Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was written on Monday, 05/19/2025 at 08:19PM
eastern, and we have a sensational show for you this
week. First, what can hentai teach us about platforms? What
can platforms teach us about hentai?
We look with Morgan Sung, host and writer of KQED's fabulous
Internet podcast, close all tabs at this racy genre and what it
reveals about the Internet of today. Then Georgia talks with
Wired staff writer Boone Ashworth about the tariffs
coming for your fashion micro trends. Office siren, mob wife,
bog chic. Can they survive? Should they survive?
And also ask an expert. But right now, we're gonna take a
quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the
member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of
the things that have happened since the last time you heard
from us. Get hype.
I've got five stories for you this week. Scientists, those
freaks absolutely blasted human cells with five g signals to see
if there are any adverse effects and folks, this is gonna knock
your socks off. There are not. This according to a paper
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America's Nexus Journal. Gizmodo
reports that quote, researchers exposed two types of human skin
cells called fibroblasts and keratinocytes to five g
electromagnetic waves at twenty seven and forty point five
gigahertz frequencies with varying levels of intensity.
Ultimately, the report says their results show with great
clarity that in human skin cells even under worst case
conditions, no significant changes in gene expression or
methylation patterns are observed after exposure. So no
x-ray vision or lizard skin mutations. I'm sort of
disappointed, honestly. Leading up to the recent Canadian
election, the Toronto Metropolitan University's social
media lab discovered the existence of what they're
calling chameleon ads on Facebook, where scammers will
set up a fake Facebook page linking to a fake website and
submit seemingly anodyne ads for approval to the platform. Once
given the green light, scammers will then switch out the
entirety of the content, replacing harmless if fraudulent
advertisements with, you guessed it, crypto scams, which have
recently featured deepfakes involving Canadian politicians.
Scammers, the lab says, will often switch the content of the
ads back and forth multiple times, making them harder to
track down. When the scam ads are finally taken down, the lab
says, Facebook will delete them and their associated pages,
which makes research and therefore prevention more
difficult. The lab calls on Meta to better archive scam ads and
their associated pages after taking them down so that
researchers can work to prevent further fraud. Twenty three and
Me has sold to the multibillion dollar New York based
biotechnology company Regeneron for $256,000,000, 4 0 4 media
reports, which means the genetic data for the roughly 17,000,000
people who used the company's services is worth about $15 a
pop. No word yet on what exactly Regeneron plans to do with this
vast repository of genetic info, but they have said they expect
23 and me will, quote, continue all consumer genome services
uninterrupted.
In a statement on the sale, Regeneron writes, Regeneron
intends to ensure compliance with 23andMe's consumer privacy
policies and applicable laws with respect to the treatment of
customer data. As the successful bidder, Regeneron is prepared to
detail the intended use of customer data and the privacy
programs and security controls in place for review by a court
appointed independent customer privacy ombudsman and other
interested parties. And finally, COSA is back. We talked about
the kids online safety act in episode 22, don't panic, from
November of last year. It failed a house vote then, but co
sponsors Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Richard Blumenthal
of Connecticut have reintroduced it.
The bill nominally requires platforms to more effectively
behave in the interest of kids using their services, but in
fact could enable political targeting and the removal of
resources crucial to groups like transgender teens. This is a
complicated issue and a big story larger than we have time
for in the news, which is why in this episode, in our
interstitials, we're talking again with Avery Dame Griff, the
historian and lecturer from episode 22, about the return of
Xhosa and what you need to know about its reintroduction. That's
the news I have for you this week. First, how platforms ate
the Internet with the exception of hentai, apparently. Then,
will the tariffs come for your little treats?
Spoiler alert, they already have. But now in our
interstitials, Hans talks with Avery Dame Griff for our first
edition of Ask An Expert about the Kids Online Safety Act.
Hans Buetow: Avery Damegriff, thank you so much for joining us
for the first ever ask an expert. You truly are an expert.
You are a lecturer in women, gender, and sexuality studies at
Gonzaga University. You also founded and you serve as the
primary curator for Queer Digital History Project, which
is an independent community history project, and it catalogs
and archives pre twenty ten LGBTQ spaces online. You also
maintain the archival Internet video index, which indexes video
footage of pre Internet and early Internet communication
platforms.
Your award winning book, the two revolutions, a history of the
Transgender Internet from NYU Press in 2023, it tracks how the
Internet transformed gender political organizing from the
nineteen eighties to the contemporary moment. In 2022,
you were selected to be a public humanities fellow for the
Humanities Washington, developing a series of
interactive online exhibits, teaching guides, and workshops
about the history of LGBTQ plus communities in online spaces.
And last autumn, you and I both worked together on an episode,
that helped us, and I think our audience, understand the moral
panics that are driving the push for COSA, the Kids Online Safety
Act. Avery, COSA is back in the news, so we wanted to come to
you and ask you, our COSA expert, is this bill gonna make
kids safe online?
Avery Dame-Griff: Nope.
Mike Rugnetta: Asking what comes after platforms is a bit like
asking what comes after cities. They define our landscape so
much that I struggle to picture a horizon that doesn't feature
their hulking shape. If not platforms as they are now, per
se, then surely we'll continue on inside their hollowed out
shells, dystopic squatters in the ruins of the old Internet.
To misquote Frederic Jamison, it's a bit easier to imagine the
end of the Internet than the end of platforms. I ask this because
it feels, to run the risk of overstating it by putting it
very plainly, like the age of the platform is ending and has
maybe even ended.
Facebook, x, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etcetera, they all came in
a short amount of time to define my understanding at least of the
global network. Even from a critical perspective, realizing
that they and the Internet are not one in the same, it became
more difficult than it should have been for me to think of the
Internet outside of the totalizing infrastructural ideal
of the platform and platforms themselves. They began to feel a
bit like the AOL and the CompuServe of my youth, walled
gardens enclosing much larger and freer territory. But what
once felt ubiquitous and frankly, untoppable is now the
subject of increasing, though insufficient regulation, and
more significantly, public suspicion. And rightfully so,
given that this sub era of the platform Internet has been
defined by social, economic, political, and emotional
turmoil, which if it can't be blamed on the platforms
themselves, portions of that blame can certainly be placed at
the feet of the people who run them.
Do these circumstances predict the demise of the platform? It
has been perhaps difficult to imagine an Internet without
them, but now can we? Must we? What could we stand to gain in
the demise of the platform is a question that may help answer if
there is some chance to the possibility of its
disappearance. Let's consider what we lost in the platform's
rise to prominence and what we value about it so that it was
allowed to become the organizing principle of the last two
decades online.
Along the way, we're gonna talk to journalist Morgan Sung
Morgan Sung: I I do love to cover the weird.
Mike Rugnetta: And academic Aurelie Petit
Aurelie Petit: It's a it's a very European perspective on
media.
Mike Rugnetta: About how things got this way and whether they
think there's any chance they'll change.
Aurelie Petit: Like, the platform is just a middleman,
which would be a good definition of platform. It's like a
middleman for content between a producer and, you know, a
consumer.
Morgan Sung: I don't know if a world without platforms is
possible, and maybe that's just me being, you know, really
myopic because I've I've only known a world with platforms.
Mike Rugnetta: In a 2010 New Media and Society paper titled
The Politics of Platforms, researcher and communications
professor Tarlatan Gillespie helped solidify what exactly a
platform is. He lays out four senses of the word platform to
ask how each applies to the eponymous piece of Internet
infrastructure. The senses are computational, architectural,
figurative, and political. We'll take each of those in turn. X,
Flickr, eBay, etcetera are above all and first pieces of
software.
Quote, infrastructure that supports the design and use of
particular applications, end quote. Like Macintosh and PC are
platforms so too are WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Weibo. They are
next, quote, human built structures. They're elevated, if
not actually, then conceptually such that one may be better
noticed, better reach an audience perhaps. Platforms are
then also a starting point for further building or growth or
action on the part of developers and on the part of users.
And finally, they are political. They define or comprise core
beliefs from which a whole constellation of positions or
assumptions follow. So what happens when we put all this
together? Tech companies form something between a product and
a place with an aim, a piece of software that masquerades as a
public space where multiple disparate groups meet around
some collective, though often asymmetric purpose that is
usually economic. A platform is a place for people to connect
and share and learn and entertain, but it is only those
things unceasingly as long as it is also a place to connect
brands, people, advertisers, data brokers, and increasingly
governments, their stooges, and agents.
To render this as succinctly as we can, a platform is a mutable
programmable interface which elevates some portion of users,
though that may or may not be the most public facing group,
thus allowing the formation or participation in a hierarchy
which creates or recreates a political order. This takes us
back to the last of Gillespie's platform senses. They define
some core set of political beliefs. What might those
beliefs be for, say, Reddit, Pinterest, Threads, Discord,
Tumblr? And having decided on those, what sorts of rules,
policies, actions, or inactions reflect those beliefs?
And how does this help create or recreate a political order that
exists in a much larger sense outside the bounds of the
platform itself? The answers to these questions fall under a
distinct area of consideration known as platform governance. It
feels safe to say that the most well known tool in the belt of
platform governance is moderation. Decisions made
concerning what is allowed to be posted and what is not,
according sometimes to terms of service, to community
guidelines, and so on. But in a lot of cases, according to
vibes, it is a perennial story online to have been deleted,
suspended, banned, limited for posts which pass in some
circumstances, but not others.
There is the ban hammer, but there is also the vibe axe.
Charting these vibes, looking carefully at things which should
trigger moderation but don't, or which do but it's unclear why,
can help us in the aim of figuring out what kind of world
those designing and running platforms imagine, what sort of
society they desire or feel for their own continued existence
they must create. One content type that can help us look
deeply into this vibe abyss is hentai, which means something
more broad in Japanese than it does in English, but which for
most of our audience will indicate a genre of media at the
edges of both pornography and illustration or animation. I
talked with Morgan Tseng about this, about what we can learn
about platforms through their treatment of hentai in the West
and what we can learn about hentai through its treatment by
platforms. Morgan is a journalist and culture writer
who covers all things weird, wild, and Internet in many
places, including on her podcast with KQED called Close All Tabs
with whom we have collaborated for this segment.
The first thing I asked her just to get on the same page is what
is hentai exactly?
Morgan Sung: Hentai is in Japan just under the umbrella of anime
and manga and video games, where it's just animated. Anything
animated is anime, manga, video games. Hentai just means that
it's sexually explicit. And hentai occupies this weird space
in the content ecosystem because it's not considered porn. It's
very rarely prioritized on porn sites, but it's also too
explicit for mainstream streaming platforms.
So it's kind of shunned.
Mike Rugnetta: Hentai doesn't really have a home on the
internet in the West. There's Pornhub, where it was the number
one search term for the past four years running, and yet
remains a second class content type in ways we'll discuss in a
moment. There's DeviantArt, sort of. There are a lot of pirate
sites, and there's FAKU, arguably the single platform
that made a go at being the western Internet's go to hentai
platform. But that proved really tough.
Morgan Sung: You know, I was talking to Jacob Grady and he's
a CEO of Faku. Faku is a subscription platform for hentai
manga. They tried to launch a hentai anime platform and
ultimately could not pull it off. Part of it was licensing
issues, like their licenses expired. It's it's very
complicated and expensive to license anime versus licensing
manga, but a lot of it was pirating.
He was like, we just can't compete with pirates.
Mike Rugnetta: Why? Why? If something is so popular, has it
proven so difficult to platform? At a moment that platforming
things is what we do on the Internet. It is the hammer of a
network lousy with nails.
We talked to Arly Petty about this. Arly is a researcher of
animation and technology and PhD candidate in the film studies
department at Concordia University Montreal. She wrote
the 2024 paper, the hentai streaming platform wars,
published in porn studies, and had this to say on the uphill
battle hentai has had finding its own platform and running
afoul of governance on more general use platforms.
Aurelie Petit: You're taking a media and you're making it
entered like a new ecology and and also a new infrastructure.
Like, for example, you make a film, like you're a filmmaker
and you're gonna make a film, and then you want your film to
go on YouTube. Well, suddenly there's a lot of restrictions
because YouTube in itself is not just a platform for you to go
and like scream at the town and scream at your fellow citizen.
It's actually like its own space that is its own policies, its
term of uses, its own like, you know, if it's a platform where
people can leave comments, it has its own sociability. So you
kind of have to make up for this.
Mike Rugnetta: Animation has many platforms, of course. But
when the animation is pornographic, it doesn't fit
within the restrictions, policies, and rules of those
platforms. There's a governance mismatch. And pornography has a
Aurelie Petit: lot of
Mike Rugnetta: platforms, but when it's animated, it doesn't
fit within the restrictions, policies, and rules of those
platforms. There's a governance mismatch. Take, for instance,
something as base as identity verification, which is required
on Pornhub both to post content and to make the most money from
that content. Here's Morgan again.
Morgan Sung: Pornhub, to monetize your content on
Pornhub, if it's animated, you actually have to send, like,
videos of yourself, like, animating and drawing the
content to
Mike Rugnetta: prove
Morgan Sung: that it's you. Yeah. To prove that it's you.
Mike Rugnetta: Like, like time lapse work in progress.
Morgan Sung: Pretty much. Yeah. You have to show that you're
actually, like, making the content to be able to, like,
verify it and monetize it. And if you're monetized, if you're
verified, you can like opt into this additional level of like
protection where if you're going to upload your content
exclusively to Pornhub, you get higher revenue shares and
they'll like send out copyright infringement notices on your
behalf. But animated content can't do that because they can't
verify that someone else is actually uploading the content,
not the original creator.
Mike Rugnetta: Orly summarizes an aspect of this difficulty.
Animated pornography, she says
Aurelie Petit: Doesn't answer to this logic of live action
governance. It's not about real people. You cannot ask for
biometrics data for a a cartoon character. You cannot ask for
consent. So, like, that's where struggle is attention.
Not everything can be platformed or not everything can be
platform everywhere.
Mike Rugnetta: And in fact, this unwillingness to answer to the
logic of live action governance is part of Hentai's deep
history.
Morgan Sung: I mean, even hentai itself, like Mhmm. A lot of it
is so weird because it was to get around Japan's censorship
laws. Like, the OG tentacle porn, the creator fully
admitted, like, no, they're tentacles because you can't show
penetration with, like, genitalia without getting
censored in Japan. But if you're using tentacles like or
monstrous appendages, what's stopping you?
Mike Rugnetta: The difficulty that animated pornography has in
finding its own platform is the result multiple compounding
issues. There are cultural forces like the conflict that
surrounds explicit media generally and conservative
groups working to ban, restrict access to, make it difficult to
make a living from any kind of pornography, They do this by
pressuring both Internet platforms and payment processors
used by those platforms like OnlyFans and Patreon. Then there
are legal and compliance and regulatory challenges. It forced
at the state and federal levels with half measure laws like
SESTA FAFSA, as well as, again, by the businesses and industries
required to make and sustain a living in The United States.
Think like banks and stuff, sometimes who have their own
ideas of governance and many of whom are themselves attempting
to remain compliant with unclear, unevenly enforced
regulation.
This, of course, creates an environment where an army of
pirates flourish. And we haven't even gotten to the further
ambivalence that surrounds hentai specifically, a largely
foreign media type that struggles to find a legitimate
place of its own online in the West in the age of platforms
because there's no governance structure into which it neatly
fits. How do we chart these vibes? Unsurprisingly, it seems
media which exists or is pushed towards the edges will be kept
there and won't be proactively furnished with accommodation
regardless even if the audience for that media is sizable. It's
hard to know in which direction even to be cynical.
The promise of profitability, which is great, is not enough to
overcome the subalternity, the suppressedness, the
undergroundedness of this media. As predicted, the political
order of the world at large is in some ways created by, but in
other ways reinforced by platforms. So why keep trying?
Why even attempt to platform this work? Why not forego this
hassle altogether?
Not everything can be platformed everywhere, Aurelie says. Maybe
not everything can be platformed, period. The answer
to this is what one gets with a platform.
Morgan Sung: I think people will always use these platforms to
drive audiences to places where their work is safe, whether
that's physical media, whether that's, you know, these kind of
paywalled walled gardens for their content. I don't think a
lot of people have the the opportunity to opt out of these
platforms. Or I don't think that they have that kind of safety
net to totally opt out. But I think that a lot of artists are
just making it work by, you know, trying to have as many
avenues for attention for their work as possible, and then
having like a safe place for their work to actually exist.
Mike Rugnetta: The platform here becomes an island, not something
which infinitely extends, not a place from which to build and
expand, but a place with an undefeatable limit, a bounded
territory that is nonetheless connected as all things are
online. What platforms offer is convenience above all else.
Everything under one earl, an audience, communication,
community, and sometimes if you're lucky, a paycheck. That
is until your own politics or those of your work challenge or
transgress the political order the platform attempts to uphold.
Media at the edges may push to the center, but only so far
until the winds of governance, the tides of vibe push them back
to the periphery.
This is the constant dance of moderation that I think we all
feel online even if we are not fans of or creators of this kind
of media.
Aurelie Petit: How can you be as normative as you can be so
nobody is gonna look too close into you? I was talking to this
content creator who suddenly, yeah, Patreon decided that his
content was too problematic. One step too far, but instead of
having a conversation with him, they just cancel his accounts
and it's his entire income that disappear. As long as we don't
have like official platform that are actually have a model to pay
content creators who do animation, you know, or like
partnership with studios. It's it's always gonna like Paris,
Paris is always gonna be a very attractive form of it.
Mike Rugnetta: So what comes after the platform? It could
always be more platforms iterating on the design until
asymmetrical aims and the economic incentives balance out
to form a governance paradigm that doesn't or doesn't
unilaterally, recreate existing political hierarchies. Or maybe
after platforms, we'll find what was here before, the rest of the
Internet, reached via a breadcrumb trail of links and
hints and suggestions wherever people congregate, platforms and
not. I think here about the idea that post modernism names not an
end to modernism, but a confrontation with the problems
of modernism. Post meaning crisis of, not after.
And so perhaps a post platform internet names an epoch where
there is a wide scale recognition of the shortcomings
of platforms while they continue to persist. In a way, the
difficulty of hentai finding its own platform provides a kind of
hope to any and every other artist, writer, media maker,
person, people everywhere whose work and lives run afoul of only
ever increasingly skittish platforms, kowtowing to brands,
advertisers, and governments.
Morgan Sung: So I went into this hentai episode thinking that I
would be telling the story about like some weird curvy dudes and
their tentacle porn. What I actually found on talking to
people involved in the industry and also fans is that there is
actually, like, a real love for experimentation in hentai. And a
lot of that is because a lot of people felt very othered. A lot
of people are queer and didn't fit into the mold anyway.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
Morgan Sung: I was really surprised, finding out how queer
and how provocative hentai really is, which makes sense. I
mean, queer art is always going to be provocative. This industry
is more than just some dudes trying to get off to cartoon
girls. It's really it it really is a space to experiment and
explore like your relationship to the world around you.
Mike Rugnetta: To hear more about this side of the story,
please go listen to the 05/21/2025 episode of close all
tabs, which you can find at npr.org, k q e d Org, and
wherever you get your podcasts, just search for close all tabs.
I talked to Morgan in more detail about the regulatory
environment which keeps explicit media suppressed and she talks
at length about hentai's cultural position. It's a great
episode. Please go listen. Thanks to Morgan Sung,
Christopher Agusa, Maya Cueva, and Jen Chen for co producing
this segment with us and inviting me to talk with them on
close all tabs.
It was a huge pleasure and thanks also to Arly Petit for
chatting with us. We'll put links to her work in the show
notes. There were easily a dozen or more ideas that didn't make
its way into this segment. I feel like we've just barely
sketched an outline of what's possible to be said here. Like,
didn't get to, how does the position of being a hentai
artist online right now possibly predict the position of all
digital creators in a post platform Internet?
How do the governance structures of platforms inform or shape
wider culture, if they are in fact the powerful arbiters of
popularity that so many of them claim to be and that so many of
us, I think, give them credit as being. What does creative
community look like on an internet defined by separate but
connected websites versus platforms where, you know, if
not everybody, then big communities of people gather. I
would love to hear your thoughts on the post platform Internet
and what explicit media might predict of its arrival. Related
to these ideas or not, you can email us, leave us a voice memo,
all the ways you can get ahold of us are in the show notes.
Hans Buetow: So Avery Dame Griff, is this new version of
the bill meaningfully different from the one that died last fall
in which supporters said it would protect children by
forcing platforms to deal with, quote, unquote, harms that they
faced? But critics were saying of it that it would have given
overly broad license for politically motivated targeting
of marginalized groups. Have the authors addressed those
criticisms at all in this new bill?
Avery Dame-Griff: Not really.
Georgia Hampton: What do you think is the oldest piece of
clothing you have?
Boone Ashworth: Oh my god. That's such a good question. I
have a pair of pants. I have a pair of pants that I inherited
from my grandfather when he passed away. And they're a pair
of perfectly good jeans and I wore them a whole bunch.
And then they got a tear in them And I have sewn them back up and
patched them. And it's a little unsightly, but I still wear them
when I'm not, like, going to work or anything because it's a
it there is sentimental value in that pair of pants. So I and I
don't know how long he had them before I started wearing them,
but it they're they're they're pretty old.
Georgia Hampton: That's Boone Ashworth. He's a staff writer at
Wired's Gear Desk. A lot of his reporting covers sustainability
and repairability, and it's those two things that made me
want to talk to him for this segment. I've been curious how
the ongoing tariff situation in The United States is going to
affect the way we buy clothing online. And by that, I really
mean on specific Chinese based sites like Shein.
Tiktok Clip: This Black Friday, shop crazy low prices on Shein
and see why Shein is America's top fashion destination.
Georgia Hampton: From the jump, the Trump administration has
been constantly moving the goalposts on its tariff plans on
Chinese goods entering The US. Back in February, the goal was a
10% tariff across the board. In March, it changed to 20%. On
what Trump ridiculously called Liberation Day on April 2, his
administration tacked on an additional 34% tax on Chinese
products. Then, a few weeks later, the administration
announced that it will actually impose a 125% tariff on Chinese
products effective immediately.
As of me writing this segment, there's tariffs ranging from
that 125% to 145%, or a package fee of a hundred dollars. But
that's also going to change on June 1 when the package fee is
set to double to $200.
Boone Ashworth: We've done a lot of reporting here on Wired about
how just it's going to be, you know, months later is when these
effects are really going to start kicking in. I mean, you're
you're seeing price increases now across the board. But it
will be a bit before, you know, shelves are empty if we get to
that point. But we are rapidly approaching it.
Georgia Hampton: And as these changes happen, a lot of Chinese
companies have tried to swerve the worst of these tariffs in a
few ways, such as shipping products like iPhones to India
in order to get a more favorable rate, or relying on what's
already stored in US based facilities.
Boone Ashworth: All of these retailers have large stockpiles,
like months worth of stockpiles of whatever products they're
trying to sell that they're probably gonna be able to go
through for a little bit of time. I think as we get closer
to the end of the year is when we're gonna start really seeing
things not be able to be produced in quite the same way
if tariffs are still at the levels they are.
Georgia Hampton: For consumers, the vibe in response to the
tariffs, at least on my feeds, has been buy now before it's too
late. And a lot of the panic I've been interested in centers
specifically around fast fashion brands.
Tiktok Clip: I'm not typically one to crash out on TikTok, but
what do you mean I have to pay $277.90 in duties on an outfit
that's a hundred and $70.
Boone Ashworth: The tariffs are shaking and I'm really not
kidding.
Tiktok Clip: I get it that we're not supposed to shop at Sheen
anymore. I get it. But where am I supposed to go for cheap
clothes now? Where am I gonna go? Amazon?
Is that much better? I can't shop at Zara. I can't shop at
Revolve all the time. It is too expensive. So where do I go just
for some cheap cute clothes?
Make it make sense.
Georgia Hampton: Shein and other budget sites like it, such as
TEMU, have previously benefited from the de minimis exception, a
tariff loophole that allows goods that cost less than $800
to come into The US duty free. And that's great for a brand
like Shein, where you can basically buy anything for a
price that is unbelievably low. Like, unnervingly, I am begging
you to think about why this is so cheap in the first place low.
The cheapness of Sheehan's clothing has also made it
virtually essential to the online trend cycle, especially
during the peak of micro trends. With prices so cheap, you can
really try on whatever style is in right now without worrying
about investing in clothing that might be out of fashion in a
matter of weeks.
Want to put together a mob wife aesthetic fit? Great. Because
you can buy a floor length bodycon dress in cheetah print
on Shein with a purse to match for the low, low price of
$18.99. If I type in office siren into the Shein search bar,
one of the top results is a $15.23 2 piece set titled,
Cosmina two Pieces Elegant Outfit for Business Casual Women
Office Siren Style Similar to Influencer Design, coquette old
money style sexy. There is no presumption that the clothes you
order from Shein will be high quality or even necessarily look
like the pictures online.
The point is the price. Regardless of the trend du jour,
Shein has something for you at a price so unimaginably affordable
that it almost feels ridiculous not to buy it. And if something
falls apart, you can just buy another pair of $9 Palazzo pants
and call it a day. It encourages a shopping experience that is
all about buying new, buying cheap, and buying a lot.
Boone Ashworth: The whole promise of these sites was, you
know, buying something so incredibly cheap and feeling
like you, you know, shopping like a billionaire. You're
you're getting these incredible deals. I think if that goes away
a little bit, then just that sentiment, that feeling of, oh,
I'm getting this crazy deal for all of these clothes will go
away. And then I think that kind of just like takes away a little
bit of the value prop for sites like this. So I don't I I I
think that prices might not skyrocket all that much quite
yet, But I don't know if they need to get all that much higher
before people start to feel the pinch a little bit more.
Georgia Hampton: And if that happens, where will people go?
Boone Ashworth: You know, back Amazon. I mean, maybe we maybe
we all pull a Macklemore and go to the thrift shop. Sorry.
Georgia Hampton: But I mean, yeah, that is kind of what's
happening on some corners of the Internet. Beyond your brick and
mortar vintage stores, resale apps like Depop and Poshmark
have been exploding in popularity. Last year, Depop
grossed $85,000,000 in revenue. And you can actually buy a lot
of Sheehan clothing on Depop. And it's still, like, single
digits price point cheap.
So sure. Yeah. We should all be buying secondhand more in
general. It's usually more economical. It's a nice way to
avoid contributing to the overproduction of new clothing.
It's also a much more intentional way of shopping. On
Shein, using their website is like scrolling TikTok, an
endless list of garments that you can just page through
forever, add to cart, and purchase without really thinking
about what you're even buying. It creates this online shopping
landscape that overvalues the performance of having stuff at
the cost of any individual piece of clothing. A single pair of
pants isn't special in this ecosystem. Having the ability to
buy 12 pairs of pants is the thrill you get here.
Volume is the name of the game. The people I saw worrying about
the possible price hikes on Shein were overwhelmingly people
who make haul content. And the emotional payoff of making those
videos doesn't come from finding that one dress you love. It's
about having this huge bag of stuff that's trendy right now
because that's also crucial to this performance based shopping
experience. On Shein, you can buy an entire closet's worth of
office siren inspired clothing at the drop of a hat, instantly
cementing you as an authority on that trend or whatever trend is
hot right now.
And trendy in this context just means single use clothing
destined to go out of style and be doomed for the donation pile.
More clothes for the trash island in the Pacific Ocean. So
what happens is this feedback loop of trends and content
around shopping that is built on this foundation where clothing
is just as important to you as how much of it you're able to
get. But with the incoming tariffs threatening to disrupt
this ecosystem of mass purchasing, I think something's
gotta give. I wanna answer the question I asked Boone at the
top of this segment.
What's the oldest piece of clothing you own? I do have some
hand me downs that are older than I am, but the oldest item
that I bought are a pair of plain black Doc Marten leather
boots. I got them when I was 19, and they're perfect. They've
traveled around the world with me. They've been waterlogged and
caked with mud and dust and left scarred and nicked by who even
knows what.
I've replaced the laces multiple times. And honestly, I should
probably do that again soon. This winter, I finally resoled
them. They're my favorite shoes. They carry a lot of sentimental
weight for me.
And with the deal's forward mentality of mass ordering from
Shein, you just won't get that. There's no sentimentality there.
And I just wonder if in the midst of these conversations
about tariffs and the changing costs of everything, if what
might be worth looking at is how we emotionally relate to the
clothing we buy. Or frankly, the clothes we already have in the
first place. So this dovetails quite nicely into something
you've written about before, which is the right to repair.
Could you give me a sense of what that factors in to dealing
with the ongoing tariff situation?
Boone Ashworth: Yeah. So so the right to repair is sort of the
broad term for a general movement of people who want it
to be easier to fix the stuff that you already own. Cars are a
great example of this. If your windshield breaks, you don't
replace the whole car. You get to replace just the windshield.
And, yes, that costs money, but it's cheaper than buying a brand
new vehicle. So the idea is kind of having that, for all the
devices that we own, whether it's computers, smartphones, you
know, smart watches, heck, even clothes.
Georgia Hampton: When I resold my Docs, it wasn't cheap, but it
was definitely cheaper than buying a new pair of boots and
breaking them in. Plus, I could never replace them because, I
mean, I did spend a lot of time breaking them in, but also
because they're special. I don't want to replace them. Following
the conversation around the tariffs and clothing in
particular, I've been wondering if repairing instead of buying
could become, I mean, the trend du jour. Or better yet, break us
out of the trend dominated shopping cycle entirely.
But that also goes completely against the kind of shopping
that Sheehan and its cohort of sites have built their entire
empires upon.
Boone Ashworth: You know, I guess what value you find in the
clothes that you are wearing will will change based on, you
know, how much new stuff you're able to buy, what the options
are. And I also think it's gonna depend on the product too.
Right? It's gonna depend on if it's something that is easily
repairable. Something that you already got cheap might not be
the best quality and so it might just not last longer.
And that's that's the problem with something like that.
Georgia Hampton: That's the thing. Right? Like, is it even
worth it to try to mend your paper thin miniskirt you got for
$3 when you could just buy another one, even for a slightly
more expensive price. And that's the lure of Shein. Right?
It's so easy. It's so cheap. It's like breathing. You don't
have to think about it. But I do think there's merit here in
thinking beyond what a site can sell us.
And instead, consider how we interact with what we buy in a
way that isn't about the promise of volume, but instead the
promise of longevity. Where value is not determined by how
much you buy, it's about having an active relationship with the
clothing that you have. Whether you buy it or got it in a
clothing swap or had it handed down to you by a parent, looking
at clothing through a lens of longevity encourages you to
think about what garments you actually want to come along with
you as you live your life. It's about what clothing has real
emotional value to you. Now, if I bought that Cosmina two pieces
elegant outfits for business casual women suit set from Shein
and the stitching fell apart, I wouldn't care about it because I
know I never cared that much about it anyway.
But if my beloved pair of Docs needed new laces, I wouldn't
think twice about replacing them. If the leather started to
crack, I would learn what kind of wax I needed to condition it,
and I would do that because they're important to me. They're
worth mending. And listen, I genuinely don't know if I really
believe that the tariffs are somehow going to magic away
these fast fashion heavy hitters that openly use sweatshop labor
and produce clothing that is destined for a landfill. That
just doesn't seem realistic.
But I do think that right now, we have a chance to look more
closely at our online shopping ecosystem and ask ourselves if
it's even working for us. Buying more and more clothing chains
you to a trend cycle that is always moving faster than you.
In that kind of system, more is just never going to be enough.
You are never going to catch up. And maybe it's time to just stop
chasing.
Boone Ashworth: There's a lot about our society that makes you
feel like you are not good enough because you don't have
the newest thing. Right? I mean, that's just that's just
capitalism. That's just how the the system works. And, you know,
sometimes they're right.
Sometimes you do need a newer thing. It's okay. But also, I
think this gets us into a space where if we have to deal with
these increases in prices and all these tariffs as nuts as
this whole thing is, if we can kind of take control of it in a
way by keeping control of fixing our own stuff, I think that's a
more positive way to look at it than just kind of wallowing in
the anxiety as I was doing earlier, you know.
Georgia Hampton: Boone, thank you so much for chatting with
me. Where else can people find more of your work?
Boone Ashworth: You can find my work on wired.com. If you got a
tip for me, hit me up at boon dot ten on signal.
Georgia Hampton: Before I go, I'd love to ask you the question
that started segment. What's the oldest piece of clothing you
own? What's worth keeping around? The links for how to
reach us are in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta: Avery,
Hans Buetow: what does the reintroduction of COSA, the kids
online safety act, what does it mean?
Avery Dame-Griff: Well, COSA is basically just as bad a bill as
the last time it was introduced, and it still likely won't
effectively solve any of the problems it claims to address.
These are things that are complicated. They're
infrastructural and social issues, and they require a lot
more than government regulation, but especially not regulation
that looks like COSA. Because even with some of the changes
that the sponsor co sponsors have added, other political
actors like the Heritage Foundation have already made it
clear that they aim to use this regulation as a way and quoting
from them to guard kids against, again, quoting, from the harms
of transgender content. And this is an argument made by Evan
Greer of of fight from the future, and I agree with it.
As she's pointed out, this focus on kind of content neutral
elements we see in COSA, things like algorithmic
recommendations, they can still be used to because the bill
focuses on it to restrict access to a variety of content,
including LGBTQ content on the grounds that this content makes
youth depressed or anxious. I'm also sort of concerned about the
possibilities that platforms will just engage in anticipatory
compliance again by making it harder for youth to encounter
anything that could fall under this duty of care provision or
sort of, like, trigger any of the elements of it. And we see
this, like, with recent rollbacks of protections related
to sexuality and gender identity by YouTube and meta platforms
suggests that they're willing to shift their policies and
practices in ways that are demonstrably worse for their
queer and trans users, but will appease those in power.
Ultimately, COSA doesn't solve the problems it claims to. It's
likely just gonna become a weapon to push LGBTQ folks
further out of public life.
Hans Buetow: Even if it fails though
Avery Dame-Griff: Mhmm. Do you
Hans Buetow: think this is the last time that we see
legislation like this proposed?
Avery Dame-Griff: Oh, absolutely not.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, June 4. I'm
gonna keep it simple. $4 a month, you can become a
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Yes. To be honest, the media that you get in return pales in
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Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the
mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer
is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer.
And the show's host, that's me, is Mike Grignetta. Luminary of
the systems of pleasure, toddlers' tea time in the Noah's
Ark.
Fog, frost, and thaw for clothes of velvet, for horses.
Petrarch's inkstand ozonated sun lounges. Hail then, purveyor of
shrimps. Almost indecency united in a joint and individual
purpose, forth to fresh fields and pastures new. Excerpt of A
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