Founder of the Meme Studies Research Network (MSRN) and doctoral researcher in sociology Idil Galip explores how she started an international and interdisciplinary research network for scholars who study memes to collaborate and organize. 

Author of TikTok Boom and journalist Chris Stokel-Walker explores the strategy behind TikTok’s explosive rise in the west, the differences between Silicon Valley and Chinese technology, and how the features of TikTok are designed to mirror people’s performances back onto themselves, allowing them to feel like they are part of a community.

Writer for Uprising: A Guide from Portland and Bellingcat and a researcher for Behind the Bastards and Worst Year Ever, Garrison Davis explains the evolution of “White Boy Summer” from Chet Hanks music video to white supremacist meme.

PhD Candidate in Cultural Analysis & Theory, artist, educator, and founder of Vital Thought, Emily Gillcrist, shows us how the 2008 recession led to universities devaluing the humanities — and how Vital Thought is working to make the critical humanities accessible to everyone.

In the second of a special three-part series, Jamie and Josh explore how the rise of citizen journalism combined with toxic troll culture gave rise to reaction reactionaries: The people who profit most from reacting to other people’s reactions.

Host of the Tech Won't Save Us Podcast and writer Paris Marx joins us to critically examine Silicon Valley’s approach to the gig economy and labor, what California’s Prop 22 could mean for the future of work, the outsourced, exploited, and hidden labor behind new robots and surveillance technologies, and approaches to worker solidarity.

In the first of a special three-part series, Jamie and Josh explore how "mainstream media" became a pejorative term through the convergence of the narrative structure of reality television, early-YouTube web series, Gamergate, professional wrestling, and the false victimhood narratives created by influencers with millions of followers.

Feels Good Man filmmakers Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini discuss how they told the story of Pepe The Frog from Boys Club to misappropriation by the far-right after the 2016 election, what it meant for Pepe the Frog to enter the U.S. Capitol building, and why we need to broaden the scope of our conversations around NFTs and digital art.

Tom Syverson, author of Reality Squared: On Reality TV and Left Politics, explores how reality television shapes our social and political lives, and explains how we can confront today’s postmodern condition.

Jamie and Josh explore Tucker Carlson's targeted harassment campaign of Taylor Lorenz and his cycle of manifesting mainstream boogeymen, a brief history of digital culture journalism and why it's essential, and leveling power so we can all negotiate meaning, together.

Artist, curator, and author of Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell explores the relationship between gender, technology, and identity, finding liberation through the glitch, the complex history of virality, and her forthcoming book, Black Meme.

Cultural theorist, CyberPsychologist, and marketing strategist Matt Klein discusses the most frequently reported cultural trends for 2021 and calls for a Rosetta Stone for Generation Z to help different understand the emotionally affective features of memes.

Creative, futurist, and mad scientist Lucas Rizzotto explains how he's building the future through augmented and virtual reality.

Educator, musician, Classics PhD and first-year law student, Brett Wisniewski joins us to discuss how our language isn’t always able to meet the challenge of describing our social reality, the difficulties pre-digital institutions face in a digital media environment, and the forms of human expression that lay outside of commodified spaces.

All Tech is Human founder, TikTok Content Advisory Council member, speaker, and writer David Ryan Polgar explores how he’s connecting the dots between individuals, industries, and universities to build the responsible tech pipeline.

Principal of Bread and Roses Digital and Executive Council at Campaign Workers Guild Aidan King shares his journey as a digital strategist after he founded r/SandersforPresident in 2013 to launching Bread and Roses Digital, a democratically-owned digital agency working to support leftist causes, organizations, candidates, and nonprofits.

Intelligent Mischief Founder and Creative Director Terry Marshall and Artistic Director Aisha Shillingford explain how they've successfully integrated satire into their civic media projects. How can we begin to address institutional injustice and tragedy when reality, itself, is absurd?

Jamie and Josh explore how a lack of agency is central to conspiracy theories, the commodification of extremism and nostalgia, and the fictions that bookend the last half-decade of electoral politics in the United States.

Director of Curiouoser Institute and writer of, "A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon," Reed Berkowitz explains how QAnon is similar to an experience fiction (XF) game — and how the designers of QAnon created a game that plays people.

Journalist and author of "Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us," David Neiwert explains how the process of learning on digital platforms enables people to become radicalized and fall into conspiracy thinking, the limits of conspiracies, and how we can begin to address a national crisis.