chapter
Caroline Busta
4 July 2024, 3:30 PM
Introductions
00:00 I’m Caroline Busta. I have been working in some form of publishing since the 90s. My dream was to work in magazines and I interned at Condé Nast in the 90s. I then worked as an editor at Artforum for six years and then I worked as the editor-in-chief of Texte Zur Kunst in Berlin for three years. That was during this pivotal 20 teens time when the nature of media really fundamentally changed.
Media is always in motion or always in different forms. There was something that was just really irreversible that happened during the 2010s where physical objectsit seemed like the print magazine alone was no longer a viable container for circulating information.
I realized I was more interested in thinking about that question. I left the magazine and I started something with my partner Little Internet called New Models. We thought of it as like a signal-to-noise reducer machine. Can we just make the signal better and the noise less? What would that kind of container look like on a shoestring budget?
That then begot a podcast, which begot a community, a discord community, which happened during COVID times. That community was incredibly generative, and that was a real teaching moment for us where we learned that one doesn’t produce a magazine, they produce an audience. This idea was shared by Busta and Lil Internet in the Dark Forest Collective Anthology, and the quote came up several times during the interviews as a way to envision the current role of the editor in the context of community creation. That’s really how we started thinking about it. From there, we’ve continued to think about how media is changing. Now we’re starting to deal with these questions of AI and what large language models mean for media.
Recently, we had the theorist artist, Kay Alato McDowell on the podcast who thinks about neural media as broadcast media. Then you have network media, then you have neural media as like the way media works in the time of AI and machine learning, generative cybernetic systems. That’s where our head is right now. It’s a bit in AI, but we’re not AI experts at all. We’re thinking about it through media.
Why: Politics of Publishing
02:01 What are some references or missions in your work, in your practice, in publishing? In the context of your article [[references | “The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram”]] and its invite to “betray the platform”, do you see yourself as someone who has betrayed legacy media, legacy publishing? And if so, how, and do you recommend it?
02:22 I wrote that article to try to make sense of something myself. It was around the time of the Black Square protest online, and it was very frustrating to see how real world injustice was being translated to some kind of action online. I realized that there was a disjuncture. I am of the mind that media ultimately is us. We should think about our speech, we should think about communicating in a more effective way.
I definitely felt like I was betraying legacy media when I left Texte Zur Kunst and was gonna make a website that aggregates all of our favorite writing in one place, because the most important thing is to filter. There’s so much information, the idea is to filter. And I think that around 2016, 17, 18, legacy media, linear media, media that is organized in books where there’s an editorial board and there’s contributors, and you go back and forth with your editors to come up with a really clear idea that has been circulated in a careful way.
That whole system became subservient to the flows of network media, of social media. It didn’t matter how brilliant your piece was. Its role in the age of Web 2.0, social media, was to create a circulating pulse, I have Kay Alato McDowell in my head. social media ?I find this taxonomy so useful, that in network media, the role is no longer of delivering information. It's simply to create an energy pulse through the network. So it doesn't really matter what the content of that content is, so long as that content creates an emotional response, something that compels you to push like, or to post in dissent, or to do some other action, to further the content circulation through the network. I feel like all sense of loyalty is kind of off the table at this point.
The only thing that you could be loyal to are like other people. The idea of being loyal to a medium is maybe just absurd. Although it was useful, I think I needed that separation at the time.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
(00:04:42) This touches on the infrastructures of publishing. The workflows that we currently have are influenced so deeply by the distribution or promotion and this frenzy of posting or reposting anger. Can we separate ourselves from that? How do you get messages across in this chaos?
I’m gonna use an example I’m thinking about in real time. I’m obsessed with Lana Del Rey’s Coachella [performance]. It’s the most iconic pop media moment of 2024 so far . She’s riding on the back of a suburban daddy motorcycle. She’s wearing a cheerleading kind of outfit. That is an absolutely incredible image. She knows how to capture attention. She’s been so good at cultivating an audience. Pretty much anything she was going to do, she would have already had an audience that was ready to interpret it, to read meaning into it, to accept it. She’s understood how to tap into a zeitgeist, like a frequency of a certain audience.
In her case, it’s a mass audience. It doesn’t need to be, but she’s learned how to tap into a frequency that because that wiring is there, pretty much anything she sends into the system is going to be valued and her audience is going to build up the world around it. And I think there’s something really contemporary about that way of thinking about the circulation of media. She’s come from a family of great advertising and she must have at least, by that association, learned something about sending an image into the world, but it seems like it’s non-conscious.
On the other side, somebody like Charli XCX is such an emanation of millennial online culture. Her new album, Brat, is doing really well. It’s so great to have a cool female pop star, but there is something that feels forced at this time about the way that she’s doing her album rollout. There’s something that feels sad about it. She’s trying so hard to pull all the tricks, the green cover is really memetic. She’s really trying to prove the point that she’s a pop star, and she’s performing it. And that feels really old and not contemporary to me.
The idea that you can, I guess force meme is the word, the idea that you can architect a rollout to reach an audience, I don’t think that works anymore. communityI think there has to be some kind of vibes level tuning or calibrating with an audience that you first cultivate. And then once you have it there, you know who you're speaking to. If it's decent, if it resonates, it will organically circulate through that network. I think that's just the reality of media circulation today.
Who: Community of Publishing
(00:07:58) Dark Forest space has understood vibe tuning, creating, fostering, understanding and communicating to an audience. This regards the publishing side of things, the leakiness of Dark Forests, and the high concentration of subcultural knowledge happening in those spaces. Not everything is rendered visible, but then when it is, it has a bigger impact, maybe because it’s capillary. We were talking to Yancey about MetaLabel, this idea of co-releasing, co-production, co-writing, but co-releasing seems a bit different, starting with a bit like Dark Forest leakiness in terms of publishing and how this more direct and partially hidden technique might work.
(00:09:06) The Dark Forest was this useful term during COVID because it really felt that way. Everyone really did feel online and there wasn’t as much physical material meeting. The nature of Dark Forest spaces has changed a bit over the past four or five years. Co-releasing similar to collaboration. One thing we’ve learned from fashion is that collaboration is the way that you signal boost. You cloutbomb, you collaborate, and you bring everybody with a social media profile together to signal.
Dark Forest spaces definitely continue to be useful. I wish there was another term besides Dark Forest. I say that as somebody who’s participating in the discourse of Dark Forest, because I just feel like it’s not as dark as it had been before.
The entire internet to me does feel increasingly fragmented. You can essentially at this point have a Dark Forest space on X or on Facebook or especially these kinds of platforms because they’ve been degraded so much. We’ve all become a bit more sober to the idea that things we say can be taken out of context and we can’t be held accountable for a line excerpted from a podcast which sounds bad but in context is not.
We’re a lot more forgiving about that kind of stuff. But whether your Dark Forest space is on Discord or whether it’s just a DM group or whether it is like some weird Facebook group, it is very good for a fast language production and coming up with a set of terms.
That language production within a Dark Forest, the kinds of things you search, is going to manifest for you as a certain kind of search world and object world. Whether it is the key terms that you’re putting into Amazon or whether it’s the way you’re searching for an article or the names that you have in the back of your head. That is going to render or bring forward a certain kind of world for you in the digital space that’s different from the person next door who has a different set of key terms that they’re using.
[[printed objects | I’m still a believer of physical, printed objects and when I visited, I appreciated Aksioma. I loved going to this gallery and then being able to buy a book and feel like I could walk away with something which was still going to be there in 50 years, if I don’t pour water on it or lose it in a box. I really appreciate the printed form as a way of our language at a particular moment in time with a particular set of people.]]
With a Dark Forest and Yancey’s MetaLabel, it’s much easier to aggregate funds in order to get those things produced. printed objectsWith print-on-demand you can do a run of two or three hundred and then have an object. That’s how we produce our archive, not by Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever, but by printing moments, de-virtualizing, precipitating moments of thought. I think it's so important.
I don’t think huge runs of these books are important, but I do think Dark Forest communities, if we’re still using that term, should do that regularly, because that’s how you can have memory. [[digital objects | These platforms degrade and devices break. It’s important to have these books.
When it comes to the digital side, just as a layperson who uses a lot of these channels, I do feel like the internet is starting to disintegrate in various ways. I also think that there is a lot of promise in communities, and that could be my mom’s flower club. It doesn’t have to be an Urbit planet, or the idea of making your own splinter net.]]
It is interesting when you think about communities using mainstream platforms in common ways so that they effectively end up creating a digital layer that reflects them, that corresponds to what things they are thinking about, that shares their sensitivities. I don’t know the shape of it, but I feel like, because of the way large language models work and the way the reinforcement learning works, that that’s going to happen.
Discussion
(00:14:30) One of the problems we face here epistemically is we understand that the expanded forms of publishing need somehow to go beyond the dichotomy between the content and the container. We need to find new ways of packaging and distributing and disseminating knowledge. What is the tension you imagine between different forms of container, different forms of content? Is this something that you see as a purely formal, technical, political, or social question?
A container need not just be a physical object. digital objectsTo use the example of New Models, we have this podcast, and people may not listen to it, but it has this wider cloud of language and people that are associated with it, and that gives it context.I know this gets back to Frankfurt School Theory, the human voice, I think, is a very important part. It’s a frequency. I don’t know if container is the right word, but a frequency that definitely helps transmit language or transmit ideas in a more dimensional way. One could think of a container also in terms of all these other forms practically.
There’s of course the classic symposium. I think that what helps even more so than what’s transmitted during the lectures is who ends up showing up and having the informal corridor talk. alternative publishing practicesHow can one rethink the container beyond just the modes that we all know? What are some of the threads that you all are interested in, or I'm curious if there's anything that feels like the hot topic there?
(00:16:49) It can all be resumed out of the category of exiting. What I find interesting about the container and your very nice description of the book, is that the book is designed like that in order to be resilient. We chose this paper, we bound it like that so that it can survive the violence of distribution, dissemination, logistics, careless book source, acute capitalism.
[[printed objects | These books [pointing to Aksioma’s books] are great because I can take them on a train, I can put them in my bag, I can store lots of them on my shelf. This is like the ideal pocket book size. And I think that’s very thoughtful of the reader. Something I absolutely hate in publishing, especially when it comes to culture adjacent theory or art, are these books that are strange sizes. I want to just be able to practically read it. I don’t want design objects. I don’t have a big house. I don’t want to have to have a special bookcase to store it. ]] There’s a place for that, of course. Every artist is entitled to do their monograph however they want it. But this is a very thoughtful container. And on not publishing too much, don’t underestimate the power of just a good book. Choose when to push the print button, whatever that thing people used to put in their signatures, “think before you print”, but do print because sometimes it’s necessary.
(00:18:06) Talking about podcasts and containers, shifting from paper to digital, but then at the same time also trying to go from digital to physical, how would you consider podcasting as a publishing object? Considering when you expand publishing into audio, the editorial process of a book is very different from the editorial process of video or a podcast.
(00:18:41) digital objectsOne thing we really liked about podcasts is that it's like fast theory. I’m still so old school that I really like a well-edited text. And I realize that’s not the case, especially working with so many publications these days. It’s rare to have a real exchange on editing, but I do like well-edited text and podcasts. We also edit a lot. I respect the listeners’ time, although I know that’s not everyone’s style. Some people appreciate the parasocial aspect of just, hitting play and letting that go. For things that are more theoretical, I think it’s really helpful to try to cut something clearer together.
digital objectsPodcasts are maybe two days of editing, whereas putting together an essay and a book is going to be a lot longer for the text production and the editing. People are busy and sometimes, getting the freshest thoughts in circulation, there's a value to that. That's what Twitter before X was so valuable for, is like journalists would just get their idea out so they didn't give it away, get scooped. The pace of the thinking was moving much faster than publishing. So podcasting is somewhere between just posting on social media and publishing a book. It's also obviously way less expensive and logistically way simpler. You just need an RSS and a computer. So that’s a big value. Video is interesting though. Julian and I think a lot about that. We think about just how popular YouTube is and how the way that most people are taking information now is multiple channels at once. And video is an important node in that.
So, especially with theory, I think it’s an interesting medium, but there is the question of how to package it. Giving just like a straight lecture isn’t great. Slides are really helpful. I think it’s combining the meme form with the voice, with the idea. I think it’s pretty effective, but there’s still also the question of how to drive people to it. Why would people be interested to click? So then you have to have some teaser or some context that propels them to click on the video.
[[physical objects | Another form, you probably won’t like this, are also like commercial objects, whether that’s merch or whether that’s different kinds of gimmicky collabs or something. But it does make people think about things in different ways. Above me, there’s this Supreme Bernadette Corporation basketball. It’s obviously a hype object, but it becomes a critical object because of the context of Supreme and Bernadette Corporation and the 90s and New York. And so maybe also objects, there’s a place for them in this. ]]
(00:21:48) Yesterday, we were having a conversation in terms of collectibles, the very traditional fetish of the object and the book. The question is, how do you touch a podcast? How do you put the podcast on your shelf? Is really the difference between a physical book and a podcast in terms of a physical difference?
I started a podcast a few years ago, but decided to go for something slightly different, Twitch. Do you have any experience with live streaming? So, immediate publishing, no editorial process, just something that becomes an event, basically in itself.
(00:22:25) [Joshua Citarella] (http://joshuacitarella.com/), his work really leaned into that, in part because that was the kind of work he was also studying, so he wanted to be one with it. It’s very demanding and takes a certain kind of personality to be able to hold that up over a long duration. I personally don’t think I’m cut out for it. It does limit your demographic to somebody mostly without children who probably has a flexible work schedule, which is a lot of people, but still it limits it. It also was more useful when we were all at home during the lockdown. It was a very particular moment for it.
Another job that Julian and I do on the side is help at a techno label with their social media. We’re always seeing that these live streams, something like Boiler Room, get a ton of people. Even something like that that is just so supposedly parasocial. I don’t think Boiler Room’s struggling, but also because they have the live event. I would say that’s really demographic contingent and for the general person.
digital objects[[community | And who goes back and watches a live stream? I participated in live streams before. I guess there's a little bit of kismet to it. Are people on? Is it hitting at the right moment? What just happened politically at that time? I just keep thinking that all these forms of media are still contingent on the audience. With the rapport with the audiences and how connected they are to the subject matter.]] I personally hate giving video lectures to students. I’d much rather be in the room live. But that’s logistically more complicated and more expensive for everybody.
(00:23:58) The question is very simple and it’s about your business model, this combination of Patreon and different channels. How do you create this kind of ecosystem to make your activity sustainable?** **
[[business models | Channel is super interesting. I still have hope for something in that general structure to work. We sold a bundled subscription to New Models, Joshua Citarella and Interdependence, which is the podcast of Matt Dreyer and Holly Herndon. It was one NFT, and it was an unlimited subscription to the podcast content for this NFT. The NFT was a token that unlocks a private RSS. ]] co-publishingI think there is something really promising in being able to co-publish with other entities, to not be dependent on Patreon or any of these larger platforms. There's been a proliferation of different platforms in the time since we first started thinking about Channel. It need not be dependent on a large platform, but the problem is that they often don't help with discovery. In theory, they could. So if there's some way to reconcile those two things, you have a really interesting podcast publishing model on your hands.
alternative publishing practicesI would love to just be able to subscribe to a channel that would switch out. Maybe Matt and Holly are busy working on a Serpentine show (https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/holly-herndon-mat-dryhurst-the-call/), so they're publishing less and maybe we'd have somebody else who would come into that orbit and then would be able to supply to the same channel. I think there's a lot of potential there. I think Web3 is gnarly and the incentives of it were tuned towards speculative accumulation of value and did not support the social intellectual goals as well as they could have. For our part with Channel, that tool is going to be open-sourced. Hopefully somebody will build with it, or maybe it’s something that we’ll pick up again if we build out some kind of splinternet so that others in our community can also publish to it.
Back to just general support, like how to fund yourself, that is just such a good question. I feel like every year we’re like “how is this still working”, and it somehow is. I don’t have a long-term plan.
I don’t have a really good answer there, other than the older institutions do not seem well calibrated to the conversations that we’re continuing to have, and it’s been that way now for six years or longer.
** **(00:27:34) I find a lot of things in common, for example, somehow we are forced to conduct two different parts in terms of activity. One is more like publishing, editorial things. On the other side, you have this kind of necessity to do consultancies all the time, to negotiate with private companies on one side, or public institutions. I think at the moment it’s the only way to survive. I’m curious to know if the subscription patterns, paywalls, really found your own activity or not. We find a good way to make our publishing activities sustainable, a very traditional way. Selling our books, it’s okay, functional somehow. The traditional book format is in a big crisis, we are looking all the time for new solutions.
(00:28:48) When you see numbers in the tech world of how large AI models are funded, or you think about the way that capital circulates, or just America’s debt, you just start thinking about whether there are simple ways to just match. I’m enough of an optimist that I do believe a lot of people in the tech sphere want to have high-level intellectual conversations about media, about the products they’re building. They want their products to be the best. They know that thinking about this can fortify them.
I’m just not sure how to make those inroads exactly, because there’s so much capital there. What 100K could do, not just one, but a constellation of small publishers, that’s significant. I just wonder how to match that money. Money still, at least in America, it still seems to operate in this very strange way. The traditional circles where we apply for funding, you have to contort your project into this very particular kind of mission. business modelsHow can we better match the money and the thinking, that's always been the negotiation of the art world. How do you find somebody with funding and somebody with ideas and find some kind of Venn diagram space where they need each other? So maybe there's some social engineering to do. Is it a cultural question? For sure it's not technical.
There’s also this bit of a purity question, who you take money from. It’s bad to take money from certain places and that’s kind of true, but also then who ends up winning and who then ends up getting to publish. business modelsI don't think there's some magic formula of like 30% books and 20% live streams and 10% podcasts. And I think it's using all those available resources and also calibrating in a different way to the social, both in terms of the audience and those who may be interested in funding those audiences. We’ve seen kind of a dark pattern in the world of praxis and like Thiel bucks. I don’t know if that’s necessarily repeatable with more savory figures.
What: Future of Publishing
(00:30:43) If you could have a say in the future of publishing, what would you want to see happening? What are some of the urgencies in the present moments that you think should be addressed? What do you think we can abandon if there’s something we can abandon in publishing?
(00:31:12) alternative publishing practicesThe model that comes to mind as the most viable is if we think of fashion and we think of art, we see that those with the most muscle end up being really good aggregators. So if you think of Virgil, or if you think of Kanye, or if you think of Demna, or if you think of Anna Imhoff, or if you think of even someone who's been around for a while, like Olafur Eliasson, or like someone like Trevor Paglen, or you think of these entities that have these studios or have these practices, which then are just very good at tapping lots of different people in their world. And they build their worlds through other experts. It's more horizontal.You still have these names at the top of it, but these artists are usually quite transparent about “this wouldn’t have happened without the help of X, Y, and Z people. Now go listen to their music” Or “go read their books”.
You would have security in the fact that your work would get published. Finding the money for it would be easier. You would have access to really good teams and you’d be really stimulated, a kind of multipolar publishing world operating under the aegis of various cultural producers across the arts, fashion, music spectrum. I don’t want to diminish, though, academic publishing, theory publishing, because I think there’s also a place for that. But just in my own trajectory, I could see that being a not uninteresting place to exist for a little while.
(00:33:32) I think that’s the main model of commercial publishing. Even the very big publishers rely entirely on influencers and celebrities to sell books. And they publish the rest of the books just to fill up the catalog. It’s a caricature obviously, but I’m wondering if you ever personally get feelings of vanity in publishing. Do you ever feel that somehow this is something you need to battle with or you need to accept it?
(00:34:12) I don’t think about it as competition. And so I kind of don’t care. Sometimes there’s vanity stuff which is weird and kind of glad that it exists. The test of time just means it will probably fall away unless there’s such a cult of personality around the person who’s doing it. Why are these magazines, especially when you walk into a bookshop, taking up real estate? There’s so much good stuff out there. Why is this what I’m offered? I think in the digital space, they care less in a physical space or like an art bookshop, a museum bookshop. And you’re like, why did they buy it? Why did they take the bait? Like, why is this there?
(00:34:50) We started the day with Kenny Goldsmith, who decided to totally retreat from the publishing world. He says, what’s the point of publishing another 35th book or something? We see that the older generation start to lose faith or start to imagine a post-publishing future for them. As writers, as researchers, I probably feel sometimes, do we need another paper? Do we need another comic book? Do we need another translated essay? It’s something that is measured always with impact. When you publish something, you expect something to bounce back. It’s not always evident that things are bouncing back. Sometimes you just say something and it doesn’t resonate anywhere.
(00:35:30) communityThe channels are essentially broken. The most frustrating thing is you can have something that's very interesting and it doesn't catch on because people aren't paying attention to it. And people do judge the book by its cover and it's more important than ever because they have no time to open it up. Something I appreciated about Ljubljana is that I don’t speak Slovenian. When I saw books in English, I was like “oh, I’m really going to spend some time and see what’s in every single one of these books”.
communityThe paths of circulation don't function anymore. I'm stating the obvious, but publishing does matter when the community is defined, when that is there and they're expecting it. We’re actually inspired by our trip to Ljubljana and the print culture that does seem to be there. But also in Slovenia, there’s a big print theory culture, which is incredible. We were thinking we’d put together some kind of little handbook of essays by guests or excerpts of guests that we’ve had on the pod, along with an updated glossary and circulate that and just have it be print on demand. And anybody in the community who wants it can have it as a record of the past year or two. It’s also interesting to them as a record. You just need to be really selective about when you push print, but also who you’re pushing print for. It’s probably difficult to have a business model that relies on the regular circulation of a high volume of books, because that’s probably no longer so sustainable.
** (00:36:43) We finished all the interview’s discussion with this question about the future of publishing. If you can give us your take about the future of reading, how reading is changing nowadays and what your feelings are on the evolution of our habits in reading? **
(00:37:03) I guess it depends on what kind of reading. Fiction will remain, because books are a form of entertainment that will remain. People do have Kindle. I don’t know if it’ll be print or digital, but that will remain. And narrative is still important to making sense of our world.
alternative publishing practicesWhen it comes to theory, I'm really of the mind that people scan and sense as opposed to read. So fast theory, I think, will continue to be helpful. Schumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist and their series (The Age of Earthquakes, The Extreme Self), this obviously doesn’t have depth, but it did a very good job at gathering the zeitgeist of that moment. I can imagine this format continuing to be successful for the time being, at least. Perfect pocketbook size, something that you can flip through and get a sense of. You can take away a couple of one-liners.
printed objectsI think there will always also be a place for very good longer form theory. I think the best longer form theory just needs to be in text because that's how we can take in information that's complex and there should still be a place for it. The books that transport themselves through you, they circulate themselves through you. You can very quickly pull out a line and in a conversation, they're kind of currency. That’s the way philosophy has always worked in a certain sense. It’s a kind of currency. It sort of infects you. It’s this idea that infects you. I do think that we’re going to be reading the very quick way. So ways to reduce and refine ideas, as sort of toxic as that sounds, is actually important for people to read deeper. alternative publishing practicesWe should consider making books that are non-linear, that pull out big ideas so that people and their attention can be secured, and they'll be enticed to read deeper.
I’m working on a catalog right now and I keep reinforcing that we should not force the reader to start at page one and end at page 300 because they’re not. There’s going to be five people who will do that and one is going to be the artist’s mother. People are going to pick it up in a museum bookstore. They’re going to scan through it and you need to have a few ideas. If they scan through it and they find two or three things that just work, then they’re going to take it on the train with them and they are going to read deeper.
I think we have to be really respectful of people’s time and be respectful of the fact that people have all these choices of media. printed objects[[digital objects | What way can a book, a print form, best support the way that our brains are being reorganized now, as opposed to trying to battle it? How can we integrate with this kind of vision? Can books be an AR layer to the way that we are experiencing the world? Could you imagine reading while also something else is happening? I know that's probably not the ideal form, but that seems to be the real form. That's what I imagine for the future of reading.]]