Joshua Citarella
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Doomscroll: 1 Million Views +
🕑 Added 2024-11-26 13:00:09 +0000 UTCWelcome to Doomscroll. This week, my guest is a dangerous political extremist who is a legitimate threat to the United States government. We discuss universal policies that have a broad appeal and overwhelming support from the public.
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After many, many requests, Doomscroll is now available on podcast feeds and rss. Find it on: Apple, Spotify and all major platforms.
Doomscroll is a talk show that helps make sense of today’s online political chaos. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote the infamous essay The End of History, which posits the widely held belief that liberal democracy is the final form of human governance. He takes inspiration from Hegel and Marx, borrowing their concept of historical teleology; the idea that human society progresses through successive political economic forms, starting with Feudalism, progressing into Capitalism and ultimately arriving at Socialism.
But after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama reaches the grand conclusion that capitalism has achieved ideological dominance. TLDR; fascism was permanently discredited in the 1930’s, Soviet communism falls in the 1980’s and capitalism triumphs as the only viable political economic model for modern life.
Today, numerous crises have placed increasing strain on the liberal democratic model. We see headlines of market and institutional failures on a weekly basis. Words like fascism and socialism are once again up for debate and history has returned. What if today’s online political chaos is more than just bad incentives on ad-driven social media? What if it is more than just teenage rebellion and hyperbole? Could it also be a reflection of this real world breakdown in political consensus? Yes, to all of the above.
In some ways this should give us hope. History is back and politics is once again open to contestation. This means that socialism could return but it also leaves open the possibility that darker alternatives may loom on the horizon.
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A year and a half ago, I sat down with Riel Roch-Decter and Clark Filio in (literally) Dimes Square to brainstorm a new collaborative video project. We were each familiar with the other’s work from afar but had never made something as a group.
Riel Roch-Dector is a Canadian born, Los Angeles based producer who co-founded the independent studio MEMORY along with creative partner Sebastian Pardo in 2014. MEMORY has collaborated with multi-hyphenate filmmakers and artists such as: Zia Anger, Amalia Ulman, Theo Anthony, DIS, Noah Collier and many others.
Clark Filio is a New York based artist and producer best known for his work on the Emmy-nominated series How To With John Wilson for HBO. His work has been shown at galleries such as Hesse Flatow, Kimberly Klark, Kings Leap, Magenta Plains, and Half Gallery. Most recently, he is developing an upcoming independent video-game.
After many months of conversation, we came up with an idea that we felt was urgent and could be an important contribution to the online landscape. We put in months of work, paid our crew and took no compensation for ourselves. We put everything we had into making the show.
Doomscroll is a cinematic podcast that explores culture and politics in the 21st century. Our goal is to make the best quality video interviews that exist online with guests who we consider to be the most important voices for this moment.
Our first twelve weekly episodes have accumulated just under 1.2 million views. This is basically unheard of, even for well known content creators, and especially when launching from a new YouTube channel without a pre-existing subscriber base. I think this speaks to the quality of the material we’re putting out.
We’re grateful to all the guests who trusted us to pull this off. We’re already shooting new episodes with plans to continue improving the show and raising the bar for online discourse. We feel confident that by producing a cinema level talk show, we can rise above the noise of online discourse and make something truly influential.
Our conversations are less clickbait and more evergreen. Grad students will revisit these videos years after they were published. We’re proud of the look and feel of the show. This also means that our production costs are significantly higher. We cut together each episode by hand, from transcript to final color. For these reasons, we think Doomscroll is the best quality independent talk show online.
After the incredible reception of the show, we’re going to attempt something really ambitious. We’re self-financing the next leg of this project. If it works, Doomscroll will be a self-sustaining, fully independent media outlet with an unparalleled quality and level of conversation. This project is fully crowd supported and never has to flinch in front of big donors who say you can’t talk about certain topics.
If you’d like to see this happen, the best way you can support the project is by becoming a paid subscriber. This goes infinitely further than view counts, likes, comments or shares. We’re taking on a massive risk but we think this project is more necessary than ever. You can help us make it happen:
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Nellie Kluz, our incredible New York director of photography, is the filmmaker behind The Dells (2024).
LJ Frezza, our tireless editor (with whom I have spent many late nights), is a member of the experimental film-making collective Anti Banality Union and a co-director of Earth II (2022).
Davis Fowlkes is a New York based artist and producer. He is the co-owner of Low Cinema.
Noah Collier, our amazing Los Angeles director of photography, is a co-director of Carpet Cowboys (2023).
Sebastian Pardo is our additional field producer on the LA crew. He is the co-founder of MEMORY, creative director and designer. His latest design work can be seen in the upcoming A24 film The Brutalist by Brady Corbet.
Also, if its not absolutely clear, this is a meme by the admins over at Do Not Research. I would never platform someone who says fringe and outrageous things, like advocating for policies that have an 80% approval rating from the public. This show has standards.
If you’ve been following this project, you already understand the importance of online media and its ability to shape our worldview. Having patiently and consistently published on these topics for the past six years, it feels a bit surreal to now get so much mainstream media attention for these particular issues.
The influence of alt-media has always been powerful but it is now impossible to ignore. We need independent media that speaks to the political interests of young people who are otherwise unrepresented in today’s online landscape.
We started this show before the election and it turns out we were right in a big way. We want to address the unique cultural experience of this moment and offer a vision for what comes next. You can help us make Doomscroll happen:
If not us, then who?
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Doomscroll is now available in audio form on podcast apps. Find us on Apple, Spotify and everywhere else. If you missed an episode, you can catch up on the YouTube channel. Comments, likes and follows help the channel to grow.
If you have friends that watch the show but don’t yet read the newsletter, you can send them this post and let them know what we trying to do. I’m grateful for your support in this project.
