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 Tuesday, 06/17/2025 at
09:06AM eastern, and we have a bop for you this week. Georgia
talks with Tim Lawrence, professor of cultural studies at
the University of East London and author of multiple books
about the history of dancing, DJs, and nightlife about why no
one dances in the club anymore. I bet you can guess.
Then the glorious return of what is going on here? Where the
Neverpost team brings in posts to the group and asks, yes, that
is right. What is going on here? And also sign offs. 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.
Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire as long
as it's five stories this week. WhatsApp is getting ads and
crowdfunding. While the chats tab of WhatsApp will remain
unchanged, two new features are coming to the updates tab used
to follow brands, local businesses, celebrities, and the
US state department.
Channel owners will now be able to offer subscriptions in
exchange for exclusive content and the updates tab will now
feature ads similar to how they appear in stream on Facebook and
Instagram. I cannot wait to see what sorts of exclusive content
and ad placements the State Department of the United States
of America offers up for a few bucks a month. Disney, assuming
mid journey, the mouse and Universal are filing suit
against the generative AI startup claiming it trained
models on archives of work owned by both studios. Reuters reports
that quote, Horatio Gutierrez, Disney's executive vice
president and chief legal officer said in a statement, we
are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about
how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human
creativity, but piracy is piracy. And the fact that it's
done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.
Your Apple Watch is calling the cops while you're moshing. Last
weekend, calls to local emergency services doubled
during Leicestershire's annual download festival hosting bands
like Sleep Token and Korn largely because the activities
of attendees triggered their smart watches crash detection
feature normally used to alert first responders to car
collisions and serious falls. According to the Guardian,
quote, police are asking fans to stay online if their device
makes an accidental 999 call or to answer callbacks made by
emergency teams to let us know you're safe. TikTok can
influence your opinion of politicians. A new paper
published in Social Media and Society titled Thirst Traps and
Quick Cuts, the effects of TikTok edits on evaluations of
politicians finds that quote, thirst trap edits cause an
increase in perception of politician attractiveness and
that badass edits improve overall evaluation of Donald
Trump, but not Joe Biden.
The study was conducted in June of last year ahead of Biden's
exit from the presidential race. We argue, the author's right,
that the proliferation of the technologies that make edits
possible represents a significant shift in the
practice of democratic politics. To date, a primary concern
around digital media is the proliferation of misinformation.
Although facticity is an important element of digital
media and to democratic politics, we argue that it is
more central to textual communication than to images or
particularly video. We study a novel form of digital media that
is manifestly not about facticity, end quote.
And finally, Nexus Mods was purchased by Chosen, an
organization that Eurogamer describes as a quote, growth
focused gaming company. I don't know what that means, but their
website says, we partner with founders to help scale what
they've built, amplifying their impact, supporting their team
and culture, and ensuring the business thrives for the long
term. Nexus Mods, a hub for game modding resources, has been run
by Robin Dark One Scott for more than two decades. In a statement
on the site's mod blog, Scott writes, the strain of being
responsible for the behemoth I created has taken its toll. The
stress of the job has been a regular source of anxiety and
stress related health issues.
I realized that I have been burning out and this started to
have an impact on my staff and nexus mods as a whole. So I
firmly believe that the best thing for the future of Nexus
Mods is for me to step aside and bring in new leadership to steer
the business forward with renewed energy to make Nexus
Mods the modding community we all truly deserve, end quote.
Nexus members immediately began digging into the past of the new
management only to find endorsements of both
cryptocurrency and NFTs which the new owners have since said
will not be forced upon the modding community. Fingers
crossed. That is the news I have for you in this week's episode,
Georgia on phones at the club, and then what is going on here?
But first, did you know that there was a time in history when
content stopped? When it turned off and it wasn't available
anymore? In our interstitials this week, sign off messages
from three television networks aired in the late seventies and
eighties.
Signoff: This concludes our schedule of events for today. If
you've missed a program or would like to see one a second time,
feature presentations are repeated throughout the month on
Home Box Office. Consult your program guide for exact dates
and times.
Georgia Hampton: For the last few months, I've been following
this online conversation around a strange phenomenon happening
at the club.
Clip: We went to a bar the other night, and the DJ was playing
bops. Okay. Kesha was played, Bad Bunny, Gasolina. And me and
my friends were the only ones dancing. You get to the club and
you just stand up.
Or the bar or wherever you go. Wherever you go to hang out,
you're not dancing. Why doesn't anyone dance anymore? Hello?
Hello?
Why aren't you dancing?
Georgia Hampton: Across my feeds, I keep seeing videos and
tweets and posts in which people claim that out at the club,
nobody dances anymore. And there was often visual proof of this,
clips where someone pans across a packed dance floor only to
show people just standing around. As this concern started
to swell online, the response to it came in just as quickly.
Basically, and you'll be shocked to hear this, but it's that damn
phone. There are too many phones out at the function and that's
why nobody's dancing.
Clip: You're worried about being on camera so people don't dance.
No one wants to wake up the next day and see their face on like
the club Instagram page.
Why does no one wanna dance anymore? Like, nobody dances so
boring blah blah blah.
It's because when people do dance,
you guys film them and put it on TikTok. Cut that shit out.
Georgia Hampton: Beyond individual people commenting on
this, Vox also published a piece a few months ago about this
exact same phenomenon. And they came to the same conclusion,
that the fear of being documented and having your
likeness shared online was a huge reason why people choose to
just forgo the act of dancing entirely. And I mean, I get
that. Like, the irony is not lost on me that a lot of the
videos I saw about the lack of dancing at the club were videos
where people were filming the other patrons at the club not
dancing. Phones are tools of distraction in virtually every
part of our lives, but I just wonder what it is about the act
of dancing and publicly dancing with other people that is so
antithetical to the presence of a smartphone.
Tim Lawrence: If the people around you are not dancing, but
they're just talking, or they're on their phones or who knows
what, It's not much it's kinda hard to have a good time. It's
much easier to have a good time when everyone around you
dancing.
Georgia Hampton: That's Tim Lawrence.
Tim Lawrence: I'm the author of three books on the history of,
dance, music, DJ culture, and art culture in New York City in
the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. I've been
running, two community parties that place a high emphasis on,
good stereo sounds, and I've been doing this for twenty two
years now. One is called Lucky Cloud Sound System. Another is
called All Our Friends, and I'm also the cohost of a podcast
about music, the dance floor, and counterculture called Love
is the Message.
Georgia Hampton: Tim has spent his career writing about and
immersing himself in club culture. He speaks about it with
this deep reverence. And as he explained to me, the act of
dancing in a public setting offers a kind of experience that
just can't really be replicated anywhere else.
Tim Lawrence: If we want to, we can just dance in our rooms, by
ourselves. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to people to
do. But if you do it with other people, you can have much more
of a sense of elation. And the reason the reason this happens
is you will generally be by being with other people, you
interact with other people, then you can have more of a pre
appreciation of of our existence and also the way that we
basically cohabit, we with other human beings and, of course,
with everything that is on the planet. What can happen in these
situations is you can come close to having a sense of the essence
of what it might be to be human.
Georgia Hampton: Tim went on to mention that a defining feeling
of communal dance is collective joy, a term popularized by the
sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2006 book, Dancing in the
Streets. In the book, she examines dance as an act that
generates both a sense of togetherness with others, and
also individual ecstatic pleasure. And that enjoyment
comes in large part due to the freedom that can come from being
a member of a collective sharing the same experience. Near the
end of the book, Ehrenreich explains that, quote, the
capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply
as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another.
We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk
of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression.
She writes that later, quote, there is no point to it. No
religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made.
Just the chance, which we need much more of on this crowded
planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous
existence with some sort of celebration. To Ehren Reich,
collective joy through public dance is just that. An excuse to
celebrate, to express oneself freely among others who are
doing the same.
Tim Lawrence: When people want to get into the go onto a dance
floor and just kind of forget about their everyday challenges,
problems, the the things that might just kind of you can't
stop, you know, you get stuck in your mind that you just find
kind of, are undermining your sense of of of, tranquility,
let's say, or goodwill or happiness. You get on the dance
floor to let all of that go.
Georgia Hampton: On the dance floor, you're not beholden to
whatever role you hold in, quote, unquote, polite society.
Nobody even knows your name, let alone what job you have or
whether you have student loans or stress out about school. You
get to be anonymous, to express yourself in a way that might be
more, I mean, free by virtue of not needing to hold on to
various components of your regular life. What's better,
everyone around you is experiencing this feeling
together, and that feels good, validating, comforting. It's a
reminder that whatever baggage you left at the door of the club
doesn't define every moment of your life, that this can also be
part of your expression too.
An expression in this space is collective and individual with
both feeding on each other. The energy exuberance of the crowd
is added to by your own form of self expression, by your own
body dancing amidst all the other bodies. It's this perfect
little circuit that is until the phones come in. So I said to
Tim, can you fully express yourself on the dance floor if
you know there's cameras?
Tim Lawrence: Well, I certainly wouldn't be able to. The phone
on some level is always going to disrupt. It's gonna take you
away from being in that moment. But the the other thing about
the phone is that it then takes you it affects everyone around
you. So if someone is by you and they're on the phone, they're
kind of you know, not only are they not there, but they're not
contributing to the, you know, this dynamism of the party.
It's all these bodies kind of, you know, in this kinetic motion
that can beautifully kind of connect together. It's a
circuit, and they interrupt the circuit.
Georgia Hampton: To better understand this, we need to dig
deeper into this notion of the crowd. Specifically, the
difference between a crowd and an audience. Barbara Ehrenreich
has an entire chapter of her book dedicated to what she calls
the revolt of the audience. She writes that, quote, the great
innovation of the modern era has been the replacement of older,
more participatory forms of festivity with spectacles in
which the crowd serves merely as an audience, unquote. An
audience is expected to observe, to enjoy perhaps, but not to
participate.
As a member of the audience, you can clap, you can sing along,
hell, you can even dance, but you are not the event. An
audience demands the presence of a spectacle, of a single point
of focus that everyone is there to observe. But the dance floor
isn't meant to be like that.
Tim Lawrence: The dance floor is is most expressive, most
dynamic, most engaging when people are dancing with each
other rather than looking at the DJ. If the crowd starts to look
at the DJ, then you're just entering into a, let's say, a
rock concert scenario, hero worship, etcetera, which is like
chur. Everyone's facing the priest. Whereas actually, what
we want is conversation, democracy, interaction,
antiphony, call and response, whatever words we wanna give it.
To me, the the dance is the audience, if you like.
This doesn't have to be a leader figure here. It's about
interacting with those immediately around you and and
feeling this sense of kind of collective energy come through
that, and it's and that surpasses your yourself as a
individual.
Georgia Hampton: When an errant phone camera appears on the
dance floor, that structure falls apart. Using your phone is
an inherently individual act, and as such, it severs you from
the communal joy of group dancing. And sure, posting about
it may bring you joy, but it's a kind of extractive joy. Through
the phone, the sense of enjoyment you receive from
sharing a video and getting likes or comments on it serves
more as a commodity than a lived, embodied experience. It's
a copy of the real thing.
And don't get me wrong, that can still feel nice. But the simple
act of pulling out your phone to record the DJ or yourself or,
God forbid, a stranger on the dance floor, instantly destroys
your role as a member of the crowd, of the collective, and
turns you into the maker of a spectacle. Your audience, in
this case, isn't anyone in the room with you. It's your
followers. It's strangers online.
Tim Lawrence: Something that says, we're gonna capture this
moment and we're gonna, like, take it we're gonna take it
outside of this environment because it's gonna preserve it.
And then that can go online. It can be shown to other people. So
on some level, it's a it's a possible breach of privacy,
let's say. It's a possible breach of kind of intimacy.
It threatens or it physically does kinda say, okay. This is
this this moment doesn't have its own integrity.
Georgia Hampton: In a lot of clubs, the reaction to the
problem of phones on the dance floor is to flat out ban them
entirely. In the time I've been doing research for this segment,
several clubs have opened that make a point to say that cell
phones are not welcome inside. The parties that Tim throws have
no phone policies too.
Tim Lawrence: People think it's a human right to be able to use
your phone, one's phone. It's incredible. It's almost like
sometimes the most offensive thing you can possibly say to
someone is, do you mind not using your phone? Even though
we've asked this numerous times over. It's like, oh, I just want
to tell my friend where I am or oh, there's this reason or oh,
there's that reason or oh, there's that reason.
And it's always about like, well, it's it's okay for me, but
but just not anyone else. But my my it's this is this is this is
why I'm special, basically. And look. I I don't it's not
serious. This is again, I don't want to take any of this too
seriously.
But what we what I do know and what the people I work with know
is that it's much nicer. It's incomparable to have a a dance
floor without phones than than, you know, a dance floor where
everyone's on the phone.
Georgia Hampton: Establishing a no phones policy interrupts that
entitlement that Tim is talking about. An entitlement really is
what it feels like here. Not just feeling entitled to
checking your phone wherever you are, but to use it to document
whatever's going on around you with little consideration of the
impact that act has on the space you are physically embodying.
It's the entitlement of creating a spectacle. So if you remove
the sheer possibility of taking a video or posting a photo at
the club, you deny the ability to create a spectacle and court
an audience.
You're also forced to focus your energy on the physical space
that you're in. You have to remain in the real world
environment of the dance floor without the possibility of
recontextualizing it somewhere else. It makes me think of what
Tim said earlier, how people come to dance in order to leave
the stresses of their lives aside, Of what Barbara
Ehrenreich wrote about how the ecstasy of communal dance comes
with a shedding of the mask one has to put on in polite society.
The no phone policy at the club suggests to me that part of that
real world baggage is your phone. And there is a way that
the phone does adhere itself to a kind of role that we are all
expected to play for ourselves and for each other.
Maybe it's being a poster, or a passive scroller, or a live
streamer. But whatever it is, your relationship with the
social Internet is a kind of performance that you do, so long
as you have your phone in your hand. I do think that there is a
degree of communal enjoyment that can come from posting
online. It's a very accessible way of being seen, of sharing an
experience, even if it's just through a screen. But it is just
through a screen.
It's a kind of togetherness that is inherently limited. It's
flat. And as Tim said to me, it often doesn't really endure.
Tim Lawrence: It's perfectly possible that some people, so
enjoy being visible to others, being seen. Let's say being seen
gives them the sense a sense of existing in the first place If
they're not being kind of on some sort of screen, if they're
not being watched and maybe admired, then they don't really
exist, then maybe this group of people can can only express
themselves fully when they're being watched. My belief is that
this kind of this thrill the thrill that might come with the
idea that you have an audience is inherently, ephemeral. It's
meaningless. There's something addictive about it, you know,
and it's the reason it's addictive is that it doesn't it
doesn't doesn't it's not a lasting feeling.
So you kind of have to kind of keep on being seen. Keep on
being
Georgia Hampton: interesting to me that Tim mentions the idea of
ephemerality here. Because in a way, what's more transient, more
temporary than a night out at the club? You'll never dance the
exact same way twice. You'll never get to identically repeat
the experience from one night to the next. Dancing is
intrinsically temporal, an endless series of motions that
disappear and are replaced with new ones.
And to that point, a video or a photo of that night has more
staying power. If you post a video of your friend death
dropping on the dance floor, your Instagram followers can see
it. You can rewatch it, and it exists for much longer than the
experience of seeing it in real life. But I think the true
staying power when it comes to collective joy is in the act of
embodied participation. Of truly being a member of a crowd, all
dancing and sweating together for no other reason than for the
enjoyment of the experience.
The phone can attract your attention. It can demand your
participation. A phone is a great tool for documentation,
for visual evidence of a wild night out, but it will never be
embodied.
Tim Lawrence: There is no video in the history of the planet
that has been able to remotely capture what is going on on that
dance floor, not remotely. We might give ourselves the
impression that it does, but if we think about it, it's that it
can't even come close.
Georgia Hampton: An immense thank you to Tim Lawrence for
sharing his thoughts and experiences on dance, club
culture, and collective joy. To find more of his work, you can
find him at timlawrence.com. And if you'd like to learn more
about the parties he runs or even attend them yourself, you
can find information at luckycloudsystems.com and
allourfriends.com. I'll include links for all of that in the
show notes. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts about
phones at the club.
Do you take videos on the dance floor? Does the threat of being
documented affect how or if you dance publicly? How do you feel
about the no phone policy? I mean, should it be implemented
elsewhere, like at the gym, at the grocery store, everywhere?
All the information on how to reach us is also in the show
notes.
Signoff: Channel six in Sacramento, California. Channel
six is owned and operated by nonprofit Central California
Educational Television. The KVIE studios are located on the
Garden Highway in Sacramento. The transmitter is located at
Walnut Grove, California and operates at maximum power on
channel six. Sound and picture are relayed to Walnut Grove by
microwave station KMZ sixty.
Portions of KVIE's daily programming are on film and
videotape. This concludes our broadcast for today. The staff
of channel six wishes you a pleasant good night.
Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, theydies and gentle thems.
Welcome to what is going on here? A segment wherein members
of the Neverpost staff bring a posts to the group about which
they would like to ask. What is going on here? What?
Could we have done some googling? Could we have gone
further down thread? Could we have cracked a book or gone to
YouTube? Probably. But where is the fun in that?
In the following segment, we share things that we found
online that made us want to know more and about which we thought
the process of finding out more would be fun to do together.
Joining us this round in order of how likely I think it is that
they are descended from an Arcturian starseed are Never
post executive producer Jason Oberholtzer. Are we ascending or
descending? This is ascending. So Jason, I think you're
probably just a human.
Jason Oberholtzer: What gives it away? The depth behind my eyes.
Mike Rugnetta: Never post producer Georgia Hampton.
Georgia Hampton: Oh, thank God. I'm just glad I'm not the top
one.
Mike Rugnetta: Never post senior producer Hans Buteau already has
the haircut.
Hans Buetow: Your emotions might be telling you that you
Georgia Hampton: Hans, no.
Hans Buetow: Know things about technology.
Mike Rugnetta: Go towards you are the light.
Hans Buetow: I am the light. It's reflecting off of my head.
Mike Rugnetta: Alright. Let's find out what is going on here.
Clip: Welcome
to today's game.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. I'm gonna send you three posts from
Instagram, and I want you to look at them in order. Hans, I'm
gonna have you I'm gonna have you start with, the aptly titled
post number one.
Hans Buetow: Post number one.
Georgia Hampton: And tell me what you see.
Hans Buetow: I'm opening up Instagram. The dress is gold.
Mhmm. It's from Ibiza. Ibiza.
I
Georgia Hampton: hate that.
Hans Buetow: A woman twirling in a satin ish Yes. Skirt and top
combo on the sand in front of an Ibiza sunset.
Jason Oberholtzer: Still hate that.
Mike Rugnetta: Do you do you have to say it like you're on
Love Island?
Georgia Hampton: I was gonna say On
Hans Buetow: paper, this is my ideal. You mugging me off?
Georgia Hampton: Okay, Hans. Go to post number two, please.
Hans Buetow: Post number two is opening. Post number two. It
might be the same woman. It's hard to tell because now she's
facing the camera. It is.
Posing video. White this time instead of gold. She's wearing
shorts and what looks like an a very woolly angora sweater, that
is collared. Sunglasses, doing a selfie of herself in an elevator
holding a coach bag.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. And now post number three, please, and I
want you to read the caption.
Hans Buetow: Post number three, the caption says, we're thrilled
to announce our new AI enhanced team member, Reem. Oh, no. Yes.
I was getting the vibes.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. The vibes were strong.
Hans Buetow: Who has joined the team as a fashion who has joined
the team joined the team as a fashion and lifestyle editor.
Swipe right for her dump of For her dump
Georgia Hampton: of the Guys.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, you nailed it, Lord.
Georgia Hampton: Who copy edited this? You're probably the AI
editor. Oh,
Jason Oberholtzer: dump of the day. Good god.
Hans Buetow: Swipe right for her dump of day one in SL office. I
don't so this is from Sheerluxe?
Georgia Hampton: Yes. Sheerluxe is a UK fashion publication, a
la, you know, Vogue, Cosmo, stuff like that.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. So you were right to say Ibiza.
Georgia Hampton: Yes. Actually, I really were.
Hans Buetow: I could sense it.
Georgia Hampton: So yeah. Reem, all the posts that I had you
look at are, like, her doing influencer things, like telling
you what outfit she was wearing, being in Ibiza, but she's not
real.
Hans Buetow: And also that which means the clothes that she's
wearing are not real.
Georgia Hampton: I don't know who likes this. Yeah. Like, who
is this for?
Jason Oberholtzer: Who is this for? This is for an executive
who feels like they will be accused of falling behind if
they don't integrate AI into what they're doing.
Mike Rugnetta: I think that's exactly right. That's a great
answer. God. That's I think I think, Georgia, your response is
exactly right. Yeah.
So like, I'm looking at I'm looking at one of the images on
ReemBot's grid, and it's her on a street holding a matcha latte
and a bag that is roughly the same color as the matcha latte
and wearing sunglasses and big gold earrings and a gold
bracelet. And then you go to the next image in the carousel and
she's gone. It's a bench somewhere else with a then a
picture of the purse and the matcha latte with like a more of
a gradient look to it. And then the third is the shoes, the
bracelet, and the earrings, all of which also look AI generated.
Hans Buetow: Interesting.
Mike Rugnetta: So that I mean, like, yeah. I guess my question
is like, what okay. What are we advertising here?
Georgia Hampton: Well, this is exactly it.
Georgia Hampton: Right? I'm like, I think Jason, you're
completely right that this is basically like for shareholders,
for for people in the c suite who feel like they have to adopt
AI, but it is still kind of doing nothing.
Jason Oberholtzer: Don't know. Which I think is is exposed more
because the objects that don't need to be generated are. Like
you could pitch the idea for having an AI spokesperson as
like novel and fun and potentially engaging in a way
that would get attention from niche independent podcasters.
And like have that character talk about items or pop into the
universe and exist with items and then show a real item that a
human could buy, rather than in frames absent this character
have AI generated objects.
Mike Rugnetta: And then, like, further down the grid, there are
image carousels where it's like, almost like a a a photo collage
of images from fashion catalogs of like I'm looking at one of
purses. Yeah. And it is a it is literally a photo collage of
purses from catalogs, enumerated like one by one with who made
them and what the product is called. But then there's just an
inset oval photo of the AI generated model.
Georgia Hampton: Yep. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: And she's like, I collected these so that you
could see them all in one place. You're like, okay.
Georgia Hampton: Guess like, but we know you didn't do that. It's
part of her dump of the day, Mike. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: And that is what's going on here. Yep.
Jason Oberholtzer: I have discovered a subreddit. And I
would like to know what is going on here. Mike, would you be so
kind as to describe what what happens to you as you join this
subreddit?
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. What? Okay.
Jason Oberholtzer: It's hard to figure out where to put the eyes
first.
Georgia Hampton: That's true. Yeah. Hold on. I gotta lie down.
Okay.
So we're
Mike Rugnetta: at we're at our fifth world picks. This was
created 10/07/2011. It's got 91,000 members, and it is in the
top 2% of subs by size. The rules of the sub are submissions
must be fifth worldly. Submissions must have clear and
concise imagery.
Post quality content be nice. We can see what I can only kind of
maybe describe as like, if you did a blender adaptation of an
MC Escher painting Yes.
Georgia Hampton: Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta: But like elaborated on it 10 times and
then used the color scheme of the old school Windows
screensaver that was the pipes. Yes.
Jason Oberholtzer: My lord. Wow.
Mike Rugnetta: That's such
Hans Buetow: a good description.
Georgia Hampton: Nailed it exactly. Holy moly.
Hans Buetow: What you're picturing to your audience? Yep.
It's exactly that.
Jason Oberholtzer: It's that.
Mike Rugnetta: And then the one below it is like, it's sort of
like you're looking down into a square well that has a similar
color scheme to it, maybe a little bit more orange. But the
vibe is no longer M. C. Escher. It's more like traditional South
American art.
Georgia Hampton: Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: The one after that is like a strange Janice
faced sculpture of some kind.
Jason Oberholtzer: This is when the genre sort
Hans Buetow: of Right?
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. The genre really takes a turn here.
Floating mug in the sky.
Georgia Hampton: I was gonna point that one out because the
caption is just addiction.
Jason Oberholtzer: Addiction. Right? Mike, I'd like you to do
me a favor. Yeah. I'd like you go to top.
Yeah. And then I'd like you to go all time. And then I'd like
you to talk.
Georgia Hampton: My god.
Mike Rugnetta: Babe, you better
Jason Oberholtzer: talk fast
Mike Rugnetta: because it is challenging.
Georgia Hampton: What is happening?
Mike Rugnetta: It's much longer than I thought it was gonna be.
Okay. So nine nine years ago, someone posted what is obviously
the best post on this.
Georgia Hampton: We should have just ended here like as a as a
society. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: This is a video. It's a GIF actually. So there's
no sound. There's what looks like a Rottweiler maybe riding a
three d man shape in like nineteen nineties, early two
thousand style three d rendering.
Georgia Hampton: Sure.
Mike Rugnetta: So a Rottweiler riding a man shape down what
looks at first like a mountain, but turns out to be the chest of
a statue bent over backwards.
Georgia Hampton: Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: So the they ride the chest down to the throat off
the chin and as they ride off the chin, the eyes open and the
tongue extends and then they get swallowed? No. They sort of No.
Jump off like a sick skateboard jump.
Georgia Hampton: There's sort of a metal creature man.
Hans Buetow: It's like a huge I'm gonna
Mike Rugnetta: go ahead and I'm just gonna stop there and I'm
not gonna describe the rest of it. There's a snowy owl, there's
a I was gonna say gotta mention the snowy owl. This defeats
language. I also I mean, maybe it's because this attitude has
been cemented more since then. This feels less fifth world y to
me than Mhmm.
The group of images that we saw sorted by most recent.
Hans Buetow: Is fifth world y something that you understand,
Mike? No. Know what that is.
Father Garrett: And not
Mike Rugnetta: outside of this. I would say that this is like,
this is one of those places on the internet where like the
whole purpose is to just sort of like divine and solidify this
vibe. Yeah. And there's sort of no other purpose than to be
like, to vibe navigate, you know, like Mhmm. To just try to
find or make things that seem to cohere in a way that is really
hard to describe.
But when you see it, you're like, oh, yeah, that is fifth
worldly.
Hans Buetow: In the rules, it defines submissions must be
fifth worldly if you expand it out. Oh. It has a definition.
Oh.
Mike Rugnetta: Must depict or seem to originate from another
dimension, must either be surreal or bizarre, or attempt
to convey a novel emotion or experience. Which I think that
that aligns with everything that we've said so Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: Asked and answered.
Jason Oberholtzer: Who hasn't had that novel experience?
Hans Buetow: Alright. I wanna ask the room real quick before
you if I say wacky Tic Tac, do you know what that means? Wacky
Tic Tac?
Jason Oberholtzer: Wacky Tic Tac? No. I don't want to.
Georgia Hampton: No. She said nervously.
Hans Buetow: Okay. Well, we're going back to Reddit. Uh-huh.
Georgia, can you please read the description of it before you
open it?
Mike Rugnetta: Oh my god. Okay. Okay.
Georgia Hampton: We're off to such a good start.
Mike Rugnetta: We really are.
Georgia Hampton: I have seen the face of god and it was weeping.
Banana.
Hans Buetow: Okay. Now you know where we are? Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: Let's open that up. Oh.
Jason Oberholtzer: Say it the way the wacky Tic Tacs would
have you say it.
Georgia Hampton: Banana. Yes.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. We're in minion land.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. We're I'm I'm in the minion system. I'm in
the walls.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. So just going through here, it's it's
all sorts of content involving minions. The kind that as you
may imagine, oh, wait. Never mind.
Jason Oberholtzer: Right? Your expectation got subverted.
Georgia Hampton: It's So
Hans Buetow: you start and you're like, this is this is a
grandma on Facebook.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. It's just literally about to say, your
aunt on Facebook was like, happy Tuesday everyone. God bless
America.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. These are no But like if minions were the
thing that lives behind the diner in Mulholland Drive.
Georgia Hampton: Oh my god. And what's funny is that not all of
them have been so we should say what is what's going on here is
that they're yes. It's this format of, you know, minion
photos photos.
Mike Rugnetta: Like in TikTok. It's documentary.
Georgia Hampton: Documentary of the real creature minions that
live among us. Images of minions, you know, with wigs or
making a funny face or pointing at themselves and has the sort
of structure of of what we were just describing of, like, you
Georgia Hampton: know, sometimes a girl just needs
Georgia Hampton: to let loose or whatever. But but every, one
that I'm seeing now, actually, I was wrong. They're all like
this.
Hans Buetow: They're all like
Georgia Hampton: this. So, like, you know, a couple down, is two
minions smiling at at you and sort of pointing at themselves
and it says, exercise? I thought you said, and then someone
clearly superimposed over whatever it originally said,
Bush did nine eleven.
Mike Rugnetta: The, the title of the post would seem to suggest
that what is, covered over is extra fries.
Georgia Hampton: Yes. Because the the caption is no extra
fries today.
Jason Oberholtzer: Now, that's funny. I like that. This George
Bush two nine eleven thing, I'm not sure about that quite as
much.
Hans Buetow: You have like under the title God has abandoned us,
you have a very grainy hungover minion that says exercise? I
sell a 130 grams of crack cocaine behind my local middle
school, run over 21 innocent children with a hijacked bus,
evade $82,000 in taxes, and commit severe war crimes in Iraq
every day. That counts. Right?
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. There's a lot of, like, a newly restored
World War one photo that is what looks like an already AI
generated black and white image of soldiers on the battlefield,
and then a minion storming alongside them. My god.
Hans Buetow: And so it keeps going, and there's a it's a wide
variety. It's not all political. There's like a cuck life one.
Mhmm. There's all of these.
It's but it's like it's like your auntie is the filthiest
person who like the filthiest tin hattiness wearing person and
is still into the same aesthetic. And the whole thing
is wacky Tic Tacs, which I looked up, there is such a thing
as a Minion Tic Tac. They're banana flavored, which
Georgia Hampton: Of course.
Hans Buetow: There are 97,000 people in this, and the title is
God is Dead.
Georgia Hampton: This does have a sort of sheen of a a 4chan or
4chan adjacent.
Mike Rugnetta: It's just it just is just leaning so hard into the
irony of,
Georgia Hampton: you know,
Mike Rugnetta: the minions are from Despicable Me, they're
funny little guys, they're, you know, innocent, strange little
characters. And now, you know, here's a book they're next to
Bush did nine eleven and on a image that says, have one finger
for a reason, woodworking accident. Like, it's just That's
one of
Georgia Hampton: the more like, you know, palatable ones.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. One of the most palatable. Yeah. Yeah. And
I agree.
Like, it it's it's very much that kind of like that 4chan
style of ironic distance or ironic detachment.
Hans Buetow: So this is really just an a repeated joke over and
over, if I'm understanding correctly, of isn't it funny to
put these cute little memed up things in actually despicable
situations?
Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. It's people making fun of Facebook
aunties by, you know, imagining what if they were edge lords.
Georgia Hampton: Edge lord is exactly the word. Because this
is sort of a classic, like, internet Right.
Mike Rugnetta: Vibe. This is like terminal posting, you know?
Like, this is
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: This is endgame posting.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Yeah.
Hans Buetow: Okay. Well, thanks. That's that's helpful. It's sort
of what I thought, but it's a lot more.
Georgia Hampton: And it's really validating to know that a wacky
TikTok is not commonly known.
Mike Rugnetta: That's what's going on here?
Georgia Hampton: We've learned what's going on here, but at
what cost?
Mike Rugnetta: We've got one more what's going on here, but
we are going to lose one Georgia Hampton because she's got
somewhere more important to be right now.
Georgia Hampton: I gotta go kill all the minions. Oh, no. I'm
stopping this once and for all.
Mike Rugnetta: Georgia, thank you for joining us. Bye.
Jason Oberholtzer: Godspeed.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. I have something that I first
encountered about a month ago. And I have been going out of my
way. I wanna know what it is so bad. And I have not gone and
searched to learn because I wanted to bring it to what's
going on here.
From what I can figure out, this is not new.
Georgia Hampton: Okay.
Mike Rugnetta: By this, I mean, a a person. This person. I get
served their videos all the time and like everywhere. And I think
it's probably because I watch them because I'm like, what? I
mean, it's the name of the segment for a reason.
What is going on here?
Hans Buetow: And the algorithm is like, this guy loves
Georgia Hampton: this. This guy
Mike Rugnetta: loves this. So, Jason. Yeah. I have four videos.
Okay.
And this is the first one.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. The name, Sufi Blower. What we have
here is a man with a microphone. When I press play, we'll figure
out what he does with that power. It's in a public space, a
crowded public space.
A lot of folks have their hands on their foreheads. Is that him
making this noise? Okay. He's like sort of beatboxing a little
bit.
Hans Buetow: It feels like he's like slamming his diaphragm,
like his abdomen to make his diaphragm work.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. He's engaging his diaphragm with his
hands. He's sort of like I need a pan down here, but looks like
he's kind of chilling his belly and
Father Garrett: Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. I'm gonna send you a second video.
Jason Oberholtzer: I just watched this man on Facebook,
now to TikTok. Okay. Because he was doing his hands. Okay. He's
sort of pulling at a necklace, a rope, round beaded.
Perhaps beaded is hard to see, I need better fidelity on these
buddy. And he's doing that same deep breath thing into a
microphone in a public setting and this one has like a delay
slapped to it and a big reverb. There
Hans Buetow: are people screaming in the background,
like scream, like someone's being attacked.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. Okay. And the same we pan to the
crowd, they have their hands on their heads again, they're
screaming.
Mike Rugnetta: And the crowd is huge. Huge. How is this how
would you describe this man's manner of dress?
Jason Oberholtzer: He's got he's got a black head wrap, but like
a multi colored sort of set of robes.
Mike Rugnetta: And someone else is holding the microphone in
front of him. Right.
Jason Oberholtzer: I mean, I would call it like a ceremonial
robe even, like there are religious overtones to this
certainly, but I don't have the cultural conversants to know.
Mike Rugnetta: To say exactly Yeah. The article of clothing.
Jason Oberholtzer: Exactly.
Father Garrett: Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta: So here are two of his own videos. Okay.
Hans Buetow: Oh, he's not hitting his diaphragm.
Jason Oberholtzer: No. He's not at all. He's just like fiddling
with yanking this necklace, this beaded white beaded necklace.
He's What about
Hans Buetow: a rosary?
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Yeah. It's a good That's a good way to
describe it. It is basically essentially a rosary. I don't
see a cross.
And the comments on this one comments on this one include,
I'm Christian but even I can tell this is not Islam and
someone else saying this is not Islam. Someone else saying, I've
been seeing this dude a lot in my feed lately, but why are
women screaming while he spits into the mic? Really trying to
underline that this is not Islam, which makes me think
there are comments that have maybe been buried here where
people are being unkind about Islam or making assumptions
there. And those more than no are making sure that we know
that no, that is not what is going on here.
Mike Rugnetta: So based on just what I've seen from the comments
of getting served these videos, is that this guy is a
controversial spiritual leader of some kind.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's what I'm picking up.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Right? Related to Islam somehow.
Perhaps tenuously in the eyes of a big group of people. I guess
my question is like, why and what's the deal with the breath?
Mhmm. But like, you know, going into a delay line while pulling
on this necklace with people losing their minds.
Jason Oberholtzer: I mean, it certainly has, you know,
overtones of some of our more ecstatic American traditions.
Mike Rugnetta: Like speaking in tongues and
Jason Oberholtzer: tongues, or yelling, or the fun little slap
the forehead and watch them crumble move.
Mike Rugnetta: You know, his name is, I'm gonna say it
probably very wrong, Haqqa'teb Hussein.
Hans Buetow: Okay. So he's got a he's got a website.
Mike Rugnetta: Serving humanity in the name of Allah SWT. Right?
Every week, thousands of people make their way to Dab'ar e
Aliyah Balawara Sharif and Astana Aliyahkar, Saddan.
Jason Oberholtzer: It seems to be Northeastern Pakistan.
Mike Rugnetta: To receive Allah SWT's blessing through the doom
and dua insufflation and supplication of Kaladar I Duran
Haqqateb Hussein Ali Badshah Sakhar m e. So this is my sense
and this was what I was hoping we could maybe figure out is
like, is this guy like a Joel Osteen who is, you know,
nominally associated with some religion, but really is just
enriching himself. Yeah. But that still doesn't answer the
question of like, why these elements? Like, I I wanna
understand the beads and the breathing and the hands on the
forehead Yeah.
And the like kneeling with the hands behind the head. I'm sure
all of this is, like, deeply rooted in, like, religious
symbolism that we just are not familiar with.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. Mhmm. I'm just I'm poking around more at
the website, at this man's website, and there's a thing
called Wazifa Taspeh, which is curative. And it says, to cure
ill cure from illnesses, solution to problems or worries,
righteous offspring income slash job, peace and blessings in the
home, righteous marriages of children, etcetera, in the
essence for all good, righteous purposes. When?
To be recited after Namaz ESR. How? After Namaz ESR, recite
Durud e 11 times, Surah Kothar 100 times, followed by 11 times.
So you have this pattern of recitation that you need to do.
And then following the completion of Wazifa, you can
make dua for yourself or anyone else for any good purpose.
It is it is also allowed to blow upon to insufflate water after
completing this wazifah and to drink it or to give the
insufflated water to some patient to drink, any illness
will subside. Mhmm. So you're making an elixir with your
breath, and I wonder if that's the idea is he's breathing he's
making his breath after he's done this cleansing ritual is
being breathed upon all of the crowds. Right.
Jason Oberholtzer: Naturally, in the way that air does get
amplified and moved Yeah. Through the microphone. Yeah.
There's a healing tab on his page where some of these
miracles are listed that I have found now. Things that he claims
to have done, or this website claims that he has done include,
a little boy had hole in his heart cured.
Hans Buetow: After four and the dom the dom is the is the breath
water.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. Cured after four dom. Man suffering
from incurable jaundice of the liver is cured. Girl who lost
her sight for seven months recovers her eyesight. Epilepsy,
liver cancer, village had wells of hard water.
Someone couldn't speak for fifteen years. These are among
the victories that he is tallying up.
Hans Buetow: So you can participate live and have these
healing properties expelled at you.
Mike Rugnetta: Little girl got dumb from Facebook live.
Hans Buetow: Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: She had been unable to walk and doctors
declare she would never be able to walk again. She was able to
walk from second to woah.
Jason Oberholtzer: I don't know, man. Yeah. May yeah. Maybe I am
cynical. Like, maybe they are purporting that this happens
over the Internet as well.
And Yeah. This is an earnest effort to provide healing and
that they believe they are providing through all of man's
available resources including the social web.
Hans Buetow: There's a long tradition of this in both
religious and secular spaces. I mean, placebos are a thing Yeah.
And not just, you know, I don't know, maybe this is working for
people, but people have been doing this, laying hands on
people, doing all I mean, that's the big tent thing, you know.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. I mean, ultimately, think, you know, we
are probably waiting into a contended area for which we have
none of the signifiers lined up to figure out any sort of Yeah.
Way finding. I think that's probably very right.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Audience, if you have things to tell us
about this, I wanna know all about them.
Jason Oberholtzer: Wanna know more.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. I think we did it Hans, Jason. Thank you
for puzzling through what goes on on the Internet. Thank you to
Georgia in absentia. Audience, are there things that you see on
the Internet about which you think what is going on here?
Or if you your self know what is going on here and you have been
shouting at your phone, at your car stereo, at your speaker in
your kitchen At your loved ones. Turn those shouts into words in
an email and send them to us and tell us. Tell us, please. What
is going on here?
Jason Oberholtzer: Thank you, everybody.
Georgia Hampton: Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Good night, everyone.
Signoff: It's a star studded hour with Ed McMahon. Careers
are being launched on the million and a half dollar Star
Search eighty six. Tuesday at 07:30 on thirty two. And now
Channel thirty two brings you this thought for today. Speaking
is Father Garrett Barton of St.
Michael Church.
Father Garrett: Our whole being craves for the use of our own
life to make it the life of someone else and someone else
happy. And by helping them out, we're doing something for them,
for our self, and for our supreme being. So you can't lose
that way. And therefore, you got to put aside all the little
things that are said and the little things that are done. As
long as you are doing what you know is right, what else cares?
What else matters? You're going to get rewarded, and I wish the
good almighty would come down and really show us the rewards
that you already have from all the good that you've done. The
good Lord praises you, and if he didn't praise you, well, he'd
let you know. So we can do lots and lots of good things. We can
be so happy in helping other people.
We can lift up this world and our little small world that we
roam around. It can be so much wonderful if we make it so. And
it doesn't take anyone but yourself to make up your mind.
I'm going to do something about it so that tomorrow, the whole
world, my world, will be different.
Signoff: You've been listening to the thought for today with
Father Garrett Martin of Saint Michael Church.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have
for you this week. We're gonna be back here in
the main feed on Wednesday, July 2. A Neverpost membership is $4
and I think you should go get one right now at neverpo dot s
t. 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 Rugnetta. Through night
lava like eyelids softly opening, the first cry of
creation's volcano flickers. In the branches of your limbs, the
premonitions build their twittering nests. Excerpt of
Dancer by Nelly Sacks. Never Post is a production of charts
and leisure.
It's distributed by Radiotopia.