[upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am Francis Zeier. And I'm still Daisy Alioto. Somehow af- [laughs] after all these years. Uh, Daisy, who are we speaking with today?
Today we're speaking with Dina Yago. She's an artist, writer, and a founding member of the trend forecasting group K-Hole.
She currently works at Cosmos, and I'm so excited to learn more about what they're doing with artists and creatives.
Um, it's been compared to Pinterest, but I think what they're doing is really different and innovative, and I don't think that they think of themselves as just another mood boarding app, I'll say that much. Yeah.
So I'm really interested to find out from her what's on the cutting edge there. So I'm doing a little dry January. Love a dry January, but as part of that- [laughs]... I also deleted the Twitter app from my phone.
That's... Well, are you logging in on Safari Daisy Alioto style? No. No. I, I, I've, I've... That's... No, but, I mean, I'm on my computer all day- Yeah... so I'm just looking at it on my computer.
Well, we're on day what? Six? We'll see what happens. Dry January. So w- I, I probably will inadvertently have a pretty dry January. I am sort of like- I feel like you're drier than I am in your daily life anyways.
Well, I don't live in the city, so I don't go out as much. Um, we don't keep alcohol at our home 'cause my husband's sober. So that's part of it, but I did, um... Kat sent me an extremely innovative Christmas present.
Um, she's always been an amazing gift giver. She sent me a carton, not a carton, yeah, a car- what is... Just a single box of cigarettes. This is, I'm revealing myself as only a social smoker, casual smoker.
[laughs] Yeah, a carton. So 20 cigarettes she sent you? No. What? How many- 'Cause-... are in a pack? A pack. 20. That's right. A pack. A pack. Yeah, that's 20 cigarettes. It's a pack.
She sent me a pack, not a carton, a pack of Chinese cigarettes. Hm. Gold foil filter, whole pack's in Chinese. I'm like- Hm... looking them up on cigarette Reddit to figure out what's the vibe.
And then in there she put in- Cigarette Reddit.
[laughs] As a reference to Paula's, um, magazine article about pe- people who collect matchbooks, she put in an as- sort of assortment of matchbooks that she had collected from her favorite local places in Houston where she lives.
Hm. Oh, that's awesome. Is that not the most thoughtful, cool gift that you've ever heard of in your life?
So what I'm gonna tell, a- if you're listening now, listener, if this is, you know, for the cigarette smoker in your life, what I'm gonna tell you to do, take your iPhone, pause this, your, your...
if you're listening to this on your iPhone, hold down the Siri button and say, "Siri, in 10 months," or whatever, "Siri, on December 1st, 2026, remind me to buy a pack of cigarettes and collect a lot of matchbooks," for the cigarette smoker in my life.
Listener, you could steal this really, as Daisy said, innovative gift idea for your Christmas this year. Now is the time to get ahead. Yeah. Did I tell you what I did for people? By the way, did you get my card? I did.
It was- Okay, good... really nice to receive. Thank you, Daisy. Um- It's been a pleasure potting with you too. Okay, g- um, I, I just keep it simple.
Actually, no, it's really my handwriting's gotten so bad that, like, if I try to write a lot on the card I, I fuck it up and then I have to- Mm-hmm... throw the cards out.
And then it's like, and then you're gonna go try to edit a little bit of it, but then you're smudging your ink- Yeah... and like the, the, the- And I'm like, haven't used white out since I was like 13 years old.
White out. I forgot that existed. Um, I got everyone, uh, well, not everyone, I got some of my friends and Dirt contributors, um, these tiny little pewter wishbones. Hm.
They're just like a little like tchotchke talisman- Oh, I love that... 'cause I was like, oh, you could put it in your purse or, like, put it somewhere with your little things.
Like, I know a lot of people carry around like a rock or something, and, um, I just wrote, like, "I hope all your wishes come true in like 2026" or something. You know, I actually broke...
I did a little wishbone break about a month or two ago. Really? I, I ha- somehow I had never roasted a chicken in my life. I've bought rotisserie chickens. I- That's surprising to me...
I'll admit on record that I have a rotisserie chicken in the fridge r- as we speak. I will, I will use it for lunch later. But- Oh, fucking love a rotisserie chicken...
yeah, I had never, I had never roasted a chicken myself, um, and I did. And actually I got it at the, uh, Asian grocer in my neighborhood. And so they, it's from a poultry
farm, urban poultry farm down in Sunset Park- Mm-hmm... so it has the feet and like the whole he- head and neck- Mm-hmm... still on. Um, so, you know, that was part...
I didn't, I did not- Was it pre-brined or seasoned or anything? No, no, no, no, no. Okay. I just, I just did a little like... I, I didn't even really brine it, I just salted it.
But anyways, I, I did break the wishbone with my fiancé, and I, I did, I was on the receiving end of, of the wish. And did your wish come true? I don't remember what I wished for, but I, I- Fair enough...
I think it did probably. [laughs] One can only hope. Uh, I woke up in the strangest way this morning to the low hum of helicopter blades over my neighborhood. No.
And I'm kind of in like a third asleep status, you know, where I'm not really awake, but I can, I... just, like, I'm registering this noise. And then my fiancé, like, kind of shakes me, wakes me up,
and she says, "There's this fire." I looked up on the, the neighborhood subreddit- Mm-hmm... to trying to find what's going on, 'cause she smelt, she smelled smoke as well.
And so just a few blocks from my house, there was this five alarm apartment fire. I think four buildings burned, 30 families displaced. Mamdani was there earlier giving a, a press conference. It was, it was that big.
But what's also... Oh, actually, w- really insane thing about this too is, so I think there was five firefighters injured, one civilian.
But one of the firefighters in the third floor, it's like a, these were, these are two by three, two apartments on each floor, three story- Mm-hmm... classic New York building.
But on one of the third floor apartments, there was an air conditioner in the window, and it fell on one of the firefighter's heads.
But what's crazy about this too, like, I wouldn't necessarily just think about- That's why you're not supposed to have those, I guess... and this wa- and by the way, I still smell a little bit of smoke in my apartment.
Yeah. But just three or four days ago, so the first Friday of the year, January 2nd that was, in my hometown, there was this big fire, and half of a block burnt down to like six businesses, a few apartments.
I think there was no injuries-Two cats did die, but what was so tragic too, for me, is maybe my favorite business ever, favorite local business ever, surely, also burned down. Northtown Books- Mm...
bookstore that's been there for 60 years. I've been going there my whole life. Uh, very few businesses, local businesses at least- Oh, good books... have had as big of an impact on my life and on who I am today.
I remember so many times going there when I was in town waiting for my parents to pick me up or waiting for some friends, and you just go and you sit and you read a little while.
I would go, like, every time I was back visiting and buy a book, and they'd do that thing where, you know, every $100 you spend, you get 10% off on your next book.
And somehow it felt like every time I went they had that. And so we'll see. I hope that they come back. But all of this to say, PSA,
if, you know, if you're a renter, make sure you have renter's insurance for this kind of thing. Yep. Make sure that you're not overloading your outlets with space heaters, this kind of thing.
Very crazy for me personally to have this fire kind of right by where I live now and then also- That's really sad... in my hometown in just a few days.
If you need an air filter for inside your apartment, I have one that we got, um, when Ben was living next to a smoker that's pretty good. I'd not thought of this but I can send it your way.
When you say, like, when you said next to a smoker, do you mean, like, of, of, of cartons of cigarettes? Or do you mean like a barbecue? [laughs] Uh, [laughs] it... Important, um, important clarification.
Somebody who smoked in their apartment. Oh, okay. Yeah. And it was just a lot. A wh- yeah, we do, we do luckily have an air purifier. Okay. And so it's, uh, it's off right now so I can podcast.
So I am suffering a lower air quality right now for the sake of this podcast, but- Right... rest assured- Well, they always double as white noise machines... we'll be right back on. Anyways, [sighs] Dina's here.
Let's talk to her. [upbeat music] What was the best thing that you got, uh, for Christmas, Dina? I went to go see Waiting for Godot with Keanu Reeves. Mm. Oh, that's incredible. Yeah.
I went with my mom and my husband, and it was excellent. Did Godot ever show up? I... You know, I don't wanna spoil it- [laughs]... for anybody. It was- Okay, yeah, no... so- No spoilers...
I, I, I was, as soon as you said that, I was waiting with bated breath to hear what you said because I, I have one other friend who'd been and, and they were disappointed. Really? Mm-hmm.
Well, I just learned yesterday that there was a version that Steve Martin and Robin Williams did back in the '90s, which I'm curious about, but it sounds like it would be a little bit more hammy than this one, which was Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter from- Mm...
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That's a tough act to follow, and especially with, like, Robin Williams being gone kind of before his time. Yeah.
I could see how, like, in retrospect, that theater run would probably take on this aura of, like... You know what I mean. Yeah. There was a bit of, like, Gen X nostalgia.
They hammed it up in a few moments during the, like, back-to-back ding-a-ling. Yeah. The other famous- For all who attended for that reason... the other famous actors on Broadway
event, play, that I've been getting a lot of ads for for the past few weeks is Dog Day Afternoon with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Bachrach, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, and- Marnie's husband, that's how I think of him...
there you go. Yeah. [laughs] But him and John Bernthal. Some people think of him as, like, the Bear cousin. I will always think of him as Marnie's husband. The Bear cousin. Yeah. I was tempted. Forgot about that.
I've not bought tickets, but that's... I like that movie. Um, I'm not sure... You know, I don't know how you replace Al Pacino in that movie, but... Dog Day Afternoon.
As a Windsor Terrace resident, that hits close to home. It was filmed on Prospect Park West. There you go. There you go.
Dina, so we obviously are so excited to jump in and talk about what you're working on, but Francis and I had one point of business that we didn't quite get to in the intro, which is I'm not sure if you saw the news of Will Welch departing GQ to work for Pharrell.
Um, but we were saying this is, like, if you'd... You needed to have, like, a first little media,
trad media moment of the year, this is, like, a nice one to start on because it invites a lot of speculation of his replacement.
Um, you know, we have a lot of conversation right now about, [laughs] uh, prediction markets, and it's always nice to see the, um [clicks tongue]
the informal prediction market of media Twitter get fired up over something like this. Do you agree, Francis?
The, so prediction markets, I am trying to find as we speak, I wish I'd, I'd thought of this earlier, if Polymarket or Kalshi have a who will be the next editor of GQ- Mm. Okay... up there yet.
Because Daisy, you have speculated multiple times, I think, on mic on this podcast, there's one name in mind. So this is a great... If you're, if you're hearing this and, you know, you're looking this up and the odds are
still really good, I think Daisy has a mind for it. Yeah, who's your bet? Well, look, I have to root for my boy Sam Hine. We go way back. Um, I started, when I started a blog in college, Sam was my successor.
[clicks tongue] And so I feel like our destinies are inextricably linked in the media industry. Um, but I will say, I think the funniest possible outcome would be if Pharrell became the editor in chief of GQ. Yeah.
Oh my God. I feel like working for someone like Pharrell, you're getting into the situation that many people are in with, like, the, the Taylors and the Charlies that... You know, the man probably sleeps in Tupperware.
He, I, I imagine he will exist forever. [laughs] It's like taking a job for an immortal. You may- Totally... be working for a celebrity who will still have resonance for my grandchildren, for better or for worse.
Right, it's like buying a tortoise that outlives you. Yes, exactly. It's, it's a great parent. Needless to say also, like, the tall hats. Mm-hmm. Like, is Welch gonna have to wear, like, a really- What is in that hat?
... really big hat?First order of business, hats So I cannot find a next editor of GQ- Well, you gotta start it... entry. I could start it.
What I could find- You could be a market maker, Francis I could be the market maker. You know, then, and, look, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be podcasting here if I was, you know?
I'd be relaxing on, in my penthouse in Miami or something like that. Oh. Well, Dina, I saw something. I don't know if [laughs]
I feel like this is not too sensitive for you, but I saw a passing reference to K-hole this morning on Twitter, and I g- I don't have the tweet queued up, but it w- it was a, a tweet about, um, being the first to assign the name to a trend- Right...
and how this had become a sort of career hack for people. Um, somebody called it, like, career arbitrage, and then somebody was like, "Yeah, look at what happened to the people that coined normcore." But, like, famously
from having talked to some of early K-hole people individually, it actually was not in any way the financial boom that people assumed that it was. Do you...
I mean, I don't know how much you wanna talk about that, but I think it, it's interesting, like, as somebody... I've also, like, coined certain things.
Nothing as big as normcore, but it is definitely one of those things where the assumption of brand security for getting to cr- creating something that goes viral in that way is way out of proportion to the reality of what you actually get, which is probably, like, an influx of new clients, and 99% of them are going to waste your time.
Yeah. There was, like, a delightful rumor going around back in 2013 when it happened, which was that we were all millionaires, uh, which was hilarious- Oh, congrats...
given the actual state of affairs, um, as- Well, I've been Mercury re- Retrograde, so I know that that's not true. Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. Woefully, um, no. My life in Berlin was a little bit more hand-to-mouth than that.
But no, I mean, I think that I've got so many thoughts, I don't really know. It will not make you rich.
And I feel like it ends up becoming, like, a managerial job of kind of claiming authorship, and that becomes almost, like, yeah, just a, an extracurricular that you end up having to do, which I've, I've never had any interest in doing.
Um, so [laughs] fully, you know- Playing like hall monitor on the internet. Exactly.
It's a very unsexy thing, and I think that it just sparks a lot of kind of infighting and, you know, claiming of ideas that, you know, are nebulous and move fluidly
whether or not you were the first to acknowledge something in print. That's such a good point. Like, I feel like the, um, asserting your IP aspect of being a creative or artist, like,
is such a time suck, and it's also, like, ramped up to kind of an impossible point.
Like, I think there's a lot more people just throwing up their hands and saying, "Whatever," like, "AI appropriated my aesthetic," because they realize that, like, the alternative is to give what could be your creative energy towards fighting, um,
fighting to assert your, like, authorship. Yeah. It's like, do you wanna be, like, the four-square mayor of an idea? [laughs] No. [lip smacks] I know. It's like people need to eat, but, um- What is the clout in that?
Yeah. But I do think that, you know, as long as you were... I, I would much rather be, like, a more meaningful contributor to the discourse than somebody that coined the term first. Yeah.
I honestly think it's probably a bit of a U-curve too where it's like
when you're just starting out, there's probably some advantage in policing people from ripping off your ideas, and then the middle of the curve is, like, not worth it.
And then when you're, like, really successful and rich and you can just send a cease and desist [laughs] that it kind of becomes worth it again. True. True. But I'm just... This is me. I'm just riffing.
Um, we'll, we'll come up with a real theory and a, and a pithy name for it another day. I, uh, I was reading this book that I got through...
Like, at work we do a sort of secret Santa, but it's just books, and I was gifted this- Secret book... secret book. [laughs] Well, precisely.
But I was gifted this book that's about this feather thief, this guy who, like, made fly fishing lures, and he stole these- Oh, I remember this story... mm-hmm. He's...
Yeah, he stole these birds from the British Natural History Museum. And so I started it last night, and the first chapter is about this guy, AR Wallace. I forget what the first two initials stand for.
But he was, he's 13 younger, 13 years younger than Darwin, and he has this whole story where he, he was younger, and he went to the Amazon and collected thousands and thousands of samples of birds and insects and etc.
And he's on the ship back to England. Ship catches fire. He loses all this.
So he has to remake his name, and he goes to Malaysia, Southeast Asia in general, to amass a collection of bird, and es- especially, uh, birds of paradise.
He was the first person to, to, to get samples of birds of paradise since, like, 300 years earlier, etc. But the reason I bring this up is there's this bit where he and Darwin
discover this idea of the survival of the fittest at the same time, and he writes Darwin a letter because he's...
The way the book frames it is he's seeing all these different varieties of bird of paradise and how did they evolve to have such an unoptimized, like, there's no predators, etc.
And so he's coming up with this idea and he writes Darwin a letter talking about it, and then the book says... It, it does a lot of dramatizing, like, you know, inserting the feelings of these historical figures.
But talking about how Darwin read it, and he's kind of sweaty. He's like, "I have been working on this idea, working on a, a book for, for years."
And he goes to the council of British scientists or, or whatever, and in the end, he makes, takes claim to the idea, and this council of, of guys decides that he has claim to the idea.
And this other guy, Wallace, never really [lip smacks]... He's fine with it.
But it was just an interesting case of this-Like this group deciding who gets intellectual property when these two people were coming to the same idea at the same time, and then who knows who A.R. Wallace is, right?
I can't even remember his, his first initials- Didn't he rob the British Museum though because he couldn't find some of the birds in the wild? Different guy. Different guy. The- there's like- No way... the, the... So
this guy's- I didn't know that, um-... samples were robbed by the guy... feather autism was so widespread in the general population. [laughs] Yeah. Let me see. Edwin- Yeah... I think his name was, like, Edwin Rike.
Okay Guy who robbed birds. I mean, I feel like, yeah- Edwin Rist... it's, like, synchronicity and collective consciousness, not to go down the woo-ness of it, but yeah, of course.
People are kind of coming to the same conclusions based on, on the same inputs and signals and whatever's happening in the world at the same time.
I feel like maybe feathers were sort of like the Chinese peptides of- Yeah... the findacicle. You know what I mean?
Well, for, for this guy specifically, Edwin Rist, who he's, according to Wikipedia, he's now 37 to 38 years old. It was in 2009. He stole 299 rare or extinct bird specimens in order to craft artificial flies.
So his obsession, his insanity was literally just around making fly fishing lures. Incredible. Well, speaking of fly fishing lures, [laughs]
that's, that's a really good hook for our next segment, which is, um, talking to Tina [laughs] It's a good hook. That was good. I do... I was gonna get there. Um, you've been working at Cosmos since the summer. Yes.
It's a discovery and curation platform that I actually use almost every day because, um, you guys built, like, an amazing resource for finding images in the public domain, which has been incredible, uh, for my work with Dirt, 'cause I like to use interesting imagery, but we can't always commission everything.
Um, and I do actually care about IP. [laughs] Um, you're also a founding member of Arena. Obviously, there's some similarities there. We've had Zane from Silk on the pod. Mm-hmm.
And I'm just curious, like, what's the culture of Cosmos? What is the thing in the category of platforms that are allowing people to
tag, organize, mark, save, um, revisit images that is kind of the Cosmos secret sauce? Yeah. I mean, I think of all of...
You know, obviously this is something that people have been doing since time immemorial- Mm...
and especially it's like there's so many platforms that have come before, which we will honor, that have kind of, like, sparked this sense of curation, creation through curation in a way. And I feel like what
very much, like, drew me into Cosmos, both with what they did with Public Works, which is what you're referring to, is it's the part of Cosmos that is all open access, kind of public domain imagery from the Met, from NYPL, different libraries like that.
Um, yeah. But kind of what pulled me in more was, like,
the wrapper of context around any individual image, which I have seen as, like, a widespread issue in visual culture, where people will take an image, they'll repost it on a different app.
They will get attribution as the poster, but everything's kind of stripped from its context.
You have to really care and do the deep diving to understand what photographer took an image, what publication it appeared in, what object is depicted in it.
So what really kind of, like, got me through the door in a big way is that they're running captions using AI to identify what, uh, the provenance of any image is.
And when you kind of, like, squint a little bit to see where that would be going, it would mean, okay, like, now all of a sudden all of the images on Cosmos, um, can be tagged in this way.
If I'm a photographer and people have uploaded my content to Cosmos, there will be a world in which all of that can be kind of sluiced into an owned and verified artist profile, which for me just felt like...
I think in my career I've been drawn towards these sort of, like, fundamental questions around technology. Like, before Cosmos, I was at The Browser Company working on reimagining a web browser. So
just thinking about something that would, like, actually tackle this issue of decontextualization was, like, super exciting to me, and is what I'm working on right now. When I think about... Yeah.
I feel like adding context to culture is a thread that really runs through your career, and as you were talking, I was remembering this awesome essay that you did that I think...
I can't remember if it lived in a Google Doc, but it was about Billie Eilish. Can you talk about- Yep... that essay there?
I feel like there's a lot of contextualization in that particular piece that I remember around pop culture at the time. Okay. So this is, like, a very 2020 story. But basically I watched the J.C.
Chandor, uh, filmmaker behind The Situation Room, um, and other political documentaries, but he made this Billie Eilish documentary in 2020 called The World's a Little Blurry- Mm...
now about, like, the making of this album and her tour around it, and I was just, like, hit by how, like, running on pure vibes it was in this way, where it was like the entire film was kind of, like, existing within the mental space of her bedroom, but kind of extrapolating that into, like, every other space she occupied.
So where it was, like, zero context around any of the sites, except for, like, large text overlays that you were in New York or Paris or anything like that. And it really kind of got me thinking about, like, how... Yeah.
Just kind of, like, communicating affect in that way.
So I went on a bit of, like, a Twitter thread rampage about it, and then Trevor McFedries and Dennis Nazarov were like, "Hey," like, "You should build this out as an essay on mirror.xyz", which was a, you know, crypto publishing platform in that moment.
RIP. So RIP. Yeah, like, not quite a Google Doc. But, um, I was also kind of interested in, like, what the first kind of, like, long form piece of cultural criticism that would live on chain could be. Mm.
And was thinking about it in terms of, like-You know, I guess this is pre-Substack, or I don't know, like early moments of Substack. Substack existed, but it was not what it is today. Yeah.
We're still like Patreon moment- Mm-hmm... there.
Um, but just what it could look like to sort of like crowdsource and remunerate an editor, an illustrator, a researcher, myself, all of those things within the production of like a piece of cultural criticism as like an artifact.
Um, so it ended up being like, I, yeah, I went very far down a rabbit hole, and it, it is actually gonna be included in a collection of essays that's being published in May. So- Yeah, let's talk about that.
I was really excited- Yeah... when you told me about that because I think... Well, I mean, I don't wanna like say context a million times. Usually the buzzword on this podcast is taste, but like what...
W- I've been thinking a lot about like why books, what do books add? What is the importance of publishing books when you're able to disseminate information so much more quickly?
We're pub- we're starting our own publishing in print.
Um, I feel like in the early internet, it was like internet could add context to books, and now I feel like it's kind of flipped and like the purpose of slow media is to add context to fast media. And
a book, like an essay collection or a book that includes things that were originally written for the web is actually like a better source of truth about those things and what they meant and the time that they came in as those essays over time.
Like that Mirror essay, that I know for a fact like this, that essay specifically will have been migrated to Paragraph, a different platform, in the last couple months. Um, and that's just like one platform.
And so I think an issue with the internet is like, you know, speed, um, and the migration of things, dead links, dead internet, whatever, like it's very hard to encounter something...
You're never encountering it in the time period it was born, and you're never encountering it in the, the true like, um, atmosphere and, and format in which it was born, or rarely. So, um, you know, a book is...
I think that the, the speed of the internet right now and the amount of slop has actually reinforced the primacy of the book, and usually we talk about that reinforcement being on the level of taste, but it's also on this level of context as well, and I think we don't really talk about that enough.
Yeah. I mean, I know that there's like taste, context. I'm gonna add craft there because I do...
You know, I'm a visual artist as well, but I really think that like, uh, my approach towards language is similarly like very high craft, and publishing something within the context where that is possible, which is like a book form, is, I think, important.
The, this is being published with a French publisher called After8 that does a series of artist writing.
So they've published Nick Maus and Amy Sillman, and then now myself, um, and it's really kind of like working with artists that have a kind of like robust writing practice, um, which I think that it's like I...
Yeah, I kind of come from a more traditional art world, but I still kind of like work in tandem and parallel in this more cultural, creative, technological sector as well.
Um, but yeah, I'm kind of like interested in my writing kind of like reaching back into the place from which I came.
There's also, I think with book form, like the embracing the fact that you can be wrong in some of your takes and like that being actually really an interesting thing that time can do, and when something is published, you can look back at the essays that you wrote and published and said, "Hey, you know, like I think this is like valuable in a moment," and this is like, uh, you know, kind of like has the artifact at the moment from which it was made and can be more or less true.
But I think it's important for something to like be evaluated in, in hindsight in that way versus like anything only just being posted and then, you know, kind of getting like lost in the feed or becoming a dead link.
Are you saying then that...
'Cause you said like in a book you can be wrong, which implied to me that on the internet you can't be wrong in the same way, or rather that maybe when you post something o- on the internet you can easily just go and edit that post or quickly write a new post saying, "Wait, I was wrong.
This is what I really meant to say. Here's the right thing." Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. There's like a b- uh, there's more self-editing.
There's more kind of like I, I'll just call it like bravado of being like right in a specific moment and like not really revisiting it and seeing how something has aged.
So that, I guess, is context in a way, is like allowing yourself to read something with the kind of like widened aperture of what else was happening in the world when that piece of writing happened.
For the stuff that appeared on the internet first that is going to appear in the book, are you editing any of it? Or are you putting it exactly how it appeared originally?
There are some kind of like light stylistic edits, but since most of them were published, not only on internet, but in like printed publications like Flash Art, Freeze. You know, E-Flux was online.
Um, yeah, it's a mix of in-print and online published pieces.
And then there's one longer form sort of like introductory essay that I wrote about Rotten.com, which is kind of like an origin story for myself and my relationship to the internet that's like framing the rest of, of the pieces in the book.
You have, um... To go back to Cosmos, you, you write a newsletter for Cosmos called Sequence. Um, and it's sort of a way of contextualizing [laughs] what's going on on the platform.
I've really been enjoying it, and it's a combination of like links and usually a short interview and highlighting an object and an aesthetic study of, um-Some certain trend or category that's bubbling up.
Can you talk a little bit more about, like, the process of putting that together and how you think about it, um, i- within your work there? Yeah.
This is kind of, like, the first thing that I tackled, 'cause I'm leading up marketing here, and just thinking about what...
You know, people are, are using Cosmos for so many different reasons, from, like, redesigning an apartment to just kind of the, like, curation of sport activity, of, like, surrounding oneself with beautiful things and shaping a personal taste.
So I think that there's, like, the activity that happens on the platform, but then there's, like, the meaning-making that needs to happen in terms of, like, understanding w- what any of this points to outside.
And, um, I was really, you know, interested in doing something that feels timely. We do it weekly.
It's a bit of, like, a culture roundup of looking at news stories across, like, fashion, design, architecture, art and whatnot. Um, and then kind of doing, like, um, smaller form of a trend piece,
spotlighting people who are using Cosmos in different ways. Um, yeah, as you mentioned, and just kind of, like, link-sharing as well. But all of it is, like- Where do you find most of your links?
Like, do you have a distinct information diet or is it, like, random?
It's pretty wide-reaching, and I also have started, like, opening up a tip line on the Cosmos Slack for people to be sharing things because, you know, I'm turning these things around on a weekly basis with, um, the help of a writer, Casey Jane Allison, who's helping me with it as well.
That makes sense. I wanted to ask about this, another essay you wrote, I think this was published in 2021, about irony. And I, I, I wanna read a little excerpt, but the...
to really summarize, you were asked if irony is still a, a legitimate cultural response in art during the culture wars that continue to rage, and your short answer is, "No, it's not," because it's no longer a monoculture, and irony is more of a monocultural response.
But when everything is so fragmented, it's much harder to tell, like, what's sincere and what's ironic, and so it's less effective. But where you get to it, and here I'll quote you, you say, "One of the many count...
one of many counterpoints to irony, however, is the recent emergence of cringe and the content that has come to represent it across the cultural sphere.
Cringe is the awkwardness that occurs when someone sincerely expresses themselves and is largely unaware of how their expression is received." And you, you come out in favor of cringe.
The last line is, "To be cringe is to be human." You s- you wrote this four years ago. Has... Is this still your thinking or? Yeah.
It's kind of what I was saying earlier about, you know, going on the record and then opening oneself up to, you know, the landscape of culture shifting.
When I think about the definition as you, as I wrote it, that you just kind of recapped here, I think about, like, every piece of comms that I see coming from tech startup
people on LinkedIn, and it's like, "That shit is cringe." And [laughs] but it is that definition. It's, like, extremely sincere thinking that oneself is, like, doing the work. Um, so do I find that to still be true?
I think I saw on a lot of out lists that discourse around cringe is out, and I'd like to just hold space for that.
[laughs] I will hold space for that, and I will also say the, the latest thing that we published on there is about cringe.
Um, but the reason I published it is because I thought that the writer, uh, Lara Williams, had a really, really good distinct taste or take, and she
knit a lot of stuff, recent stuff together from, like, Lily Allen to, like, the work of Tim Robinson. Her argument is basically, like, we have to separ a- separate out this idea of effective, uh, mediated cringe.
Like, she talks about cringe as, like, something that's effective in the sense that, like, it's something we feel in, like, our nervous system.
There's, like, this level of, um, evolutionary response to embarrassment and, like, wanting to fit in with the group that causes us to feel cringe on such, like, a visceral level.
And she talks about mediated cringe versus embodied cringe, which is, like, mediated cringe is artists that are able to put cringe in service of their art.
So, like, um, Nathan for You, The Chair Company, um, you know, stuff by Lily Allen, Audrey Hobart, um, as a sort of, like, clown in her music video, in her artistic presence. And it's...
you make people uncomfortable in service of the art to cause them to question certain norms in society, whether they're fair.
But because it's in the context of this art, there's usually, like, a resolution, where, like, the discomfort we feel in our nervous system as we experience this piece of art is, like, eventually resolved or counteracted by the substance of the questions intellectually that it causes us to ask, versus embodied cringe, which is the sort of, like, meme, "I'm cringe, therefore I'm free," which is, like, this sort of, like, antisocial behavior right now, where it's like, to ask people to adhere to norms is, like, in some way, like, fascistic,
whether it's, like, talking too loudly in a cafe or just, like, um, you know, taking up just a ton of space i- online and, and just repeatedly hijacking other people's nervous systems, like, just because you can.
Um, and you're making other people uncomfortable, not for artistic purposes, but simply out of your own sort of, like, selfishness. And I just really love this distinction.
It really put into words something that I feel and would wanna say but f- would feel like I couldn't articulate it without feeling like I was making a argument for conservatismBut the way she threads the needle is actually, it's like, it's incredibly conservative to be,
to be so individualistic that you think your behavior in any context should supersede other people's comfort without any sort of meaning or practice behind it.
And so I was really happy to publish this, and I was like, "You know what? I actually think this does add something new to the cringe discourse," which I agree would otherwise be like completely played out. Yeah.
I kind of can't wait to get into the shame discourse, which is like- Yeah... I think also the undercurrent that nobody's talking about it.
Like, there is this like w- a German word of like Fremdschäme or just like disembodied shame that one gets from, which is like also just feels very German, of like watching someone else stumble and fumble and like not being able to sort of like distinguish what their kind of like embodied experience of that is, and you're just like hurting by watching them, which I learned about while watching Curb Your Enthusiasm with my like college German boyfriend to kind of illustrate what that, that moment might be.
And I think at the, at the undergirding of like a lot of the discourse around cringe is ultimately like negotiating shame in the public arena, and like how, how one owns that or does not.
So that's not, you know, really like... I, I think that that's just like, I would prefer to call it what it is. I think cringe is l- just like a, a wrapper around, like, how we negotiate shame.
[laughs] I, I'm reminded of something a former boss of mine told me. This is like a lesson in working in any sort of content media, right? Building content. We were working at a, doing marketing for a tech startup.
But he said, "Francis, don't kill the part of yourself that's cringe. You have to kill the part of yourself that cringes," which is to say, "Don't be ashamed. Don't be-" Did Ari say that to you? I think he did.
Uh, a friend of the pod, former guest of the pod. Oh. Shout out to Ari, who maybe should be a little bit more ashamed sometimes. I... Well, maybe. But- [laughs]... you know, it works from, I...
And I don't know, may- maybe he pa- maybe I'm paraphrasing that and maybe he was parroting it, but I, I attribute it to him in my mind.
But I see people say versions of this all the time, whether it's like in a newsletter, I think I read this in a newsletter, a version of it, just a few days ago that was like 26 things to do in 2026 if you work in social media, right?
I see versions of it on LinkedIn, but the idea is just- Substack core... be earnest- [laughs]...
when you're, like, if, if you want to be producing content on any of these platforms or as an independent creator, you have to, you have to get over that shame of, of being earnest and of trying this thing.
The problem with shame is like all the wrong people are ashamed, right? Like, I s- [laughs] I think- I'm adequately, I'm adequately ashamed- Yeah. Well, I-... I would say [laughs]...
I simultaneously feel like too many people are held back by shame that's impacting their lives.
I see it with writers whose work that I, um, would like to see more of in the world, that shame is a component of like what's holding them back. We know it's not writer's block 'cause that's fake.
Um, and then on the other hand, I'm like, every time I see a tweet that's like, or a post that's like, "Bring back shame," I'm like, "Absolutely."
So it's like we're simultaneously, like we're in like the K-shaped economy of shame where it's like- [laughs]...
all these, there's a certain degree where like people, all the wrong people have this sort of surplus, and then we have the shamelessness of the current political environment. Um, and it's really hard to square it.
I think that's what makes it so hard to talk about because when you, if you wanna write an essay being like, "Actually, like, stop being cringe," all the wrong people will assume that it's about them and internalize it when it's like, it's never gonna reach the people who are actually taking up that space.
Um, but it's still articulating something important- Well, is, is-... about this point...
part of the solution then shaming, the act of not feeling shame yourself, but of actively trying to make other people feel ashamed, maybe more shaming? Francis, you're welcome to try. You're welcome to try.
It occurs to me that this is the anniversary of [laughs] January 6th.
I was thinking about the, um, the load-bearing Azealia Banks Instagram story about, uh, of people scaling the Capitol that I think was captioned method behavior.
Um, I think that, I mean, it's the paradox that, like, the shameless are unshameable, right?
Like, I think maybe there's a, there's a, a tier beneath the shameless of, of enablers and useful idiots that can sometimes be brought back to reality, and I think those are the people that you can really only...
That's the, that's the best that you can hope to reach. Like, picking off people, I mean, somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? There's a certain selfishness to her pivot, right?
But, like, you can eventually pick off people like that by appealing to their values if they have values.
Um, but I think some, some people are just, like, unreachable, and unfortunately all of those people are enabled by our technological and political culture right now. I'm also- Yeah...
I'm reminded of an ad- Sadly, Pete Hegseth, unshameable. Exactly. True. I'm reminded of an ad I've seen on Instagram a few times over the last couple weeks. I think it's for Kalshi, and I'm gonna- [laughs]...
slightly mess up the, uh, the exact verbiage, but it's something to the tune of, "Trade the results of football games." And then what I do know it s- it says is, "Legal in all 50 states."
And that's so shameless because it's so saying, "Bet on football games. It's legal to bet on football games using our app in all 50 s- in all 50 states," but it's not betting.
It's trading on results, and that is just so shameless. Mm. Yeah. It is. Language is really, it's a beautiful thing to witness.
Um, when you were t- Francis, when you were describing that, that article about, you know, 26 things about social media and I said Substack core, um, I, it occurred to me that I'm curious whether there...
Cosmos is obviously like a newer platform, but you have-Um, I don't know if you can reveal the number of users. I think you had told me privately. Like, you have a massive user base.
Um, and I'm curious if there's been the emergence of something like a Cosmos core. Um, 'cause from my perspective, like, a platform has really made it when you end up in one of those, like,
uh, trend matrixes, like the arena hat, right? Like, when, when the certain user of a platform becomes identifiable as a meme, that's when you've, like, made it.
So I'm curious if, like, there's a Cosmos starter pack or a Cosmos core, like what would be on there?
Well, I do think that there has been the emergence of the Cosmos girl in the way that there was like the Tumblr and VSCO girl. Oh, yeah.
We're, we're seeing this, uh, making the rounds, and I think that what that aesthetic can be pinned down to is just, you know, it's slightly messy girl aesthetic.
It's a little bit more, like, robust and uncurated and, and playful. And, like, not to get into the gender politics of any of it, but it's like people...
Yeah, people are really kind of like identifying and latching onto that in a way. Um, we have like a...
Today there's like a fairly dominant aesthetic that exists on the platform, and there's some, like, decisions being made in terms of taste, in terms of like how and why and where we surface things above like a certain aesthetic threshold that's been determined, which is really, I think, interesting.
Um,
but I think we are doing a big launch in the next few months, which will sort of like open that aperture and maybe like redefine instead of like what is within a Cosmos aesthetic, more like what is without, um, or like what is like outside of, uh, outside of that threshold.
Can I say as, as a slight aside, the... You used robust there, and robust is one of those words that I've trained myself not to use in working in tech marketing- Oh...
because I've seen so many- Should we call Bella Hadid? Well, no, but- [laughs]... like every damn product says like, "A robust suite of features," or whatever feature- Interesting... so robust.
[laughs] And so it's just one of those ones that, like, I've checked off on my list, but the way you used it, it was like- Need to strike it from the record... it was...
No, but the way you used it felt like not like that at all. It was the first time I've heard or seen [laughs] that word used in like three years. So I'm like, that's actually... Wait, that is robust. A correct use of it.
Yeah. You know what? Hey, like if I'm not B2B SaaS pilled, then... [laughs] I was thinking about, um, photos of Sofia Coppola's bedroom as you were talking. Exactly. Exactly. There we go. That's the Cosmos girl.
A robust photo of Sofia Coppola's bedroom. Yeah. [laughs] Um, I love it. I, I hope to meet the Cosmos girl and maybe even become her. Are there any other- You may already be.
As you, like, when I, when I've ever come into like an audience development or marketing role in a platform, the first thing I do is sort of audit what's going on under the hood, um, in terms of user behavior and, and things that, like analytics that we don't necessarily look at on a day-to-day basis because we're too in the weeds.
Um, I'm curious like what sort of user behaviors have surprised you in a good way or, or in a bad way as you sort of like came in, started auditing what was happening and, and thinking about how people could be influenced into using the platform in, in ways that really prioritize the use cases you're interested in?
Yeah. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that I am almost 40. I work in the creative pro-... I consider myself, in some sense, like I'm a creative professional. I show up to my laptop to get shit done.
I have a job to do. I'm very task-oriented. And being surrounded by the artists, writers, and, like, numerous versions of creative directors in my life, I kind of assume that everyone else is using
tools online for the same reason. People are there to work and get shit done. So when I...
You know, not having spent that much time, like, in the community or on the platform when I first showed up, I assumed that this was a tool being used by interior designers and graphic designers and art directors and event planners and all of that.
And then we did a lot of user research kind of like over the summer and early fall, and it was really surprising to see that people who are younger and students and, you know, people who have absolutely nothing to do in the creative fields were just spending their time, like, culling and organizing images for their own personal inspiration for...
without any intended outcome. And if you look at something like Pinterest, like, so much of their marketing and so much of the product is outcomes oriented. It's like, "Here's the cupcake. Make the cupcake."
And on Cosmos, it's truly something that feels more like meandering and wandering and, you know, like a sort of creative act in its own right, which was really surprising.
What do you think about the prediction that Pinterest is gonna be acquired by OpenAI? No comment. [laughs] No comment. Okay. Fair enough. No comment. Though I do really love... I mean, like I feel like that
was just a rumor from a journalist who was disappointed- It was literally a prediction that got like the unusual Wales treatment and became, like, fact. [laughs] Exactly. That is Kalshi core. So Kalshi core. For sure.
Has there been... Da- uh, Daisy, has there been more writing about it? I haven't really kept much eye on this. Uh, I know. I threw it up on Clone- I'm curious what the take is...
'cause I thought it was an interesting prediction, but I thought it was funny that, like, tech Twitter was reporting it as like if it was news. Um, yeah. I mean, that one in, in particular, but also I...
Like, I had like a... I don't know. This is a personal aside, whatever. Like I... I was like, "Kalshi, what's up? What's going on here?"
And like the first thought that I had was I was like, "Oh, this is the logic of StockX and Airbnb and Uber and the sharing economy, just like extrapolated to opinions." Mm.
And that seemed like a really interesting lineage in a way, where it was like-All of a sudden, all of us, like, renteas, we, we all kind of, like, saw the objects in our lives that we weren't even owning, but just renting as, like, assets for value extraction- Mm-hmm...
with, like, you know, fractional ownership and whatnot, and just taking that into, like, the dematerialized realm of opinions was like, "Oh, that's what this is about. I see why this [chuckles] exists now."
How does Cosmos think about AI and both, like, the curation of stuff that's been generated by AI and the use of AI in curation?
Uh, I think that one of the aspects of it that people really love, and I do too, is that you can just easily filter or hide out images that are, you know, using AI to detect whether or not they're AI-generated or not.
So, like, anything that, that the Cosmos, you know, back end assumes is AI, it'll, it'll block or hide, which I think people have a real appetite for, and I know that, like, you know, other larger platforms like Pinterest is kind of a hellscape of.
Um, but then the other ways in which it's using it, I kind of say it's, like, AI for good, um, because you're specifically using AI to, like, identify provenance and context around images, which, like, unless you're doing, like, a global wiki hack, uh, to, like, manually attribute all of those things just isn't gonna happen at the scale that it needs to.
So that's- For some reason I thought that you were gonna say AI for girls. [chuckles] AI for Cosmos Girls. [laughs] Yeah. There's an essay. It's interesting. Yeah. I did this article, um, it must have been
more than 10 years ago now, about a trend that was happening in, um, art museums and people who worked in archiving around tagging, tagging their collections, having...
finding ways to get visitors to actually contribute to these tagging projects.
And so I think there's a lot of what we talk about as AI, which is, like, basically tagging rebranded, um, where there's always been these repositories of tagged images and information and the ability to pull from them with specific queries.
It's just it's all been collapsed into the stuff that is new, um, which is, like, the refinement of, you know, the ability of these agents to complete those tasks.
Um, but I think user tagging and the ability to query those tags, um, has always existed and been, like, a really useful part of these platforms. Yeah.
Um, but there is something about the authenticity of context beginning with the user and being interpreted by the computer versus beginning with the computer and being interpreted by the user that feels really important.
Yeah. I mean, I think that there's, like, layers of context on something like Cosmos. Like, there's the tagging that happens on the image.
You know, right now that's, like, automatically done, and if you feel like it's in- inaccurate, you can kind of report that, and there's a system for, for doing that. But then the way, you know, the, um,
the clusters as we call them, like, the way that you manually curate and organize images based on taste or some other notion, that's kind of like the, that's the human layer.
But I do think that it's like those are, those are kind of like- Mm-hmm... it's a question of scale. It's like what problem are you trying to fix?
Are you trying to have this be an activity that an individual who's very spec- like, of a very specific psychographic that enjoys manually tagging and, like, refining data, uh, versus are you, you know, someone who actually has absolutely no idea about niche lamp designers from the 1930s and is there to learn, and, like, what does a tag do at scale for an audience like that?
Totally. I mean, I... To go back to that article I was working on, like, a big takeaway from these projects was, like, it's actually really hard to get people to do this.
Um, people want to be able to go back and search on a museum website and be like, "What was that painting with the dolphin?" And they wanna be able to do it off of, like, a single detail that they remember.
Um, but, like, to use myself an example, I, I was telling Francis before you came on, I still use Tumblr, and every time you post on Tumblr it's like, "Do you wanna add some tags to this?" And I'm always like, "Fuck no."
Like [laughs] Yeah. I don't, I don't have time. So it's... I think
people who are archivers on the internet, like, we're all curators, but there's a specific type of person, like, probably the type of person that's on the cigarette subreddit or, like, the feather guy.
Like, the 2025 version of that is the person whose, like, special interest is really, like, annotating and tagging the internet. No genius.
And- Yeah, I- Um, we have to, like, really value it and, and, like, enable those people, I think. They're very, uh...
Maybe they're cringe sometimes, but they are extremely important load-bearing part of the internet as we've understood it up until this point.
The one that I personally really enjoyed partaking in was, like, the, the New York Public Library has had many versions of these, you know, crowdsourced tagging projects in the past.
There was one where it was running through their entire menus collection, which is absolutely amazing, and you just had to manually tag the listings on the different historical menus that I think were all donated by, like, an Astor or something like that.
That's so sick. I had no idea about that. That one, I, I did that one because I was like, "Well, you know, it's meditative in a way." Totally. But that's not, that, that's not what I need.
That's not the role that I need Cosmos to play in my life, you know? Mm-hmm. This...
So hearing the two of you speak about this, I'm thinking about, like, tags as Dewey Decimal System in that the Dewey Decimal System is something that's so rigorous and so, like, specific and refined, and not that I fully understand the Dewey Decimal System, but tagging on the internet as, like, too many tags when maybe it's helpful, but you're, "Oh, like, what's that one painting with the dolphin?"
And I remember one detail and because there's so many tags on it and so much context, but it's, like, low-quality context, then you can easily find it.
But maybe you were saying if, if, if this person doesn't know about, like, 1930s lamps, if this person doesn't know about 1930s lamps designers, should they be tagging images of this 1930s lamp, or are they providing low-quality tags that actually water down the knowledge and the context?
But
I then also thought of two weeks ago, as we record, about two weeks ago, Instagram introduced a new rule where you can only put up to five hashtags on a post or reel, which is, I don't know the full logic behind them, but it sounds like them trying to fight maybe abuse of too many hashtags and trying to put a thing, a, a piece of content in a context where it doesn't necessarily belong and forcing people to be more rigorous about the context.
But that's... I guess what...
the, the point I'm trying to pull out here is there's such a thing as too many tags, and things should have less tags that are more considered, but the problem is the people creating these tags often aren't necessarily considering them and either it's sort of an abuse, as with Instagram, or it's just a lack of knowledge that then waters down the product, and- Yeah...
ultimately streams of knowledge. I just don't think that the technology needs hashtags today in the way that it did previously given- I think that's also true... the rise of AI. I think it's just, it's...
Yeah, it's like a vestigial tail at this point. Guys, hashtags are out for 2026. You heard it here first. [laughs] This has been Tasteland. Thank you so much, Dina. This was fun. This was delightful. Thank you, guys.
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