The people who built La nueva carne spend their days making the internet. Fuego Camina Conmigo is an independent creative agency in Barcelona with some eighty employees working in digital strategy, analytics, and content production — the kind of shop that builds brand campaigns for clients like Estrella Damm and Decathlon. And yet in 2019, the agency’s CEO Luis Conde asked editor and creative copywriter Samuel Valiente to conceptualize something deliberately at odds with everything they do for a living: a print magazine, slow and deliberate, about the ways digital technology is reshaping what it means to be human. The result borrows its name from David Cronenberg’s concept of “the new flesh” — the idea that the body is not fixed but perpetually mutating. Except here, the mutation isn’t biological. It’s algorithmic.
Each issue of La nueva carne orbits a single abstract concept. The first explored Identity — how our physical and virtual selves interact, whether we’ve lost control over our own image, whether an AI can develop something resembling personality. That issue featured an interview with András Arátó, the retired Hungarian man the internet turned into the meme known as Hide the Pain Harold, alongside essays by philosopher Amador Fernández Savater on the crisis of attention. Subsequent issues have taken on Beauty, Faith, Power, and Memory, each time assembling writers, artists, and thinkers — from novelist Sabina Urraca to philosopher Eudald Espluga — who approach digital culture not as technologists but as humanists. The Spanish editions of early issues sold out; the magazine now publishes bilingually in Spanish and English.
Art director Núria Pujol gives the magazine a visual identity that quietly refuses the clichés of tech publishing. There are no neon gradients, no circuit-board motifs, no cyberpunk typography. The small-format covers (160 by 240 millimeters, perfect-bound) tend toward the unsettling and allusive — the issue on Beauty featured an embossed gold logo over a cover image hovering between portrait and avatar, while the Memory issue carried a remarkable embossed face on an otherwise blank surface. The design choices reflect a core editorial conviction: digital culture is not a subculture anymore, and treating it with hyper-futuristic aesthetics only distances readers from recognizing how deeply it has already entered their lives.
That tension — a digital agency choosing paper to examine the digital — is not a gimmick. It’s the entire point. As the editors put it, they publish on paper so readers can engage slowly and attentively, free from clickbait and filter bubbles. The writing draws on architecture, philosophy, psychology, and art rather than product reviews or startup profiles. In their own words, they are not fans of transhumanism or the Elon Musk school of techno-optimism. They don’t treat progress as inherently good or bad. They treat it as something worth thinking about carefully — which, in an era of hot takes and algorithmic feeds, may be the most radical position of all.
Stocked at La Central and Laie in Barcelona, at magCulture in London, and through Stack Magazines, La nueva carne has built a loyal readership that crosses borders and disciplines. For anyone who spends their days immersed in screens and occasionally wonders what that immersion is doing to them, this magazine offers something rare: the space to sit with the question.
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