CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. Catch last month’s episode with Callahan & Witscher’s Jack Callahan, where we dig into the Fenix Flexin saga and the future of AI-assisted music, the recent hipster discourse, and more.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “the marketplace of ideas”: the classical liberal belief that when ideas compete freely in the public square, the best ones will always rise to the top. But what does that “marketplace” look like in the media landscape of the 2020s, where ideas are distributed via personalized algorithmic feeds and the public sphere has fragmented into clusters of charismatic content creators with cult followings?

That’s the question that Doomscroll’s Joshua Citarella and New Models’ Carly Busta and Lil Internet tackle in “The Online Marketplace of Ideas,” an installation they put together for Strange Rules, a group show currently on display at the Palazzo Diedo at Berggruen Arts & Culture in Venice, curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herdon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Adriana Rispoli. Hint: It’s a room packed with over 400 t-shirts, hats, books, and other “dropship basics” from the personalities that have dominated the discourse in the 2020s, ranging from Joe Rogan and Call Your Daddy to Chapo Trap House, “Abundists” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Andreas Malm, Curvis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and Byung-Chul Han.

We brought on Josh and Carly to walk us through the exhibition, what bringing together all these objects reveals about the larger economic and geopolitical shifts this apparent ideological diversity obscures, the increasingly blurred line between being a content creator and being a politician, and our transition from the age of linear media into a neo-oral one. Plus: a cameo appearance from New Models co-founder Lil Internet, discussing his theory that this wild profusion of internet ideologies has become America’s primary cultural export.

Strange Rules is on display at the Palazzo Diedo in Venice until November 22, 2026

Subscribe to New Models on Substack or Patreon

Subscribe to Doomscroll on Substack and YouTube

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Mapping "The Online Marketplace of Ideas"

The Culture Journalist

Mapping "The Online Marketplace of Ideas"