Essay arguing alt-media has outgrown legacy outlets and analyzing how online attention markets shape ideas and influence.

➡️ follow NEW MODELS on SubstackThe Online Marketplace of Ideas, 2026The Online Marketplace of Ideas (2026) is an expansive survey of the present and recent history of Internet culture. Today, alt-media has become quantitatively larger than legacy publications. As a result, any consensus or “mainstream” has fragmented into a chaotic digital landscape. The cultural and political fringe is now co-mingled with the establishment. Challengers have become incumbents and vice versa.Within the exhibition, each carefully selected item has been purchased online and is shown without the knowledge of its creator or author. Contributors range from canonized artists to podcasters, influencers, bloggers, memers, musicians, and even politicians; each represents an accidental avant-garde for 21st century media.Created by Joshua Citarella & NEW MODELS (Caroline Busta & Lil Internet) with architectural design by sub, The Online Marketplace of Ideas brings together traces of the digital layer into the physical world. The installation includes more than 400 pieces of creator merch (t-shirts, hats, and other drop-ship basics), printed matter (books, journals, zines), and ephemera (nicotine pouches, Modafinil blister packs, mewing gum, etc), plus a small number of artworks. A Call Her Daddy baby doll tee sits opposite a Joe Rogan Experience shirt, draped over Charlie Kirk’s MAGA Doctrine. Fanged Noumena shares a shelf with Abundance below a Chapo Trap House hat. The bazaar includes a broad canon of accelerationist writings and maps the vast memeplex of ideas that drive attention and ideology on social media. Shown together, these objects convey the cultural and political incoherence of the present moment; infinite consumer choice with limited or no political agency.Viewed as a whole, The Online Marketplace of Ideas becomes greater than the sum of its individual parts. Similar graphic motifs emerge from disparate editorial voices. Colorways, typefaces and aesthetics flow seamlessly between