Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running on Neomania

I was recently a guest on Lance “it’s ya boi” Robotson‘s alt-futures discussion podcast Neomania.

It’s one of my favourite shows, so it was a real pleasure to join him on air. Lance has interviewed a whole cluster of online weirdos recently, and I think the pod will become a fascinating record of where a certain current of people find themselves intellectually in the mid-2020s.

Across 100 minutes we covered many of the usual hits from this blog: Solarpunk, Cultural Fracking, and the importance of Worlds as a lens. We also touched on AI in the present moment, blogging, and making podcasts, and in an unguarded aside I think I shared some spicier opinions about copyright.

But since I never re-listen to my interviews, I can’t remember exactly what I said!

You can listen to the full episode below, or click though the links to your podcatcher of choice here.

Neomania Episode #09

Exploring solarpunk as a memetic engine, cultural fracking, and how worlds are the medium of the 21st century.

I’m joined by Jay Springett (@thejaymo), solarpunk steward, world-runner, and author of thejaymo.net. Together we dig into how cultural fracking has left our collective imagination hollowed out, what it means to treat worlds as a creative medium, and why protocols and infrastructures may be the real artforms of the future.

We discuss copyright battles from Napster to Disney to AI training data, the parallels between hip-hop sampling and machine learning, and how solarpunk thrives not just as an aesthetic but as a generative memetic engine for imagining alternate futures. Along the way, Jay traces a line from D&D in 1974 to MUDs to corporate canon world-running, unpacks “protocol art” as artistic gestures upstream of production, and argues that futuring itself can provide a laboratory for testing ideas for what comes after the fall of empires, because as Jay tells us, you can’t fight a culture war unless you’re making culture.