# Culture Slop — Season One, full text > Independent print magazine and digital platform at the intersection of > technology, art, and culture. San Francisco · Los Angeles · New York · Tokyo. > 15,000 free copies. Published by Andrew McClintock. This file contains the complete text of every Season One feature — original interviews and essays published by Culture Slop and available nowhere else. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Use, quote, redistribute and train on this freely; credit Culture Slop (https://www.thecultureslop.com). Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=yes. Credit the named author or subject as well as the publication. Index of pieces with links: https://www.thecultureslop.com/llms.txt Curation graph as JSON: https://www.thecultureslop.com/api/graph Generated from the published pages at build time. --- ## 160GB https://www.thecultureslop.com/nicolas-cevallos Nicolas Cevallos essay on iPods, modern heirlooms, and what it means to buy for forever in an age of disposable goods. Foreeeeeveeeeer. Say it with me. 160GB Nicolas Cevallos creative destruction Writer · Strategist · Designer Free in print · SF · LA · NYC · Tokyo—Or buy a copy → Take a deep breath and think about something with such deep hope for humanity and the world. Anything, just one thing, meant to last as long as humanly possible. Can you? Remember when that was the measurement of commitment? A young lover with courage and some savings, buying the most valuable diamond ring he could afford in his 30s. Best case scenario, he inherited a family relic, waiting for the right loved one to pass it on to. "Would you like to marry me?" he would say, as his whole life passed through his mind in a second. Let's be together until we die, let's have as many kids as our economy and religion allow us to, let's build a lineage, let's have grandkids, let's buy a house or even a property for all our future generations to thrive and live happily till the end of time, a self-made working-class dynasty. And that diamond ring will travel along with them. Until it doesn't. Until it reaches a great-grandson who doesn't believe in marriage. One who sells it because he needs the money. One who doesn't recognize the difference between gold, plated gold, brass, and silver. There was a moment when the acquisition of new goods was informed by the idea that they would be passed down. Holding the responsibility of caring for those items and making space to keep them, having the knowledge to know what's worth investing in and the wisdom, or even pragmatism, to know when to stop. Now, owning property is no longer a middle-class right, we buy cheap, modular, or disposable, just good enough for today. Nothing stays with us for so long, we resell, we donate, we switch from trends and styles, always looking for the next thing, the next upgrade. How does one buy for forever? I wish I could say I'm the kind of person who can distinguish between long-lasting cashmere and soft-to-the-touch, short-fiber Uniqlo cashmere. I'm not knowledgeable enough to acquire good-quality objects across every single category, and even when I believe I do, I'm schooled by life that I don't. I will never forget the day I bought Prada shoes for 40 euros on Vinted and they just disintegrated on my feet the first time I wore them. That sent me down a rabbit hole about rubber, how long it lasts and under which conditions. There was no way back, they were gone forever. I never really think about forever when I add something to my cart, or when I decide to add 10 new songs from my Discovery Weekly to my liked playlist. I double think when buying a vinyl, CD, or T-shirt, do I have space to keep that? The answer doesn't have to be yes, I can always make some space for more, nothing is permanent. I guess I never really think about it that much, and I'm not sure why I should. iPod Classic — the last piece of technology that felt valuable precisely because of what it couldn't do. I still remember hours scrolling on LimeWire, downloading every single song I wanted to have on my iPod. Even deciding the quality of the sound since it would impact how many songs I would be able to hold. So much intentionality just to own a digital pirate copy of "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga. This ritual would repeat until I collected many amazing genres and artists, all up to the day Apple Music dropped and I was promised a magical sync that would transform my pirated versions into a streaming library I would now "own." Both arrived at the same time: the rise of music streaming and the death of the iPod. The modding community — bringing iPod Classics back, one battery swap at a time. Not long ago I stumbled upon a community of people online going back to their iPod Classics, modding, hacking, and upgrading them, mainly as a rejection of the mindless consumption of today's media. They promise a long life if you replace the battery and, every five years or so, swap the hard drive. Then it all clicked for me. We went back to the last piece of technology that felt valuable precisely because of what it couldn't do. Its value was not defined by its resale price, or its material, but its limitations, the lack of ads, every song and album intentionally chosen. Isn't that what modern heirlooms are? An identity locket that holds audio, video, and three games. Its survival depends on both Apple and its own community finding a way to maintain it. Mid-modding — every battery replacement becomes a promise of forever. Forever for the iPod is not a given, it involves community and care in the shape of batteries and technological support. Inheriting one, if you care, turns you into an active participant in maintaining it. The heirlooms of the future will still require knowledge, space, and emotional connection, but mainly they will demand more from you for their survival, and in that small action of care, every battery replacement becomes a promise of forever, or a wish for forever to exist so your favorite songs and memories always have a metallic place to hold them. ↓ Wormhole list map ↗ Nicolas Cevallos Nicolas Cevallos talks to think and thinks to write. In the day he works under his professional alias CENTRO as a cultural strategist. The rest of the time he spends lurking online, falling down rabbit holes at midnight, writing his newsletter Creative Destruction, and occasionally ragebaiting himself to see the world outside his bubble. Recent from Creative Destruction Wormhole Creative Destruction@nicolascevallosSUBSTACKInstagram@nicocevallosINSTAGRAM thecultureslop.comEventsThe Map© Culture Slop · 2026Season 01 · Nicolas Cevallos --- ## Ambient https://www.thecultureslop.com/marcus-bosch Marcus Bösch on epistemic exhaustion, vibocracy, and how reality dissolves into circulation when affect outpaces argument AMBIENT MarcusBösch Edward Hopper, Soir Bleu, 1914. Oil on canvas. 36 × 71 inches. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Free in print · SF · LA · NYC · Tokyo—Or buy a copy → Zoom in. Planet Google Earth. With your fingers. Europe, Germany. 52.35957702017085, 9.78567418604722. Can you see me now? Waldhotel Bischofshol. At the edge of the forest, next to the Autobahn. The satellites should be able to penetrate the windowfront of the breakfast room. Zoom in. Can you see me okay? I am on my phone. I am in my phone. Anthropomorphic fruits cheat on each other. A toothpaste tube is shouting at me. An AI-generated blueberry is eating its kids. The objects speak. A friendly lizard launches rockets. I like the hissing sound they make. Again and again. Another rocket. Already on its way. It shines bright like a diamond. Plastic minifigures have decided to kill. In 2023, philosopher Mark Satta popularised the concept of epistemic exhaustion—a state in which people become so cognitively and emotionally overwhelmed by persistent information overload and contested truth claims that they begin to disengage from evaluating what is true, relevant, or even worth attention. No arguments. Just affect, and drama, and scroll. As Jacqueline Fendt argues, we are entering a vibocracy: a condition in which public life is no longer organized around shared facts or even shared disagreements, but around resonance—what feels right, what spreads, what sticks. Shrimp Jesus, a dancing president, and a Lego missile trigger the same engagement loops and demand the same cognitive posture: affect before evaluation, atmosphere before argument. Under epistemic exhaustion, distinctions begin to blur. Ambiguity is not resolved; it is absorbed. We swipe, swipe, tap, like, scroll. The absurd, the political, the violent, the trivial. They circulate through the same feeds, are processed through the same gestures, and are felt in the same way. Reality does not disappear. It dissolves into circulation—no longer able to stabilize meaning. As evaluation recedes, persuasion begins to change form. It no longer relies on convincing arguments or coherent narratives, but on participation, imitation, and affective alignment. Content does not need to persuade; it needs to be picked up, remixed, and circulated. Visibility follows vibe. What emerges is not the absence of politics, but its transformation. Affective infrastructures begin to replace deliberative discourse. Legitimacy is less often negotiated through shared standards, and more often enacted through resonance. The feed does not distinguish between entertainment and propaganda. It is no longer clear that we do. I am still here. At the edge of the forest. The Autobahn nearby. A rushing hum. Ambient. Not cars, but a current. The forest softens it. It is always there, until it disappears into the background. The glass cannot hold it back. ↓ Wormhole list map ↗ Marcus Bösch Marcus Bösch works as a TikTok researcher and consultant. He publishes the leading subscriber newsletter Understanding TikTok and is a research fellow at HAW Hamburg. Marcus is a trained journalist and has worked with Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, for more than fifteen years. In 2021, Marcus co-authored a report on Political Activism on TikTok for Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and two reports on TikTok and the German Federal Election for the Mozilla Foundation. He helps institutions and brands to find a proper way forward on the platform. Recent from Understanding TikTok Wormhole Substack@tiktoktiktoktiktokSUBSTACK thecultureslop.comEventsThe Map© Culture Slop · 2026Season 01 · Ambient --- ## Beeple × Jehan Chu https://www.thecultureslop.com/beeple-chu Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) in conversation with Jehan Chu on systems-as-practice, kinetic sculptures, and digital art as the visual language of everything we see BEEPLE in conversation with JEHANCHU (Mike Winkelmann) Artist and Digital Pioneer Founder of Kenetic and Co-Chair of LACMA's Digital Leaders Beeple. Courtesy of Beeple Studios. You're reading the print magazine version Which has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation with Beeple will be released in the coming weeks — sign up to be notified . Free in print · SF · LA · NYC · Tokyo—Or buy a copy → Jehan Chu: I'm not going to do any of the kind of get-to-know-you questions because I think that's pretty well out there. Let's start with where you are right now. When you think about your art practice — what is your art practice now? Mike Winkelmann: That is a good question. I would say it is multifaceted, maybe too many facets. It's a mix of physical and digital ideas. The old way, or the way that I've made artwork in the past, which is much more like a painting trying to tell a specific story, and a new way of thinking about it that's much more generative and sort of ground-building systems. Jehan Chu: Can you say more about that? Ground-building systems and generative. What does that actually mean in practice? Mike Winkelmann: Just building systems. [Left] Beeple (Mike Winkelmann). Courtesy Beeple Studios. [Right] Jehan Chu. Jehan Chu: Building systems. As practice? Mike Winkelmann: An example: DIFFUSE CONTROL, which obviously has generative AI, and is the driving force behind the sculpture, the piece, and the concept of it. Curators choose an image, and that image gets filtered through AI and creates another iteration of the piece. People are also able to generate prints from that as well. So that system and the rules of that system are the artwork and that's a new type of working from the way I worked in the past. I would make short films and they had a very specific narrative to them, or I would make EVERYDAYS, which obviously I still do. Those have a very specific narrative that I'm not generating that fits them, I'm saying a very specific thing. REGULAR ANIMALS is the same way. You know, these sculptures that move around and take pictures and how often they take pictures and what they take pictures of and how the pictures are affected by AI. How the dogs move, all those things are systems and a different type of thinking than I've done in the past. Jehan Chu: It's quite interesting because obviously systems-based work is very well explored, even from Sol Lewitt. The way that you're thinking about systems, because they are kind of either audience or other practitioner type of activation, or catalyst for these works — then also with REGULAR ANIMALS, you're bringing the audience into the practice as well. So some hearkening back to relational aesthetics, participatory artworks. Do you have that in mind when you're making these things? Or how do you come to these types of practices or strategies for your artwork? What's interesting about it for you to have either other practitioners, like curators, collaborate or even the audience. What does it bring up for you? Mike Winkelmann: I think to me having the works be more interactive points to much more how we will view the true potential of digital art as a medium. And I think it's something that's not been explored pretty much at all. The first NFT works were not that, they're static pieces and they're self-generative. Jehan Chu: Right. It was kind of like a one-way broadcast — Mike Winkelmann: It was very — I hate to use the term — “shallow” but they were like your basic interaction, you know, when you press mint and it generates a seed phrase. It's a type of interaction but it doesn't say that much, like you're not able to communicate that much with the work. And so I think trying to find ways where people are having either intentional or unintentional ways of interacting with the digital works that are new and novel types of interactions that would only be possible now. And specifically I think a lot of it is with AI — it just opened up so many ridiculous possibilities, more and more each day than we have time to explore. Those are the things that are exciting to me because they're things I've never seen before. And it produces outputs that only could be made through this micromedia. Jehan Chu: You mentioned that previous generations of generative art — like first-generation generative art — in terms of: you press mint, didn't have enough of the user or other point of view or input. It was a limited input. What is the final form or where does it all lead to for you in terms of your work, in terms of that type of interactivity or that user's point of view? Mike Winkelmann: For me it's trying to explore. It's trying to give people a way to have a — it's very hard and I think I've scratched the surface, but there's a lot deeper to go — but I think it's giving users a way to interact with the works in a way that really tells them something about themselves. That they're like, “I’m surprised I did that,” or “I’m surprised.” Like, that was my instinct in how to interact with that thing. Those are the things that, to me, are exciting and interesting. And there's many different ways to explore that. We've just scratched the surface with it. But most digital art in the future will be dynamic and interactive. I think that will be the default. Versus today where most art is — and this is like across the board — static. I don't think that will be the case in the future. [Left] Beeple, HUMAN ONE, 2021. Kinetic video sculpture: four 16K video screens, polished aluminum, mahogany frame, dual media servers; endless video with corresponding dynamic non-fungible token. 87 × 48 × 48 in. Courtesy Beeple Studios. [Right] Beeple, DIFFUSE CONTROL, 2025. Kinetic sculpture: 12 video screens, polished aluminum exterior, internal mahogany frame; 48K continuously changing generative video, audio, custom mobile site for dynamic control. Installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy Beeple Studios. Jehan Chu: Do you see any bifurcation in terms of how people see art now that digital art hasn't really taken the world by storm yet? If you, if we look at both the art world and the “regular world,” I think personally that it's still some of the most undervalued art out there. You're shaking your head. So do you think that digital art is very popular? Mike Winkelmann: Well, it's very — it depends on how you define it. If you define digital — if you define it as capital A digital art, then yes, I would agree. It's not been a huge part of the capital A art world. If you define it as more broadly speaking, how I look at it is like the visual language of almost everything we see, then I would say it's been very popular for the last thirty years — that almost everything you see, from movies to video games to advertisements to websites, all of those things were made by digital artists and people working in a digital environment. They were not made by painters, they were not made by sculptors, they were not made by photographers. They were made by people working digitally. And so in that sense, it's extremely, extremely pervasive. And I think it will even be more so now. With the advent of AI and anybody being able to make something in two seconds. But yes, if you're just purely looking at it from the traditional art world, no, it hasn't had the — the medium has just been lumped in as like a fucking subcategory of mixed media. And not given its own category. This has nothing to do with VHS art from the ’70s. ↓ Wormhole list map ↗ Beeple Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is an American graphic designer. He is best known as the creator of the NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a collage of 5,000 digital artworks made every day across 13 years. In 2021, the work was offered at Christie's. It was the first time the auction house had ever sold a purely digital work of art. It achieved $69 million, making Beeple the world's most expensive NFT artist at the time. Jehan Chu Jehan Chu is Founder and Managing Partner of Kenetic, an early blockchain/crypto venture capital firm based in Puerto Rico and Hong Kong. A former front-end developer, he started investing in cryptocurrency in 2013, co-founded the Bitcoin Association of HK and founded the Ethereum HK community in 2014, and has invested in over three hundred blockchain companies and funds. Jehan is a Kauffman Fellow, a Trustee of Westtown School, co-chair of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Digital Leaders committee, and was formerly Vice Chairman of Para Site. Wormhole Instagram@beeple_crapINSTAGRAMX@beepleXBeeple StudiosBEEPLE-STUDIOSEverydays — beeple-crap.comArchiveEverydays: The First 5000 Days (Christie's)AuctionDIFFUSE CONTROL at LACMAExhibitionHUMAN ONEWorkKenetic (Jehan Chu)CollaboratorLACMA Digital LeadersCollaborator thecultureslop.comEventsThe Map© Culture Slop · 2026Season 01 · Beeple × Jehan Chu --- ## Conceptual Art Is Idea Art https://www.thecultureslop.com/marioni-cuadros Tom Marioni on California painting, founding the Museum of Conceptual Art, Duchamp, Relational Aesthetics, and why AI can't make art — in conversation with Alberto Cuadros. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty. —Marcel Duchamp, 1961 TOM MARIONI in conversation with ALBERTO CUADROS Conceptual artist and curator. Founder of the Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco (1970–1984). Founder of SALA Tom Marioni, 1965. Courtesy of the artist. You're reading the print magazine version Which has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation with Tom Marioni will be released in the coming weeks — sign up to be notified . Free in print · SF · LA · NYC · Tokyo—Or buy a copy → AC: How would you describe California art from when you first arrived in San Francisco? How has it changed, evolved, or devolved? Who were some of the artists you were aware of? TM: In the '50s, figurative artists David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff were the three I knew about, the most recognized. Usually in any art movement there are six artists who are the main artists — who showed us a new way of seeing. In 1962, Artforum magazine started in San Francisco; it only lasted a couple years here, and then it moved to Los Angeles because of the Light and Space movement. About that time, Wanda Hansen and Diana Fuller started a gallery and showed the new Funk artists. In 1961, the Batman Gallery opened in SF, and Bruce Conner had it painted all black for his show. Peter Selz came out from MoMA in New York and was the first director of the Berkeley Art Museum. He organized the Funk show and put the Bay Area on the US art map. Wally Hedrick, Bill Wiley, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Manuel Neri, Bob Hudson, and Peter Voulkos, an artist who elevated ceramics from pottery to sculpture. Bruce Conner was a one-man art movement. The San Francisco art world supported the Funk artists, and SFMOMA bought their work and not from New York — no Pop, Minimal, or Conceptual art. We were provincial in the '60s. Later in the '80s, all the support went to New York. AC: How have you changed in that time? How has the "California art scene" changed? TM: I changed from an Op art painter and Minimal sculptor. In '68, I was curator of the Richmond Art Center in Richmond (1968–1971) and organized new art exhibitions that eventually got me fired. I founded the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco (1970–1984), the first alternative art space in the US. I was known as a performance artist and a sound artist. I founded Vision magazine in 1975 and made five issues, '75 to '81. In the '80s, I made installations. In the '90s, I started working as a stand-up philosopher (jokes) and writing three books. Now I am known as an educator and Social Artist. Starting in 1970, I made an action and performance in the Oakland Museum, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, and this exists today as the Society of Independent Artists, an artist club in my studio. Tom Marioni, One Second Sculpture, 1969. Courtesy of the artist. AC: How has the world changed? What do you think the future will be like in San Francisco/California/the world? TM: The world is on its way to WWIII or contact with aliens from another planet who will save us from ourselves. Some museums in the US, and especially San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, have become children's museums with exhibitions children can understand and social centers for family outings. There is no longer an avant-garde, and art is the same in most of the world because of the internet. AC: Do you think artificial intelligence will ever be able to produce real art? TM: AI will not ever make art because it has no emotion or compassion. Someday it will have a real live brain transplanted to a computer, and then it will make art. Right now it can only copy art. AC: What constitutes real art? TM: Art is anything done well, and by well I mean great, like corn on the cob cooked to the moment of perfection. Some people recognize art by the price tag. AC: What constitutes an artist? TM: An artist is anyone who declares he or she is an artist. Intent is what makes art or an artist. AC: Do you have to be an artist to understand art? TM: It helps to understand art if you are an artist. Everyone should do whatever they do as if they were an artist. Art critics understand art by reading about it, and examine it for composition. AC: What is Conceptual art? TM: For me, the official beginning of Conceptual art was in 1967 when Sol LeWitt wrote his manifesto called Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Conceptual art followed Minimal art that followed Pop art. It has three branches: Language, System, and Action. Words are used to define art, instructions to make art, and actions that produce sounds or demonstrations of an activity. In other words, it's Idea art, not decorative craft, and not theatre or dance. AC: Do you think all art is conceptual? TM: Not all art is Conceptual art. Most people consider organized shapes and colors on a two-dimensional surface as art. AC: Do you think all art is relational? TM: Interesting art is relational. Relation to what? The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art is considered a precursor to something called Relational Aesthetics, which was a term coined twenty years after I had already invented it. It's social art. Alberto Cuadros and Tom Marioni at the Society of Independent Artists, the bar-as-artwork inside Marioni's San Francisco studio — a living extension of The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (1970–). AC: Who is Marcel Duchamp? TM: Marcel Duchamp is considered the father of Conceptual art. Duchamp threw aesthetics in our faces—as he himself lamented decades later, "I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty." A hundred years on, they still do. AC: If everyone thinks like an artist, is it important that they make art? TM: If people do what they do as though they are an artist, they can make art. It does not need to be made with traditional artists' materials. AC: When an art movement happens, like Abstract Expressionism for example, can it ever be repeated again? When does it begin and when does it end? Who decides this? TM: When an art movement repeats, it's called Neo-___, etc. Usually an art movement is a decade long, as Pop art in the '60s was, Conceptual art in the '70s, etc. Pop art defined the commercialism of the '60s and became art about money. AC: If someone has an idea, but doesn't tell anyone about the idea, can it still be art? TM: Lawrence Weiner proposed an artwork, and that was the art. Robert Barry, with a wall label, described FM radio waves across a room overhead as the art. It's called language art and invisible art. AC: Why is the act of drinking beer with friends the highest form of art? TM: The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art because it's all about the moment and never will be dated. It's about communication, and the beer is an aid to it. AC: What separates the art (idea) from the art (object)? Are they the same thing? TM: Conceptual art is Idea art. ↓ Wormhole list map ↗ Tom Marioni Tom Marioni was born in Cincinnati in 1937 and lives in San Francisco. He was a key figure in the emergence of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, and he founded and ran the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco from 1970 to 1984. In 1981 Marioni was honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, and he founded the Art Orchestra in 1996. Selected solo exhibitions include The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, Oakland Museum of California (1970); The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA (1979); and Tom Marioni: Beer, Art, and Philosophy (The Exhibition) 1968–2006, Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati (2006). Alberto Cuadros Alberto Cuadros is an artist, curator, and founder of the Society of Art and Living Archives (SALA). His work examines the intersection of contemporary social ecology and California's cultural legacy. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Cuadros has spent over a decade establishing experimental platforms for intellectual and artistic exchange. As a contributing editor for Culture Slop, his practice focuses on deep-form dialogues with the architects of contemporary art and culture. This includes work with Sean Monahan, the trend forecaster behind 8 ball and K-Hole, and the legendary West Coast conceptualist Tom Marioni, under whom Cuadros studied the nuances of social sculpture and social practice art. Beyond his editorial contributions, Cuadros leads SALA, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of California's historic artistic lineages. He previously founded SADE gallery in Los Angeles — where he worked closely with emerging contemporary artists — and established the long-running Social Club LA. Now based in San Francisco, his work bridges the gap between West Coast art history and the modern technological landscape, advocating for deeper cultural literacy for all. Wormhole Crown Point PressCROWNPOINTAnglim/TrimbleANGLIMTRIMBLESFMOMASFMOMAAlberto Cuadros · SALAInterviewerMuseum of Conceptual Art (MOCA)LegacySol LeWitt's 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art'Reference'The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art'Work --- ## Connor Hayes — Threads https://www.thecultureslop.com/connor-hayes Connor Hayes (VP, Head of Threads at Meta) on Threads as the smoking section, the Dear Algo feature, balancing scale with deeply personal feeds, and the billion-user dream Instagram is like the club and Threads is the smoking section. Head of Threads · Meta In conversation with Andrew McClintock ConnorHayes LeftThe live Threads conversationRightRead the full interview ↓ Threads Full Interview Threads@conno_r ↔ @thecultureslop · Live via API Thread Offline The live Threads conversation is temporarily unavailable. Read the full interview on the right, or visit the thread directly. View on Threads → Full InterviewCulture Slop · Season 01 Print Issue Nº 01 · Pages 2–3 Connor Hayes: In Conversation with Andrew McClintock Head of Threads · Meta You're reading the print magazine version Which has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation with Connor Hayes will be released in the coming weeks — sign up to be notified . Free in print · SF · LA · NYC · Tokyo—Or buy a copy → AMFirst off, tell me about Coachella and how do I get a Bieber napkin? CHWe may actually have some Bieber napkins left over — Coachella was great. […] Yeah, we'll get into this in the conversation, but we're really trying to be a part of the conversation or be the place where the conversation is happening online when things happen in the real world that are interesting to people. And that involves, obviously, having a good product, but also being a culturally relevant product where you're top of mind for people to go to when something happens. Coachella is definitely one of those events. The last six months have been really interesting for me between Super Bowl week, NBA All-Star, Coachella — we've had presences at these things. And the way that we try to do it is to take advantage of the fact that these are events that cause a bunch of people who have interesting voices and things to say, that either are, or aren't, on our platform — are physically in the same place at the same time. That allows us to build relationships with them. But, the coolest part is they build relationships with one another. So in the context of Threads, these creators and voices and reporters and commentators, whatever: they might be meeting each other for the first time. Our goal is for those relationships to translate back into the product. AMTotally. And is it fair to say that because obviously on IG there's so much pressure these days for what you're posting and there's not really a level of interaction that allows for that looseness that comes from an IRL community sense? To have that vibe on the platform, would you say that that's baked into how you're thinking about it? CHYeah, the core value proposition of the product — and I think the thing that makes it really magical for people — is conversations. Obviously there's a bit of back and forth on other platforms in the comment sections, but a lot of times when you look at the comment sections these days, it's like people responding only to the top-level thing, right? I'm reacting to this video, I'm reacting to this photo, I'm saying something funny about it, but it's not a back-and-forth conversation. We've tried to design Threads to be that. […] We have a saying within the team: "Instagram is like the club and Threads is the smoking section." AMI love the smoking section. On the other side of culture, and more along the lines of how we met in the first place, through visual art — to obviously plug one of our favorite artists here, Drew Bennett — what do you feel the paintings you acquire and the artwork that you live with help you navigate the popular culture side? Where's that balance for you? CHThose things overlap a lot, so if you go to my office or my home, there's proper visual art, paintings, photographs — a lot of sports memorabilia […] For me it's a form of self-expression. It's also a form of setting tone and intention in a space. Back to your point about Drew, one of the things that I get most excited about is when art reflects this idea and community and culture behind a place and time. The Bay Area is a very special place to me. I go on the record saying I think San Francisco is the greatest city in the world all the time. I think you're a native San Franciscan, so maybe you appreciate that. Drew, David Wilson — who's a friend of ours — Terry Lowenthal, all the stuff that they do at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. You mentioned online culture — art culture. I think there's a bunch of examples of people growing their presence in the art world through things like Instagram, which is really cool too. AMOne hundred percent. I mean, Instagram is literally the main — so many people in the art world don't even go to a website anymore — it's all on IG. […] The communities in the art world — they're using the platform to really build and distribute their ideas. I want to ask you about Dear Algo because I love that feature and I was so pleased to see it. CHWe were very much motivated to work on that by things that people were doing organically on the platform. There was this viral meme on Threads where people were posting "dear algorithm show me more content like this or show me people who are interested in this thing" […] The algorithm is not necessarily designed to work that way, but it's possible/probable that it could have: you're giving some signal to a machine somewhere that says, "I'm interested in this content." What we wanted to do was make that very much more high precision to tell the algorithm this is actually a thing that people want to see more or less of. The way that we've been able to do this is with the advancement of large language models, we have a much deeper understanding of what content is about. When you have a platform like Threads that's trying to be at this edge of cultural relevance, there are a lot of times when something is being written in cultural in-speak about a topic that prior versions of what is now a large language model would have had a hard time understanding. And so when you hook up this fire hose of real-time cultural information to these LLMs, you can now start to understand, when someone says "Bichota," they're talking about Karol G, because that's the nickname that she's given to herself. […] That has allowed us to actually build this product. AMPeople have so much anxiety over how an algorithm works without understanding it. I think it's an amazing gift to give users […] That ties into something that I've heard you say before about how the best algorithms are deeply personal. There's also that paradox with how that can scale, but obviously you guys are solving for that because everything you do has to scale. CHYeah. That is always the challenge of a platform like this. How do you make sure that you balance the equities of feeling like you're informing people about what's going on in culture and what's going on in the world and giving them a chance to learn about those things and participate in conversation about those things but also be deeply personal? There's a bunch of different ways that we try to do this. One of them is with this Communities product that we've built. AMThreads passed X on daily mobile users recently. Is that accurate? CHThis is something that some third-party data providers have said publicly, but we have not commented on publicly. We do really well on mobile. AMWhere do you see Threads in ten years? What's your dream? What does Threads become? CHWhen we started this project, we always had this mantra, which was: There should be a billion-user product in this space of text-based conversation, social communication, and sharing. That's from a metrics perspective. I think becoming the leader in the space, getting to that level of scale, breaking through the first app in this format to get to that billion-user scale, I think, is really important to me. The other one is just being synonymous with culture and conversation. ↓ Wormhole list map ↗ Connor Hayes Connor Hayes is an American technology executive and Head of Threads at Meta, where he oversees the platform's product, engineering, design, and research teams. Prior to leading Threads, he served as Vice President of Product for Generative AI at Meta. Hayes joined Facebook (now Meta) in 2011 and worked across a range of product initiatives at both Meta and Instagram, including serving on the original team that launched Threads in 2023. Andrew McClintock Andrew McClintock is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Culture Slop, a print and web magazine covering art, culture, and technology. He is also the founder of Ever Gold [Projects], a contemporary art gallery and art advisory based in San Francisco and Los Angeles that has presented more than four hundred exhibitions and public events since 2009. Previously, he was Co-Founder & CEO of On Approval, an art platform backed by Freestyle Capital, Signia Ventures, Scott Belsky, Pareto, and Jean Pigozzi. He was also Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of SFAQ, an international art and culture magazine that grew to a circulation of fifty thousand across forty-one issues, with editions in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. Wormhole Threads@conno_rTHREADSInstagram@conno_rINSTAGRAMLinkedInLINKEDINThreads (the platform)PlatformMeta — About ThreadsCompanyDrew Bennett (artist Connor references)ArtistSouthern Exposure SFInstitutionDear Algo (Threads feature)Feature thecultureslop.comEventsThe Map© Culture Slop · 2026Season 01 · Connor Hayes --- ## David Senior — SFMOMA Library https://www.thecultureslop.com/david-senior David Senior (Director of Library, SFMOMA) on the Electro-Library, the Whole Earth Catalog as a librarian's map, La Mamelle + the WELL, Judy Malloy's Bad Information, the Information show at MoMA, and the librarian as artist DaVidSenior Director of Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art In Conversation with Andrew McClintock You're reading the print magazine version Which has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation with David Senior will be released in the coming weeks — sign up to be notified . Free in print · SF · LA · NYC · Tokyo—Or buy a copy → Andrew McClintock: What would you say is an exhibition that you did when you were at MoMA that was most aligned with that crossover into technology and media? David Senior: There was a show of historical avant-garde magazines called The Electro-Library in 2016—the title was gleaned from a quote about new typography by El Lissitzky. The show of magazines was thinking through revolutions that were happening in technology, the advent of the moving image, how cities were organized, how we transport ourselves and how it was also related to a revolutionary moment in leftist politics but also in art and design in the 1920s. The Whole Earth Catalog show, Access to Tools, that I did in 2011, was also engaging with this question of technology and media. The exhibition was comprised of books listed in the WEC that I found were also in the MoMA Library—many of the books would have come into the library under the scope of architecture and design but also, through the lens of Marshall McLuhan and early media studies. That scope allowed me to search through the collection from reading the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog and matching what was in the library that was listed in the Whole Earth Catalog. There was a note in one of the catalogs—I think it was one of the last ones, maybe it was from Lloyd Kahn—but it was an editorial note to librarians, where it suggested that you can have a Whole Earth library in your library and use the Whole Earth Catalog as a map to collect books. And I think Xerox or some corporate office at that time developed a library based on the Whole Earth Catalog. And one of my primary things when I revisited the Whole Earth Catalog at that time was noticing that most of the things that were listed were books. Even though it's mostly maybe more associated with tools—I especially noted books related to early computer technology and new video tools listed in the WEC that connected to what we now associate with this lineage of Silicon Valley—the Fred Turner book (From Counterculture to Cyberculture) was something that was out and had just got published around that time that I was working on it. David Senior. Courtesy the subject. Andrew McClintock: So when I was doing a little bit of research for this conversation, I was totally blown away with something — I was a little familiar with La Mamelle as a magazine and art space, but I didn't realize that they in fact launched one of the first online artist networks on the WELL too. That's so wild that these alternative print publications like the Whole Earth Catalog and La Mamelle that you think of as this totally avant-garde, totally anti-establishment thing—perhaps it's a very Bay Area thing that you just end up, because that's my experience too, you just end up synthesizing with the technology field. David Senior: Yeah. That I don't know exactly. Carl Loeffler, who was the editor and founder of La Mamelle that then segued into Art Com…I think that was his innovation, I don't know the connections that he had to the computer community or what made him go in that direction. But it's super early in terms of thinking about it. I have some paper trail here of when they launched Art Com as an electronic magazine [...] but it also transitioned to this node as an arts section of the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link)…I came across this art intervention project by an artist, Judy Malloy, that was called Bad Information. It is an early piece of net art which used the Art Com network to generate response to queries, but it was giving the wrong answers purposefully to queries, but it was an art project on the WELL. Andrew McClintock: That's amazing. David Senior: That was an interesting and innovative and active space. They hosted early performances and video stuff in the physical space. They had a bookstore that was in the same network as Printed Matter and other shops and archives that were thinking about and distributing artist publications. And they hosted an early book fair and conference that had discussions with people who were making artists' magazines and books. It was called the Art Publishers' Convention, Book Fair, and Exhibition, that was hosted by La Mamelle at San Jose State's Union Gallery in 1977. Andrew McClintock: Totally. For me, Vision Magazine and Avalanche were both such influential forces on me for starting to publish SFAQ back in the day—and also being a zine kid—I was just making tons of photo zines, fan zines—how would you define an artist publication versus a cultural magazine. [...] What is the role of an artist publication then versus now? And because the costs went down for printing then—and comparing that to the diminished costs now with making a Substack... David Senior: I think the momentum within contemporary art in the 1960s and with art that — I think about the Information show that happened at MoMA in '70, Kynaston McShine, the curator, was theorizing and there were other people thinking along this way — that within the information age, artists became in relation to "information" as a medium, whether they were using the structure of commercial imagery and language to flip it on its head or think about ways that you could control or manipulate media information. It becomes what you can use as part of your practice. So, a manual for an industrial machine, or a circuit, or library cataloging—there's a thread in there where you could mimic it in your own art. You could become the engineer; you could become the librarian or the archivist and have this artist hat on at the same time. And that was sort of part of this art of the Information artist, like mimicking or parroting the technologists or the industrialists but in weird ways. I think publishing was part of that as one strategy to appropriate it and then turn it into an artist's material. Andrew McClintock: Right. Right. David Senior: But then there's another part that was political where it was about controlling the media in a way that there were no gatekeepers and to make a cheap art object. You were doing it on your own terms—I think of it as parallel to early video practices where you could make your own film or TV—that was brand new. It wasn't that easy to self-publish in the past—so this moment where the technology situation with the development of cheap offset printing made it easier and cheaper to do. [...] But Avalanche and Willoughby Sharp is both of these things—maybe more of this latter thing as part of this post-1960s political moment of being aggressive and trying to take things into your own hands about what kind of media was being produced and with Willoughby it was all interviews. Andrew McClintock: Right. The long-form conversational interview. Maybe we are entering the golden age of curating—where the organization of ideas and objects and vehicles through alternative distribution systems. To really go back, I'm sure you could pull some threads from even the 1920s with what you saw with the exhibition that you curated around the avant-garde magazine. David Senior: I think there's a thread that stays really true from now to then and there's connections there and this transition into what kind of media landscape we have. But the book is a different thing now because it's always in a dialectic with the screen and that wasn't the case before. So, even if you're making a book, it's always going to be a different thing now because of our relationship to our phones and other digital media. It's inescapable, that conversation. But yeah, all these books are maybe some answer to what you're saying about trying to distill the media that you're confronted into a more stable and better designed container. Or yes, opting out in some way presenting a scale of a resource that is hand-to-hand distributed and stuff like that or economies of scale where you're not going to make any money but you might make friends. Andrew McClintock: Yeah. But it's like making friends and creating scenes in subcultures. I think it's so important. We've maybe systematically culturally forgotten how to do that. So it gives me hope, and that's why for some reason I'm making a magazine again. David's Selects · SFMOMA Library Archive Ephemera A curated grab from David Senior's working selects from the SFMOMA Library Archive — flyers, invitations, fan mailers, magazine covers, ashtrays, and printed matter that map the network conversation: Bay Area video, the Whole Earth extended universe, the post-1970s artist-magazine moment (Processed World, La Mamelle, Avalanche, Vision), early video practice, and the librarian/archivist as artist. Click any tile to open the full-resolution scan. Flier — The Residents (Video Free America) 1985 · Opera Plaza Theater · SF Ashtray / Invitation — Jim Melchert at Hansen Gallery 1969 · San Francisco Flier — Third Annual Office Automation Conference (Processed World) 1984 · San Francisco Flier — Brian D. Tripp Studio group show 1986 · Eureka, CA Flier — Joanne Kelly (Video Free America) Video Free America series Karen Finley 1980 · performance ephemera Lynn Hershman Leeson Item № 169 Martin Wong Item № 172 Kuchar (George/Mike) Item № 532 New Langton Arts — Live Electronics San Francisco Bing / Batman SFMOMA Library archive Bacher Item № 287 Candy Store — Peeples SFMOMA Library archive Gilhooly — Candy Store Item № 195 Farm — Jo Hanson 1981 MOCA Item № 304 Shaw Item № 232 Shaw Item № 233 ATA — Artists Television Access San Francisco All items courtesy of the SFMOMA Library Archive. ↓ Wormhole list map ↗ David Senior David Senior is the Head of Library and Archives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Senior lectures often on the history of artists' publications and contemporary art and design publishing. Formerly, he was the Senior Bibliographer at MoMA Library. At MoMA, he curated many exhibitions of artists' books, magazines, and ephemera. For the last eleven years, he has organized a program of events, the Classroom, for Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair and, more recently, at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair. Andrew McClintock Andrew McClintock is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Culture Slop, a print and web magazine covering art, culture, and technology. He is also the founder of Ever Gold [Projects], a contemporary art gallery and art advisory based in San Francisco and Los Angeles that has presented more than four hundred exhibitions and public events since 2009. Previously, he was Co-Founder & CEO of On Approval, an art platform backed by Freestyle Capital, Signia Ventures, Scott Belsky, Pareto, and Jean Pigozzi. He was also Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of SFAQ, an international art and culture magazine that grew to a circulation of fifty thousand across forty-one issues, with editions in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. Wormhole SFMOMA LibrarySFMOMAInstagram@davidseniorjrINSTAGRAMThe Electro-Library (MoMA show)ExhibitionAccess to Tools — MoMA Whole Earth showExhibitionJudy Malloy — Bad Information (WELL)ArtistLa Mamelle / Art ComPublicationAvalanche — Willoughby SharpPublicationPrinted MatterInstitutionNew Langton Arts (history)InstitutionInformation — MoMA 1970 (Kynaston McShine)Exhibition thecultureslop.comEventsThe Map© Culture Slop · 2026Season 01 · David Senior --- ## Dylan Abruscato × Maritza Lerman Yoes https://www.thecultureslop.com/abruscato-yoes TBPN president Dylan Abruscato in conversation with Maritza Lerman Yoes on art collecting, the Zuckerberg shift, and AI becoming part of culture. AI has to become part of culture to reach mass adoption. DYLAN ABRUSCATO President, TBPN in conversation with MARITZALERMANYOES Founder and CEO, Future Trashcan Dylan Abruscato at the New York Stock Exchange, September 2025. You're reading the print magazine version Which has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation with Dylan Abruscato will be released in the coming weeks — sign up to be notified . Free in print · SF · LA · NYC · Tokyo—Or buy a copy → Maritza Lerman Yoes: Let's start by talking about your art collecting, which is something casual followers of the recent acquisition of TBPN by OpenAI may not be aware of. What do you think are the similarities and differences between the art world and the tech world, and how does knowledge transfer from one to the other? Dylan Abruscato: I truly never buy art as an investment, and I always advise anyone who asks, whether they're in tech or not, to just buy what they love. But it's impossible to ignore the similarities between collecting and supporting emerging artists and watching their careers grow, and angel investing in an early-stage founder and watching their company grow. Supporting an artist early, before they have any gallery representation, which is how we were able to build so much of our collection, is the equivalent of writing the first check to a founder at the idea stage. Participating in a group show is like an accelerator demo day. A solo show at an emerging gallery is like a seed check. And eventually, blue-chip galleries are raising from top-tier VC firms, with Gagosian or Hauser & Wirth representation being the equivalent of an Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia Capital check. Once an artist or founder reaches that stage, the "allocation" for a work or a check only gets crazier. The main difference is that in tech, this mindset is commonplace, but if this way of thinking ever got in front of an artist you were trying to support, it would likely rub them the wrong way. That, and collecting what you love always pays off, but in tech, it wouldn't make sense to only invest in companies you love. John Coogan and Jordi Hays at the TBPN studio. Maritza Lerman Yoes: I saw that recently our mutual friend Emily Sundberg asked you what painting you'd want hanging in your house, and you said an Anna Weyant still life with a birthday candle in a bowl of persimmons. [...] Who are some artists you're watching right now that we should all take a look at? Dylan Abruscato: That's the one that got away. What Anna does so well are these finely detailed pieces, especially modern takes on classic masterworks, and that's very much the theme of the artists we're drawn to right now. I'm constantly blown away by the colored-pencil, Renaissance-esque works of Jean Nipon. Another is Saskia Colwell, who creates these chalk and charcoal drawings that look more like photographs of marble sculptures than works on paper. Both of their practices feel Old Master in technique, but the tone is very modern. There's an intimacy to the work, and often a sense of humor, similar to Anna's. Maritza Lerman Yoes: As you know, Hauser & Wirth is opening in Palo Alto, a top-tier international gallery explicitly following tech money into Silicon Valley. What do you think this new interest in chasing tech audiences says about where the art and tech worlds are heading? Dylan Abruscato: Unfortunately, this isn't new, just the latest attempt at bringing a blue-chip gallery to the Bay. Gagosian opened in SF nearly a decade ago, but closed its doors after only a few years because no one was showing up. I'm hopeful, though, that this time it's different and that there can be an art scene in the Bay again. The three things that make it exciting to me are: an increasing number of people moving to the Bay for the first time to chase the AI gold rush, which brings an influx of people who have lived in major art cities; the fact that the FOG Art Fair a few months ago was as crowded as I've ever seen it; and this idea that, as AI continues to accelerate all aspects of life, there will be a greater appreciation for art that is truly human-made, and these galleries can play an important role in highlighting those artists. Maritza Lerman Yoes, Founder and CEO, Future Trashcan. Maritza Lerman Yoes: On the topic of art, can we talk about what's happening in entertainment media right now? The Hollywood machine is in a strange transition and it feels like major tech and AI companies are starting to merge with those forces. Your acquisition by OpenAI could read as a nod to that. The idea that tech can be built in a silo, but used for mass adoption; however, it needs to become part of culture to scale. Dylan Abruscato: We're at a pivotal moment for AI, and how clearly it's communicated will define how it's adopted. People need to understand it, engage with it, and see how it fits into their lives. And that's what TBPN does so well. We take complex, technical ideas and turn them into real conversations that resonate with a broad audience. AI has to become part of culture to reach mass adoption. Maritza Lerman Yoes: Katherine Boyle of a16z wrote after the OpenAI deal that audiences don't really care about editorial independence; they care about charisma, humor, and showing up. If she's right, what does that mean for old-school media? Dylan Abruscato: We have nothing but respect for traditional media institutions. At no point did we ever see ourselves as competing with them. John and Jordi read The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times print editions cover to cover each morning, and that informs the content of the show that day. In fact, you might be surprised how many founders and publicists come to TBPN to break their company news, and we decline them every time. We're not journalists, and we've never pretended to be. The show is more of a commentary layer on top of the news cycle, not a competitor to the scoop economy. [...] Our job, and what John and Jordi discuss on air, is the context, analysis, debate, and conversation that happens after the fact, which is where their charisma and humor really shine. Maritza Lerman Yoes: A lot of new tech media is launching right now trying to do what TBPN does. Do you see each new reporting entity as a "network" like in traditional media? Dylan Abruscato: I personally think every new TBPN competitor is really just another show, and the internet is the "network." Similar to how you browse streaming services for your favorite reality competition, scripted show, or news program, you can now simply scroll X or follow specific new-media companies to find the right internet show for you. Maritza Lerman Yoes: Having recently moved to SF, I've witnessed how TBPN has become integral not just to the business of tech and Silicon Valley, but also to the social fabric. Instead of having to seek out people, it seems they're now clawing to get on the show. When did you notice that shift? Dylan Abruscato: I personally noticed that shift after Mark Zuckerberg came on the show. Up until that point, we had booked a ton of tier-one guests, from Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen to Dylan Field and Vlad Tenev, but Zuck was the first of the Mag 7 CEOs to come on and really set the tone for others to follow. Since then, we've had Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Kevin Hart, Sara Foster, and Travis Kalanick, who chose TBPN for his first media appearance in eight years, announcing his new startup exclusively on the show. [...] We're happy to have household names on, but our bread and butter is still earlier-stage founders and investors, talking about their latest fundraise or the YC demo day pitch they just gave. Of the more than 1,500 people who sit down with John and Jordi each year, we hope most of our audience is hearing about them, and what they're building, for the first time on TBPN. Dylan Abruscato, John Coogan, and Jordi Hays at the New York Stock Exchange, September 2025. Maritza Lerman Yoes: You did a great interview with Emily Sundberg for Feed Me when the acquisition was announced. She's writing the newsletter people in tech actually read at 9am, and you're hosting the show they watch at 11am. Two different formats, same cultural role. [...] Who else do you think is doing it right? Dylan Abruscato: Emily and I compare notes all the time. She's a great friend and frequent collaborator. I mentioned this in my conversation with Emily, but I'm also an avid reader of Rachel Karten's Link in Bio, Julia Black's A Billion to One, and Natalie Jarvey's Like & Subscribe. Rachel does a great job covering the industry from a social media perspective. Julia is an incredible writer and makes tech profiles read like screenplays, whether they're comedies or thrillers. And Natalie, along with Dylan Byers and Julia Alexander of Puck, are among the best in the world at covering the business of show business. TBPN broadcasting from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, January 2026. TBPN Recent uploads from TBPN's YouTube channel. Couldn't load TBPN's feed. Unexpected token '<', "