Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta, and this intro was written on Tuesday, 07/29/2025
at 09:34AM eastern. We have a fresh episode for you today. I
talk with media and communications researcher Emily
Owens and Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day and Panic World
about brain rot. Then Hans talks with four librarians about their
work rescuing and preserving datasets that are under threat
by the United States government.
And also on ask an expert, we talk with on the media's own,
Micah Loeinger. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break.
You'll 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. Man,
it's a hot one, like five stories this week from the
midday sun.
The Internet Archive is now a federal depository library. What
does this mean? It means it's a library that will house federal
documents. Writing for KQED, Morgan Sung, who you'll remember
from our hantai segment, writes that the Internet Archive,
quote, will join a network of more than a thousand libraries
around the country tasked with archiving government documents
for public view. The status is particularly notable, some
continues, as the Trump administration has
systematically removed information from federal
websites under new anti woke executive orders.
Archive visitors will now have access to primary government
sources in addition to materials uploaded by users or saved
through accessible websites, end quote. You're gonna hear Hans
talk more about this sort of thing this episode. You stopped
clicking things when you Google. Pew Research finds that only 8%
of people are likely to click on search results if they are shown
an AI summary of those results compared to 15% who are not
shown an AI summary. Furthermore, folks shown AI
summaries are more likely to simply close the browser window
after their search versus those who are not.
Pew says about one in five searches in their study produced
an AI summary.
Clip: Oh, man.
Mike Rugnetta: Hackers leaked data they stole from Tee, the
women only dating safety app, twice at the time of writing.
Four zero four media reports it was able to access millions of
messages containing sensitive data drawn from what is
nominally an anonymous platform. Highly personal details
including names, addresses, phone numbers, social media
handles, and as one might expect, hellishly hot gossip are
all included. It's unclear who else may have discovered the
security issue and downloaded any data from the more recent
database, four zero four media rights, continuing members of
4chan found the first exposed database last week and made tens
of thousands of images of t users available for download. T
told four zero four media it has contacted law enforcement, end
quote.
Okay. Deep breath before this next one. Itch, the indie games
publisher, last week search banned its sizable offering of
not safe for work and otherwise explicit games. Also removing
them from browse functionality and restricting the sale of many
with almost no warning to game makers and publishers. This
because of pressure from payment processors like PayPal and
Stripe following pressure they received from a very small group
of Australian based activists calling themselves collective
shout, which self describes as a grassroots campaigns movement
against the objectification of women and the sexualization of
girls.
IGN reports that users estimate nearly 20,000 adult games may be
affected by this de indexing. On July 24, Itch released a
statement reading in part, our ability to process payments is
critical for every creator on our platform. To ensure that we
can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all
developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our
payment partners and take immediate step towards
compliance. An update posted on the twenty eighth further
elaborates saying that to retain the ability to pay anyone, Itch
will be working on stronger age gating, more specific terms of
service, and will begin a search for more lenient payment
processors. There's a grassroots counter campaign underway
seeking to exert equal force in the opposite direction on
payment processors.
We're gonna put a link to more information about that in the
show notes if you're curious. And finally, polling by YouGov
shows a majority of respondents and 60% of those aged 18 to 24
in Europe would prefer locally based social media platforms
over current US based options. I wonder why. Recently, a number
of developers have launched EuroSky, a European alternative
to BlueSky. Its website reads, built in Europe, run on our
cloud, ruled by our laws.
Users choose the content, businesses control their brand
environment, people control the algorithms. Social media is
crucial infrastructure and a vital piece of the European tech
sovereignty agenda. We need to regain structural control over
our information ecosystems, end quote. Developers include Sherif
El Sayed Ali, the executive director of the Future of
Technology Institute, a self described think and do tank, as
well as Sebastian Voglesong, developer of the AT Proto
compatible photo sharing app Flashes. In show news this week,
we released a funding announcement one upload ago.
If you missed it, please go back and give it a listen. But the
long and short is we're about to do some fundraising to assure
that we will be able to continue making this show past the 2025.
What does that mean? It means that you should keep an eye out
for T shirts and a live streamed membership drive, which is
happening the week of August 18, so please put that in your
calendars. We're gonna release a more detailed schedule in the
coming weeks, that's what I can tell you so far.
Week of August 18, we're gonna be doing a bunch of stuff. I
think that Thursday is gonna be particularly busy. Hey. Also,
just as an aside here, the response to the funding
announcement has been sort of unbelievable, honestly. Welcome
to a bunch of new members listening to the show in the ad
free feed.
We are extremely happy and excited to have you. And to
everyone who sent us along a tip, it is so so, so appreciated
and extremely helpful. I can't even be begin to say how much. I
think we're you know, it's a tough time to be an indie show
doing the weird sorts of things that we do, and so far, your
response to us asking for help is just it's incredibly
encouraging. So thank you, really.
Thank you. Thank you. Alright. That's the news I have for
you this week. In this week's episode, Hans, Jenny, Kate,
Molly,
and Linda on tactical archiving. Then me, Emily, and Ryan on
Brain Rot. But first, in our interstitials this week, we're
gonna talk with Micah Loeinger of On the Media and get his
expert opinion on what happens now that the US government has
drastically cut funding to the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting. Michael Lowinger, thank you so much for joining us
on Ask An Expert. You are truly an expert.
You are the cohost of WNYC's On the Media, a nationally
syndicated public radio show that can be heard on over 400
stations across the country. You worked as a producer and then as
On the Media's first staff reporter, and your investigative
and human interest stories have focused on political extremism,
Internet culture, and the evolution of the news industry.
You have won the John m Higgins Award for best in-depth slash
enterprise reporting. You were a finalist for Third Coast's best
news feature, a finalist for a Livingston award, and a finalist
for a Mirror award for best commentary. In 2019, the New
York Times wrote about your experiment on the use of
restorative justice in moderating the Internet's
largest Christian forum.
Your radio and written work has appeared in The Washington Post,
The Guardian, NPR, Death, Sex, and Money, and Gothamist. You
have worked in public media, reported on public media, and
are now the host of a public media show about media. On July
18, Congress passed house resolution four, which took back
1,100,000,000 that had already been allocated via legislation
to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This money
was slated to go from the CPB to local public media radio and TV
stations in all 50 states. And despite two thirds of Americans
supporting the use of that money in that way, Congress has now
eliminated federal funding for public media.
Is this defunding going to change the American media
landscape?
Micah Loewinger: Yes.
Hans Buetow: Alright. Here we go. Wilson Lever, U of M. As the
clock tolls noon. Isn't that exciting?
Okay. Here go. Here we go. Here we go. A recent, gorgeous July
afternoon, I was very on time, no big deal, for an appointment
to meet a trio of librarians.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi.
Jenny McBurney: Jenny. Jenny. Yeah. Welcome.
Hans Buetow: Thank you.
Jenny McBurney: Go find our room.
Hans Buetow: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love a
library. I love a library.
There's just this feeling when you walk in like, I'm smarter
with all of this collected info around me. Like, these resources
and ideas are available to me. Could just grab them, take them
in, and synthesize them all for free.
Jenny McBurney: So this is what we were thinking. Yeah. It
sounds weird in here. It's so quiet.
Hans Buetow: Good. Perfect. Change anything.
Jenny McBurney: I can
Hans Buetow: Love it.
Jenny McBurney: Want tables or chairs or
Hans Buetow: whatever they want. This is great. We got plenty of
chairs. I'm gonna have us all sit awkwardly close to each
other That's fine. Because that's just
Jenny McBurney: I'll sit way back.
Hans Buetow: How we do. Yeah. And even though it's the middle
of summer and this university library is basically empty, it
feels very cool. I mean, maybe even more cool to be hanging out
with three librarians.
Jenny McBurney: I'm Jenny McBurney. I am the government
publications librarian here at the University of Minnesota Twin
Cities. Mainly, my job is to steward our collection and make
sure that the public has access to government information.
Kate Sheridan: I'm Kate Sheridan. I'm the publishing
librarian at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and I run
the library's scholarly publishing program.
Molly Blake: I'm Molly Blake. I'm a social sciences librarian
at the University of Minnesota. And along with Jenny and some
other fabulous people, I helped launch the Tracking Gov Info
Project.
Hans Buetow: The Tracking Government Information Project?
That's why I'm here. Jenny, Kate, and Molly, they'll help
run it along with Sangah Sung of University of Illinois Urbana
Champaign and Ben Amada from California State University in
Sacramento. So these five librarians and their project,
which tracks what changes are being made to the public
information online, is a volunteer effort that is just
one of a group of volunteer efforts that are currently on
the front lines of data and information rescue and
preservation. There have been data rescue efforts in play for
literally thousands of years, from the burning of the library
of Zimri Lim in ancient Mesopotamia, the destruction of
the Maya codices by Diego de Landa in 1532.
You've got the deliberate arson of US Library of Congress in
1812. You got lots of libraries destroyed in World War two.
Information has always and is always at risk of being lost,
and part of the work of librarians is to make sure that
it isn't.
Jenny McBurney: So there's always been librarians and
members of the public who want to help to preserve government
information, and there's super long standing efforts to make
that happen.
Hans Buetow: But this year feels different. This year, The US has
entered what for it is a new era of information threat. Alright.
So I'm gonna start. I'm gonna read you all a headline, and
then I'm gonna ask you what this headline makes you think of, how
it makes you feel.
This is from 03/20/2025, 04:48PM, from Politico. Trump
signs executive order to dismantle education department.
You all work in information sciences in the library. And so
when you read that, you open up your paper. What people don't do
that anymore.
You open up your browser. And you read that. What like, what
do you think from your perspective as librarians, as
data information folks?
Jenny McBurney: I mean, my first thought is, is that legal? My
second thought then is, uh-oh. Where is all of the stuff that
those people are working on gonna go? Is it gonna disappear?
Are we not gonna have access to that those reports, that data,
any of that stuff anymore?
Molly Blake: And the Department of Education produces just an
amazing amount of data that is used by grant writers, that's
used by researchers. I think right away of the Institute for
Educational Sciences, which is in charge of ERIC, which is
probably the most popular educational database of
scholarly articles and gray literature, conference papers,
things that are extremely useful for educational researchers.
Hans Buetow: ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center,
ERIC, is a searchable online database of about 2,000,000
pieces of education research. Molly and her social sciences
colleagues rely on ERIC.
Molly Blake: I work with a lot of researchers that do
systematic reviews and evidence synthesis. So they have a topic
and their goal is maybe their topic is reading in third grade,
for example. And they then want to figure out what is everything
that has been published over the years on this topic. Because of
the cuts of the Department of Education, ERIC is likely not
going to be indexing the same number of journals. It's gonna
be cut by almost half in years to come.
Hans Buetow: Which means the researchers that are relying on
it can't go back and replicate their searches, and you lose not
just the materials, but the metadata, the indexing of
information, where the information is stored, how it's
discovered. There's just gonna be less to find. But it also
means that there's gonna be downstream effects. Here's Kate
Sheridan.
Kate Sheridan: Eric feeds into so many other things. Right?
Eric records get pulled into commercial databases. Eric
records get pulled into Google Scholar. If Eric is affected,
many other things are affected as well.
If the researchers who come to Mali are gonna have their
systematic reviews impacted by this, that's literally going to
reshape the knowledge we're able to have moving forward. That's
going to reshape our ability to make new discoveries, to make
progress, to innovate. Like, you have to look at what's been
previously done, design a new experiment, test it, report back
on it, and other people will read it and design new
experiments. We're gonna be missing part of that.
Molly Blake: Once we lose that information, we lose the ability
to understand things about issues such as school
segregation, issues such as equity. It's taking away data
that people can use to make education better for everyone.
Jenny McBurney: So what was happening in the early days of
the Trump administration is that librarians started getting
questions from researchers saying, my article's gone. Why
is it gone? Help. Other people were saying, wait, this dataset
that I was using is gone. What do I do?
How do I find it? How do I complete my research project?
And there was a super interesting article, which I
brought along today just in case, from The Lancet that was
talking about how an important part of this data is
transparency. In normal practices, if you make a change
to something, you document it. You say, this was changed to
this.
But that's not what's happening here. Changes are just happening
without anyone knowing, without any documentation, without any
recording. How do we even know what's an accurate dataset
anymore?
Hans Buetow: So Jenny, Kate, Molly, and their colleagues
started the tracking government information project, which is a
crowdsourced spreadsheet that helps everyone be able to track
what's being changed on any federal websites and where you
can go to find what it used to say before the changes.
Jenny McBurney: Say, okay. I'm looking for everything relating
to COVID. You can find everything that has to do with
it. You can see which websites, which documents have been
removed, and find where it is pointing you to. So where is the
preserved copy of the covid.gov website, for example.
Molly Blake: And part of what we're doing in addition to
pointing people to preserved copies, which is super
important, is we want to raise awareness about the scope of
this problem. Like, what does it mean that the Department of
Education may be dismantled? What information is being
collected? What is their expertise? What types of work do
they do?
Because even if we can preserve information that goes away, what
we can't do is we can't write a report that's not going to get
written this year.
Jenny McBurney: That's one of
Kate Sheridan: the things that stresses me out the most. I
think there was, like, two weeks when the mortality weekly report
didn't come out. It's the morbidity and mortality weekly
report. The MMWR is intended to publish information that is
timely and related to public health. So if there was, like,
an E.
Coli outbreak happening and they had some new information about
the outbreak source or about something to do with the actual,
like, B. Coli bacterium, something to do with that, you
could find that in the MMWR. And so we don't know what was lost
necessarily, not just because the articles weren't published,
but because we don't necessarily know what they were about.
Jenny McBurney: We will never get those two weeks back. We
will never get those reports back. That is a seventy year old
dataset that has a gap for the rest of eternity. Even if
everything was snap fixed tomorrow moving forward, that's
never gonna come back. That's gone forever.
It it was never created because people weren't able to create
it.
Hans Buetow: This was a big revelation for me in
understanding all of the layers to what's happening. It's not
just that we need to be concerned with the data being
actively taken out of the public view, but also the impact of the
government efficiencies in heavy scare quotes that have all
eliminated data gathering by shutting down research. They've
canceled server contracts to host and store the data, and
they've fired the people with the expertise that's needed to
contextualize it.
Lynda Kellum: If I can't, like, be assured that I'm gonna be
able to access this website because those people aren't
there or the, you know, there there's link issues or the API's
down or the contract's been ended, I wanna be able to access
that data, and there's no reason why people shouldn't be able to
access that data.
Hans Buetow: This is Linda Kellum. Linda is a data
librarian with expertise in qualitative data research and
software. And Linda is a leader in the field of data rescue, so
much so that just the mention of her name Tamale prompted She's a
big deal. She's a big deal. She's a big deal.
Yeah. I wanted to talk with Linda in her capacity as
founding organizer of the Data Rescue Project, which is a
volunteer group that works on emergency archiving of datasets.
And I have to say I was a little surprised. Maybe I shouldn't
have been, but I was a little surprised by Linda's reaction
when I read her that March headline, Trump signs executive
order to dismantle education department.
Lynda Kellum: First thing I thought about was I was happy
that we had actually done something. So in a lot of ways,
I felt satisfaction at least we had tried to do something. Wow.
But you're you're right. I mean, I it was it was it's also
disheartening and it's really dismaying to see, you know, that
considered as something that
Hans Buetow: could be thrown away, You know, not
Lynda Kellum: it's something that's not worth preserving for
the long term.
Hans Buetow: That's a very surprising answer to me. Not the
second part. The second part is kind of what I expected. Yeah.
You know.
It's made in things. Let's talk about the first part of that
answer, though, where you said you felt satisfied that you had
done work. When you say that as a data librarian, when you say
that as someone who works with a data rescue project, what does
that mean? What what work have you done already when you read
that announcement in in March?
Lynda Kellum: For us, we were just this was rapid response, so
it was really just get what we can. We knew that the Department
of Education had a target on its back and wanted to go ahead and
do as much as we could at that time.
Hans Buetow: Was there anything specific that that led you to
see that target? Like, how did you know that target was there?
Lynda Kellum: Project twenty twenty five.
Hans Buetow: Oh, that was
Lynda Kellum: that's the road map.
Hans Buetow: Oh, you mean they told you?
Lynda Kellum: Yeah. Yeah. They told all of us what they were
gonna do. So we were looking to see where they had explicitly
said it would target agencies. We started with the Department
of Education.
That was the very first department we even looked at,
just to figure out what data sets would be publicly
accessible for us to download and preserve.
Hans Buetow: The first step was to understand what information
they're even looking for.
Lynda Kellum: And that's what we did. We went, you know, with a
spreadsheet and started documenting inventorying, if you
will, the different datasets and surveys that were available on
that website. What's there? What's the size? What do we can
we get it?
Are there alternative sources that are not government based?
Hans Buetow: As full a catalog as possible was made of what
needed rescuing, adding metadata and documentation to everything.
Lynda Kellum: We want everything that's associated with that.
Once we felt we had everything we could find, we asked others,
people who had expertise in those areas to add additional
datasets, and then we could start the process of a rescue.
Hans Buetow: Getting the actual data can be either simple or
complex. Some datasets, you can just click and download. Easy
peasy. Other datasets, not so easy. Some are so big that they
need to be scraped, and there are others that are just
idiosyncratic.
Lynda Kellum: Department of Education has this thing called
the Data Lab, which has wonderful data sets, but they're
all in tables and there are about 900 tables for each data
set. And there's no way to download the entire we just
can't get it out of the system. There's no API access for it. So
Right.
Kate Sheridan: We've been working
Lynda Kellum: on projects where we just go through and download
each individual table.
Hans Buetow: What? That's like archaeology. That's like dusting
dusting grains of sand in the middle of a desert.
Lynda Kellum: Yeah. It's it's definitely tedious work, and I
thank all of the volunteers who've worked on it.
Hans Buetow: Once data is downloaded or scraped, it has to
go somewhere as quickly as possible. Somewhere that has the
space to store it, isn't controlled by corporations in
terms of service, and is publicly accessible.
Lynda Kellum: When we take the dataset, we don't keep it. We
put it into ICPSR's DataLumos, which is a crowdsourced
repository for public data. It was in 2017 in response to
concerns about the loss of public data. And from there, it
becomes publicly accessible quite quickly and it has all the
fields that are needed for datasets to include the metadata
in the documentation. The role of ICPSR is long term
preservation so that they can, you know, help make ensure that
that dataset, that package will be accessible in the long term,
which is a very different thing from just web crawling and, you
know, in mass amounts.
So it's a supplement to what Internet Archive and others do,
but geared around data.
Hans Buetow: So that's the process that Data Rescue Project
has been doing with the Department of Education since
February. But the Department of Education are not the only ones
who have been targeted across the government. We have seen
huge changes to government agencies like Health and Human
Services, CDC, NOAA, Department of the Interior, and some
nongovernmental like USAID and lots, lots more. This same
crisis is happening all over the government all at once, and all
of it is in need of the same levels of response. How how wide
is the aperture for this?
Lynda Kellum: Yeah. I think that's a great question and
something we're still figuring out, certainly. Interesting.
Hans Buetow: So, yeah, we don't really have a sense?
Lynda Kellum: Yeah. Because we don't know like, somebody's
asked us how much data have you captured, and we don't have a
way of knowing because there was no one inventory for all the
federal government data. Even data.gov is not an inventory for
and and data.gov has its own issues. I think agency by
agency, we have a sense of what has happened. And, you know, in
the coming months, this would be a project we could do is look at
the agency by agency and kind of detail what has occurred.
And but even then, it's it's it may be office to office within
an agency. So it's really challenging to have a sense of
kind of that whole picture at this particular point in time.
But in terms of scale, like, I don't know at this point. I
can't even say.
Hans Buetow: I find all of this upsetting, not the efforts of
all these wonderful people. That is the only thing that's keeping
me from just laying down on the floor, letting the fates take
me. What I find upsetting is that all this work, all this
data that we're scrambling to save, it already belongs to us.
Jenny McBurney: Yes. This is our data. We are all it's it's for
the people, by the people, of the people. Right? Like, that's
the whole point of our government.
And so the government creates things for us and we have a
right to access it. The role
Lynda Kellum: of the federal government really is to help us
understand ourselves. That's I believe. Right? It's it's the
federal government is the only real entity that can has the
mission to collect public data and make it accessible to the
public. It's built into our constitution that we take a
census.
Collecting data is is part of our who we are.
Molly Blake: Certainly, a democratic ideal is that we
should all have unfettered access to information that then
we're able to get and interpret both as private citizens and in
the work we do in any way that we see fit.
Lynda Kellum: It's how we hold the government accountable. It's
how we inform ourselves about our communities. It's how we
understand who we are as a people. Yeah. Yes.
That's an informed electorate is a fundamental part of democracy.
One institution, my institution, my my library can't replace that
mission on the scale that the government can do it. A private
company can try, but their role isn't to do that. Their role is
to to make money. And so when it comes to losing access to any of
the public data that we've had, it's a shame not just from a
from a topic level in the sense of this is what this Department
of Education dataset is for, but in a sense of of this is what
the government should do.
It is gather information about us, help us understand
ourselves, help us be able to project into the future about
ourselves, help us build services for our people. That's
the role of the government in my opinion.
Hans Buetow: One of the hard parts about this moment is that
these ideals, which represent an idea of how the country has been
run, maybe since it became a country, these ideals are not at
all being met by the actions of the people who currently run it.
And that means that, like Linda, Kate, Molly, Jenny, the
volunteers they work with, and the teams building and running
theirs and other data rescue projects, these are the people
working to build systems that hold up our ideals and keep our
information free and available. As I was listening to Linda talk
about all this, I started actually to see a picture
forming in my head. And this was a picture of, like, pipes being
laid. It was a picture of structures being designed and
pathways being paved.
And it suddenly occurred to me that even though this hurts to
feel such a letdown, We might be laying some kind of groundwork
for something new. Are we creating new infrastructure with
this project that we haven't seen and that might undergird
longer than just to the next administration?
Lynda Kellum: Yeah. I oh, I think there's there's a building
awareness of the existing infrastructure. Certainly,
people now know about DataLumos beyond just a few data
librarians. And I give you an example of that. There were only
a 100 data sets in DataLumos from 2017 to 2025.
Since 2025, we have put 700 in. So Wow. Yeah. It gets doesn't
seem like a lot, but each one of those takes a lot of time and
and effort. And it is the creation of maybe a new way of
thinking about what we're doing.
And we're still figuring this out. Certainly with Data Rescue
Project, one of the things we would like to do is create a
infrastructure for rapid response for digital objects.
Right? So it's not just that every time something happens, we
have to spin up this thing, but we actually have an ongoing
documented, understood way or best practices and as well as
well as technical infrastructure for people who who need to do
this.
Hans Buetow: Even if we have an eye toward the long term, there
is a lot of information being threatened and a lot of need to
fulfill right now. Luckily, there are people working on it,
and there are plenty of ways that we can all get involved in
helping them.
Jenny McBurney: So for example, we've talked a lot about the
Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. Those started, like, in
the nineties, early two thousands. Those are essential
tools. They're doing such a great service. And I would
encourage anybody anywhere to add the Wayback Machine browser
extension to your browser.
And if you see something, save something.
Molly Blake: Could be on a government website or could be
anywhere that you're just worried about what would happen
if this information goes away. It just takes a second to click
and to save it.
Hans Buetow: This sort of flagging and identifying, this
is exactly the work that they're hoping everyone can do. Like
contributing, for example, to their tracking government
information project.
Molly Blake: We have a really simple form where you can just
report this is the link I wanna, share. This is what I know
hasn't been removed or modified. And, again, we know everybody
uses these websites in different ways, and so we need everyone's
expertise. Like, need to hear from teachers that are using
lessons plans on these websites, anyone who's using reports on
this website. If there's something that you've used and
you you notice it's gone or changed or even if you're not
sure if it's changed, go ahead
Hans Buetow: and submit it, and we
Molly Blake: can kind of, investigate on our end.
Hans Buetow: And if you're really curious and you wanna go
see what data has already been rescued, you can go to the data
rescue project's tracker to see all 1,200 data sets and
counting. And that doesn't just include their rescues, but
everyone's.
Lynda Kellum: One of our the main things that we wanted to do
is make sure that we were amplifying what other people
were doing. Mhmm. So it's not just about us. We we want people
to know about University of Chicago's data mirror or the
Federal Data Forum or America's Essential Data. Right?
All of those are great things that are doing similar but
different work. And so we wanna make
Hans Buetow: sure Yeah.
Lynda Kellum: To amplify those. And that's what's great about
this community is we're not It's not about territoriality. We're
trying to amplify each other and work together because I don't
want people doing what you described to going and just
hoarding things and putting it in their servers. That's not
useful. And so we wanna make sure that everybody knows where
they can go for the things that they are working on.
Hans Buetow: Everyone I talked to, Molly, Kate, Jenny, Linda,
everyone assured me that you do not need to be a data person or
a programming expert or a background in library sciences
to do this work to be able to support and pitch in. You just
need to be willing to join in.
Molly Blake: Speaking for myself, I was like, is somebody
a little more experienced than me starting this project
already? And I kept kind of waiting. And eventually, I think
we kinda decided, well, we have to be the ones that start this
project. And we're gonna learn as we go, and we're gonna get
other people involved, but somebody has to be doing this,
and it might as well be us.
Hans Buetow: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to
Jenny McBurney, Molly Blake, Kate Sheridan, and Linda Kellum.
I had long conversations with all these folks, and they were
incredible.
Y'all, librarians are the best. Full stop. Unqualified. I will
be publishing, those longer conversations to our members,
later in August. If you are not a member, but you wanna hear
those conversations, you can always sign up for just $4 a
month and get access to all of the extended interviews, not
just from this episode, which will be there, but also previous
episodes.
You can go deep on a lot. You can also go deep by looking in
the show notes for this episode. I'm gonna link to all of the
projects that were mentioned in this piece, to the Wayback
Machine if you wanna start archiving websites, to the Data
Rescue Project, to the Tracking Government Information Project,
and lots, lots, lots more. If you think you might be
interested in learning more or possibly joining the cause and
volunteering some of your time to help, you can find a great
starter in the show notes or head on over to neverpoe.st.
Mike Rugnetta: Michael Lowinger, this removal of funding for the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the latest and
most concrete escalation of a battle that has been waging
about public media since it started in 1967. When this
amendment passed, Republican house speaker Mike Johnson said,
this is, in our view, a misuse of taxpayer dollars. They're
biased reporting. They're not objective. They pretend to be
so, and the people don't need to fund that.
In your expert opinion as a media reporter reporting on
media, is public media any more biased than CNN, NBC, Fox News,
or any other nationally broadcast news outlet?
Micah Loewinger: No.
Ryan Broderick: I've seen it used a lot now in tandem with,
like, AI content, like, particularly, like, that weird
Italian crocodile that's popular on TikTok. That's Ryan
Broderick. You might
Mike Rugnetta: know him from well, here. I'll just let him
tell you.
Ryan Broderick: Hi. My name is Ryan Broderick. I am the author
of the Garbage Day newsletter and the host of the Panic World
podcast. And if you like this show, you'll like those slightly
less, but like them probably.
Mike Rugnetta: Ryan's being glib. You would love his work if
you don't already know it, but you probably do. We are huge
fans at Neverpost at least. And the crocodile that he's talking
about is called Bombardero crocodillo and it's maybe the
most well known character, I guess, in a lineup of characters
featured in a series of now slightly passe TikToks
collectively called Italian brain rot. He brought it up
because I asked him to tell me what exactly brain rot is.
Ryan Broderick: It's ugly. Like, it's it's it's almost always
ugly. It feels lazy and it feels unfulfilling beyond just sort of
understanding the references. This feeling of like you're just
consuming this stuff, but it doesn't really add up. It
doesn't really stay in your mind.
It sort of pleases you in a sensory way, but it's not great,
and you know that deep down. And people really like watching the
videos, but they know that they're bad and and and
unfulfilling. The way I see people use it seems to be
similar to the way you would talk about, like, eating a lot
of junk food. Like, there's a pride to it, but the pride is
kind of making fun of the compulsive aspect to it.
Mike Rugnetta: I wanted to ask Ryan about brain rot because it
seems to be front of mind for a lot of people at the moment,
even if that mind is diminishing in its faculties. And it also
seems to be like three different things. It's a verb, which is
what happens to your brain looking at, as Ryan calls it,
unfulfilling content. It's also an adjective, the label given
generally to unfulfilling content. Celebrity gossip, weird
food challenges, those livestreams where they try to
very carefully remove the shell from a raw egg while keeping the
shell membrane intact, you might reasonably call all of that
brain rot, which is also a noun, a genre label for Tralolero
Tralolot, Skibbitty Toilet, Le Poisson Steve, and others.
All media with this shared and specific kind of irreverence or
inanity almost. All of that also is brain rot, maybe with a
capital b. To put this as succinctly and confusingly as
possible, not all brain rot is brain rot, but it may all rot
your brain all the same. So how do we get these three different
but related senses of brain rot? And what sort of anxieties or
compulsions does brain rot as a concept confront?
Why was this term coined and why is it useful is what I'm curious
about in this segment. The contemporary Internet usage of
brain rot, of course, echoes a phrase I grew up hearing
sometimes in earnest, but mostly ironically as a throwback to a
very similar set of anxieties also related to technology. TV
rots your brains.
Clip: But you
should know that watching TV rots your brain. Rot your
brains.
Mike Rugnetta: This is a very well worn worry that some new
type of media is somehow destroying the minds of its
audience, especially if that audience is young.
Emilie Owens: We have evidence to show that when the novel was
introduced as a format for the every person to read in Denmark,
the newspapers or and and public commenters at the time were
like, kids can't be reading books. They will essentially rot
their brains.
Mike Rugnetta: This is Emily Owens.
Emilie Owens: Like, this is a very old tradition of young
people doing something, adults finding it abhorrent, it making
its way into the mainstream and becoming our culture in whether
we like it or not, and often in ways which are really cringe.
Mike Rugnetta: Emily is a doctoral research fellow at the
University of Oslo working in the Department of Media
Communications.
Emilie Owens: Broadly, I am interested in teenagers' lives,
meaning their social experiences and their identity development,
and how, if at all, those are shaped by digital media broadly
and in the case of my research, TikTok specifically.
Mike Rugnetta: In June, Emily published an article in the
journal New Media and Society titled, It Speaks to Me in Brain
Rot, theorizing brain rot as a genre of participation among
teenagers. In it, she points out that when brain rot was named
word of the year by Oxford University Press in late twenty
twenty four, a parade of hand wringing followed with headlines
like, I'm a neuroscientist. Here's the surprising truth
about TikTok brain rot from BBC News. Smartphone addiction is
leading to brain rot, doctors say from CBS. Pope warns of
brain rot from phone scrolling from Catholic news website
Alethea.
Brain rot, the new generation's epidemic from the cub. And, of
course, more.
Emilie Owens: People were freaked out about it. They
thought it was a a genuine mental health condition
affecting young people who use the Internet too much, but also
older people who use the Internet too much or the type of
content that causes that mental health condition. So that it was
overwhelmingly, like, negative, very little sort of tongue in
cheek. That's maybe emerged more now as we get more comfortable
with the term, but certainly at the beginning, it was real,
like, panicky vibes.
Mike Rugnetta: In the midst of all this, Emily is conducting
research with, quote, a small group of teenagers at an
international school in Oslo, as she writes, and something
happens.
Emilie Owens: And in, workshop three, since the third time I'd
seen them all, they were starting to get a bit more
comfortable. And that was the first time that Brain Rot
actually came up, and it was brought up by a a young woman
named Yari, 16 years old. And she is the self proclaimed
TikTok expert of the group.
Hans Buetow: And I say self proclaimed, but others often
also referred to her as the TikTok expert in the group.
Emilie Owens: And so we were in the middle of a discussion about
why TikTok is valuable to her, why she likes it so much. And
she she started saying to me, like, well, there's
controversies going on in the world, and there's always
someone explaining it on TikTok. And I went, yeah. And she said,
or I've seen, like, Russian ladies describe math to me, and
Hans Buetow: I understand it. And then another boy, Adrian,
checked in and said, oh, yeah.
Emilie Owens: I've seen that. I know her. And that's when Yari
said, yeah. It's like it speaks in, like, brain rot to me. I
understand it.
And I embarrassingly responded just by repeating slowly, it
speaks in brain rot. But I think you you can see that in that
excerpt, I was I was sort of computing this concept. Like, I
couldn't even take it in. I just had to say it back to her. And
that's where it essentially started.
And I went on to ask, if you come across a video on TikTok
explaining something, would you find it easier to understand in
school? And every single one of them nodded or said, yeah. And
then a 16 year old boy, Lennox, said exponentially. And when I
said, really? Yari went on to say, yeah, and everybody is on
it.
Mike Rugnetta: Emily asked the kids in the next session what
they mean when they say brain rot. They say that it's stuff
for younger kids, stuff that maybe isn't, quote, cognitively
beneficial, but they also say that's kinda the point. She
boils down their stew of responses in the paper like
this. Brain Rot can perhaps be defined as a piece of slang
referring to a way of engaging with childish memes and general
TikTok content which is nonproductive or time wasting by
nature and is humorously understood to rot the brain of
the user. From this definition emerge some of the key
characteristics which make up brain rot as a genre for
engaging meaningfully with TikTok, following its mention by
Yari in the previous example.
One, brain rot is childish or unserious. Two, brain rot
provides no cognitive or developmental benefit. And
three, brain rot is deliberately nonproductive. Brain rot is
therefore a conscious rejection of self development and
productive activity in favor of a childish enjoyment, end quote.
So it turns out teens, like everyone else, live in the world
and are under a lot of pressure from school, home, friends,
stuff they see on the Internet ironically, more on that in a
minute.
And so they, like you, like me, get some scrolling in as a way
to release some of that pressure. But crucially, they,
we still wanna be engaged. We don't want nothing. We just
don't want anything asked or expected of us in contrast to
every other part of life and there is only a particular
stripe of media that can really walk that line. In an attempt to
capture all this, Emily calls Brain Rot a decompression driven
genre of participation.
I asked her to take me through what that means exactly.
Emilie Owens: To start, I wanna say that that term actually came
from my childhood best friend's mom, Kathleen Moore. I was like,
I don't know what to call this thing. I don't have the right
term. And she was like, sounds like this is a a like, you're
these kids are trying to decompress. It's not necessarily
about relaxing.
That's not the right word. It's not about, like, switching off
entirely. It's more to do with sort of not not trying to
improve in any way or not trying to produce anything. Not you're
not seeking out a new friendship, and you're not
seeking out an interest. You just wanna you just wanna
decompress.
Mike Rugnetta: Emily explained to me that genre of
participation is based on the work of cultural anthropologist,
Mizuki Ito, and is a way of centering the idea that people
do things with media. They look for it to play a role in their
lives to solve problems, and it exists in a complex aggregate
with the rest of their experiences versus how media is
often framed and talked about, especially on the news, as being
this monolithic thing that flies in and changes an audience, that
it has some effect on them after they've experienced it, and then
both they and the media move on. To sit down, scroll through
TikTok, and let one's brain rot isn't the comatose welcoming of
cognitive decline the headlines would have you believe, but a
purposeful activity which fits in alongside others that make up
a highly social aggregate. As Emily says
Emilie Owens: It's more like this is something they kind of
want or need to do anyway, and now it has this digital
component.
Ryan Broderick: Yeah. Like, I I I we we love to believe that the
Internet is this really addicting, dangerous force, and
there's this really, like, intense wave of millennial
Ludditeism right now that's, like, I find very
counterproductive. And so there's this feeling of, well,
you know, the Internet is this dangerous thing. And, I mean, we
we've been talking about that in regards to every media type
throughout history, like, you know, go watch David
Cronenberg's Videodrome, like, if you wanna see how VCRs could
be evil. Like, this is just this isn't new.
But right now, we're really interested in this idea of the
Internet changing our behavior, changing the way we think. So
brain rot,
Mike Rugnetta: I think, has become popular as an expression
of that. A tale of two rots, basically. To butcher an old
rhetorical classification, not if by whiskey, but if by rot. If
by rot, you mean the cognitive decline of a generation of young
people whose attention spans and appetite for involved tasks or
consuming long texts has been diminished by short form video
and a bottomless feed of clips expecting nothing from them,
then of course, I am against it. But if by rot, you mean the
ability to manage one's emotional state through the
selective viewing of low stakes feel good media available at all
times in which has the possibility of forming or
reinforcing social bonds amongst peers, then of course, I am for
it.
I wondered aloud to both Ryan and Emily, does this mean Brain
Rot is more of a lens? A framework one brings to media
over and above it being a type of media that one sits down and
is able to make or find on purpose? Ryan and Emily both
kind of agreed. It's found, and being able to find it may be
circumstantial. Ryan's response was dialogical.
I I
Ryan Broderick: think in many ways, it's like brain rot is
always being defined by someone else in a way. Like, it's it's
it's it's it's a label you put on something, or it's like a
label you put on what you're looking at as a way to kind of,
like, digest what you've just spent twelve hours looking at
online. I would be surprised if someone could sit down and
effectively make brain rot to make brain rot. Like, I I feel
like it it's it's almost like outsider art in that way. It has
to kind of be discovered and labeled rather than I'm gonna
sit down and make something really insane, and people are
gonna, like, watch hours and hours of it.
Mike Rugnetta: For Emily, this question became one about if
there is a need for teens to decompress, what's the reason
they're going to content, to social media to do that? Why is
the activity they're engaging in scrolling or searching or
watching and not anything else? What does it mean that
decompression, as important as it may be, happens in
environments like social media platforms, which adhere to a
very strict hyper capitalist logic?
Emilie Owens: One of the themes that emerges in my data a lot, I
which am finding hard to write about because I don't know how
best to do it, is that these kids feel like grown ups do not
give a shit at all, and that they are they are left to their
own devices in terms of everything that they are warned
about. So they you know, I brought up, you know, data and
digitalization. And the first thing they said was, oh, no.
Companies are taking our data. We know, but there's nothing we
can do.
So, like I wrote this article because I was annoyed at how the
grown ups were understanding Brain Rock. I was like, you got
it wrong, and you're replicating this media panic that we've seen
over and over and over and over again. There are problems to do
with TikTok and BrainRot, but they are not BrainRot. It's not
that young people are going to BrainRot to turn their brains
off. It's that young people don't have other places to go to
switch off.
They don't have the tools to do that. There's not a lot of
public spaces to go enjoy. It's not like you can go out to a
park and just switch off and do dumb stuff and be a kid in that
way. To be trapped in a phone when you're trying to decompress
because someone makes money from the fact that your eyes are on
that phone, I think that's really grim. And I think that
these kids, these teenagers that I was working with, they don't
say it explicitly because maybe they haven't cognitively
recognized it as such, but I think they feel that that's not
good.
There are loads of things you could do to decompress.
Sometimes it is use your phone, but oftentimes it's go for a
walk, like go for a swim, take your bicycle out, paint a
painting, write a little story. And we're, I think,
systematically discouraged from doing those things because those
things don't make anybody any money. And that's yeah. That's
my that's my beef with Brain Rot.
It's not that it exists or that young people are doing it. I
think that's fine. We should let kids do what they want. If
they're enjoying it, who cares? It's more that there's this
bigger systematic problem that all of our time is being
capitalized on, and that's not nice.
Such a lame button to on.
Hans Buetow: Not nice.
Mike Rugnetta: But that's a great button to end on. Thanks a
million times over to both Ryan Broderick and Emily Owens for
chatting with me. You can find Ryan's newsletter at
garbageday.email and his podcast Panic World wherever you listen
to pods. You can find Emily's work at emily owens, that's e m
I l I e o w e n s, dot c a and at h f dot u I o dot n o. We'll
put links to all these things in the show notes.
What happens to your brain when it rots? Is there something
that's particularly effective at rotting your brain? How do you
feel about that? Would you admit it to us? Send us an email, a
voice mail, leave us a voice memo about your rotting brain
and we may include it in an upcoming Mailbag episode.
Micah, what does the change in funding for the CPB mean for
media over the next few years in The United States?
Micah Loewinger: Well, we don't know for sure what's going to
happen. We can only guess. But it helps to have some
understanding of how this ecosystem works. Essentially,
we're talking about money that has been taken away from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Federal funds
appropriated by Congress, given to an agency that, in this case,
doles out money to public radio stations and public television
stations around the country.
Some 300 plus TV stations, over a thousand public radio
stations. Now that that money is gone, those stations will have
to ask themselves, what do we really value? Do we value these
national programs that our audience really likes that helps
us fundraise? Do we value local news? Do we value keeping an
environmental reporter?
Somebody going to the courthouse? Somebody hanging out
in the State house all day? What do we value? Because we are
seeing that there are gonna be heterogeneous effects. Some
urban radio stations, for instance, they only rely on,
say, you know, less than 5% of their overall revenue coming
from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Really rural radio stations, some of them rely on it like
99%, 90%, 80%. I saw one estimate from this guy named
Alex Kerley, who's a former product manager who worked at
NPR. He created a tool called adoptastation.org to help
people, like, figure out how much their local radio station
is at risk of losing because of these cuts. He estimates that
15% of public radio stations might shut down in the next
year, because 15% of public radio stations rely on more than
50% of their revenue traditionally coming from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That would be
disastrous.
I do think in the short term, we're already seeing this, lots
of huge surges in funding for radio stations and public media
organizations, particularly ones in urban areas. But you know how
it is, like, when there's a crisis, people show up and open
up their wallets, but then life goes on and it gets harder to
get people to care.
Mike Rugnetta: With all this in mind, Micah, do you feel like
we're seeing the end of public media?
Micah Loewinger: No.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. That is the show we have for you this week.
We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, August
13. Friends, listeners, now is the time. If you've been waiting
for a moment to support Neverpost with a membership, we
could use your help right now more than ever.
Our runway is quickly ending. We need to find a way to make the
show financially sustainable by the end of the year to keep
doing whatever it is we do here. Media criticism? Tech theory?
Synth solos?
Become a member at neverpo.st at $4.07, or $12 a month for which
you will get access to a bunch of bonus content, but mostly
knowledge that you're helping an indie podcast to do weird,
wonderful work so off the beaten path, even we are not exactly
sure what to call it. Neverpost's producers are Audrey
Evans, Georgia Hampton, 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 Rugneva.
The green color of the Cheshaco smells of fresh recollections of
what once has been in the distant, remote past. Cha No Yu
by Katherine Christer Annex. Neverpost is a production of
charts and leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.