Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post. This
is a mailbag episode. It's the one for, I don't know, spring
twenty twenty five? How's that sound?
Jason Oberholtzer: Sounds beautiful. Spring has sprung.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Spring is here.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. Great. If you are new here, a mailbag
episode is where we respond to listener emails, comments,
voicemails, and voice messages about our segments. Do you want
to get in touch with us and tell us your thoughts about our
thoughts? We want to hear your thoughts on our thoughts.
All the ways that can get ahold of us are in the show notes. You
can drop us a line. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. Joining me
today in order of how uproarious I assume their go to karaoke
song is ascending. Hans Buto, never post senior producer.
Hans Buetow: You've nailed it. Can I tell you something?
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
Sure.
Hans Buetow: I've never done karaoke, so I don't have Wow. I
don't have a karaoke song.
Mike Rugnetta: The maximum on uproarious.
Hans Buetow: Exactly. Oh my god. First runs. Of the gate.
Mike Rugnetta: Jason Oberholzer, Never Post executive producer.
Jason Oberholtzer: The middle's a good spot for me because it
really depends on how my cover of D'Angelo's Untitled is going
to go over.
Mike Rugnetta: I think we should stop the recording because I
just wanna think about that
Jason Oberholtzer: for a while. Swings wildly depending on the
room.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Right. Georgia Hampton, never post
producer.
Georgia Hampton: Yes. Let me be clear about something. I am a
performer first and a podcaster second.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's what that is.
Georgia Hampton: And my performance of I'm With You by
Avril Lavigne. Oh. We're talking I fall to my knees. I'm crying.
The whole room is crying.
It's very emotional.
Jason Oberholtzer: I believe it. Now quickly, do you believe
Avril is still with us?
Georgia Hampton: No comment. Okay. I think I think we need
more more intel first.
Mike Rugnetta: Very smart. It's one of those things, know, you
gotta do your own research.
Georgia Hampton: So true.
Hans Buetow: Our perennial question, where do you fit into
this Mike Rugnetta?
Mike Rugnetta: I think that I am probably in the mid mid low. My
go to is Johnny Cash. Oh. I can do a ring of fire, which I like
because everybody knows the words too. Yeah.
It's, you know, it can be uproarious, but there's an upper
limit to how uproarious I think ring of fire can be. Fair.
Georgia Hampton: Fair enough. Yeah. I've had people come up to
me after a karaoke performance and shake my hand.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's what I would have wanted.
Hans Buetow: Is that is that good?
Georgia Hampton: I take it as good. That was after a
performance of Lips of an Angel though by Hinder.
Jason Oberholtzer: Oh, wow. Okay. So how
Mike Rugnetta: This is now. We're gonna abandon my bag.
Actually, this is now just a karaoke roundtable in which Hans
is unable to participate.
Georgia Hampton: Hans, you can just you can just log off if
you'd like.
Mike Rugnetta: Georgia, are you a singer? Like, do you can you
sing?
Georgia Hampton: I think I'm fine. I'm not like I'm not one
of those people who's gonna show up to karaoke early and be like,
me
Mike Rugnetta: me me me me. Like Do those people exist?
Georgia Hampton: Oh, they super exist. At bar karaoke?
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, yes. Absolutely.
Georgia Hampton: You hear the first few notes of At Last by
Etta James, you're like, oh, Jesus Christ.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. They're taking this seriously.
Mike Rugnetta: You there are other rooms for you to do that.
Georgia Hampton: There's other places. But I mean, I did, like,
I did musical theater in, like, middle school. So I was never,
you know Mhmm. I can't read music. I never took voice
lessons, but I can belt when it is called for.
Mike Rugnetta: Got it. This is good intel. Let's talk about
some listener stuff.
Jason Oberholtzer: It's a beautiful transition.
Hans Buetow: Oh, that god. Seamless. This
Jason Oberholtzer: mailbag is also of note because it is our
first one as a member of Radiotopia. And we got some mail
as requested from our longtime listeners about what it means
that we are a part of Radiotopia. And one in
particular I thought it'd be interesting for us all to weigh
in on came from Malcolm Toll. Malcolm says, I write now about
one concern I have about podcast ad networks. It unnerves me to
hear the hosts read out ads.
Paragons like The Verge have a deliberate firewall between ads
in the newsroom. It prevents undue financial influence and
bias from impacting reporting. Malcolm provides an example of
this that he thought was particularly odious, says that
he understands the sort of pressures that places can be
under when they are parts of organizations. Goes on to say,
could be wrong. I believe the only ads I've ever heard on the
member feed are for the show itself.
That's sensible. But if the producers are going to read ads
for other companies, I'd like to see a discussion about the
practice in the audio industry. And that's what you're gonna
get, Malcolm, right now.
Georgia Hampton: Let's go. Let's go.
Mike Rugnetta: I mean, I think this is something that we could
probably talk about, maybe not in a segment, but in something
else that we release and record. Just our experience with, you
know, not just to this show, but other shows that we've worked on
and been involved in about, like, how advertising works and
what those pressures are, at least from my perspective as the
nominal host of the show who, you know, when they come to us
and they're like, okay. This ad has to be a host read. My name
is gonna be at the top of the list. I also don't like it.
I just wanna be right really upfront about that. But I think
we have a broad remit in our relationship to say no to ads
just in general. So if we are brought ads for things that we
don't like, then we can say, oh, no. We don't wanna advertise
that. We also have broad sort of like permission to it's like
when they're like, we want you to read this ad and we want you
to include some of your personal experience with this product.
We get to say, I don't have any. And then, you know, just read
the ad. And I think that over time, we're gonna figure out how
that works, and we're probably gonna do some stuff that's
uncomfortable along the way.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. That seems fair. I think the other
thing that's important to point out here is that Radio Topia has
handled this very collaboratively Yeah. Yeah. And
sent us a huge list of things to sign no on essentially.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Where we were able
Jason Oberholtzer: to point out all the places that we might
have some sort of conflict of interest, things that we are
going to have to cover, things that are on our beat, things
that we just don't like. And we have a huge list of those we
sent over, and they said thanks, and they're not gonna send us
those things.
Mike Rugnetta: It's great. I mean, this is maybe one of the
things we could talk about if we ever explain this at length, but
it's like a spreadsheet because it's all standardized. So every
ad has to slot into a basically like type, like a tag type.
Georgia Hampton: Category.
Mike Rugnetta: Category. Yeah. That's that's the word. Uh-huh.
And, yeah, we just went through and we're like, no supplements.
Just no. Just a blanket. No supplements. No. Thank you.
Yeah. And, yeah, they were like, cool. Sounds good. You know? And
then probably dozens of other things that we said no to.
Georgia Hampton: Oh, I mean, this list, like, imagine a long
list and then times it by, like, 800 of how specific you can get
about what kind of ads you don't want.
Jason Oberholtzer: Think about a list. Now think about a bigger
list than the list you're thinking of.
Georgia Hampton: This list is so unimaginably big. But
Mike Rugnetta: I think, you know, we are trying to be
thoughtful about it, and we would hope that when we miss,
you guys will tell us. And, you know, the list of things that we
don't wanna read ads for, like financial services and health
insurance Yeah. And just all the stuff that make you feel just
generally.
Jason Oberholtzer: The other response we saw a few times to
our Radiotopia announcement was fear on the part of the
listeners that we would get rid of what has been described many
different things, many different ways, the little sonic eye dent
at the end of every episode. Oh. You know the sound. I'll put it
Hans Buetow: crack this.
Jason Oberholtzer: Right here. What would you all call I
Mike Rugnetta: think of it as the egg crack in my brain.
Georgia Hampton: That's what it is. Yes. I completely agree
Jason Oberholtzer: with that.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, that's interesting. I I
Hans Buetow: think of it as the snap.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. It is it is, I think, mostly described
as the egg crack and genuine fear from the listeners that the
egg crack would go away to make room for the dulcet tones of
Radiotopia. Fear not, they are all there. We are cracking eggs
and singing opera at the end of every show. I always think of
that sound as like pulling out a quarter inch plug.
That's like a little wet.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. I was gonna say. From an uncooked hamburger
patty? Yeah. Like
Georgia Hampton: oh my god. Anyway,
Jason Oberholtzer: it's not going anywhere.
Mike Rugnetta: Jason, you also got a bunch of outreach from
folks who wanted to let you know that there are in fact podcasts
of music, and how dare you not know about them?
Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. People wanted to let me know that I was
wrong. Can you imagine this? No. This is very helpful.
This is exactly what I asked for. I wanted people to send me
things that were podcasts that they thought amounted to a
musical expression of the form. What if a podcast was music?
What if music arrived as if it were a podcast? And we're gonna
list off some of the things I thought were more interesting
that got sent in.
So thank you, everybody. One of the ones that seemed more
interesting was Ultima Thule, an Australian radio show that seems
to have gone dormant at the end of twenty twenty four. So it
seems like we just missed the window on that, but let me know
if I'm wrong about that since you all love to let me know when
I'm wrong about things. And some other examples people sent in
were real synthetic audio, a state of trance, song of the day
from the current, morning becomes eclectic. Turns out
there's just a lot of stuff out there that people believe to be
music that arrives via podcast.
Hans Buetow: I actually got a text, Jason, from my
brother-in-law, Steven from Brooklyn. Hello, Steven. He's a
listener and a fan who feels bad that he doesn't write in and
only text me individually. So now I'm forcing him into the
show. That's good.
Mike Rugnetta: That's good. Yeah. You should
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Believe in bullying on the show.
Hans Buetow: Let's let's bully our families. So he suggested a
couple of VivaRONT Radio by Jeremy Olander and Above and
Beyond puts out something called group therapy. He said there
were a lot of these that he has listened to over the years
because he listens while he works. He listens to ambient
music while he works.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay.
Hans Buetow: And he pointed me interestingly, what I thought
was interesting, to the final episode of a podcast called
Anjuna Deep Edition. And so they publish this in May 2022, and
they open it by explaining a bit about why they're not doing
podcasts anymore.
Clip: As you might have realized, the weekly Anjuna Deep
Edition mixes haven't been appearing in your podcast feed
since episode 400 a few weeks ago. Sadly, this isn't a glitch
in your app, and we are in fact closing down the podcast feed.
When we first launched the Deep Edition and our other radio
shows, there were very few options for distributing those
kind of mixes. And so like many other labels and artists, we
turned to podcasts. Today, there are a whole host of music
specific platforms that host our mix content, including YouTube,
SoundCloud, and Mixcloud, where you can find the Angunity
petition, along with Apple Music, where you can find our
new Anguno Mix series, and on Spotify, where we've got various
other mixes along with all of our new releases.
These platforms all cater for music in a way that the podcast
feed sadly doesn't, in that the musicians and creators behind
the mixes can receive royalties for their music being played. So
thank you so much for listening.
Mike Rugnetta: Suck. I mean, hard to argue. Do you guys know
Camp? Mm-mm. No.
It's like a French, like, artist residency for electronic
musicians, and they have a radio show sort of radio station,
really just a website that collects mixes that people do.
And it's all hosted on Mixcloud, which I've never encountered
before, you know, like, a couple weeks ago when I found out about
this. Mixcloud rules. Okay. So just hearing this now.
It's like this I'm sure this is frequency illusion. You know
what I mean? Like, suddenly, this is everywhere, but I'm sure
I just never encountered it before. But yeah. I mean, it's
compelling.
It's a compelling reason.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. It makes some sense.
Jason Oberholtzer: One email I wanted to spend a little bit of
time on was one from Jam, who suggested that they're a casual
music listener, but the first thing that jumped to mind were
DJ sets and playlists, such as Isaac Varzim's Groovy sets,
Humano Studios guest sets, Boiler Room sets, made me want
to ask the question in the other direction. Rather than what
podcast might be music, what music might actually be a
podcast and I nominate DJ sets.
Mike Rugnetta: Interesting. Yeah. Okay. In a way, opera.
Jason Oberholtzer: You're right. The original podcast is
Mike Rugnetta: talk people talking about their problems.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Sorry. The second podcast. First, had
cereal, then we had opera.
Georgia Hampton: Traditional Italian opera.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's actually the perfect answer. Oh,
my god.
Georgia Hampton: So up next, in response to an email from Thales
Baretto in our last mailbag regarding our segment from last
year's live show at xoxo, which is about TikTok shop. We
attempted to identify which online business might be the
most parasitic. And in Talis's words, the question was, which
online business is able to profit while being the least it
can be? Jason Mehmel writes in with his contender, which is
PayPal. Jason writes, I'm sure there was some level of work to
make initial bank connections and such.
But at this point, it's just a middle stop between whatever
banks are involved in the transaction. Maybe that initial
work deserves credit, but it's devolved into being just a
membrane skimming from the transactions moving through it.
I'd love to know if there are better methods now. I feel like
PayPal is an an entity that seems vaguely evil to me, but I
know so little about.
Mike Rugnetta: PayPal, don't listen. PayPal, if you're
listening, just just fast forward. PayPal sucks. And
PayPal
Georgia Hampton: All my homies hate PayPal.
Mike Rugnetta: Can only exist because payment infrastructure
in The United States is so atrophied and at under the
control of, like, corporate interests and doesn't actually
benefit people. Whenever you, like, talk to someone who
doesn't live in The United States about just, like, sending
small bits of money back and forth to your friends, they're
like, just use your bank. And our answer is, oh, you can't.
Well, yeah. We got PayPal, a third service that is like the
money mafia.
Georgia Hampton: It really feels like that. Like, as someone I
don't feel like I interface that much with PayPal. I don't know
why that is. Maybe just the transactions I'm doing. But
usually, in my experience, the methods that are used are like
Venmo or Zelle.
PayPal kinda doesn't exist in my life. So I I sort of defer to to
you guys.
Mike Rugnetta: Well, Venmo is just is owned by PayPal. So it's
just it's just another scan on it. It's just a yeah. It's just
one level on top of PayPal.
Georgia Hampton: Also, isn't there just they have like a
really easy backdoor to get into or something? I feel like I've
heard so many stories of people having like, their identity
stolen through PayPal, or like their bank information stolen
through PayPal. Something horrible happening. The main
thing that
Mike Rugnetta: they do is they they have an even more sensitive
tripwire than, say, Visa does as far as just saying, well, you
can't do that anymore. And that they are well known for if they
don't like something that you're doing or just mildly suspicious
of you, just shutting your account down and taking all your
money, which, of course, is in their interest
Georgia Hampton: to So what I'm hearing is maybe this is
actually exactly the most parasitic. It's pretty bad.
Maybe we just got it. Like, maybe this is it.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Okay. PayPal, you can start listening
again. And that's why I love PayPal. And that's why the
Georgia Hampton: sponsor, PayPal.
Mike Rugnetta: It's it's just it's extremely convenient. And
honestly, their trust and safety team, I feel like they go out of
their way Above and beyond. Sure. Yeah. To make sure that
everybody who uses the service, like, really knows what they're
doing.
Jason Oberholtzer: So to rewind to the beginning of this
mailbag, we're gonna get no advertisers. Okay.
Mike Rugnetta: Good news. In our last mailbag, Toby called in,
and the voicemail got cut off. And then Toby called in again.
Jason Oberholtzer: Hell, yeah.
Georgia Hampton: Yes, Toby.
Toby: Hey, Never Post. I'm so sorry about whatever happened. I
think what I was getting at is my social media algorithm in
terms of specifically ads has changed significantly since I,
like, medically transitioned. And so basically what happened
is I started noticing I was getting a lot more gun oriented
things, a lot more fitness. I was getting more ads for shitty
supplements.
And I was just curious about, like, the sort of gender
assigned at social media algorithm idea.
What do you all think?
Is this, like, a legitimate
thing in terms of, like, your ads predicting sort of, like,
your gender?
Mike Rugnetta: So I would like to just remind everyone that we
accept pitches.
Georgia Hampton: Yes. Toby.
Mike Rugnetta: And that we pay people to make segments and that
this is interesting.
Georgia Hampton: Fascinating. So interesting.
Hans Buetow: Toby, call us back again.
Jason Oberholtzer: Just call Hans. Just call Hans.
Mike Rugnetta: Just give me a
Hans Buetow: raise time.
Mike Rugnetta: Hans' phone number is Hi. Next up, in
response to our segment about section two thirty with Mike
Masnik, my pal Guy, and Hans' pal Guy
Hans Buetow: Oh, Guy.
Mike Rugnetta: Called in.
Guy: Section two thirty is a US law. Laws have jurisdiction, and
I wondered how section two thirty sort of related to the
Internet and the the global entity. And I know you guys have
talked about, you know, this in other shows about, you know,
it's hard to know the Internet from other perspectives other
than The US. But I wondered if, you know, if there was anything
to say about if section two thirty does go away, how does
that impact the Internet in other places? Do other countries
follow it?
That would that make The US an outlier, or would then they join
more countries that also don't have anything like section two
thirty?
Hans Buetow: So Guy yes. Guy lives in Canada. Mike, I have a
question for you. I I wanna predict your answer just a
little bit and actually see if I'm at all right about this.
Jason Oberholtzer: Alright.
Hans Buetow: That the torch is being passed. Two thirty does
affect it at the moment because so many places have to deal
with, do business in, and be subject to American laws.
However, that source of power has been shifting over the last
ten years maybe to the European Union who is coming and being
much more strict with all sorts of places that The US is
currently choosing not to be strict at all, especially with
the demise of net neutrality. Like, the European Union is the
only one who is actually doing this and are shaping
Mike Rugnetta: the Internet for the rest of us.
Hans Buetow: Am I sort of right?
Mike Rugnetta: So, I mean, the important thing to remember
about net neutrality is that that is not a content level
decision. Right? That is or or it is content level insofar as
its content that goes through infrastructure, which the EU is
trying to regulate both both of those things. But the
infrastructure is like a completely different thing.
Right?
The cables are where the cables are, but the information is
everywhere. So I think there is a way to think about this where
we get two Internets, essentially, and we see a larger
version of what already exists with, say, the right to be
forgotten, where every year I think it's every year. The EU
gets, like, 50,000,000 requests for results on Google to be
removed or to be downranked, and Google adheres to or accepts,
like, half of them. I think it is. But that only happens in the
EU.
Right? There's no right to be forgotten in The United States.
There's just the Internet works in two different ways in two
different places. There's a chance that that happens. I
think it's probably really unlikely.
The, like, bigger thing to consider is that most of the
largest Internet players right? And really, we're talking about,
like, social media is really what is what is to be considered
here. They're all US companies. They will have to abide by US
law. And so in their if section two thirty goes away, right,
they have basically two choices.
They can moderate everything. They take the path of, like,
we're gonna look at everything. We're gonna approve it before it
all goes up, where everything's gonna get the green check mark.
Everything's treated very, very equally that way. The things
that I've seen written about this is that other countries,
especially other authoritarian countries, look at that and they
say, oh, so you are looking at every post.
Great. When you come across posts that say Erdogan is bad,
could you take all those down? Like, you you're already doing
it. You're already looking at everything. Like, why don't you
just don't take it all down?
What happens then? Do they agree? Do they stop offering
their services in those countries because they don't
wanna get involved in that situation? Do they offer a
different version of the Internet in those countries? You
sort of end up at the two Internets again.
The other outcome is they say, okay, two thirty goes away.
Okay. We can't moderate anything. We don't moderate
anything. We're not gonna look at anything.
That means the Internet, as Mike Masnik described it, becomes a
cesspit for everybody who engages with it. Until the EU
then says, well, you can't there are certain uses or posts. There
are certain kinds of content that just cannot be seen here,
and so fix it. Does that then mean, you know, there's now two
versions of the Internet again? There's the one in The US that's
not at all moderated, and there's the one in The EU that
is moderated to their regulations.
You know? There's so many things that have to happen before we
know what happens, but those are the two sort of, like, branching
paths that I've seen other people talk about as far as what
is the rest of the world like if section two thirty goes away in
The United States?
Jason Oberholtzer: Well, our most recent relevant example is
GDPR, which is now fairly old. Yeah. But American companies
ended up just by and large becoming GDPR compliant across
the board because it's more of a hassle not to have been. So that
was EU taking the lead and everyone just opting into the
ease of just following along.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. So I think the answer here is
Hans Buetow: no.
Georgia Hampton: Up next, Jay wrote in about my conversation
about having fun on the Internet with Kyle Chaeka. And Jay said,
I gave some thought into the ways that I combat algorithmic
fun. And this is what I've come up with. And here's a fabulous
list of options. Disable auto play or auto preview.
I always manually select the next thing. Yes. I do this too.
It's amazing. Click on the subscriptions tab on YouTube.
I also do this. Very smart. Whenever possible, sort only by
chronology. Yep. Which interesting.
I hadn't even thought of that. Whenever possible, use RSS in
quote unquote quiet apps. Subscribe to newsletters when
it's important to me, and RSS is unavailable. I often find cool
stuff tag surfing on Mastodon, Tumblr, Bandcamp, maybe soon on
Blue Sky. Whenever I go to the library weekly, which wow.
Nice. Thank you. I will grab one comic, one jazz CD, and one
movie I've never heard of.
Jason Oberholtzer: And do them all at the same time,
Clip: I assume?
Georgia Hampton: Multiple screens, full While
Mike Rugnetta: watching a Subway Surfers video.
Georgia Hampton: That's a really beautiful practice. I really
love this. And then finally, they say, anthologies. I enjoy
buying things in bundles on itch.io. We're supporting
anthologies on Kickstarter, and that's a fun way to discover new
creators.
This is a wonderful list.
Jason Oberholtzer: It's beautiful, Jasmine. It's
Mike Rugnetta: Tag surfing on Bandcamp rules. I cannot
recommend it highly enough. I do it almost every day.
Jason Oberholtzer: I want more of these. Where else are people
finding intentional interactions with their media and attention?
Georgia Hampton: And then Sam also called in with message
about this segment.
Sam: I have to say, I have gone back to using RSS feeds for
pretty much all of my Internet consumption. And I actually spun
up my own RSS server on a web server that I have. And since
then, I have been using that and it is so much better. Oh, I know
exactly what's there. I want exactly what's there.
And I don't have to deal with some algorithm getting in my
way. And it's great.
Georgia Hampton: Mike, I want you to go first.
Hans Buetow: Mike's Alright. Punching the air that rules so
hard. Yes.
Georgia Hampton: All time. Mike, I see the floor to you.
Mike Rugnetta: That's it. That's I mean, that's all I have to say
is punching the air. Sam, that rules. I I fully I think I don't
wanna call it a resurgence because it never really went
anywhere, but the refocusing, let's say, on RSS has been a
long time in the making, and I think it's only going to
continue in focus as people realize what the current way of
getting information has done to the information environment and
to our brains. And we're gonna go back to calm, as the last
comment said, quiet ways of getting information in organized
streams in particular places and not having to just sort of,
like, live underneath the waterfall.
Georgia Hampton: God. Yeah.
Hans Buetow: It's real simple. It's real simple.
Jason Oberholtzer: One other email I wanted to take a look at
here for your sake, Georgia, The payment about this piece
involves pretty much exclusively Titanium Daydream.
Georgia Hampton: Let's go. Yes.
Jason Oberholtzer: You wanna tell the folks what Ethan wrote
in to say?
Georgia Hampton: Absolutely. It would be my pleasure. Ethan
writes in that they are also a huge fan of Titanium Daydream,
which is fabulous news for me. Ethan, get in touch. Would love
to talk to someone else who's watching.
But they also write that what's interesting is that I think it
both shows what's incredible about TikTok and the problem
with algorithmic content feeds. I'm thrilled that an equation
somehow produced the numbers that served this incredibly
niche and esoteric video series to me. But the big caveat is
that its weekly output schedule doesn't work well with the
platform. You either have to diligently check-in on the
account every Tuesday, which I sometimes do, or pray the
algorithm brings you the next episode. So far, I haven't
missed any episodes.
But this randomness gives the completionist in me a bit of
anxiety. They go on to say that this is true for a lot of other
serialized content on TikTok, which this is exactly how I feel
about Titanium Daydream.
Jason Oberholtzer: So do you are you a Tuesday viewer? How do you
engage?
Georgia Hampton: I kind of have the the other approach, which is
just that I regularly use TikTok and kind of hope Yeah. That it
will bring Titanium Daydream to me. I also do I will say this. I
follow that account on Instagram as well. And so that account
will post on their story like, hey, the next episode is up.
So that I can be like, oh, right. And maybe go on TikTok.
TikTok's algorithm knows I like Titanium Daydream, and I will
Mhmm. Always see it. I I also have not skipped an episode.
Jason Oberholtzer: It is funny as a counterpoint to the
intentional Internet we were just championing a moment ago. I
have stopped following new accounts on TikTok even. I am
just entirely to the algorithm behold them. I I don't even like
things anymore. I forget to heart them.
I just watch something and I'm like, for sure, more of this
will get back to me because I have watched it, and I let the
numbers do their thing. I have nothing in the middle anymore.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I think a lot of this speaks to the kind
of fundamental dishonesty of the algorithm whose promise was,
hey, don't worry about it. We're gonna bring you the stuff that
you like. And then it just doesn't. It just simply doesn't.
It just brings you stuff that's close to the thing that you
like, so that you spend more time letting content happen to
you as you turn into a puddle on your couch. And I think it
speaks to the intentionality and the specificity of RSS where you
get to say, I like this. Bring more of it to me. And RSS just
says, okay.
Georgia Hampton: Done. I love you.
Mike Rugnetta: Alright. On that, we're gonna take a break. We're
gonna listen to some ads. For PayPal. Okay.
We are back. Hans, we had some people write in about the just
unbelievable number of cameras in the world.
Hans Buetow: It is a shocking number of cameras, and I
appreciate that everybody gets that. Pat wrote in. Pat Reddick
wrote in to say that they really appreciated the AP footage that
I referenced from April 2006. I found this video of how how
amazing it was that there were three traffic cameras being put
up in New York City, and they did whole these whole cloth
things. And Pat says a little over three years later in
02/2009, I was in a first year computer science studies
lecture.
And even by that point, the surveillance state felt like a
given. So my jaw nearly hit the floor when the professor told an
anecdote about how he had led a push to stop the administration
from installing cameras all around the university. I
remember him telling the story like his view that the idea of
cameras everywhere was a creepy prospect with little upside was
obviously correct and, like, everyone in the room would
agree. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there like, you mean we have a
choice in this matter? We can opt out of this?
Honestly, I hadn't even noticed that the university lacked
cameras. I had just assumed that they were like everywhere else.
I remained involved in university life until 2016, and
they did not install any cameras I was aware of during that time.
And I think that timeline makes a ton of sense. So in the
research for the piece that I did, I had written an entire
section that I wanted to put in that I thought I was gonna put
in using the research of Shoshana Zuboff, who's a
sociologist from Harvard.
And she has this whole thing about surveillance capitalism
that she does, which is about the industry, the money that
gets put into surveillance all over the place. And she actually
puts the rise of cameras into the late nineties, mid to late
nineties with Gore. And there's a we'll put a link to it in the
show notes, but she's got this really great talk where she
tells these anecdotes of being right around that time and being
in conferences and having people be like, the information is
everything. We need to surveil. We need to surveil.
And so, like, you're exactly right to have noticed it at that
moment that that was really what the ascendancy was. And a lot of
it was in response to to nine eleven, but it started even
before then.
Mike Rugnetta: And I feel like we're only just now starting to
see what the people who wanted the cameras might want to and be
able to use them for. Yeah. Twenty years ago, they were
like, we should install. We should build a horrible machine.
Yeah.
And in 2025, they're like, we should turn the machine on.
Yeah. For
Hans Buetow: that 02/2006 AP article, I found a New York
Times article also that was talking about that same event
from February. And in that, they basically were like, yeah. It's
kinda weird, I guess, but, like, the quality of them is so low,
and the data is so big, and you have to actually go to, like,
pull the data out of the camera. So I don't think it'll ever get
big. We laid the groundwork back then, and all we had to do is
fix those small.
You really didn't think cameras were gonna get better? You
really didn't think connectivity was gonna improve? Like, that
was the only way it was gonna be limited, and now here we are
exactly like Mike says. Chris also wrote in, and I really I
think this is a really striking comment. Chris works at Walmart
and says that there are cameras everywhere.
The self checkout area alone has at least two cameras per
checkout spot. One is to look at your face as a customer, and the
other is to watch your scanning technique waiting for when you
make a mistake or you might be trying to steal like the carrot
technique. There are very few spots where there is not a
camera of some kind. In fact, I tend to take notice of where
there is a blind spot or a weird lack of cameras. I feel
constantly watched because I'm being constantly watched.
That's true. But I also know from talking to coworkers and
customers that they do not really feel this way, which is
very interesting. But also, like, I can't say that. That's
deeply relatable. Like, that's what my whole piece was about.
Like Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Yeah. You normalize it. Yeah. I know
I'm constantly being watched, but I rarely engage with that
knowledge.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. I don't have feelings about it. And and it
took me a lot of looking at it to actually have have any
feeling.
Georgia Hampton: I wanna briefly return to this self checkout
thing. Because just the fact of the normalization of of watching
yourself. Because I even think of this at Target. Right? Like,
the self checkout camera is showing you yourself.
Like, you can look at it. You're watching yourself there. And
what's interesting to me is, like, I have a lot of friends
whose impulse when they see that is to, like, take a picture of
themselves, like, with their phone of the self checkout
screen that's showing them. Yeah. And it's I don't I just
find that's, like, such an interesting reaction in the
conversation of this normalization of just like, yep.
That's me, and here's me, and here's my phone, and here's the
screen.
Jason Oberholtzer: Taking the power back. And now I'm the
you're I'm making content out of you. So yeah. You're the
commodity.
Mike Rugnetta: Have you guys tried to buy a power tool at a
like a Home Depot recently?
Georgia Hampton: Oh, you know, haven't.
Mike Rugnetta: In the in the hardware aisle where, like, you
know, the angle grinders or whatever are in the Home Depot,
there are cameras now and then small little screens that again
show you what camera what the camera that you're on. And that
picture is sent to a building somewhere else. I don't I don't
know where in another state where there are people who just
sit there and watch.
Clip: Woah.
Mike Rugnetta: It is an outsourced company that looks
specifically at the tools in Home Depot to make sure that no
one steals them. And I once heard a man, like, talk to
someone through the camera to, like, explain because someone
was, like, trying to pick up something, and they was like,
hey. You can't you're not gonna be able to pick that up. You
gotta go get someone.
Georgia Hampton: If you
Mike Rugnetta: pull harder, you're gonna set the alarm off.
Georgia Hampton: Woah. Oh my god. This actually transitions
perfectly into the voicemail that Carl sent us about an
experience that he had at a local restaurant regarding
cameras.
Carl: I was just in New Haven last weekend and I went to a
really great vegan restaurant or vegetarian restaurant called
Claire's Corner Copia, which I've been to a couple of times.
And it's this really homey, really cute little restaurant
with like drawings of farms on the walls. And really, I mean, I
think kitsch in a fun way decor. And as I was kind of looking
around enjoying my vegan French toast and taking in the
environment, I noticed the camera. I was like, okay,
that's, I guess, normal.
Normal for a little restaurant to have a camera. As I was
looking around enjoying more of the decor, I noticed another
camera and another camera and then two more cameras. And by
the end of my sort of aesthetic scan, I've identified 11 cameras
in a small dining room
Mike Rugnetta: Too many.
Carl: Of a small restaurant in the middle of New Haven. Mean, I
was bothered, obviously, by all these cameras. But the biggest
question for me was how can there be this many cameras
covering so small a space? And this sort of like surveillance
ideology is so invisible that the owner of, like, a homey
vegetarian restaurant in New Haven can think it's good and
appropriate to to surveil from every angle possible everybody
in the restaurant at once.
Mike Rugnetta: I saw this happen on my block with Ring cameras.
The exact same thing. When people ins people install a Ring
camera, and they're like, I can I can finally see all of the
horrible nonsense? They become Batman. And they're like, you
know, I must surveil Gotham from the rooftops.
And then they install another camera to get this angle, and
then a third camera to get the other angle, and then a fourth.
And then they're just watching it all day long to be like,
who's that person that walked by in this? And I like I had to
leave. My block had a group text, and I was like, I had to
leave. I left it because everybody was going insane about
just, like, normal city shit that happens on every block.
And I think I think it is surveillance ideology. I think
people get addicted to it.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Once you pop, you can't stop.
Mike Rugnetta: I can just one more camera. Just one more. But
agree. Yeah. Jason.
Jason Oberholtzer: I just back to this rest how many different
types of behavior are you policing in that restaurant?
Like, I don't know. Put one by the door. If someone ditches,
you'll be able to, like, see their face and make this is the
guy who ditched. Don't let them back in.
Like, are they eating weird? What do you need to know?
Georgia Hampton: Well, that's my thing is that I'm like like, to
Carl's point, who's watching? Like, what are they why do they
need this? It's too much. It's just undeniably too much.
Jason Oberholtzer: Noah Hertz writes in in response to
George's piece on the impending once and future never resolves
TikTok ban Yes. To brag that he deleted TikTok off his phone.
Well well well.
Georgia Hampton: Well well, Noah.
Mike Rugnetta: Noah, who you all might remember from the David
Social segment.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. Right. And so interestingly, Noah
remarks that he doesn't really think his average screen time
has come down all that much since he deleted TikTok off the
phone. Oh. He was hoping that that would be the case.
He just replaced it with using Instagram more. But he finds
that the average scrolling session on Instagram is far far
shorter than it was on TikTok.
Mike Rugnetta: Mhmm. Because it sucks.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Because it's bad. Yeah. But your body
still needs the same amount of raw
Georgia Hampton: feed. Scrolling.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Now it says they learned a lot of cool
stuff, saw lots of cute funny videos. Thanks to TikTok, but
also felt like they spend a lot of their time watching whatever
slop was being fed to them. Now they think they're getting more
out of Instagram than it's getting out of them, which they
stopped feeling like with TikTok. So I guess that's
progress.
Congratulations, Noah. Thank you for bragging, and I hope that
you continue to love what Instagram is giving you. But
it's a post script, which I found particularly interesting
here. In light of some other emails that came in, Noah
included a picture of him listening to Never Post on a
classic iPod.
Georgia Hampton: Oh my god.
Mike Rugnetta: I'm seeing more and more classic iPods, pictures
of them refurbished and modified and jailbroken and whatever in
the feed, and I support it. I fully support. Yeah. I think it
rules.
Georgia Hampton: Oh my god.
Jason Oberholtzer: And this leads me to some emails we got
harkening back to last summer's Sound Files of Summer episode,
where we talked about our evolving strategies of music
curation and how we stored and streamed and lost and deleted
and refound files of music in our lives. We got an email from
Lenny who might not be using the iPod Classic still, but is
trading USBs with their friends. Living in Canada where music
streaming services and phone data plans cost a lot more than
The US, it's common to drive or visit places where you lose cell
service and there are no radio stations. Old phones, ancient
iPods, and visor holders full of CDs are our friends during these
stretches. I often wonder if other places have similar
experiences, especially with the rise of cheap Android phones and
SD cards for storage.
This is basically becoming our reject modernity use old gear
and old protocols episode.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Really is. I love
Mike Rugnetta: the idea of a like a file swap. Yeah. Like you
go to a place and you bring your USB, your thumb drive, you swap
files. Sounds great.
Jason Oberholtzer: Lenny's final contribution to the Sound Files
of Summer discourse is to tell me for the second time in this
podcast that I was wrong about something.
Mike Rugnetta: You should reconsider being wrong so much.
Jason Oberholtzer: I went on the record as a person who used the
star ratings on iTunes. My favorite songs were five stars.
My least favorite were one star. Lenny tells me that this is
wrong, and that the on the go music management system that
works the best is one star for your best music, five stars for
the ones you wanna delete so that you can quickly mark a song
to delete without taking your iPod out of your pocket, which
is some next level behavior, Lenny. You keep up literally
everything you're doing up there.
Mike Rugnetta: Ronald wrote in in response to the segment that
I made about real photos that look like AI and what this does
to sort of like our sense of being able to know things and
what the truth is and what is real. Ronald wrote, thought you
might want to know that AI is already well and truly
contributing to the erosion of the foundations of modern
scientific inquiry. Academic watchdog blog Retraction Watch
recently published an article on vegetative electron microscopy,
a borderline nonsense phrase that began making its way into
publications apparently because an AI algorithm spliced together
words across the gap between two justified columns in an article
from 1959. Holy shit. Regardless of its origins, the phrase is
almost always an indicator that a paper was produced by a
publication mill.
One set of authors claims to use the phrase to define a specific
analytic technique, but I'm not enough of an expert in
microscopy to adjudicate this claim. If you're trained in the
STEM fields, searching Google Scholar for vegetative electron
microscopy with the quotation marks is good for a chuckle or
maybe a looming sense of dread as one of humanity's best tools
for fashioning truth from falsehoods falls into
fabrications. One of my favorite results, this article, and we'll
put a link in the show notes from 2022, which was low key
corrected in June 2024 to remove the offending phrase and to
renumber most of the citations, which were apparently wrong.
See? Hilarious.
Please help. I'm scared. Ronald,
Georgia Hampton: right there
Mike Rugnetta: with you. I think, you know, it's you wanna
believe that this sort of technology is used for fun, you
know, in with a bunch of quotes around it to make weird silly
pictures that you couldn't make otherwise, you know, and maybe
people don't know what the cost of that is. But, yeah, it's
everywhere.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: Whoops.
Hans Buetow: Whoops.
Mike Rugnetta: Whoops. Some folks also wrote in about my
segment on blocking, where I spoke with Caroline Cinders
about what it feels like to block people and what the
technology is for and its usefulness and the kind of
ambivalence that you can feel around blocking. Alex Posten
says, please forgive the following tortured metaphors. I
will. Like a lot of people, I began the process of jumping
ship from Twitter after the Elon takeover and finally permanently
deleted my account after the changes to the block function
were announced.
Blocking, IMO, is the most important safety feature for a
social platform, and when safety features don't function
properly, people get hurt. If Kia pushed an update to my car
telling me that going forward, my airbags would only sort of
work, I'm shopping for a new car that day. To paraphrase a line
from doctor who, blocking isn't self care, it's pest control.
And so far, as I'm aware, nobody has built a better mousetrap
than blue sky. The nuclear block should be the standard for
social media.
I'm sure the of blue sky will come eventually, but for now,
I'll just sit back and enjoy the sound of my own voice and the
voices of folks I actually wanna hear instead of listening to all
the rats skittering behind the walls. I mean, I will say the
blue sky block is incredible. It's really great. One wonders
whether or not it will eventually be nerfed in some way
or another as brands show up because, you know, if Blue Sky
wants to make money from brand presence and they want if they
end up wanting to do in line advertising, you're right. They
almost certainly will not allow you to block as effectively
those accounts as they do, you know, other posters because
that's gonna be part of their business model.
But fingers crossed, you know, whatever solution comes along,
it doesn't detract from what is yeah. Like, a really, really
just incredibly effective moderation tool. Ellie also
wrote in on a difficult decision to block or to not block someone
that she knows in meatspace.
Elli: You know, I think often we think about blocking as a tool
that we can use for harassment, like you like you mentioned on
the show. But the only reason I haven't blocked this particular
person that I'm thinking about is that they are, to some
extent, still within my existing IRL social network. Right? And
this is somebody that had sort of career power over me for a
while and is still, to my knowledge, relatively well
regarded. And so, you know, I the the thing that's kept me
from blocking her for so long is like, what if she finds out?
And then she's like, what beef does Ellie have with me? And,
you know, could that have consequences in my career or in
or or could that be a reason that I don't get an opportunity
later? What does it mean to block someone when you can't
block them in real life also, you know?
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. This is extremely
Jason Oberholtzer: relatable. We're all staring at each other
uneasily right
Mike Rugnetta: Jason doesn't know I have him muted on
everything.
Jason Oberholtzer: I was gonna say, is this is the case for
mute. Right?
Mike Rugnetta: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Unless you don't
like, it depends upon, I think, how well you know the person and
how likely it is in conversation. They're gonna be
like, oh, you saw that thing I put.
Right? Like, whatever whatever. Sure. Like, you can always say,
like, oh, no. Like, I haven't signed in in a couple days, and
there's some, you know, plausible deniability.
But, yeah, there's the case for mute. I also like there are
people who I haven't unfollowed because I'm like, I don't I feel
some pressure to be, like, continuing to follow this person
that I like, you know, really have no interest in seeing
anything that goes on with them. Mhmm. But I justify it to myself
where I'm like, well, I'm like, think the creepiest way to put
it is, like, keeping tabs on them. See what they're up to.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: Make sure I'm not where they are.
Jason Oberholtzer: Is this your version of a vegetarian
restaurant full of cameras? And finally, as a tradition rounding
out the mailbag and update to cool graffiti that people have
sent us. I
Mike Rugnetta: think isn't it funny graffiti? I think it's
funny tags.
Georgia Hampton: Right? Okay. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: It used to be single word graffiti. Its purest
state is single word graffiti that you found funny. And Hans,
I think there's a name in here you might recognize.
Hans Buetow: Oh, Steven Heil.
Jason Oberholtzer: Eagle eared listeners might recognize from
earlier in the program, Steven Heil. Yeah. Who spotted in
Brooklyn, a purist's one word answer, which is okra.
Georgia Hampton: Yes. Scrolled on just a regular brick wall.
Yes.
Jason Oberholtzer: And then for those of us who are allowing
more words in these things, a beautiful bathroom wall that
says watch Star Trek the next generation.
Toby: Solid advice.
Mike Rugnetta: I didn't get a picture of it, but I will. And
then I will formally submit it for the next. But I saw a tag
also in Brooklyn yesterday. Very artfully. Clearly, someone spent
a lot of time on it.
It said, oh boy, enema.
Georgia Hampton: Oh boy.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's great. That's great. There's a lot more
graffiti in the mailbag. I'm gonna save some of it for next
week because we are running out of time that we have for this
week to talk. But there's one more graffiti I wanna talk about
before send us all home.
And that is friend of the show Talia has found us another
Garfies.
Hans Buetow: Woo. Oh, no. Woo.
Mike Rugnetta: It looks like it looks like this is forever. This
is a big titty Garfies.
Georgia Hampton: It sure is.
Mike Rugnetta: A big titty Garfie holding a bomb? A bomb?
Yes. Absolutely.
Jason Oberholtzer: I did
Mike Rugnetta: a little bit
Jason Oberholtzer: of research. Now that there's two Garfies.
This is apparently a thing in Melbourne. Most specifically,
there are Garfies everywhere. Garfies across Say right.
Melbourne. Sorry, everyone. For those of you who are new to
Garfies, it is Garfield with tits doing things.
Georgia Hampton: Big tittie Garfield.
Jason Oberholtzer: They're apparently all over Melbourne,
and I have no idea why. And no one else does.
Georgia Hampton: I actually like it less when you do that.
Mike Rugnetta: But to remind our listeners that we do accept
pitches. Yes.
Georgia Hampton: We the line is open, and we're ready to listen
to you.
Jason Oberholtzer: Toby. Toby.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. That's what we got for you in mailbag. Thank
you everybody for writing in, calling in, sending us your
voice memos, sending us your emails. Thank you friends for
the conversation. We're gonna be back in the feed one week from
today on April 9.
We'll see you then.
Hans Buetow: Bye.