Follow â> Joshua Citarella on Substack
In recent episodes, youâve heard us mention the project we created this spring with Joshua Citarella (host of the Doomscroll podcast), together with the spatial design studio sub, for âStrange Rulesâ at Palazzo Diedo, Venice. On this episode, we chat with Josh about this work.
The exhibition, which was curated by Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli, presents practices that engage with the âprotocol layerâ â in other words, the rules that determine how culture is created, transmitted, remembered.
In addition to the audio, we also share our collective notes on the work (see below). Stay tuned for a follow-up subscriber-only post with BTS from the making-of.
The Online Marketplace of Ideas (2026) is an expansive survey of present and recent Internet culture. Today, alt-media has become quantitatively larger than legacy publications. As a result, any consensus or âmainstreamâ has fragmented into a chaotic digital landscape. The cultural and political fringe is now co-mingled with the establishment. Challengers have become incumbents and vice versa.
Contributors to this artwork range from niche bloggers and anonymous memers to established podcasters, artists, scholars, and even politiciansâa kind of twenty-first-century accidental avant-garde operating beyond the norms and structures of legacy media. With few exceptions, all items exhibited as part of this bazaar were purchased online without the knowledge of their creators.
Created by Joshua Citarella & New Models (Caroline Busta & Lil Internet) with spatial design by subâs Bill Bellingham & Giulia Domeniconi led by Christopher Blohm and Niklas Bildstein Zaar, The Online Marketplace of Ideas brings traces of the web 2 protocol into the physical world.
The installation includes more than 400 pieces of creator merch (t-shirts, hats, and other drop-ship basics), printed matter (books, journals, zines), and ephemera (snus containers, Modafinil blister packs, mewing gum, etc), plus a few artworks (e.g., Simon Dennyâs Extractor boardgame, Tibor Dietersâ Delft Pol/der Tiles, Jenn Leung & Daniel Felsteadâs GLP-1 Ozempi plush toy). Here, items that would rarely intersect in information space have physical contact: A Call Her Daddy baby doll tee hangs opposite a Joe Rogan Experience shirt thatâs draped over Charlie Kirkâs MAGA Doctrine. Nick Landâs Fanged Noumena shares a shelf with Ezra Kleinâs Abundance below a Chapo Trap House hat. The bazaar displays the canon of accelerationist writings and maps the memeplex of ideas that drives attention and ideology on social media. Shown together, these objects convey the cultural and political incoherence of the present moment: infinite consumer choice with limited or no political agency.
Yet the longer one looks, contrasting editorial outlets appear to brand their merch and books with similar graphic motifs; and to share common typefaces, colorways, and object forms (DTG printed Gildan tees, machine-embroidered Yupoong hats). These identical modes of on-demand production and just-in-time delivery evidence an unseen relay of logistics churning beneath the digital content layer. Across the political spectrum, the webshops of ideologically disparate channels are linked to the same physical warehouses (in Texas, Ohio and elsewhere) via e-commerce storefronts often built using the same Shopify backend. Through the leveling structure of the bazaar, all of these political positions can be conceptually containerized as the singular output of a set of shared protocols and supply chains. While recent commentary has focused on the controversial opinions of online personalities, it has often overlooked the protocol-level reorganization of work and materials in the world. Seen in totality, the installation points not toward a single dominant voice or ideology but toward a specific overarching systemic hegemony.
In an era defined by downward mobility and the digitization of culture, people under 45 have carried far fewer cultural artifacts with them through life than previous generations. Whereas Boomers purchased property or other physical assets, younger generations find todayâs home prices unaffordable and material goods increasingly disposable (if not also lower-quality). Whereas Gen-Xers might have amassed valuable record collections through discerning taste, Millennials (limited by the logistics of a nomadic work/life and prohibited, anyway, from drilling shelving into the walls of their forever-rented flats) have streaming subscriptions linked to cloud-based archives. Merch is where the immaterial experience of web 2 culture touches down in lived human space. It is the physical precipitate of the âdigitalâ layer. As an analogue display technology, it signals identity in social contexts the screen cannot reach. These printed objects are worn by community members as proof of belonging and to represent the strength of their collective belief. Ultimately, merch is a form of consensus technology and, for many of us, it may be the only kind of cultural artifact that we physically pass on to our kids.
The recent flipping of âfringeâ and âmainstreamâ also signals a larger transformation that is shaping the twenty-first-century. Over the past decade, message boards have evolved into think tanks, content creators have become political actors, and platforms have pioneered new forms of sovereignty. Todayâs media streams are the signals organizing new social formations. The content and connections we make online have become the fertile ground from which new political organizations, guilds, universities, and/or societies are slowly emerging.
The design of online spaces guides human interaction and shapes the possible political positions it engenders. When futaba.php (the original source code for 4chan and related message boards) was first deployed in Japan, it seeded a far-right movement there. A similar extremism developed in the US following the rise of 4chan. Wherever the futaba.php code has taken hold, it has, through its rules of engagement, produced a particularly virulent cultural formation. As a work for this bazaar, Lil Internet printed every line of futaba.php on a B2-size poster, titling it Protocol Weapons of the 21st Century. If code alone can so efficiently conduct society now, society needs new rules, platforms, and institutions capable of productively engaging on this most consequential protocol level.
Already, journalists and critics have dubbed 2024 the âpodcast election.â In todayâs digital landscape, candidates compete for prime spots on alternative programs. In certain instances, politicians have become successful content creators themselves, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom or President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum, among many others.
Stranger still, two previously distinct social forms appear to be converging: media outlets and political organizations. Within todayâs information networks, they are increasingly structurally identicalâboth communicating with their audience/constituents via the same publishing infrastructure and attracting the attention of their fan/voting bases through the same memetic strategies. Historically, media channels have shaped democratic opinion through carefully crafted content published by registered organizations supported by annual dues. But direct revenue from rolling subscriptions is starting to eclipse this legacy model, and content is changing in turn. (The Democratic Socialists of America used to charge $27 annually but now bills $5 a month, just like a podcast.) At the same time, content creators (podcasters, streamers, Substackers) are demonstrating a greater fundraising capacity than many individual political candidates. Notably, the conversion rates of creator communities, when called to take political action (donate, vote, canvass, protest), are generally outperforming those of legacy institutions.
As an artwork, The Online Marketplace of Ideas is not concerned with individual political positions or speculating on which ones will succeed or fail. Rather it just wants to make viewers understand, in their bodies, that more or less all politics in the platform age are downstream of a shared, hegemonic systemâa protocol stack that hyper-efficiently organizes belief, materials, and politics into atomized channels while remaining all but invisible to the publics it conducts.
Note: Our friend Kevin Munger, author of The YouTube Apparatus and Generation Gap, wrote about the bazaar on his Substack. We highly recommend it.
