Do Your Own Research: Is This Podcast the Problem? w/ Joshua Citarella

**Richard** (0:30)
And that means you need to use Instagram or YouTube or maybe even have a merch store. And so the logistics networks sustain both your local variety of peculiar esoteric leftism, whatever that is, and the far right are the same.
Run by the same people, by the same companies, who profit from your beliefs, whatever they happen to be. Perhaps the seeming ideological freedom of liberalism is just window dressing for a process that continues regardless. But even in the supposed free marketplace of ideas, that's where you are right now, one ideology is clearly winning. It's the ideology of the networks themselves, of the infrastructure, of the logistics that brings you that political diversity, techno libertarianism. And so maybe it's time to get real, to get sober, to tune out all the ideological noise and focus on the one thing that seems to truly matter, our confrontation as workers with capital. My guest today is artist Joshua Citarella, host of the Doomscroll podcast and founder of the community Do Not Research. Although of course you should go and do your own research. He cut his teeth trying to understand the ideologies of the present, the synthetic nonsense of a terminally online world.
But since then, he's sharpened his analysis. And maybe he thinks now it's time to lock it. This is the final episode of Series 1 of Do Your Own Research.
Please suggest in the comments who you think we should get on for Series 2 Any general improvements we can make to the show? And I will see you back here in a few weeks for Series 2 This episode connects to my conversations with Trevor Paglin on the psyops that control what we can and cannot even see. And of course, to the episode with Quinn Slabodian and Ben Tarnoff on the Musk Universe. The map, as ever, is freely available online on the Novara Media website. The link for that is in the show notes. Joshua Citarella, welcome to Do Your Own Research.

**Joshua Citarella** (2:39)
Thank you for having me. Good to see you again.

**Richard** (2:41)
We last spoke on camera 2024 I think it was just after Donald Trump had been elected, he was president-elect, and we came to New York after having been in Pittsburgh for election night.
You took us up to your Manhattan penthouse, and I think it was you, me, John Podesta, and the commandant of Antifa, who decided to become the liberal Joe Rogan. I think that's who it was.
The quartet. Yeah, and I just want to check in. How's it gone being the liberal Joe Rogan? 18-month mark, big milestone. How's it going?

**Joshua Citarella** (3:24)
Yeah, 18 months of doing the show. We're at almost, I think, the two-year mark of having started filming, because we started shooting, I think we did the first episode with Young Chomsky right around this time last year. So it really has been nonstop. It's been a kind of, you know, exciting, unpredictable ride. I guess I was optimistic or hopeful that we would have ended up here, but it was kind of difficult to envision all of the twists and turns along that path.
Yeah, I guess I have been to some degree disillusioned by solutions that I thought were maybe relatively easier for how to solve certain crises of media strategy and tactics and things like this, and certain political solves that I had been maybe more optimistic about, let's say, six years ago, eight years ago maybe when I started publishing. I also think that the media environment has significantly changed within that time.
The Clipper economy from streamers has really significantly shifted the landscape of where attention is moving. So yeah, the podcast dynamic or I guess the way that we're used to talking about these things even from just a few years ago, a lot of that terrain has really, really shifted. So yeah, we may need a democratic confederalist, Adam Friedman, something like this. I'm not sure what the solve is right now.

**Richard** (4:51)
And so what are the market forces underlying that shift? So you're talking about the move away from the long form podcast. Very sad for me, of course, somewhat sad for you as well. Into much more chopped up little bits of content that get presented in a scrolling format to people. And are not presented organically in the language of online media, but presented because there is certain market incentive. This is something that we've seen for sure on the right in the UK.
Lots of famed influencers. I don't know if this story touched you, but there was a story of a Sri Lankan AI slop engineer, basically, who ran a media empire mostly on Facebook, which was pumping out this kind of racist vial, largely against people who in lots of cases looked like him, against Indians or Sri Lankans or Pakistanis and so on in the UK. And yet it was immensely profitable for him. So how do you understand the market dynamics of that kind of shift? And is there just sort of a pure cynicism behind it?