NYE 2020/21 WE SPENT IN COMPULSORY QUARANTINE in Berlin, dialing into the NM Discord to commiserate and speculate about the world as it is—and as it will come to be. Typical New Year's fare, but this time without the stained tablecloths, ripped nylons, and debauched euphoria the last night of the year typically affords. Instead, this untypical year concluded (at least for us) with a group discussion via an improvised matrix of platforms accompanied by a timid toast of grocery store champagne and roman candles salvaged from a forgotten 2019 stash.

Beyond our apartment window, fireworks still exploded across the city, but the streets were eerily empty. Explosions in full streets feel like celebration; explosions in empty streets feel like war. IRL New Years this year was eerie and surreal, but it was impossible to not feel grateful to be joined by so many from the New Models community. Maybe because the marking of New Years itself was so distributed this time—a hazy non-chronological ringing-in together across time-zones—the official arrival of 2021 did not feel like a beginning or an end, just a louder-than-normal outburst of liminality, of uncalibrated, ungraspable time. Notably, the tradition of “New Year’s Resolutions” seems to have been wholly forgotten, as if the dominant sense of uncertainty renders any sort of directed change abstract if not absurd. Yet we feel something concrete with our peers, together forming a stable, generative, living machine. Case in point: New Models invited our fellow NYE “party-goers” to a shared Google Doc that asked what should be kept or killed from 2020, created for our future, and reanimated from our past. The result is what follows here.

We wish everyone a Happy New Year, and also one in which the world’s pervasive uncertainty is reframed as a tabula rasa—white noise that can be shaped into myriad forms. What will we hallucinate through this Ganzfeld effect that has been forced upon us? What might we in the New Models community hallucinate together this year? There’s a particular word used to describe a hallucination shared by a large enough collective—it’s called reality. — NM

5G infrastructure / intermittent lockdowns / working from home / the ambient [music] resurgence / cooking / ...it real / free gov't money / “Nature is healing...” / rent cap / Trump family out of politics / Casino World antics (crypto-scene, wall-street-bets) / Yung Lean / Bladee’s venture into esoteric Christianity / DeFi Chaos / resilience mindset / Kim Stanely Robinson / not wasting half of every paycheck at the bar / facemasks [when sick] in public / pressure on the police / Western democracy with Asian organizational characteristics / foraging / psychedelics / growing platform cooperativism /  decriminalizing drugs / Telegram / ephemerality / the friends we made along the way / guillotines trending

Vampires / the gerontocracy / “Now more than ever...” / “In these uncertain times...” / “I hope this finds you well...” / “And socially distanced, of course!” / Cottagecore / Zuck / the feed / the conflation of ambient music and experimental music / your landlord / SUVs & Crossovers / Pastel IG slideshows / GANs in art / rappers dying / billionaire gains / The New Normal / dating apps / niche-fitness storefronts / bread-baking on Instagram / single-use plastic / wellness discourse featuring 'taking breaks' & ‘self care’... so you can work harder / Tik-Tok speedrun of '00s youth subcultural aesthetics / Tik-Tok / IG Reels / zombie [art] discourse/ the [somehow still undead] 19th-century gallery model / computation creep / factional political LARPing (Proud Boys, etc) / cinematic universes / streaming-optimized entertainment / space debris / moral theater (corona, politics, etc.) / autocracy / stevia / the subprime attention economy (engagement maximization, hyper-targeting) / hobby politics / news pundits presenting speculation as fact / elastic waistband fashion-loungewear, except the elastic waistband wool slacks, those are sick

A new way to talk about generational differences without defaulting to marketing diatribe / COVID-19 vaccine in app-form / “New Berlin” / Spanish-speaking NM Gang / 300-year business dev strategy for Discord / redistributive creator stacks / more government debt / home office tax write-offs, corporate-subsidized WFH offices / wages for domestic work / carbon capture at scale / alt social media communities (metaverse + VR chat, etc) / patchwork coalitions / shared IRL reality / research-oriented image board / next-gen memes / NM long-tail history pitch classes / “backloop” living / convincing institutions / alternative podcast formats / a NM "no scope" meme / anti-billionaire querdenken / left-wing radicalization funnel for teens / gun control / more ultra-light prepper gear / troll armies / NM Codex 2021

THe EcOnOmY!! / MARK FISHER / sustainable acidity levels in ocean water / Julian Assange / Anonymous / Silk Road / the gold standard / 1944 US tax rates / IRL flirting / romance / Chris Marker / Prodigy from Mobb Deep / The Prodigy / MF Doom / Trip-hop / Illbient / Dub-step (jk, not really) (no, actually, this is a good idea) / movie theaters and shared media experiences / ad-free Instagram / satirical artist David Dees / Chris Morris comedy / King T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) / 2000s tech gear aesthetics (as in Surfware) + bespoke technology / Adobe Flash / Flickr / Peter Fend’s geopolitical organization by drainage basins / net neutrality / software piracy / the demoscene / personal web pages / trade unions! (neo-trade unions with cross-disciplinary characteristics? collectives organized around labor/work, but intersectional) / Project Itoh / public intellectuals

Published: 3 January 2020