The Tip of the Iceberg with Joshua Citarella and Audrey Pfister
The underlying question is: to what degree is conspiracy a product of capitalism? Or to what degree is conspiracy simply a psychological grounding of how humans think about the world through mythological narratives?
When I call Joshua Citarella on Discord, it’s close to midnight. My video doesn’t work, so he can’t see me, but I can see him. He speaks with the same clarity I’ve known from his podcasts and streams for years: articulate and never obscured by esoteric jargon or art speak. It feels like my own private episode.
Citarella’s YouTube channel, Doomscroll, now has over 136,000 subscribers. Last year, The New York Times profiled him, asking, “Is This Artist the Joe Rogan of the Art World?” But long before The Joshua Citarella Experience, he emerged from the post-internet scene, loosely positioned between the 2008 financial crash and Trump’s 2016 presidency, alongside Jon Rafman, Cory Arcangel, Amalia Ulman, Brad Troemel, and DIS.
When the pandemic hit, Citarella’s Discord quickly became a refuge — a “dark forest” for the terminally online. While Citarella streamed himself researching every topic on the chart, I joined the sleeper-cell Discord and began attending reading groups at punishing AEST hours. Out of those conversations emerged
a loose constellation of artists, writers, and posters with questions, ideas, and energy, who put their efforts into building what it is today: Do Not Research (DNR). What began as a workaround for Citarella’s Instagram censorship in 2019 slowly evolved into an arts and cultural platform in its own right. Now, on our call, Citarella reflects that the purpose of DNR was “to demonstrate that you could build a community towards more productive ends,” which I’ve seen undoubtedly firsthand. I know it, too, because I met my dearest friend through it.
— Audrey Pfister
Exclusive to the Magazine
The Tip of the Iceberg with Joshua Citarella and Audrey Pfister by Audrey Pfister and Josh Citarella is featured in full in Issue 5 of Memo magazine.
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Audrey Jo Pfister is a writer, editor, and curator based in Naarm/Melbourne. Audrey is currently the General Manager at the arts publisher un Projects.
Joshua Citarella (b. 1987, New York) is an artist and internet culture writer. He is the host of Doomscroll, a talk show that explores online culture and politics in the twenty-first century. He is the founder of Do Not Research, a non-profit arts organization based online and in New York City. He is the author of Politigram & the Post-Left (2018).
