AKA in the 20th-century as “the media,” delivered in such standardized formats as the “Sunday paper,” the “nightly news,” the “September issue.” Unlike decentralized Web. 2.0 media where narratives are algorithmically organized by filter-bubble with the digital platform capturing the value, legacy media refers to pre-digital media outlets that were the platform, selling information to the masses and, more lucratively, the masses’ attention to advertisers, making the informational “weather” in turn and paying writers royally for their work (under legacy media conditions, Condé Nast was known to pay upwards of $3 a word (or $15K for a top 5000 word feature). “The media” became “legacy media” in the 2010s. Today, you can find its former C-suite execs retired in the Hamptons, its Gen-X ex-editors greasing the urban-to-pastoral pipeline in rural enclaves everywhere, and its youngest staffers holding down NYC/London/Paris/Berlin leases from the ’00s by laying brick for Web 3 with Substacks and Patreon pods.
Carly Busta: Really the people who are part of this pod right now, Dan, Simon [Denny], Julian [aka LIL INTERNET], myself. I mean, before there was New Models, there was the four of us in various different configurations being like, what do we do with media? What do we do with art? What do we do with the state of discourse? I was at Texte zur Kunst and getting a lot of top down blowback for speaking about the way that discourse was changing in the online space, addressing forms of visual and linguistic creative production that didn't fit neatly into the legacy art world. And we felt like, okay, there has to be another space to address some of these changes. And out of that we got New Models.
