Miguel Prado and fellow Guild navigator (and co-host for today’s episode) Sonia de Jager meet Diana Walsh Pasulka: professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. We discuss what do we mean by agnostic when we want to be challenged by new knowledge, the UFO phenomena as a new form of religion, recent Congress’ public hearing into “unidentified aerial phenomena”, how ancient aliens could have handed technology to humanity and much more!

Angela Nagle discusses Millennial values, Silicon Valley ideology, NGOs and moral fanaticism.

Astroturfs of Offense is a diagram and glossary of terms related to the topic of astroturfing. The project is a collaboration between the New Models community and Shifting Uncertain Situations (S.U.S.). S.U.S. is an agency that seeks out public discussions and intervenes to produce documents that sow productive suspicion and ambiguity into wider conversations and unsettle ingrained patterns of thought. The agency encourages protesters to download and distribute their flyer at grassroots and astroturfed events. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

I recently spoke with one of my longtime favorite accounts: @The_Political_Compass. We chat about her background, the evolution of radical online subcultures and the ever-expanding Overton window.

Dorian visits the stream to investigate gay frogs.

Choose Your Future, 2021, is part of KW Digital: Open Secret, 16 July – 31 December. In 2021, I commissioned a group of artists and memers to write short wiki-style descriptions of fantastical future scenarios. Writers were instructed to copy/paste existing wikipedia entries and “play mad libs” with the nouns and dates. Drawing on movements from the past, these short stories recombine political history to anticipate long tail ideologies and factions that may soon emerge. Choose Your Future takes the hyperbolic imaginings of young people, raised on the internet, and puts their words directly into the mouths of content creators. In this ...

What do Agent Katsudon, Agent Yeni Raki, The Countess Vodcula, The Albatross, The Sicilian, The Chef de Cuisine, Mr. Bernard, Agent Bobcat, The Buddha and the “WAH” have in common? They all belong to a mysterious fraternity of darkly bespectacled agents and clandestine radio/signal operators who navigate a maze of shifting loyalties and alliances while risking their lives in sensational car chases. They send encrypted messages into the foggy ether of the night sky and then have a savory snack baked in a concealed kitchen, embedded with a piece of micro-film alluding to future covert affairs. Allies could potentially be enemies. ...

The (political) power of memes has moved beyond virtual images. The distinction between the virtual and ‘real life’ no longer applies, or perhaps was never really there. Their effects (or should we say affects?) are moving through digital infrastructures, policy, regulations and bodies. If memes are used as a tool by the alt-right to mobilize people to storm the Capitol and play a substantial role in the Ukrainian war, can they also be used by the left to spark a revolution, as memetic warfare is more immediate and accessible than real-life demonstrations? What kind of labor would that require? What ...

Memes are bastards, and we love them for it. But memes are bastards in the sense that they are born from two seemingly incompatible ontological registers: an unholy matrimony of semiosis and virality, sense and nonsense, signification and circulation. More on that later. First, let’s acknowledge that the meme is also an infantile and laughable term, as are all words that repeat themselves. Yet—encountering its own stupidity, and making this into its generative principle—it is not ashamed; like any self-respecting idiot savant, it never ceases to persist in its own convoluted wisdoms. ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and ...

What exists beyond America’s blue-checkmark core? Journalist JAMES POGUE (Harper’s, New Yorker, American Conservative, plus author of the 2022 Vanity Fair chartbuster “Inside the New Right: Where Peter Thiel is Placing His Biggest Bets,” as well as his 2018 book, Chosen Country) joins NM just before the 2022 midterm elections to sketch out the emergent USA he sees. Along the way, we talk localism v. globalism vis-a-vis 18th-century politics, 20th-century media, and the likelihood of 21st-century American civil war.

Dean Kissick is the New York editor for Spike Art Magazine.

Beyond performative resistance and melancholic complicity with the existing order, a crucial strategy emerged in the 1980s from a collective of artists in Yugoslavia who used complicity as its most lethal weapon. Inke Arns and Slavoj Žižek have respectively described the activities of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and its sub-groupings (the band Laibach and the artist collective IRWIN, and Scipion Našice Sisters Theatre, among others) variously in terms of over-identification or subversive affirmation, as performing the “hidden reverse” of state ideology. From Laibach’s nationalism in drag to the issuing of a passport for an imagined “NSK state,” NSK is perhaps ...