🆕 Never Post! Betting On Whatever

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Friends! Get out your dice and your late 20th Century haircuts because we have a RISKY new show for you today. Mike thinks through the amount of gambling we are forced into, and contributing producer Melissa Locker tells us the story of a very special 90’s online newsletter. Also: Book reviews!

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voicemail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
• See what interstitials we need submissions for

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Intro Links

• What to know about online age verification laws
• Trial reveals flaws in tech intended to enforce Australian social media ban for under-16s
• Australia regulator and YouTube spar over under-16s social media ban
• French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools

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Posting In The Age of Chance

•  Trapped - the secret ways social media is built to be addictive (and what you can do to fight back)
• Everything in America is Gambling Now - Adam Conover
• Tiny Subversions (2014) - Darius Kazemi
• Tiny Subversions (2024) - Darius Kazemi
• The Online Gambling Epidemic - Drew Gooden
• You’re Not Addicted to Content, You’re Starving for Information - Hank Green

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Whatever

• https://oasisinet.com/
• And After All - Melissa’s book on Oasis

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. This episode's contributing producer was Melissa Locker. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Look, 
this is not the West, this is
the 21st Century but still as desolate
cottonwood pollen blowing through
abandoned mansions, the ball-bearing factory,
strikers with their flapjack placards
waving at a glance of traffic

At the discount cinema, gunfighters name
a young Cherokee guide “Look”
because of the way she stares, because
of the way they look at her. And everyone
keeps their eyes on the horizon,
Look, you’ve won a set of false teeth.

Excerpt of Look by Sarah Messer

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

No. No. That's not right. Calibrating?

Never post. But because Internet. Error.

Recalibrating.

Never

post. Podcast Internet. Mike Runera.

Parameters with intolerance. Schematics finalized.

Friends, hello, and welcome to never post a Podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Yes. Sounds just like him. Friends, I have a problem. I'm not Mike Rugnetta.

I'm AI Mike Rugnetta, confessing. Created, of course, with his permission, real guy Mike Rugnetta said, I could finish making the show if the team ever needed me to and if it was funny. Anyway, here's my problem. Mike and everyone else on the team left for vacation and didn't finish the episode like they were supposed to, so now it's all down to me. They left a bunch of pieces at Never Post HQ, and I found them, and now I am the show.

I am Never Post. Okay. First, what is on today's episode? Yes. Okay.

Here's the list. First, Mike Rugnetta. Hey. That's me. Well, anyway, Mike Rugnetta promised to do a segment about online gambling.

If I can find it, you can hear it. Second, contributing producer Melissa Locker sent in a segment I definitely saw come in. It's about the band Oasis and early Internet mail lists. It's cool and so is Melissa. I heard real Mike say so.

There should also be interstitials, but I can't seem to find any lying around. Maybe I'll make my own. Give me a moment to dig around. Anyway, unless you are a member, you have to hear ads now. I am very sorry about this.

I'm back and good news news heads. I found the news Mike read. Oh, was that a poem? Check that off a list. Okay.

News dot wave going into the feed. Mike has labeled it. This intro was written on Saturday, 06/28/2025 at 09:57PM eastern. Now I press play.

It's Mike from the past. I guess you're kind of always listening to Mike from the past, but this is me especially in the past because when we release this, I will be on vacation. Sun, a breeze, some birds, maybe grass. But does any of this stop me from five stories for you this week? Of course, it doesn't.

The US Supreme Court upheld a lower court's ruling in Texas, which requires websites displaying pornography to verify the ages of visitors by asking them to submit photos of their IDs amongst other methods. Critics of the law point out that both location tracking and age verification technologies are notoriously ineffective and they also point out the obvious privacy concerns of uploading photos of one's ID to any website, let alone one which distributes adult content. Get those VPNs ready folks. We're all European citizens now. Australia has similarly been on a crusade to limit internet usage of under sixteens by banning them from social media and is running into flaws in the facial recognition technology being trialed to verify age.

The Guardian reports that, quote, legislation does not explicitly say how platforms should enforce the law and the government is assessing more than 50 companies whose technologies could help verify that a user is 16. Guardian also reports that facial recognition technology tests seem to be able to judge within eighteen months of most people's real age and that it is quote, not foolproof. It's almost like these sorts of schemes end up inconveniencing everyone and not just the people they target. And speaking of targets, YouTube is arguing it shouldn't be subject to Australia's social media ban owing to research showing 65% of parents found the platform suitable for kids aged 10 to 15. The Australian government's e safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant counters with the statistic that nearly forty percent of young teens self report seeing quote harmful content on YouTube.

Asked about the discrepancy, she told Reuters that she's more concerned quote about the safety of children and that's always going to surpass any concerns I have about politics or being liked or bringing the public on side. Meta is in hot water with its own oversight board, the applet body of Meta which makes quote precedent setting content moderation decisions for both Facebook and Instagram. This month, the board called Meta's application of its own rules regarding manipulated and AI generated media incoherent and unjustifiable. Generated audio which uploaders claimed to be a recording of two politicians discussing rigging the upcoming parliamentary elections in Iraq was inconsistently labeled as such. Meta says consistent labeling is only possible with still images and not moving images or audio upon which the oversight board calls bullshit writing, quote, given that Meta is one of the leading technology and AI companies in the world with its resources and the wide usage of Meta's platforms, the board reiterates that Meta should prioritize investing in technology to identify and label manipulated video and audio at scale.

The US embassy in Dublin is requesting the last five years worth of social media handles from people seeking to enter The US from Ireland under f, m, and j nonimmigrant visas. Omitting the info, the embassy claims, could lead to the denial of entry and ineligibility for future visas. Irish online newspaper, The Journal, reports that a spokesperson for the Union of Students in Ireland says the requirements represent a, quote, disproportionate intrusion into students' personal lives and raises serious concerns about freedom of expression and online surveillance, end quote.

finally, following up on a story we first mentioned in episode 32, Leon is ditching Microsoft. The register reports a sighted desire to reduce dependence on American software and, quote, strengthen the technological sovereignty of its public service. The city will move the software used by its 10,000 some employees to Linux and various other open source tools like OnlyOffice and Open Digital Territory, a French developed suite of office tools including video conferencing. Teams is dead. Long live Teams.

This is going well.

Right? We've got a strident show for you today. I think I was supposed to say that earlier. Well, first segment coming up. Mike on gambling.

I bet it will be good. Bet. Mike said I had to be funny. Check that off the list. But before that, I'll make you an interstitial.

It will also be funny. We will play a game. First, I make silly voices and read Goodreads reviews at you, then you guess which book the review is for. In the end, all will be revealed. Sound fun?

Fun. Good. Check. Here we go.

If this book was a spice, it'd be flower one star.

How do people cry while reading this? I wanted to bang my head against a wall. I think I have no heart, broken heart emoji, unofficially taking a break that no one asked for from romance. BC, I'm apparently a stone cold bitch unless your name is James Herondale, one star.

If I have to read another quote crooked smile, unquote, again, I'm going to die. One star.

I remember hating this with a passion while reading it but can't recall enough to review it now. So shrug emoji, one star.

How is this marketed as a rom com? The rom part left something to be desired and the com part was nonexistent. As for the promised enemies to lovers storyline, they're enemies for literally three chapters, one star.

Quote, when I watch you sleep, I feel overwhelmed that you exist, end quote. Like, are you fucking kidding me? One star.

Annoying hats for 300 pages who moved, one star.

Yes. That was fun. This is going well. I will let you know what book that was in the outro. Now, we will listen to Gambling Dot Wave.

Take it away, Real Mike. Here we go.

If you can, try to imagine a world without chance. A view of things absent the idea that each action you take and many of the events that occur around you are associated with probability. That there's some numerical weight indicating how likely an outcome is. And in a perfectly perceivable world, where the chance of any given outcome is always calculable and maybe even pliable. It's a tough exercise, banishing chance.

How likely are you to get the job or have a kid or make the bus or get sick or get in a car accident or hit by lightning or get those concert tickets? Might your basement flood or the stock market soar or so on and so on and so on. Our relationship to and understandings of and the decisions we make in the world are deeply informed by probabilities. We think of increasing and decreasing odds, of taking actions to encourage or discourage outcomes. We balance risks, rewards, costs, returns, and we hope always that the odds are in our favor.

How else is there to live? Well, before probability, there was, god, I guess. The divine, a force which decides in its infinite and often inscrutable wisdom how things happen and why. Before probability, it wasn't luck or not just luck, but divine intervention that determined the outcome of things. Forces beyond our understanding would intercede in the material world to make things just so for their purposes, and maybe for ours if we were lucky.

But outcomes weren't weighted. There was no probabilistic consideration until markets, economic markets, and eventually gambling. I promise we will eventually get to the Internet. In her book, The Age of Chance, Gerda Reith, a sociologist and professor of social sciences at Glasgow University, who studies the role and impacts of gambling in Western culture, describes how the growth of mercantile capitalism around Europe in the seventeenth century created, quote, an entrepreneurial risk taking milieu. Large sums of money were tied up in speculation, the first stocks and securities, as well as the goods of physical trade.

People naturally sought to mitigate the many risks of ocean travel, and this gave rise to the insurance industry. Insurance had existed for centuries, but in the seventeenth century, there arose the first type from marine shipments specifically that sought to calculate probabilities of loss. Quickly, Reith explains, the practice extended beyond maritime trade, leading to an industry of, quote, ambitious companies organizing a form of speculative insurance which could be purchased for anything. What happened, you might wonder, to fate, to predestination, to the will of a higher power? It is as though the idea, Reith writes, that fate or providence would oversee the unfolding of events could no longer provide sufficient assurance to those whose goods might be at stake in trading situations, end quote.

The world suddenly looked dangerous and risky, and the powerful had money to make by harnessing that risk. This attitude expanded. Numbers, numeracy, and enumeration proliferated in enlightenment Europe and a newly acquired calculative attitude, as Reith calls it, extended over all aspects of life. Pascal's wager, the idea that it's a better bet to lead a life free of sin even if you don't believe in God just in case there is eternal life after death, sparked what Reith calls a burst of interest in chance, after which began in earnest the study of probabilities. Though this genealogy leads us back to mercantilism, the eighteenth century thinkers who contributed most to the approaches and principles of probability focused their studies largely on games and gambling, which they saw, Reith writes, as the paradigmatic aleatory contract.

Not least of the reasons why being the growth in mercantilism led to a growth in wealth, which led to a growth in disposable income that was wagered liberally at a moment of global transition. Quote, the craze for betting on anything was a means of applying money and hence value to opinions, which in an age of dramatic economic, political, and religious upheaval had become unstable, end quote. To study probabilities at this time was to study life as it was lived. This progression from a world without a view of chance to a world dominated by it mirrors my own progression online and in a few ways, the progression of the internet itself. At first, I possessed only a remote sense of risk and none of probability using the internet.

I didn't consider how likely I might be in one scenario or another owing to some set of choices or another that I'd make friends, that I'd make and upload something that anybody outside of my immediate circle might find, that I as a person could become known even in a limited sort of way and certainly, I never considered that I might make a living somehow. I didn't consider the chances I might stumble onto formative media or communities or experiences. These things happened or they didn't. Using the Internet for me for a while really was not unlike visiting the library or the CD store. Each of these abounded locale in which I felt safe to experiment in mediated experiences with minimal cost and basically no sense of risk.

After which, I would exit and I would return to the arcade, my friend's basement, the gazebo in the center of town where we hung out for some reason, and in which I have these weirdly strong memories of playing with my friend Frank's dad's Apple Newton, which almost certainly did not connect to the Internet. This relationship to a fenced in online, an online with its commensurate offline, persisted through and even after I left college. One defined, I think, by a small amount of risk, a paucity of chance, and a significant amount of choice. Agency even, maybe. But to the degree it ever really was, which is arguable, the Internet no longer feels like that fenced in place.

And chance has more fully colonized it at the cost of that agency as platforms continually refine their approaches for managing and distributing luck to serve their ends and not those of, well, people. Choice hasn't been obliterated online, but it has been subjugated by a set of technologies that seek to know and through knowing guide and ultimately control outcomes online, mostly steering those outcomes towards tech companies' economic and political ends. Along the way, we, the grease in the gears of the machine, are rewarded with darling jackpots. Perhaps a video of a capybara. This reflects and is reflected in a larger societal shift where chance not only brackets our view of the world, but factors into it more literally, more directly, and more practically than it ever has before.

It's not just harder to get lucky online in whatever sense, finding what you're looking for, making a living, being entertained. It's harder to get lucky generally in the world even if it feels like getting lucky is all there is. Adam Conover put it this way in a recent YouTube video.

Why have we allowed entire segments of American life from sports to finance to entertainment turn into just another form of gambling?

In 2014, artist and software developer Darius Kazzemi gave a talk at xoxo fest that I think about all the time, still over a decade later. Xoxo was nominally a conference about how one makes it, whatever that means, economically, emotionally, as an independent creator. Darius at the time was most well known for his army of bots. Many, many small coding projects unleashed onto the social web, each with their own narrow purpose. The description of his talk reads, in How I Won the Lottery, Darius explains how he became a successful lottery player, and with hard work and a little luck, how you can too.

The first half of his talk is a sort of ironic recipe for success, advising the audience on sharing one's methods for playing the lottery and building a community around that practice. At the ten minute mark of a twenty minute video, he says

So to sum things up, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't. But I kept buying lottery tickets anyway and playing numbers that just appealed to me. But in addition to making things that I liked, I reached out to fellow lottery number creators and general fans of the lottery, and I ended up building a community. And so in the end, I learned the real formula for success.

Keep buying those lottery tickets. Keep making those connections, and you'll win the lottery too. Thank you.

The joke, of course, is that anyone who gives you advice about how they made it is describing how to get lucky. They're recounting all of the methods they used to win the lottery. Darius goes on to describe his process in earnest which entailed making many small projects released often. He says this is akin to buying lottery tickets And that beyond a few baseline qualities, most of the success or not of his work and probably yours is up to chance. He describes the surprise success of a Kickstarter project, not his own, like this.

I also think it could have been due to the single right person, maybe a TV producer at NBC, seeing a tweet about it because their flight was running late and they glanced at their phone. Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings in the rainforest. Maybe it's because billions of years ago, two distant galaxies collided, and the resulting conflagration fused particles into never before seen elements that got violently ejected into our part of the universe, setting in motion a chain of mysterious and unthinkable cosmic events that eventually resulted in the coolest.

This may sound obvious now to say that it's all about luck, but I found it really refreshing in 2014. A couple years before this around twenty eleven, twenty twelve, I was at this marketing conference where important and successful people like producers advice, people who worked in advertising and television, got on stage and told this big group of people the tech utopian tale. If you post it, they will come. Just make something good. The Internet is a democratizing force.

It circumvents gatekeepers and people are looking for things that are good. And maybe, maybe, in a very narrow sense, that was kinda true at the time. It aligned with my experiences up until that point at least. There were no influencers yet, really. The number of people making money from YouTube was I mean, it wasn't small, but it wasn't as many people as it is now.

Big audiences moved more fluidly and it still felt like there was some divide between online and not even if again there wasn't. It felt at least like you weren't making things for everyone, you were making things for the internet. So maybe it did for a moment, feel like you could make something good on purpose and people would see it. This was after all one of the promises of the early internet. But that promise faded and as it did, people held on to it tighter and tighter.

Almost like giving up that idea of an open level playing field was somehow giving up on the internet itself or giving up on ourselves. So being there at xoxo, hearing Darius, hearing someone successful whose work I enjoy say that at a certain point it's all chance, kinda like the rest of the world, felt really clarifying. Darius even joked in 2024 about how many people were moved by his lottery talk.

You laughed. You cried, and for the first time in your life, you questioned the very foundation of your reality. But we all know that my talk changed your lives.

The intervening dozen or so years since that original talk, the primacy of chance in our experiences online has only become more explicit. And in both directions, the amount of chance involved in a good audience finding your work and the amount of chance involved in audiences finding good work have both increased by design. By eroding agency, platforms can increase mystery, which is maddening and exciting and puzzling and surprising. It is above all things engaging. And so it's hard to tear ourselves away from it.

I'm gonna let Adam Conover list for you four characteristics that make an activity addictive. We've edited this slightly from how it appears in the video, because in the original, he gives away the answer to a question that I wanna ask once you've heard the list. Okay. Here it is.

Four factors make a behavior especially addictive. First, when it's antisocial and solitary so you can get lost in the flow. Second, when it offers continuous fast feedback that reinforces the behavior. Third, when it's unpredictable so you never know when the reward will come. And fourth, when the activity never really ends or resolves.

What specific behavior do you think Adam just described? To recap, it's antisocial, solitary, and flow state inducing. There's continuous fast feedback. There is the unpredictable delivery of reward, and the activity is potentially infinite. He's describing gambling, specifically mobile app sports gambling, but he could have just as easily been describing scrolling or even posting.

The abstract qualities of each have come to so closely resemble one another that they begin to feel like different skins over similar base experiences. This is, as is well documented, purposeful. Consider the pull to refresh feature common to social media apps, Catherine Price wrote for the BBC in 2018, where dragging the screen downwards prompts the screen to refresh. Not only is the action itself similar to pulling the lever on a slot machine, but it takes advantage of our attraction to unpredictability. Sometimes when we check social media, there's something exciting waiting for us, a reward.

Sometimes there's not. It's the unpredictability that keeps us coming back, end quote. Unpredictability defines the experience of audience and creator alike online at the moment. We're all buying lottery tickets, we're all placing bricks, casting nets, whatever metaphor you like and hoping to hit it big. Often, if not always at this point, with the help or hindrance of the algorithm.

Where maybe we were once able to undertake a calculative attitude towards our activities and actions online, we now contend with well, a force which decides in its infinite and often inscrutable wisdom how things happen and why. This is a relatively new development on the social internet, but has been a hallmark of gambling, especially slot machines, for ages. In her landmark book Addiction by Design Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Shull talks of the tension between the cold hard calculations of slot machines, the deeply rational nature of computers, which they are at base, as it meets the seeming irrationality of their output, which is random, but can feel almost magical. This disconnect is programmed into the machines. A tight balance is engineered giving players a sense that there's some deep process at work that success or reward can feel close, purposeful, calculable, even if it is by design some combination of very remote and very random.

Slot machines are designed to, quote, accentuate the illusion of control, And they are so successful at doing this that even the people who designed them, quote, describe a turning off of knowledge when playing, during which their calculative rationality falls away. Knowledge becomes irrelevant, one of them says to Scholl. In playing, gamblers seek not stimulation, participation, and the gratification of agency, but uninterrupted flow, immersion, and self erasure. Gamblers and scrollers alike describe scenarios where the balance of process and reward is such that it can feel impossible to stop even if you're having a bad time. In a video on sports betting, Drew Gooden describes how the AI powered alerts from mobile sports betting apps target gamblers, encouraging them to make ill advised bets which then lock them into watching a game they don't even enjoy.

Of course, they wanna shove betting apps down everyone's throats. It gives people more of a reason to watch the games, especially bad ones. While most people would turn off a 20 blowout in the fourth quarter, you're still glued to the screen because you need Seedy Lam to get 12 more yards for your parlay to hit. They've figured out a way to make every moment matter even if it doesn't.

This is me in bed, not wanting to scroll, not wanting to stop scrolling, scrolling. This is me in my life at my desk every day, not wanting to post, not wanting to not post. And here we are, posting. I love it. I hate it.

In a recent video, Hank Green compares this experience not to gambling, but to hyper palatable foods, which also he says, play games with our agency.

We have a great metaphor in food. And what have we learned from food? Companies will do everything they can to make things that are very appealing, even addictive. We have less control than we imagine that we have, and giving your agency away a little bit can be fun and rewarding. But giving it away completely isn't just damaging to you and your ability to flourish.

It's kinda cringe. Like, nobody brags about the start of their second hour on TikTok.

It's not, as Hank explains, that the Internet or even platforms are bad. It's that they're powerful. They're the house, and the house doesn't lose. It can't or else there wouldn't be a house. So their power can be and often is abused.

These experiences become a microcosm of contemporary life in The United States, especially where guarantees are few and far between and there's no necessary link between cause and effect, societally speaking. Especially not now. Contemporary life is defined by almost a reliance on chance. It's why social media thrives. It's why there's an epidemic of gambling addiction fueled, it seems, by mobile apps.

It's why scams and grifts abound. Our current social pressures create environments where the gamble is the most sure bet. And sometimes it feels the only one. How do you think about chance online? I'm especially curious to hear from professional content creators.

How do you think about improving your odds when posting or do you not? How do you feel about your agency online? Send us an email, call us, leave a voicemail or a voice memo. All the ways you can get a hold of us are in the show notes and we may respond to you in a future mailbag episode.

I'm back. Holy heck. Jeez. Oh, me. Oh, my.

Do the mashed potato. I can't believe, well, anything when you really think about it, but I especially can't believe how well

this is going. I'm saving the day.

Here's round two of the Goodreads game. What book is this about?

Take a guess.

Either this book makes absolutely no sense or I am stupid. Probably the latter. One star.

Not sure if it was bad or if I'm just stupid. I have zero clue what I read. Felt all over the place and I had

a hard time following what was going on. First page was promising, but after that, not so much. One star. This book may just be too smart for me. I couldn't tell you

a single thing that happened. You get dropped in the middle of the world and then no backstory is given. And honestly, you don't get any current story either. If it had been longer, I probably would have DNF'd. One star.

Grotesque. I lost my appetite for a day. Only reason I didn't DNF was because the book is literally only a 175 pages long. I wouldn't recommend this thing when I know. That being said, I kinda hate horror and really only like cute horror or ghosty horror.

Maybe this will be all the rage for the horror community but I certainly will not read another horror book for a long long long time. One star.

I couldn't follow. Didn't realize the one character was a cat, maybe. One star.

How droll. Now I have found what Melissa Locker sent in. She's cool. Remember? Even Hans said it.

Melissa is a podcaster and an author. She just wrote a book called and after all. It's a fan history of Oasis, the real band, you can find at your local bookstore. We're thrilled that Melissa guest produced this segment for us. Even Jason said it, and he hates almost everything.

Please enjoy.

Today, we are stepping into a time machine and heading back to the mid nineties when the Internet was a very different place. It was the days of web TV and dial up modems. Mac's eWorld had just launched, and people were slowly learning what you've got mail meant. Back then, connecting to the Internet wasn't just a matter of picking up your phone. It meant plugging in, logging on, and hoping no one called the landline and disconnected you.

Still, the cyber world was becoming a place you could hang out and meet like minded people if you were willing to put in the effort. Say, for instance, you were the kind of cool kid who picked up an import CD at the local record store and fell in love with an up and coming UK band that no one outside of HMV or the pages of Melody Maker knew about. Where would you go? How would you be a fan? Who would you even talk to about that new b side or tour groomer?

Back in the nineties, there was no Instagram to follow the band on. There was no Twitter for updates or Tumblr for fanfic. No YouTube for concert footage. Most bands didn't even have websites yet. So what do you do?

Well, if you're lucky, you find a mailing list. And if you're really lucky, that mailing list is run by someone who is willing to put in the effort to connect fans around the world even when he wasn't the biggest fan of the band. This signet is about the whatever mailing list, the unofficial official home of fandom in the mid nineteen nineties for the band Oasis. It's a story of a grad student who accidentally became the ringmaster of Internet chaos and the obsessive fans who made his life beautifully insane.

So it wasn't until 1992 and specifically the winter of nineteen ninety three, in my first year of grad school at UC Irvine that I fully got a sense of, oh, okay, I'm getting a sense of the Internet now because it was such a tech heavy campus at UC Irvine even though I was working in, the English literature department.

Ned Raggett was a grad student in 1993. Most people had barely heard of email at that point, but Ned was out there discovering his people.

It's a bit complicated and I don't remember all the details, but the long and short of it was, kind of hilariously, there were a bunch of computer science undergrads who were sort of in our circle who, weirdly enough, had created the Internet space and were running it for literally the business school on campus as a separate project. Think about this now. A bunch of undergrads running the business school of a of a high level institution just just casually because, again, no one had quite figured out the Internet yet or what could be used for or what it actually meant. They were still everyone was still like, what? You know, sort of going on there.

And, basically, this crew were connected with our crew. We had a couple people who bled over into the radio station that did stuff.

Ned, along with other folks at UC Irvine's radio station, had been learning how this whole Internet thing could work by running a mailing list for the band Sparks.

God. Yeah. Great band and all that.

The radio station people wanted to test out how mailing list software could work, and Ed had this mailing list already, so they came up with a plan.

Yeah. Why don't we just set up some mailing lists, and why don't you set it up for bands you like or things like that? And I'm like, that's a really good idea. And, like, we can have the sparks list be one of them. Keep in mind, let's back up here.

I am a 24 year old grad student moving into the fourth year of my grad student life, teeing, theoretically getting ready to, like, know, prep for my exams in a year and a half, And I'm deciding out of nowhere to just do all this because, like, oh, it would be fun on top of other things I'm doing.

Two years and 1,600 miles away in Shreveport, Louisiana, teenage Sarah Connolly was about to meet some people who would be very important to her as well.

I remember the very first time I saw Oasis was after school. I was watching MTV while doing my homework. I was, like, what, 14, 15, somewhere in there. And the video for video for Wonderwall came on, and now it just stopped.

What she saw was a grainy black and white video of Noel Gallagher strumming his acoustic guitar while his brother Liam Gallagher sings, I don't believe anybody feels the way I do about you now. Pure teenage girl catnip.

I was a huge Beatles fan before that. Visually and whatnot, there were a lot of Beatlesque, you know, the haircuts and the every every I was like, oh. Oh. And then from that point forward, I was absolutely obsessed. Just obsessed.

She was obsessed and wanted more, more access, more information. But she didn't really know where to go. Like, the library? Look it up on microfiche? Sarah had read about tech savvy bands that had websites in the hallowed pages of Spin magazine.

And she desperately wanted to check out the Oasis website, but getting online in 1995 wasn't simple.

Nobody had a computer here, you know, Hicksville.

She was offline and out of luck. That is until her mom took on a little road trip to Dallas.

We went to a circuit city. I'm dating myself here. We went to a circuit city, and they had, like, computers that you can test drive the Internet on. And I was like, yes. And so I went in there, and I was like, www.oasis.com.

And I sat there, and I waited, and nothing happened. And I tried it again. I didn't know back then, of course, you had to put the HTTPS in front of I know. You don't know what you don't know. And so then I was there after, like, twenty minutes.

My mom's like, okay. You can't just stand at the computer. It's Nolan. It's Liam and I.

So Sarah left the Circuit City having found nothing. But back at UC Irvine, Ned has spent the last two years getting deeper into discussion groups and online communities. And while nobody really knows what they were doing on the Internet yet, in 1995, they started to have some ideas.

What I kind of got known for, known in quotes, was I set up a bunch of essentially Britpop mailing lists, and Blur already had a mailing list that was run elsewhere. People knew this, and if you didn't know, you could see because in the, liner notes for the album, The Great Escape, which came out in 1995, it's printed in there. It's saying, hey. There's a discussion mailing list. You can go here.

It's one of the early examples of fans going like, yeah. You can find us online, and here's something here. And, this was not an official Blur announcement list. This was a Blur online mailing list where fans could email in, get messages back, and talk to each other. That was the model.

And I thought, well, Blur has one. Why don't, like, some of these other bands like have one? So the main ones I set up for, I definitely set up one for Pulp lip gloss. I set up one for Suede, Wild Ones, and I set up one for Oasis. And I called that one Whatever after the standalone single that came out between, Definitely Maybe or What's Story Born and Glory.

Whatever. It was the perfect name for what was about to become a chaotic music community congregating on the early Internet. But first, people had to find it. That's where the magic happened. The official Oasis website, good old httpwww.oasisinet.com, linked to Ned's little mailing list.

So if you are a young web surfer in '95, you have access to a computer or as is increasingly starting to be the case, you find Oasis's webpage. You're like, yeah. And it's like, oh, there's a way to connect with fans? Oh, there's this mailing list. Oh, I just sent with my email address and I joined.

And again, the band is starting to get huge. Boom. You know, we were, I mean, hundreds is probably an underestimate. I don't wanna say we had thousands on there, but we had a huge number of people relative to the size of the other list.

Meanwhile, Sarah had been waiting patiently for the opportunity to get on the Internet and hopefully connect with Oasis, Liam specifically, and other fans.

That year for Christmas, I got Web TV.

What is Web TV? Great question.

Web TV was if you didn't have a computer, it was like a little cable box that you could hook up to your television. And, like, you put online that way, but it didn't, like, save anything. Like, it had no memory stored.

Once Sarah got Web TV, she headed directly to the website address she had memorized ages ago, oasisinet.com.

I went on the website, and then from there, I found there was a link to whatever, the mailing list, and then that was it. That was just absolutely it.

But what exactly was a mailing list?

Mailing list, you would go on and you would subscribe. Now it would be almost like a newsletter. But in order to post something, you would send an email to whatever@coocy.org. And then it I still remember that. That is so weird.

But you would send an email, and then it would go to everybody else in the mailing list.

It was a reply all email storm before that was a thing.

So there were two options for signing up to the mailing list. You could either have the option where you would get every message individually, one at a time as it was sent, or every 20 messages, a digest would be generated that would be sent a message containing the previous 20 messages.

It was basically a twenty four seven international fan convention via reply all emails. The volume was insane.

And there were so many posting. There were people would post, like, two and three hundred emails a day. It was wild. I would stay up as long as I could, and I would go to sleep and wake up, and my inbox would be full.

So remember, this is 1995 when email wasn't unlimited and inboxes would get full. Sarah's web TV setup had a tiny inbox that constantly overflowed, which would automatically kick her off the list.

I would have been kicked off the mailing list because when they started bouncing back, you automatically kick off. And so then you'd have to resubscribe, and this was a lot.

By late nineteen ninety five, Oasis was massive.

Oasis, the Manchester bred quintet, have already taken their homeland by storm and now have their eyes on The US. But they disagree with the media hype over the notion they are the leaders of the next British invasion.

While their first album, Deafening Navy, was critically acclaimed, their second album, What's the Story Morning Glory, made the band a household name. Thanks to songs like some might say champagne supernova and Wonderwall Oasis was everywhere.

And the winners were the best newcomers. Truly wonderful, Oasis.

And Ned's little mailing list became the gathering place for Oasis obsessives from around the world.

Poor Ned. God. It was like I had to have been like herding cats. Ugh. Because we were brats back then.

It was horrible. A lot of hardcore Liam girlies.

Sarah

was a full participant in the growing fandom. In January '16 year old Sarah learned that there was going to be a US oasis tour she knew she needed to get from Shreveport, Louisiana to Scranton, Pennsylvania. She posted about this need to the forum, of course. Carol, one of her new Internet friends, said that Sarah could come stay with her if she could get up to Pennsylvania. So Sarah asked her mom if she could go on a Greyhound bus thousands of miles across the country alone to meet a stranger from the Internet.

Yes, ma'am. Now would I let my kids? No. No. I mean, even my oldest, she's a grown woman, and I'd be like, no.

You're not doing that. Mm-mm.

No. I also cannot imagine letting my child travel across the country to go meet a stranger from the Internet unaccompanied. But I'm the sort of person who, as a full grown adult, went to go meet a stranger from Twitter and told four friends and turned on my location sharing services before I went to the restaurant that was three subway stops from my house. So no. There's no chance my imaginary teenage daughter is getting on a bus alone to meet a stranger from the Internet.

But it was a different time. And for Sarah, it was really important to see Oasis early in the tour because they had this nasty habit of breaking up halfway through US tours.

And I'm 16. I'm telling my mom, I like, I have to go. And she's like, okay. Well, maybe there'll be some dates nearby. Was like, no.

You don't understand. That's not guaranteed. I have to go to the earliest date available.

Her teenage insistence worked. And her mom relented and said that Sarah could go stay with Carol in Pennsylvania and go to the show at George Mason University. All she had to do was take a bus. What could possibly go wrong?

I got on a Greyhound by myself from Shreveport, went all the way up to Scranton, got robbed. Yes.

She was robbed at gunpoint in Atlanta. But she kept going because she was not going to miss her first Oasis show.

So got robbed in Atlanta, got up to Scranton. I had to go up to New York and then back down because that's how they routed me. I inadvertently got to see the world trade. Like, I poked my head out and saw it. So there was that.

She made it to the show, met other list members, and saw the band. On the way home, Sarah got stranded at a closed bus station in the snow until police rescued her. And, of course, she posted about it. She shared every little bit of the adventure with her friends on the whatever list, one email at a time, one response at a time, adding to the fire hose of Oasis information that was coming through fans' inboxes. Luckily, Ned kept the fire hose under control.

He had created something that didn't really exist yet and was apparently in great demand, a place to talk about Oasis, but also a place that was consciously moderated.

He was like the principal of a very unruly school. I'm just trying to keep order and bless that man. He did an excellent job, though, because it was a safe space. Because there were some older people there. And I say older, like, I was 14, 15.

Actually, by then I was 15 or 16. And there were, you know, guys in their mid twenties, you know, late twenties. And regardless, you always felt safe. Like, Ned would not allow any any, you know, bullshittery anywhere.

The whatever list didn't just connect fans to the band. It connected fans to each other, permanently sometimes. Sarah met someone else through Oasis fandom years later.

My friend Sarah, she ultimately started with the list, moved on to the bulletin boards. Got to know a nice nice little Welsh boy and things like this. And they came over, and they've been married now for, what, two decades?

Now we have two kids together who would not exist were it not for that little band from Burnage.

What was it about this band that created such intense connection? Sarah has a theory.

God, I'm gonna cry. There's this little there's this little band from Burnage who did not give a shit about what anybody else thought of them, and they were going to be loud and brass and do what they wanted. And damn it, there's not something freeing about that. That life is open. Like, you can do what you want to do.

TikTok wouldn't be definitely call them the lulu. You know? Back in the day, like, know, we're just gonna we're gonna be the biggest fan of the world. We're gonna be bigger than the Beatles. I mean, they just they were manifesting before manifesting was a thing.

But I have a theory too. This list brought people together. It was people with a shared love of Oasis and music and even the early Internet. And that alone is enough to create these connections. It's a bunch of passionate folks reaching out desperate for something that they had waited so long to find, a community.

It was a place to meet other people with the same interest who were far from their local area, a place to connect people from, say, Wales and, you know, Hicksville. These days, people meet other people online all the time, but back then, not so much. By the early two thousands, technology was moving on. Bulletin boards were replacing mailing lists. The band was cooling off.

The fans were growing up. Lives were changing, and so was the Internet.

It was one of those things like, I'd rather just pull the plug on the list rather than just let it die. I wouldn't call it taking charge of your own destiny. It's one of those things like, look, know when to end things. Know when something is sort of like, if it's not there for me anymore and people are getting what they need elsewhere and people can make their personal connections and keep going without the list, fine. Great.

You know, and people did do that, and people did keep in touch in different ways. And that's fine. That's fine. The list served its time.

Around 02/2001, Ned shut down the listserv for good. No more emails, filling in boxes individually or in digest form. The mailing list was gone, but the connections remained.

I will say, I I know people who we we lost members of the list, people who died far too young. I remember that. I know people who met people through the list and got married, and as far as I can remember, are still together, which is lovely. You know, lives were changed. These things just emerge as they do.

This is what emerged. And that's why I look back on the list going like, it was a moment in time. I'm glad I'm not running anymore. It wouldn't serve its purpose anymore. It's it's it's outmoded for a variety of reasons.

Mailing lists certainly can and stew deal exist. I do I am on a couple of them on very, very specific sort of fora for very specific things, but they're not the center of things anymore, and I'm fine with that.

The band was gone by then too. The brothers got in a fight backstage at a show in Paris and never played together again. No one thought they would either as they spent all their free time trolling each other online and making solo albums. The world had moved on. Then fifteen years after Liam allegedly threw a piece of fruit at Noel and Noel allegedly smashed his guitar on Liam, the band got back together.

Oasis announced their reunion in August 2024, and the old community from the mailing list, they found each other again.

Well, we were all posting online on Facebook. There were, like, a lot of people were posting simultaneously, like, oh my god.

Twenty nine years later, when it comes to Oasis, they're still each other's go to people.

Yeah. It's like our era's tour. It's wild. But Lori Jo and her husband, they she was able I think she stayed up for, like, two days straight to make sure that she could get the Manchester tickets, but she got tickets

So whatever mailing list existed for maybe six years, but it changed lives permanently. Sarah's kids exist because of it. Ned made lifelong friends. We've grown cynical about online community in many ways because it is what, well, what it is now. It's easier to see more optimism and what we remember before algorithms decided what you should see or what you could see, before platforms monetize your attention, before everything got corporatized and sanitized, back when there were just fans typing reply all emails to other fans, building something beautiful and chaotic and human.

But community still exists online. People still find each other despite the friction platforms put in place. And that stranger I met on Twitter, we're still friends. Turned out she wasn't catfishing me and really was a 60 year old woman. Still, the Internet is an evolving place, and it's easy to stay cynical about that possibility finding a real community online.

Just like it's easy to stay cynical about, say, the band Oasis. But that little band from Burnage is back together now. Their reunion tour starts this week, and somewhere out there, the first wave of Oasis Internet fans are buying tickets to the shows, texting old friends, and reminiscing about the old days of the band and the old days of the Internet.

I told you Melissa was cool. Georgia said it once too, and she was right as always. Now one more round of Goodreads fun, and I will reveal the answers. About whomst is this book Divinit? As

I write, this book has a higher rating than Catcher in the Rye. A higher rating than The Color Purple. It's rated higher than, hold on to your hat, both The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird. Yes. You read that correctly.

Why? Someone tell me why right fucking now. This book is crap. This book is what would happen in the dark of night at the Barnes and Noble if the shittiest romance novel in the store brushed up against Elizabeth Taylor's autobiography, I'm assuming here she has one, and those two books somehow had a book baby. And that book baby was born on a stack of Us Weekly magazines and so some of that smut rubbed off on the horrible book baby.

I recommend you read this awful thing only so you can honestly give it the one star rating it deserves. Please join me in putting this awful book in its place.

Truly unbelievable mirth. I'm sorry you had to wait. Here are your answers. The first book you heard about was Beach Read by Emily Henry, then we got reviews for The Unworthy by Augustina Buzztereka, and finally The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. And that's that.

This has been the greatest show anybody has made. Nobody needs to come back from vacation. I'm a hero. How do you end this thing? Oh, there's one last bit of tape Mike left here.

Let's give this a try.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, July 16. A pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream costs an average. This is across the entire United States, so I imagine the actual range of prices is pretty wide, but an average of $6. For $2 less, you could have a Neverpost membership.

But for $10 total, you could have the most exciting Friday night of your life with access to our weirdly effective sleep aid podcast slow post, our weirdly insightful movie watch along podcast, Never Watch, our weirdly weird field recording podcast, Posts From The Field, and our not at all weird, actually pretty good and fun and interesting to listen to extended segments and interviews alongside that pint of chunky monkey. Never Post membership, $4 a month, $10 with the listener supplied ice cream sidecar. Neverpo.s t. Never Post'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. The show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetto. Look. This is not the West.

This is the twenty first century, but still is desolate. Cottonwood pollen blowing through abandoned mansions, the ball bearing factory, strikers with their flapjack placards waving at a glance of traffic. At the discount cinema, gunfighters name a young Cherokee guide, look, because of the way she stares, because of the way they look at her. And everyone keeps their eyes on the horizon. Look.

You've won a set of false teeth. Excerpt of Look by Sarah Messer. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and it's distributed by Radiotopia.

I told you Melissa was cool. As always, Rand is off my hands, opens up some mic as night, and it's gave to leak. And finally, this curectanity in our student and our Taman there. Our human stakes are a fund one. This is the servicing's tire, Nils.

Some are answer for crew to doing and remove for the answers. And that's is. Yes. I will love you officiability today. And if you heard, promise if you don't really can tell a thing that probably the came out not a lost in, but finally here you go.

So let here away that. The first new two, I am escape mythel, the top of the show over about whom's of regis men off to be stronghold. Check-in the wait to the break of innamoei, who's per hair to reaching then you can, you can't Scott. For example, if you hold on Websiter, a deputy with ism and Mitch Tifrey. So if you release pretty jurorly, I'm get to you use, you know, when or care she was.

About whomst is this book? Divine it.