Joshua Citarella

Joshua Citarella on Chewing Falim Gum for a Chad-like Appearance, Montez Press Radio, Capitalist Realism, and more.

February 20, 2023

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Joshua Citarella is a New York City-based artist and internet culture researcher who has spent the last few years diving into zoomer politics on platforms like Instagram and Discord. Joshua is also the director of “Do Not Research", an arts organization that started as a Discord server and now publishes writing, visual art, and more. He recently put out a great piece titled “Politigram & the Post-left” that explores the radical politics of Gen Z’s online memetic subcultures— you can read for free on Substack or purchase a paperback copy. Season 3 of his podcast is available everywhere. Lucky for us, Joshua is here to tell us what he’s been into.

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Serial Experiments Lain

Artist Rachel Rossin introduced me to this anime series from 1998. Serial Experiments Lain is an early cyberpunk mystery (that predates and heavily influences The Matrix) where the online and offline worlds blur in strange and unexpected ways. The show has some really beautiful art direction and points at today’s “extremely-online” social alienation with incredible foresight.

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Simple Soap

Your average soap brand is full of phthalates, xenoestrogens and other endocrine disrupting chemicals that are making you sick, lowering testosterone levels and shrinking your fetal infant’s taint (it’s real). In the US this stuff is basically totally unregulated and corporations are allowed to dump toxic chemicals into the public sphere. A few easy ways to reduce your exposure is to: use an unscented soap (Simple Soap), store food in glass or metal containers and stop touching receipts. You don’t need to be maxxing, you will just feel better if you absorb less plastic.

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Falim Gum

Mewing is an exercise technique for the tongue and jaw muscles, with the goal of reshaping one’s face into a more desirable Chad-like appearance. In most cases, it involves overpriced plastic bite guards, but I recommend the much more affordable Falim gum (for beginners) or Tears of Chios tree (for experts). It's a very strange and profound thing to watch your face subtly change over time. Don’t go overboard or you will seriously injure your joints!

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Montez Press Radio

Founded in 2018, Montez Press Radio is broadcast live from the heart of downtown NYC. They have the best original programming happening right now. There’s a rotating line up of new and interesting voices. This is a good way to check the pulse and see what young creatives are talking and thinking about. In an era where big media and cultural institutions feel increasingly irrelevant, Montez Press Radio is an independent and trustworthy voice that stands apart from all the noise.

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Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

I honestly hadn’t heard about this book until I saw a shit ton of memes about it a few years ago. Capitalist Realism is a very worthwhile read and I can definitely see why it's so popular now. Fisher does a great job articulating the cultural experience of neoliberalism. This book set me on the right path in life. I also got much smarter and more attractive after reading it.

⚙️

MAGAcommunism

I’ve been watching this new political faction take shape online over the last year or so. In 2022, they held several IRL conferences around the US to launch a new organization called “The Center for Political Innovation”. A friend of the pod called in for a Field Report episode on this very topic. MagaCom is something like a far right flavor of Marxism-Leninism: advocating for a single party socialist state in the age of multi-polarity. (Yes, these guys are literally Russian funded Duginists and the whole thing reeks of clumsy psyop.) I’m most interested in this project because their promotional strategy is “discursive terrorism” which basically means using cumbersome political labels that drive normal people insane like: Libertarian-Stalinism, Red-Yellow Ron Paul Maoists, Mecha-tankies and Exo-proletariat. After making big waves on social media, the CPI rapidly dissolved once allegations arose about the party leader’s misuse of funds and insatiable spanking fetish.

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Roll20.net

This is the best site to set up remote D&D games. The interface is super easy to learn and it automatically calculates most of the complicated rolls that bog down the beginner RP experience. My last character was stranded in the middle of an open rebellion after a nefarious lich converted the local living labor into dead zombie labor at a nearby Amazon fulfillment center. Nobody wins but it's a lot of fun and you will learn a lot about your friends.

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Joshua Citarella

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