NEW MODELS is a place. It was created by Caroline Busta and Lil Internet. Busta entered the legacy media world as an intern at Condé Nast before working as an associate editor at Artforum in New York and later as the editor-in-chief of Texte zur Kunst in Berlin. Lil Internet is a multi-media artist, music producer, and creative-director who early-on achieved social media notoriety. Both come from pop cultural backgrounds intertwined with old media structures. They would bear witness to those legacy models’ collapse.Carly remembers that shortly before starting at Artforum in 2008, Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull work, For the Love of God, purportedly sold for $100 million dollars. And a few months after she arrived, the financial crisis hit. The ground beneath their desks started to erode. Lil Internet remembers, two years earlier, convincing a famous online streetwear retailer that putting free videos on YouTube was a good idea, realizing that, with the arrival of socially networked media, attention was all that was about to matter. Both Carly and Lil Internet sensed that the art and culture industry as they’d known it was underpinned by economic structures that were already starting to come undone. This terrain would continue to shift as our media landscape transformed.As they define themselves, “NEW MODELS is a media channel & community addressing the emergent effects of networked technology on life. It seeks new frameworks for understanding the mess of the world and the ways in which the mediation of this mess shapes us.” Carly mentions the artists Dis and Bernadette Corporation as influential to her and Lil Internet’s early ideas for New Models. They asked themselves, “Can we create a space that makes smart people feel cool and makes cool people feel smart?” Carly recalls Juergan Habermas’s description of the public sphere, “a space that is conceptually distinct from the state, and a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can, in princip