/api/graph for JSON, /llms-graph.txt for LLMs, and /llms-full.txt for the full text of every piece.Licensed CC BY 4.0 — credit Culture SlopEvery node and every connection in Season One, written out — and served as JSON at /api/graph and as plaintext at /llms-graph.txt. Each connection is labelled with how the two are related, not merely that they are.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick on nihilism, enshittification, and the internet as a condition
Max Hollein on The Met, open access, museums in the digital age, and the future of curation
Marcus Bösch on epistemic exhaustion, vibocracy, and how reality dissolves into circulation when affect outpaces argument
Soleio on speed as a moat, the end of the human monopoly on taste, and why a total addressable market of one is sufficient
Brewster Kahle on building the global brain, public AI, the loss of Aaron Swartz, and libraries as unfinished business
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
Kyle Chayka (Filterworld, The New Yorker) on algorithmic homogenization, taste as deeper understanding vs superficial preference, the death of subculture, and AI co-opting taste
Cy Canterel — a brief ontology of slop. LLM vector space as areality, language without a speaker, slop as epistemic solvent on the world of mutually-beholding appearances
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
Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen Design / Harvard GSD) in conversation with Quentin Hardy on alchemy + AI, Isaac Newton as the last magician, fermentation as a slow art form, and dissolving guns into pigment with Nellie King Solomon
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
David Welch's conceptual curatorial practice — anti-gatekept platform of art for the people; selection of ten artists changing the landscape of contemporary art; @problemchild.advisory
TBPN president Dylan Abruscato in conversation with Maritza Lerman Yoes on art collecting, the Zuckerberg shift, and AI becoming part of culture.
Painter Mario Ayala on SFAI, archiving, the Surrealist exquisite corpse, and his TV-stack paintings, in conversation with Jen Vanegas Rocha.
Rhizome's Executive Director Michael Connor, in conversation with board member Katherine Frazer, on archiving digital culture at thirty.
Industrial designer and DJ Eugene Whang on taste vs. preference, twenty years with Jony Ive, refusing AI, and parties as designed experiences.
Eugenia Kuyda on home-cooked apps vs frozen software, raising AI like a garden, and shaping software instead of being shaped by it.
Jason Yuan on propaganda as design language, gossip as broadcast, DOT and theory of mind, and why the meaning of life is to love and be loved.
Andrew McClintock on tension as the point, going down the wormhole, and why he made a free print magazine about art, tech, and culture in the age of the algorithm.
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.
Mieke Marple and Francesca Sonara on the gift economy vs. the market, clowning as a response to alienation, third spaces, AI slop, and what comes after social media.
W. David Marx in conversation on Pearl Jam, taste, subculture, and Andrew Tate as the end-point of a 25-year ideological shift.
Artist Matt McCormick on baseball cards, zines, books as primary work, music, and treating the whole practice as one ongoing scrapbook, in conversation with Matt Shuster of Karma.
Sean Monahan in conversation with Alberto Cuadros on normcore, quiet luxury, Silicon Beach, and the press-vs-tech war.
Nicolas Cevallos essay on iPods, modern heirlooms, and what it means to buy for forever in an age of disposable goods.
Essay excerpt from Edition #43 of Scott Belsky's Implications newsletter on content creators vs. artists, Precision Generative Workflows, and why humans will crave more human art.
Tom Sachs on sympathetic magic, Beuys, Nike Craft, the ISRU app, Sol LeWitt, and why taste is an exclusionary act.
Stanford's Fred Turner and writer Jasmine Sun on counterculture, the California-to-Texas ideological move, and AGI as warmed-over '90s network-society rhetoric.
U.N.N.A.M.E.D. partners Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg on the affect-industrial complex, why you can't SaaS-scale taste, and brand universes.
American artist, b. 1937. Word paintings, artist books, the LA vernacular. Gagosian, MoMA, LACMA, National Gallery.
LA-based writer. The Trend Report on Substack. Culture, internet, taste.
Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Previously Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Researcher and writer. Publishes Understanding TikTok on Substack. Research fellow at HAW Hamburg.
American designer, angel investor, and advisor. Shaped product design at Facebook and Dropbox. Hosts First of Kind.
Founder and director of the Internet Archive (1996). Co-founder of Alexa Internet and earlier Thinking Machines. MIT AI Lab alumnus.
American digital artist, b. 1981. Everydays project (one new artwork per day, 20+ years). Christie's $69M sale (2021). HUMAN ONE, DIFFUSE CONTROL (LACMA).
Founder of Kenetic Capital. Co-Chair of LACMA's Digital Leaders. Interviewer for the Beeple piece.
Staff writer at The New Yorker. Author of Filterworld (2024) and The Longing for Less (2020). Publishes User Mag on Substack. Brooklyn.
Writer and filmmaker working at the intersection of language, technology, and philosophy of mind. Writes on LLM ontology, the digital commons, slop.
VP and Head of Threads at Meta. Building Threads — Meta's text-based conversation platform that launched in July 2023. Bay Area–based; art collector.
Founder and creative director of Stamen Design (San Francisco data viz studio, est. 2001). Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard's GSD. Pigment-making practitioner with Nellie King Solomon — inks from oak galls, copper, salt, and dissolved firearms.
Former Head of Editorial at Google Cloud; former Deputy Technology Editor at The New York Times. Writes on alchemy + AI; interviewer for the Eric Rodenbeck piece.
Artist; collaborates with Eric Rodenbeck on the pigment-from-dissolved-guns drawings. Makes drawings of guns using ink Eric ferments from guns themselves.
Director of the Library at SFMOMA. Curator of The Electro-Library at MoMA. Works at the seam of artist publications, library-as-medium, and the early online artist networks of the WELL / La Mamelle / Art Com era.
David Welch's conceptual curatorial practice. Blog-style online collection + physical group shows at Guerrero Gallery (LA) and Alyssa Davis Gallery (NY). Anti-gatekept, sampling-as-curation.
French-American artist, 1887–1968. Father of conceptual art. Readymades, Fountain, The Large Glass.
American artist, b. 1930. Flags, targets, numbers. Neo-Dada, bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.
Art dealer, 1907–1999. Championed Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein. Defined the postwar New York gallery.
Swedish actor. Cited in Kyle's essay on AI: "AI is owned by the tech barons."
American artist, 1928–1987. Pop Art, The Factory, Campbell's Soup, screen prints. Connected to Ruscha via Pop lineage.
Writer at The Atlantic. Referenced in Kyle's essay on "post-ironic fatalism."
Industrial designers. Authors of Super Normal. Referenced in Kyle's essay on design without spectacle.
Performance artist cited in Lippard's conceptual-art canon.
Painter Eugenia invokes for the 'pure undefended space' through which true ideas pass.
Artist, curator, and founder of SALA; Culture Slop contributing editor who interviewed both Tom Marioni and Sean Monahan.
Painter of finely detailed modern takes on classic masterworks; represented by Gagosian.
Los Angeles painter whose TV-stack canvases collage music-video and film stills into Surrealist exquisite corpses.
Author of 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; his 'the original withers' argument anchors the taste-and-AI thread.
German artist of social sculpture who taught that everyone is an artist.
Conceptual artist cited as making instructions his art.
Filipino-American painter and Mario's first painting professor at SFAI who treated material as identity.
Musician photographed in the 'They don't build statues of critics' t-shirt that closes the piece.
Situationist theorist invoked for the 'Debordian' reading of cultural capital and spectacle.
Writer Eugenia quotes on companies that 'do not love us' and only want our attention or money.
DJ whose contentment with a simple life Eugene cites as refreshing.
President of TBPN, art collector, and founder of Crypto: The Game (acquired by Uniswap Labs).
Partner & Creative Director at U.N.N.A.M.E.D.; graphic designer and Fast Company columnist on authorship and judgment in an age of infinite output.
Owner of X, framed as a Hearst-like media baron in the press-vs-tech war over citizen journalism.
Writer of Feed Me, the morning newsletter tech people read; friend and frequent collaborator of Dylan's.
Industrial designer and DJ; founder of record label Public Release and feeling; two decades on Jony Ive's design team at Apple.
Moscow-born founder and CEO of Wabi (personal software platform) and earlier Replika, the AI companion app.
Artist who collaborated with Mieke Marple on the painting ENJOY!!!!!!! (2026).
Curator, collector, and arts philanthropist; co-founder of times nonprofit arts centre in New York.
Stanford professor of communication; author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
Architect Tom Sachs worked for early in his career.
Aviator-mogul whose ties to cinema and the aerospace/war industry shaped Southern California culture.
Writer and technologist; contributing writer at The Atlantic, author of an 'anthropology of disruption' Substack.
Founder of HIVEMIND; formerly co-founded New Computer (Dot) and designed on Apple's Human Interface team.
Artist making colored-pencil, Renaissance-esque works Dylan is watching.
Assistant Curator at The Broad, Los Angeles; co-curator of Desire, Knowledge, and Hope.
Co-host of TBPN.
Creative director whose cultural capital became the 'orienting compass' that transformed Loewe.
Designer who led Apple's design team for decades and founded LoveFrom; Eugene's longtime mentor.
Co-host of TBPN.
Writer of A Billion to One; her tech profiles read like screenplays.
Artist and product designer at Apple; joined Rhizome's Board of Directors in 2026.
Artist who at Rhizome's 2014 7×7 hackathon made what's popularly described as the first NFT.
Critic and author of The Nineties, cited as a touchstone for the book's framing.
Architect whose 2002 essay 'Junk Space' frames the affect-industrial complex's aesthetic commons that conceals its construction.
Pop artist whose track 'Just Dance' the writer recalls pirating onto his iPod.
Critic and author of Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object.
Artist paired with Eugenia at Rhizome's Seven on Seven (7x7) at the New Museum in 2024.
Founder and CEO of Future Trashcan, a cultural marketing studio at the intersection of technology and culture.
Tokyo-based culture writer; author of Blank Space, Status and Culture, and Ametora.
Artist working across books, paintings, objects, and clothing, distilling the American West into a personal visual language; lives between LA and New York.
New York-based bookseller and collector who runs the book program at Karma Gallery, specializing in rare books, artist publications, and cultural ephemera.
Britney-era pop architect Jason invokes to explain propaganda, hooks, and being 'catchy to lots of people.'
Vice co-founder Marx ties to the transgressive backlash against political correctness.
Executive Director of Rhizome; led the Net Art Anthology initiative retelling the history of net art.
LA-based artist and writer behind Live Laugh Lube; former co-owner of Night Gallery.
Designer cited by Belsky for defining creativity as 'a mistake of the eye.'
Writer of Like & Subscribe, covering the business of creator media.
Writer, designer, and cultural strategist (alias CENTRO) who writes the newsletter Creative Destruction.
Partner, Strategy at U.N.N.A.M.E.D.; brand strategist and cultural critic, author of 'This Is Your Brand with a Universe' and 'The TikTok Oracle.'
Musician and founder of Humanrace, a recent Eugene collaboration.
Artist cited by McCormick as one of the self-publishers who treated books as primary work rather than documentation.
Writer of Link in Bio, covering the industry from a social-media perspective.
Painter cited alongside Mario as another artist skewing the collaborative exquisite-corpse technique into solo work.
Light-and-space artist whose perception-first practice (via Weschler's 'Seeing Is Forgetting') Eugenia cites as an antidote to fight-or-flight mode.
Pop-art painter Jen invokes for the layered, technological logic of Mario's canvases.
Net artist and longtime Rhizome collaborator featured in the Rhizome archive grid.
Artist making chalk and charcoal drawings that read like photographs of marble sculptures.
Partner at A24, founder of Behance, former Adobe Chief Product Officer, and writer of the Implications newsletter.
Trend forecaster behind 8 Ball and K-Hole, also interviewed by Alberto Cuadros for Culture Slop.
Artist whose 1967 manifesto 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' Marioni cites as the official beginning of Conceptual art.
Goldman Sachs CEO (DJ D-Sol) Marx cites DJing Lollapalooza as a sign of culture's commercialization.
Apple co-founder Turner cites as the first to deploy countercultural branding strategically.
Creator of the Whole Earth Catalog; one of the first people McClintock consulted about Culture Slop.
Manosphere figure Marx frames as the end-point of the counter-counterculture.
Conceptual artist and curator; founder of the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco and 'The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art.'
Sculptor known for bricolage recreations of Modern icons; runs his studio as a startup.
Pearl Jam frontman whose anti-sellout ethos opens Blank Space; the hero image.
Conceptual artist cited as making instruction-based work.
Facebook founder cited as the slob-flex origin of quiet luxury and Silicon Valley dress codes.
Political theorist whose The Life of the Mind frames thinking as dependent on appearance and plurality — Cy Canterel uses Arendt to argue an LLM's vector space is an 'areality.'
Sociologist of liquid modernity; his Wasted Lives ('to know is to choose... the product is separated from waste') opens Cy Canterel's ontology of slop as the factory of knowledge.
Pop icon whose Max Martin–penned "…Baby One More Time" Jason Yuan invokes as the model of a "catchy to lots of people" universal hook.
Jazz saxophonist and bebop innovator; among the music Matt McCormick draws on as the armature for his studio practice.
Artist and curator behind ProblemChild Advisory — a conceptual curatorial practice that treats the online repost as an aesthetic gesture, mounting concise group shows in LA and NY.
Painter and one of Connor Hayes's favorite artists, who built the artist-in-residence program at Facebook; the figure through whom Hayes and McClintock first connected over visual art.
Astrophysicist quoted by Cy Canterel on the opacity of the quantum world — 'something unknown is doing we don't know what' — applied to the radical opacity of LLM interiors.
Designer and guest on Soleio's show First of Kind, Season 2.
Head of Design at Stripe; guest on Soleio's show First of Kind, Season 2.
Ruscha's friend who drove out to California with him in 1956; aspiring insurance actuary turned musician/comedy writer.
Industrial designer who, with Naoto Fukasawa, defined the 'Super Normal' object — quality that becomes invisible by doing its job well.
Designer behind Cursor's product. Soleio calls Cursor "a spirit guide living inside your VS Code" and praises Ryo Lu's insistence that the tool not feel like a black box.
Fine-art book printer Ruscha worked for to learn hand typesetting while making his first artist books.
Programmer, activist, and Reddit co-founder who helped build the Open Library and championed public access to the public domain. Prosecuted for downloading academic articles, he died by suicide in 2013; the Internet Archive holds Aaron Swartz Day in his memory.
Author and activist who coined the term 'enshittification' and co-wrote Chokepoint Capitalism on how a handful of platforms capture creative markets.
Computer scientist, co-founder of Thinking Machines Corporation, where Kahle worked on massively parallel supercomputers and the idea of a 'global brain.'
Inventor whose hypertext and collaborative-computing work ('The Mother of All Demos') is invoked by Kahle as part of the original vision for interconnecting human knowledge.
American painter whose 1914 canvas 'Soir Bleu' — figures and a clown under colored lanterns — opens Marcus Bösch's essay on ambient atmosphere and absorbed ambiguity.
Machine-learning pioneer cited by Quentin Hardy as echoing Newton's desire to transcend the self through superintelligence.
Scholar who argues we are entering a 'vibocracy' — public life organized not around shared facts but around resonance: what feels right, what spreads, what sticks.
Net-art pioneer whose Bad Information used the Art Com network on the WELL to deliberately return wrong answers as an art project.
Curator of MoMA's landmark 1970 Information show, which theorized information as a medium for conceptual and information-age artists.
San Francisco new-media and conceptual artist represented in David Senior's SFMOMA Library ephemera selects.
Photographer of Fred Turner's portrait, courtesy of Stanford University.
Philosopher who popularized the concept of 'epistemic exhaustion' in 2023 — the cognitive and emotional overwhelm that leads people to disengage from evaluating what is true.
AI pioneer and co-founder of MIT's AI Lab, where Brewster Kahle studied in the early 1980s.
Media theorist whose early media studies framed how MoMA Library books entered under architecture, design, and media — a lens for the Whole Earth Catalog show.
The committed alchemist and color obsessive Keynes called 'the last magician' — a central figure in the Rodenbeck-Hardy conversation on alchemy and AI.
Coined 'hypertext' and conceived Project Xanadu, an early vision of a universal, interlinked document repository that Kahle cites as a forerunner of the web-as-library.
Engineer whose 1945 essay 'As We May Think' proposed the Memex, a personal device for storing and linking all of one's books and records — a founding vision of hypertext and the digital library.
Co-founder of Avalanche magazine, the all-interview artist publication of the post-1960s political moment that influenced Andrew McClintock's SFAQ.
Global gallery representing Ed Ruscha. New York, LA, London, Paris, Hong Kong.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Major Ruscha holdings.
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ruscha retrospective and permanent collection.
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Ruscha in the permanent collection.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Directed by Max Hollein since 2018.
San Francisco Arts Quarterly. Original Ruscha interview by Andrew McClintock.
Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). Where Ruscha studied after moving to LA in 1956.
American magazine. Charlie Warzel's home base. Referenced in Kyle's essay.
Kyle Chayka is a staff writer. Filterworld author. Key voice on algorithms and taste.
The Met's medieval art branch in Fort Tryon Park, Upper Manhattan.
Cited by Kyle: "proud to have no reason" — nihilistic violence reporting.
Cited by Kyle: "Bella Ciao" — fascist aesthetics in political violence.
Cited by Kyle: "Christian nihilism" taking over American life.
Cited by Kyle: "right lacking a philosophy" — Rufo, Yarvin, political nihilism.
Cited by Kyle: "everyone is content" — the collapse of creator and audience.
Cited by Kyle: "quitting social media" — the opt-out generation.
Cited by Kyle: "arts killed by AI" — the ruins of human creativity.
Cited by Kyle: Skarsgård on AI, Robin Williams, Lars von Trier at the Oscars.
Publisher of Super Normal by Fukasawa and Morrison. Referenced in Kyle's essay.
Venture firm Dylan invokes as the blue-chip equivalent in his art-as-angel-investing analogy.
Independent film, TV, music, and publishing studio based in New York where Scott Belsky is a partner.
Software company where Scott Belsky served as Chief Product Officer through 2024.
Tech company where Eugene spent two decades on Jony Ive's design team, working on the iPod Nano and AirPods.
New York venue that staged Tom Sachs's Space Program: MARS (2012).
Art magazine founded in San Francisco in 1962 that later moved to LA following the Light and Space movement.
Software company on whose Board of Directors Scott Belsky serves.
Global platform for ~60M+ creative professionals, founded by Scott Belsky in 2006 and acquired by Adobe in 2012.
London jewelry house; Eugene designed a vase with them.
University whose entrepreneurship and tech councils Scott Belsky serves on.
McClintock's contemporary art gallery and advisory in SF and LA, 400+ exhibitions since 2009.
UK arts center where Connor's first online curatorial project took place in 2003.
Business and design magazine where Elliot Vredenburg writes a column on creative direction and authorship.
Jason Yuan's social intelligence company built on using AI to help people see and understand each other.
Maritza Lerman Yoes's cultural marketing and creative studio focused on technology and culture.
Newspaper that has written about Mieke Marple's work.
New York museum holding Tom Sachs's work in its permanent collection.
Los Angeles museum holding Mario Ayala's work in its permanent collection.
Blue-chip international gallery opening in Palo Alto, following tech money into Silicon Valley.
Pharrell's skincare and wellness brand; a recent Eugene project.
Nonprofit digital library hosting every free, searchable Whole Earth Catalog issue.
New York gallery whose bookstore program, run by Matt Shuster, deals in rare books and artist publications.
Trend forecasting group (2010–16) whose 'Youth Mode' report coined the term normcore.
Art academy where Joseph Beuys taught from 1968-1974.
Peer-to-peer file-sharing service the writer used to download music onto his iPod.
Spanish leather house cited as the working case study of coherence without consistency under creative director Jonathan Anderson.
Jony Ive's design firm, which Eugene joined after Apple.
The first alternative art space in the US, founded by Tom Marioni in San Francisco (1970–1984).
Jason Yuan's previous AI startup, maker of Dot, a private personal AI forming a theory of mind.
New York contemporary art museum that has been Rhizome's partner and home since 2003.
The New Museum's incubator; Rhizome partners with it on the art and code track.
New York university where Elliot Vredenburg has spoken.
Los Angeles gallery that Mieke Marple co-owned from 2011 to 2016.
Footwear brand behind Tom Sachs's NikeCraft collaboration.
Trading floor TBPN wrapped in its branding for a remote broadcast.
Site of Marioni's 1970 action 'The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art.'
McClintock's seed-stage VC-backed art platform startup, shut down in 2024.
AI lab that acquired TBPN.
McCormick's clothing and objects line — the studio practice extended into another language.
Paris museum holding Tom Sachs's work in its permanent collection.
Media company; Dylan Byers and Julia Alexander cover the business of show business.
AI companion app Eugenia founded, grown out of a memorial chatbot for a late friend.
Thirty-year-old digital art organization and memory institution preserving internet art, affiliated with the New Museum.
Society of Art and Living Archives — Alberto Cuadros's nonprofit preserving California's historic artistic lineages.
The art school where Mario Ayala studied under Carlos Villa and Bruce McGaw.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which collected Funk-era Bay Area work and hosted Marioni's MOCA in 1979.
Streaming service referenced via its Discovery Weekly playlist as a symbol of frictionless, disposable music collecting.
University where Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication.
London museum holding Tom Sachs's work in its permanent collection.
Daily live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, acquired by OpenAI.
Los Angeles contemporary art museum where Jen Vanegas Rocha is Assistant Curator and which holds Ayala's work.
Three-year planned-obsolescent nonprofit arts centre in New York co-founded by Francesca Sonara.
Publisher of Turner's books, including From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
University of California, Los Angeles, where Mieke Marple earned a B.A. in Fine Art in 2008.
Brand and design practice based in New York, Stockholm, and Los Angeles, where Walia and Vredenburg are partners.
Media brand Marx cites as an engine of the anti-PC counter-counterculture.
Personal software platform (backed by Andreessen Horowitz) where anyone can build 'home-cooked apps' for an audience of one.
New York museum holding Tom Sachs's work in its permanent collection.
Stewart Brand's 'access to tools' publication, the conceptual ancestor of Culture Slop's Wormhole.
Print edition John and Jordi read cover to cover each morning.
Startup accelerator; Eugenia went through the W15 batch with her chatbot startup Luka.
New York gallery where ProblemChild Advisory has curated exhibitions.
The Los Angeles art school with a strict dress code that Ruscha first wanted to attend; its filled quota pushed him to Chouinard instead.
The auction house that sold Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69 million in 2021 — the first purely digital work it had ever offered.
AI code editor Soleio describes as "a spirit guide living inside your VS Code" — a tool that shortens the path between an idea and its production while staying scrutable.
Soleio joined Dropbox in 2011, first as adviser/investor then full-time for two years building the design group.
The de Young and Legion of Honor; Max Hollein served as Director and CEO from 2016 to 2018 before The Met, bringing contemporary artists into scholarly institutions.
Design tool Soleio backed early, part of his sustained investment in design tools and design education.
New-media research institute; Cy Canterel is an alumna. Studies how networked text and digital reading reshape knowledge.
Commissioned Stamen's interactive web edition of Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles photographic archive.
Technology company; one of the Met's digital partners cited by Max Hollein for collection access and imaging initiatives.
Los Angeles gallery where ProblemChild Advisory has curated exhibitions.
Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where Eric Rodenbeck lectures in architecture.
Apple's discontinued music player — for Cevallos, the last technology that felt valuable precisely because of what it couldn't do.
Early blockchain and crypto venture capital firm founded by Jehan Chu, based in Puerto Rico and Hong Kong, with investments in 300+ blockchain companies and funds.
Pioneering Bay Area artist magazine and art space founded by Carl Loeffler that launched one of the first online artist networks as an arts node on the WELL.
Annual benefit for The Met's Costume Institute; described by Hollein as the year's biggest popular-culture moment where fashion-as-art meets timely cultural debate.
Parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, where Connor Hayes leads the Threads product as Head of Threads.
Technology company partnered with The Met on digital and AI initiatives, named by Max Hollein alongside Apple and OpenAI.
Where Kahle studied under Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis in the early 1980s, building early AI and supercomputers.
Rhizome's online exhibition, book, and touring show retelling the history of net art through 100 exemplary works.
San Francisco alternative arts space; site of early live-electronics and experimental performance ephemera in the SFMOMA Library archive.
Cy Canterel served as a former visiting scholar at NYU, decoding systems of power and meaning across new media.
Nonprofit dedicated to artists' books and publications; host of the New York Art Book Fair, where David Senior organizes the Classroom program.
Social platform Aaron Swartz helped found; cited by Kahle as an example of platforms leveraging user-contributed content they get for free.
The Los Angeles gallery Alberto Cuadros founded, working closely with emerging contemporary artists before establishing SALA.
Nonprofit artist-centered organization in San Francisco's Mission District that Connor Hayes name-checks as part of the Bay Area art community he supports.
Eric Rodenbeck's San Francisco design and technology studio (founded 2001), a defining force in online mapping and data visualization.
Payments company where Katie Dill, a First of Kind guest, leads design.
Text as visual art. Ruscha's paintings of words — OOF, BOSS, HONK — as visual events, not language.
Art where the idea takes precedence over aesthetics. Duchamp through Ruscha's artist books.
Books as art objects. Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
Central thread in Kyle's essay. Political nihilism, post-ironic fatalism, culture without meaning.
Cory Doctorow's term for platform decay. Key concept in Kyle's essay on the internet as a condition.
Free public access to museum collections and cultural resources. Central to Hollein's vision for The Met.
The role of cultural institutions in public life. Hollein on museums as democratic spaces.
Artificial intelligence and its impact on creative work, curation, and cultural production.
The crisis of curation in algorithmic feeds. Kyle Chayka's Filterworld thesis. "There's no map."
Areality, language without a speaker, the epistemic solvent.
Affect-first epistemology — vibocracy, exhaustion, the feed as climate.
The algorithm as place — where attention is made and unmade.
Heirlooms, longevity, what we keep when nothing is permanent.
How institutions, the Internet Archive, and individuals decide what survives.
What dies when the algorithm flattens — and what gets built underneath.
The industrial-scale production of things that feel good; central frame of the conversation.
Ayala's lifelong practice of collecting ephemera and screenshots that feed his compositions.
Dylan's frame likening supporting emerging artists to writing early-stage founder checks.
Walia's concentric BRAND CONCEPT / PRODUCT / AUDIENCE / DESIRED CULTURAL IMPACT strategy framework.
Audience-interaction performance as a response to alienation and present-moment human connection.
Ayala's compositional method — layering found and drawn imagery, physically then digitally, into paintings.
Gathering objects, books, images, and memories as both a creative practice and a way to hold the energy of a thing.
Buying cheap, modular, or disposable goods 'just good enough for today' instead of objects meant to be passed down.
The ideological backlash against liberal inclusivity Marx traces from Poptimism to the manosphere.
Generative-pixel collection acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, cited by Belsky as art rooted in human lore and story.
Sustaining long-term access to digital culture via emulation, containerization, and web archiving.
Bay Area art movement shown by Peter Selz's Funk show, putting San Francisco on the US art map.
Interfaces generated from intent, heading toward subvocalization and brain-computer interfaces.
Exchanging value through giving rather than the market — central to Live Laugh Lube.
Objects whose survival depends on community care and maintenance — the iPod Classic as identity locket.
Solving a physical problem through form, distinct from sculpture's pure emotion.
The ceremony and ritual of gathering off-screen, becoming more valuable in a generative age.
Jason's thesis that the meaning of life is relationships — to love and be loved.
Internet-native art, the focus of Rhizome's collection and its Net Art Anthology initiative.
The idea that the internet is the network and each show or newsletter is a channel.
K-HOLE's 2013 trend concept of unstyled, fit-in fashion that mutated into quiet luxury.
Software shaped by its user — 'home-cooked apps' for an audience of one rather than mass-market, frozen products.
Scott Belsky's term for non-destructive, control-preserving creative pipelines that combine traditional and generative tools.
The competition between East Coast media and Silicon Valley, framing social media as decentralized news.
Storytelling at scale — hooks, slogans, and symbols that disseminate mass social coordination.
The stealth-wealth aesthetic Monahan traces to Silicon Valley's slob-as-flex dress code.
Social-art term Marioni says was coined twenty years after his beer-drinking action invented it.
The online community reviving iPod Classics through battery swaps and hard-drive upgrades as a rejection of mindless consumption.
The LA tech moment when startups housed creative workers outside the SF wage premium.
The tech industry whose self-conception as a counterculture Turner and Sun interrogate.
Art made through social action and communication; Marioni's 'Social Artist' lineage and the basis of the beer-drinking work.
Marx's thesis that the desire for social rank drives taste, identity, and constant change.
The movement behind the exquisite corpse and 'picture consequences' games Ayala adapts into solo painting.
Ritual practice where like becomes like; Tom Sachs's core operating philosophy.
Knowledge, refinement, and originality — and 'the new moat' in tech jargon Marx critiques.
The friction between Art, Tech, and Culture that Culture Slop treats as 'the point.'
Civic spaces beyond home and work, eroded by phones and commerce.
The Whole Earth Catalog ethos of giving readers doors into a subject's universe — Culture Slop's Wormhole concept.
Self-published subculture printed matter central to McCormick's early book-making in NYC and LA.
The mid-century movement Ruscha is associated with — deadpan signs, commercial imagery, and monosyllabic words on canvas.
The lineage of avant-garde artist magazines and self-publishing — from 1920s typography through Avalanche, Vision, La Mamelle, and zines — as a medium and a politics.
The feed as a panoptic threat — 'Smile! You're on camera :)' — where autonomy is wagered against perpetual monitoring.
The ancient dream of refining base matter into something higher — used as the lens for AI, fermentation, and dissolving guns into pigment.
The flattening of culture as algorithmic feeds push all users toward the same most-clickable content — the central thesis of Kyle Chayka's Filterworld.
Cy Canterel's term for the interior of an LLM: a space that structurally cannot meet the conditions for reality, producing language without perspective, situatedness, or a speaking subject.
Childhood card and memorabilia collecting — the SF Giants, the Card Barn, stats — as the origin of a lifelong collecting impulse.
Subvocalization, telepathy, and BCI as the endgame of UI — when the interface dissolves into thought itself. Jason Yuan: "what even is UI?"
The Met's founding belief that bringing the world's art to one place strengthens American civic life — a counterweight to nationalism.
Communication instrumentalized into media-stuff optimized for circulation rather than meaning — the contentified foundation on which, per Cy Canterel, the vector space of LLMs is built.
The 1960s Ferus Gallery generation of Los Angeles artists — slick, finish-fetish surfaces and West Coast cool — cited as a core influence on Mario Ayala's painting.
Server containerization, software emulation, and dynamic web archiving — the technical practices that sustain long-term access to digital culture.
A state of cognitive and emotional overwhelm from information overload and contested truth claims, leading people to disengage from evaluating what is true or relevant.
Hollein frames fashion as a fast medium of self-expression and visual culture — the Costume Institute treats it as a serious art form.
Pigment-making, ink, and food as slow alchemical processes in dialogue with microbes and cultures over months.
The difficulty of accessing and participating in culture — gathering signs, symbols, and understanding over time, eroded by frictionless feed design.
Art for the people — an anti-establishment, anti-gatekept platform carving space between maker and proprietor at the speed of endless data.
Art where the rules of a system are the work itself — from Sol LeWitt's instructions to Beeple's AI-driven, audience-activated kinetic sculptures.
The idea that the internet's original purpose was to interconnect all human knowledge into a single accessible intelligence — the Memex, Xanadu, and Engelbart's hypertext realized as a public library.
Dissolving firearms into artistic pigment — a slow-violence transmutation of America's most ubiquitous violent artifact.
Digital art that responds to and is co-authored by its audience — Beeple's bet that future art is dynamic and interactive rather than static.
The cultural drive to build for posterity versus making things that matter in the present moment — a tension running through Mieke Marple and Francesca Sonara's conversation.
Deep reading and humanities education as the foundation for critical cultural consumption versus passive entertainment.
The Los Angeles art movement that, Marioni recalls, drew Artforum south from San Francisco in the mid-1960s.
The craft of turning data into legible cartography and visual story — Stamen's core practice across science, climate, art, and history.
Tech's post-boom contraction: AI companies running lean, college grads facing higher unemployment, and AI-written applications fed into AI vetting systems for jobs no one is reading.
Non-fungible tokens as a market and medium for digital art — minting, seed phrases, and the question of whether the first NFT works were too static and one-way.
Michael Connor's framing for deciding what counts as part of a digital artwork — often requiring the preservation of entire software programs.
Designing an institution or project with a built-in sunset date as a deliberate counter to growth-at-all-cost — the founding premise of times nonprofit arts centre.
The 1960s movement Marioni frames as 'art about money' — the commercialism of the decade — and a precursor in his lineage of Pop → Minimal → Conceptual.
Kahle's vision for AI built by research and cultural-heritage organizations on the best public information, aimed at big public problems like climate, health, and disinformation — rather than enclosed by a few platforms.
The shared commons of works free for all to use, which Kahle argues is being starved by ever-lengthening copyright terms and platform licensing.
Defining an aesthetic through the online gesture of the repost — akin to sampling or DJing, the curatorial logic of ProblemChild Advisory's blog-style feed.
Tom Sachs's idea that a shoe, a video, a book, even an interview is all sculpture — everything carries the transparency and values of the object.
The capacity to model how others see us — the design premise behind Jason Yuan's DOT and HIVEMIND: software that reads people at high resolution to help them see each other.
The acceleration of news from daily editions to round-the-clock broadcasting — Monahan traces it to CNN's nonstop coverage of the first Gulf War, the moment that began hollowing out newspapers.
A condition in which public life is organized around resonance — what feels right, what spreads — rather than shared facts or shared disagreements.
Building one expanding narrative across mediums — books, paintings, objects, and clothing all as entries in the same ongoing scrapbook.
Meta's conversation platform. Powers the live Ed Ruscha interview feed via Threads API.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick's Substack newsletter. Pulled via API proxy in the Wormhole.
Visual platform. Culture Slop community hub (40K followers).
Microblogging platform. Secondary distribution channel.
Sean Monahan's Substack newsletter on what comes after the internet — normcore, vibe shifts, trend forecasting.
Nicolas Cevallos' newsletter on consumption, design, and what we keep.
Marx's Ghost newsletter on pop culture and its hidden mechanics.
Scott Belsky's monthly newsletter on technology, craft, and the evolution of creative work.
Tom Sachs's studio-as-startup app: 170,000 downloads, four million submissions.
Professional network where the subjects post and which Walia jokes is where something is always being born or dying.
Mieke Marple's ongoing project trading paintings with clowns and comedians via a gift economy.
Nikita Walia's Substack publishing 'This Is Your Brand with a Universe' and 'The TikTok Oracle.'
Eugene's record label; recent EP from Lauer with contributors including Khotin.
Short-video platform central to Walia's 'TikTok Oracle' and encoding/decoding diagrams.
Nicolas Cevallos' newsletter on consumption, design, and what we keep — source of the 160GB essay.
Private personal AI built by New Computer that forms a theory of mind and narrative memory to help users make decisions for themselves.
Soleio's podcast/video series on design, software, and taste. Featured guests include Ryo Lu (Cursor), Katie Dill (Stripe), and Everett Katigbak.
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link — early online community spun out of the Whole Earth Catalog that hosted Art Com and Judy Malloy's net-art piece Bad Information.
Ruscha's adopted home since 1956. The horizontal city — gas stations, parking lots, Sunset Strip.
The Met, MoMA, Gagosian, Tom Sachs studio. The other pole of the Culture Slop axis.
Culture Slop HQ. Missing Link Club on Maiden Lane. SFMOMA, SFAQ, Internet Archive.
Where Ed Ruscha grew up before driving Route 66 to LA. Origin point of the American vernacular.
Home of the 1960s counterculture and the '90s 'California ideology' of interconnection.
Where Jason Yuan grew up, immersed in the rhyme and rhythm of party propaganda.
Where Eugenia got her start as a journalist (Afisha) before coming to San Francisco with nothing.
Home of the Pompidou Center.
One of the three cities U.N.N.A.M.E.D. is based in, alongside New York and Los Angeles.
Extractive, deregulated state tech firms are relocating to for land, water, and power.
Where Marx is based and the vantage point for Ametora's Japan-American style history.
Where Marcus Bösch writes from — the breakfast room of the Waldhotel Bischofshol, at the edge of the forest next to the Autobahn.