Traces the causal chain from Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy through venture capital incentives, platform monopolization, and enshittification — arriving at a landscape of brain rot, grift, and hollowed-out internet culture.

A critical history of post-Internet art — from 1960s art-and-technology collaborations through 1990s net art to the movement's emergence, commercialization, and dilution in the 2010s. Narrated by a participant with no claim to objectivity.

A satirical retrospective lecture covering 20 chapters of contemporary art world shifts from 2015–2025, arguing that political polarization, cancel culture, representative-diversity orthodoxy, NFT speculation, COVID lockdowns, parasocial media, and Silicon Valley indifference collectively eroded art's cultural authority. Real controversies (Philip Guston cancellation, Dana Schutz/Whitney protest, QAnon, NFT bubble, AI influencers) are intercut with fictional vignettes to diagnose how art stopped leading culture and began chasing it.

A long-form video essay tracing cancel culture as a coercive mechanism within a politically stagnant liberalism, arguing that downwardly mobile "fallen professionals" used online mob punishment to enforce ideological conformity and compete for scarce opportunities, and examining why its power has declined through discourse fracture and political realignment after 2022.

A critical history of American art schools arguing that the forced merger of avant-garde culture and academia since the 1930s produced an obfuscatory dialect called art-speak, a cycle of professional failure at scale, and financially predatory MFA programs — institutions that commodify the promise of creative community rather than reliably advancing artistic careers.

A video essay by Brad Troemel analyzing QAnon as a cultural and social phenomenon — examining its 2017 origins on 4chan, its mechanics as a guided-apophenia augmented reality game, and its appeal as a participatory creative outlet for Trump supporters disillusioned by unmet political and cultural expectations.

A cultural critique by Brad Troemel tracing how neoliberal achievement society replaced institutional disciplinary control with internalized self-optimization, producing universal burnout expressed through therapy-speak self-diagnosis, woo spiritualism, and healing communities. The talk argues that neither therapeutic nor mystical healing methods address the underlying societal cause of burnout, and that structured social rituals and physical community offer more genuine relief.

A comprehensive video essay tracing hipster subculture across four distinct eras (1999–2014), arguing that hipsters emerged from two macro forces—unrestricted internet access to culture and the service economy's commodification of lifestyle—and that rather than dying, hipsterdom became the invisible background software of contemporary culture, ultimately transforming into activist identity after 2015.

A video essay tracing the four eras of American hipster culture (1999–2014), their origins in digital cultural access and the service economy, their corporate representatives (Pitchfork, Vice, American Apparel), and their eventual dissolution into mainstream culture and the successor identity of the social-media-era activist.

A cultural analysis using "cloud bombing" (mass micro-celebrity group photos) as a lens to examine post-COVID shifts in social behavior, parasocial relationships, the collapse of aesthetic connoisseurship into representative diversity, the media mythology of geographic scenes like Dimes Square, and the anti-social habits cultivated during pandemic isolation.

A lecture by "Brad" analyzing "literalism"—the willful bad-faith literalization of metaphor—as the common rhetorical engine driving American moral panics, traced across three eras: the 1980s–2000s Satanic Panic, the 2010s campus call-out crusades, and the current "cavefab" era of performative outrage without genuine ideological conviction.

A video lecture by Brad Troemel analyzing the "left can't meme" phenomenon through a comparative history of liberal social media culture and 4chan anonymous culture, tracing their divergent meme philosophies from the late 2000s through Gamergate, the 2016 election meme war, and the post-election hashtag resistance era.

A critical report by art writer Brad Troemel analyzing the celebrity artist phenomenon in the contemporary art world. Traumel categorizes celebrity artists into four archetypes—ACAs, retiree hobbyists, merchandise grifters, and industry interlopers—and exposes how publicist-driven media narratives manufacture the appearance of artistic legitimacy for cultural insiders, while critics and the art world remain complicit through silence.

A video essay by Brad Troemel tracing hustle culture from its Protestant and American Dream roots through three distinct social media eras — morning-positivity memes, gig economy grind culture, and Web3 crypto scams — arguing that each iteration functions as ideological cover for workers to embrace their own exploitation under conditions of economic precarity.

A video essay by artist Brad Troemel tracing the origins, mechanics, and persistence of "art speak" (a.k.a. International Art English) — the jargon-heavy language of gallery press releases and art world criticism. Trimell argues art speak emerged from two forces: modern art's paradoxical return to literary dependency as it dematerialized (literary horseshoe theory), and the academic elite overproduction of MFA graduates competing for scarce art world positions. The essay also dissects art speak's grammatical techniques — verbification, dependent clause stacking, liminal framing — and concludes that misplaced ambition in writing must be redirected into the art itself.

A video essay by Brad Troemel tracing the contested history of art museums—from their 19th-century founding by robber-baron heirs through the academic identity-politics turn toward inclusivity—to argue that selfie museums are the logical, troubling endpoint of a decades-long public demand for representation over education, and a case study in how "inclusivity" launders commercial cynicism.

A documentary analysis of the CIA's covert program to deploy Abstract Expressionism as Cold War soft power, tracing the collaboration between MoMA, the Rockefeller family, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom to position American avant-garde art as a global symbol of individual freedom against Soviet socialist realism — and examining how this engineered the privatization of arts funding in America.

A critical video essay by Brad Troemel analyzing millennial visual aesthetics, tracing digital interface design from skeuomorphism through flat design to neumorphism, and Instagram's cultural zeitgeists from brunch photos to selfies to infographics, with analysis of how social media incentive structures, economic anxiety, and political polarization shape collective identity performance and visual culture.

A video essay by Brad Troemel analyzing the evolution of millennial visual aesthetics—skeuomorphism, flat design, and neumorphism—alongside Instagram's cultural shifts from brunch posts to selfies to infographics, framed through Baudrillard's theory of simulacra and a critique of social media's attention-economy incentive structures.

Brands as cultural machinery: patronage, research systems, institutional validation, founder mythology, AI workflows, DIY worldbuilding, and the scaffolding that makes value feel natural.

Culture stored in small containers: etymology, algospeak, finance vocabulary, choking-sign folklore, printmaking substrates, esoteric symbols, and analog practices that preserve memory.

The self under format pressure: metrics, personas, AI agents, trend signals, anti-caption refusal, comedy taxonomies, brand-maxing, and brainrot as political theory.

Taste as anti-generic specificity: visual defaults, fashion geography, Catholic beauty, canon defense, scanned texture, anti-surveillance image literacy, and place-based looking.