of media producing? On this ep, we speak with K Allado-McDowell—the author, with GPT-3, of Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint, and founder of the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI—about how media is evolving. Specifically, we ask about rise of “neural media,” which K has theorized as developing out of network media in the mid-2010s amid increasing human-AI interaction. Hearing K describe neural media's mechanics, it seems inevitable that our ideas of individuality and identity formation, even what it means to communicate as a human (among other living beings) are about to be majorly recalibrated. For more: @kalladomcdowell (IG & X) “Designing Neural Media” (2023), Gropius Bau Journal https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropius-bau/programm/journal/2023/k-allado-mcdowell-designing-neural-media "Am I slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth" (2025), The Long Now https://longnow.org/ideas/identity-neural-media-ai/