chapter
Caroline Busta
4 July 2024, 3:30 PM
Introductions
00:00 Hi, I’m Caroline Busta. My whole life, I’ve been really interested in how media works and have been writing for and working in and around magazines since I was a teenager. This has included interning at Condé Nast in the 1990s, serving as an editor at Artforum from 2008 to 2014, and then as the editor-in-chief of Texte zur Kunst in Berlin from 2014 to 2017.
Media is always in motion, evolving in tandem with technology and human desire, but the past two and a half decades have been a particularly turbulent period to experience and physical objectsby the mid-2010s it was fully evident that the print magazine was no longer a viable container for circulating new information—archiving it, yes; but not its primary circulation.
I came to grips with this change while working at Texte zur Kunst. Amid the 2016 Trump election and Brexit and the rise of Germany’s AfD, I had been finding it increasingly difficult to focus on new art without first addressing how our media was so fundamentally becoming something else. Eventually the question of “what was happening to media?” superseded, for me, any critical inquiries into art. So at the end of 2017, I quit my job and started the media channel New Models together with Lil Internet (aka Julian), who had been working in the music industry where a parallel collapse of twentieth-century cultural forms was transpiring.
The initial idea for New Models was as a signal-to-noise optimizer—a website that would offer a cohesive cultural enclave by selectively aggregating and contextualizing material from the increasingly chaotic online media sphere. This led us to start a podcast, which attracted a subscriber community that encouraged us to start a Discord server, and then COVID hit. Media had changed tremendously, yet one old adage had never been truer: editors do not make magazines, they produce audiences. So rather than ask ‘what’s the best content?’ our question very quickly became ‘how can we create the best audience?’
Lately, we’ve been interested in how AI-enabled systems are changing media. According to theorist referencesK Allado-McDowell’s taxonomy we’re now in an era of “neural media”. Their essay, “Neural Interpellation” in Gropius Bau Journal is incredible and should be required reading for anyone thinking about this subject matter.
Why: Politics of Publishing
02:01 What are some references or missions in your work, in your practice, in publishing? In the context of referencesyour article “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 that I personally wanted to better understand. It was around the time of people posting black squares online in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. I found it very frustrating to see how real world injustice was being translated into a posting protocol that was at once ravaging peer groups while sending platform engagement into overdrive, and thereby pumping platform profits. There was a clear disjuncture in what posting black squares was purportedly achieving and how it was actually operating yet it felt impossible to have a public conversation about this.
traditional publishing practicesExiting magazine publishing did feel like some kind of betrayal, a giving up on a media format that has been massively important to organizing our society since the rise of the modern era. But by 2017 it was so obvious that anything published via a linear-media pathway would be subservient to the ‘physics’ of network media. If the function of linear, broadcast media is to transmit information from ‘expert’ to audience, network media circulates any information whatsoever capable of eliciting an emotional response. No matter how brilliant or pivotal a piece of content is, its use-value in network media will be foremost as a kind of fuel.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
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?
05:06 You can’t escape network media. But you can play into or against its properties. Speaking in early July, I’ll use the example of Lana Del Rey’s recent Coachella entrance, which has been one of the most iconic pop images of 2024. A motorcade of suburban leather daddies riding retro-classic (but actually EV) motorcycles carrying Lana, in a glittering cheerleader look, hair blowing in the wind, through the crowd to the stage. More than performing songs, Lana performed an image – communityan image that we can imagine her fanbase (myself included) collectively, subconsciously desiring. One could picture Lana’s fans generating a scene like that using Stable Diffusion or another text-to-image model but here she was actualizing it in real space and time so that her fans could record (rather than prompt) it. And having personal proximity to a spectacular event today is akin to witnessing a religious apparition. Lana created circumstances, raw material, in and with which her fans could make original content, content that when posted would ignite their various networks. There is something distinctly contemporary about this way of thinking about the circulation of media. I don’t typically consider an individual’s family history but it’s probably significant that in the 1970s and 80s both of Lana’s parents worked for Grey Advertising, which produced some of the most memorable mass market taglines of the late 20th century. Lana’s intuition about how to craft and transmit an effective image, how to worldbuild through image and affect, is exceptional.
Who: Community of Publishing
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 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 Dark Forest leakiness in terms of publishing and how this more direct and partially hidden technique might work.
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 is similar to collaboration, which we’ve learned from fashion is about 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. At this point you can essentially have a Dark Forest space on X or Facebook, 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 shouldn’t be held accountable for a line excerpted from a podcast.
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 fast language production and coming up with a set of terms.
That language production within a Dark Forest, the kinds of things you search, will 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 objectsI’m still a believer in physical, printed objects and when I visited, I appreciated Aksioma. I loved going to this gallery and 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 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 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 objectsThese platforms degrade and devices brick. 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 through an Urbit planet or something to avidly use these spaces or to create collective protocols to use these spaces. It’s the idea of making your own splinternet.
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’s going to happen.
Discussion
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, distributing, and disseminating knowledge. What is the tension you imagine between different forms of containers and 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 helps transmit language or transmit ideas more dimensionally. One could think of a container also in terms of all these other forms, practically.
There’s of course the classic symposium. 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 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?
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 and bound it like that so that it can survive the violence of distribution, dissemination, logistics, careless book sources, and acute capitalism.
printed objectsThese 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 pocketbook 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 be able to practically read it. I don’t want a design object. I don’t have a big house. I don’t want to have to need 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. 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, like that phrase people used to put in their signatures, something along the lines of “think before you print”, but do print because sometimes it’s necessary.
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 a video or a podcast.
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 like a well-edited text. And I realize that doesn’t always happen anymore, 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 the podcast 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. But for more theoretical things, I think it’s helpful to try to cut something clearer together.
digital objectsPodcasts are around two days of editing, whereas putting together an essay and a book is takes a lot longer in terms of 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 thinking was moving much faster than publishing. So podcasting is somewhere between simply posting on social media and publishing a book. It’s also obviously way less expensive and logistically way simpler. All you need is 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 the popularity of YouTube and the way that most people are consuming information now is through 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 objectsAnother form, you probably won’t like this, are commercial objects, whether that’s merch or 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, the 90s, and New York. And so maybe there’s also a place for objects 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? What is 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.
22:25 Joshua Citarella’s 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 an extended period of time. I personally don’t think I’m cut out for it. It does limit your demographic to somebody, mostly without children, who probably have 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, gets a lot of engagement. Even something like that, which is supposedly parasocial. I don’t think Boiler Room’s struggling, but that’s also because they have the live event. I would say it’s demographic-contingent and for the general person.
communityAnd 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 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 really dislike 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.
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?
Channel is super interesting. business modelsI still have hope for something in that general structure to work. We sold a bundled subscription to New Models, Joshua Citarella, and Interdependence, a podcast by 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 promising in being able to co-publish with other entities and not be dependent on Patreon or any of these larger platforms. There’s been a proliferation of different platforms since we first started thinking about Channel. It doesn't need to 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, 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 and 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 we’ll pick up again if we build some kind of splinternet so that others in our community can also publish to it.
Back to just general support, such as self-funding, 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 good answer there, other than that 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.
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 and editorial things. On the other side, you have this kind of necessity to do consultancies all the time, to negotiate with private companies or public institutions. I think at the moment it’s the only way to survive. I’m curious to know if the subscription patterns, and paywalls, really fund your own activity or not. We find a good way to make our publishing activities sustainable, a very traditional way: selling our books. And it’s okay, it’s functional somehow. But the traditional book format is in a big crisis, so we are looking for new solutions all the time.
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 to believe a lot of people in the tech-sphere want to have high-level intellectual conversations about media and 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. Like thinking about what 100K could do for not just one, but for a constellation of small publishers, that’s significant. I just wonder how to match that money. Money, at least in America, still seems to operate in this very strange way. In the traditional circles where we apply for funding, you have to contort your project into this particular and narrow 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. It's a cultural question.
30:07 It’s definitely not a technical question.
30:09 There’s also a bit of a purity question, like who you take money from. It’s bad to take money from certain places and that’s somewhat true, but also then who ends up winning and who ends up getting to publish? business modelsI don’t think there’s some magic formula of like, 30% books, 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 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
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?
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 someone like Trevor Paglen, you think of these entities that have these established 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 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 be stimulated, a kind of multipolar publishing world operating under the aegis of various cultural producers across the arts, fashion, and music spectrum. I don’t want to diminish, though, academic publishing or theory publishing, because I think there’s also a place for that. But just in my own trajectory, I could see that being an interesting place to exist for a little while.
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 that you just need to accept it?
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 I’m 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 so much space? Especially when there’s so much good stuff out there. Why is this what I’m offered? Why did they buy it? Why did they take the bait? Like, why is this there? I think in the digital space people care less about these kinds of publications than in physical spaces. The same goes for art bookshops, like a museum bookshop.
34:50 We started the day with Kenneth 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 starts to lose faith or imagines a post-publishing future for themselves. As writers and researchers, we sometimes ask ourselves: do we need another paper? Do we need another comic book? Do we need another translated essay? It’s something that is always measured by 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.
35:30 communityThe channels are essentially broken. The most frustrating thing is that you can have something very interesting that 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 because then they’re expecting it. We’re actually inspired by our trip to Ljubljana and the print culture that seems 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. Then 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 an archival object. You just need to be very 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.
36:43 We finished all the interview’s discussion with this question about the future of publishing. If you can give us your take on the future of reading, how reading is changing nowadays and what are your feelings on the evolution of our reading habits?
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 Kindles. I don’t know if it’ll be print or digital, but that will remain. Narrative is still important in 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. Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist and their series (The Age of Earthquakes, The Extreme Self), which doesn’t have depth, but 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. These perfect pocketbook size publications which you can flip through to get a sense of their contents and allow you to just 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, that circulate themselves through you. You can very quickly pull out a line and in a conversation, they’re a kind of currency. That’s the way philosophy has always worked in a certain sense. As 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 toxic as that sounds, is actually important for people to read deeper. alternative publishing practicesWe should consider making non-linear books which 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. 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 objectsWhat way can a book, a print form, best support the way that our brains are being reorganized now, as opposed to trying to resist it? How can they be integrated into this kind of vision? Can books be an AR layer to the way that we are experiencing the world? Could you imagine reading while 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.