🆕 Never Post! Hentai and the Post-Platform Internet

Friends! Stare into the governance abyss with us in the latest Never Post! In this episode, Mike talks with Morgan Sung of KQED’s Close All Tabs podcast and PhD Media and Technology researcher Aurelie Petit about hentai and platforms. Georgia talks with WIRED gear reviews editor Boone Ashworth about the tariffs coming for your fashion microtrends. ALSO: Ask an Expert with Avery Dame-Griff.

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Become a Never Post member at https://www.neverpo.st/ for access to extended and bonus segments, and our side shows like “Slow Post”, “Posts from the Field” and “Never Watch”

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

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Intro Links

• Scientists Blasted Human Cells With 5G to See What Would Happen
• 5G-exposed human skin cells do not respond with altered gene expression and methylation profiles Open Access
• The Hidden Game: How Scammers Use “Chameleon Ads” to Bypass Meta’s Moderation
• 23andMe Sale Shows Your Genetic Data Is Worth $17
• Regeneron Enters into Asset Purchase Agreement to Acquire 23andMe® for $256 Million; Plans to Maintain Consumer Genetics Business and Advance Shared Goals of Improving Human Health and Wellness
• The Kids Online Safety Act is back

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Ask an Expert

• Avery Dame-Griff
• Avery’s book The Two Revolutions

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Platformization Woes 

• Close All Tabs
• Morgan’s website
• Morgan on X
• Aurelie’s website
• The hentai streaming platform wars
• Hentai Music 2018 AH OH UH

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When Tariffs Come for the Treats 

• Right to Repair in the age of tariffs
• Find Boone Ashworth on Wired
• Boone on X
• Boone on Bluesky
• To send in tips, contact Boone on Signal at Boone.10

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

luminary of the system of pleasure
toddler’s tea time in the Noah’s Ark
fog, frost and thaw
for clothes of velvet, for horses
Petrach’s inkstand
ozonated sun lounges
“Hail then, purveyor of shrimps!”
almost indecency united in a join and individual purpose
“forth to fresh fields, and pastures new”

Except of A Social History by Kim Rosenfield

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Monday, 05/19/2025 at 08:19PM eastern, and we have a sensational show for you this week. First, what can hentai teach us about platforms? What can platforms teach us about hentai?

We look with Morgan Sung, host and writer of KQED's fabulous Internet podcast, close all tabs at this racy genre and what it reveals about the Internet of today. Then Georgia talks with Wired staff writer Boone Ashworth about the tariffs coming for your fashion micro trends. Office siren, mob wife, bog chic. Can they survive? Should they survive?

And also ask an expert. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Get hype.

I've got five stories for you this week. Scientists, those freaks absolutely blasted human cells with five g signals to see if there are any adverse effects and folks, this is gonna knock your socks off. There are not. This according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America's Nexus Journal. Gizmodo reports that quote, researchers exposed two types of human skin cells called fibroblasts and keratinocytes to five g electromagnetic waves at twenty seven and forty point five gigahertz frequencies with varying levels of intensity.

Ultimately, the report says their results show with great clarity that in human skin cells even under worst case conditions, no significant changes in gene expression or methylation patterns are observed after exposure. So no x-ray vision or lizard skin mutations. I'm sort of disappointed, honestly. Leading up to the recent Canadian election, the Toronto Metropolitan University's social media lab discovered the existence of what they're calling chameleon ads on Facebook, where scammers will set up a fake Facebook page linking to a fake website and submit seemingly anodyne ads for approval to the platform. Once given the green light, scammers will then switch out the entirety of the content, replacing harmless if fraudulent advertisements with, you guessed it, crypto scams, which have recently featured deepfakes involving Canadian politicians.

Scammers, the lab says, will often switch the content of the ads back and forth multiple times, making them harder to track down. When the scam ads are finally taken down, the lab says, Facebook will delete them and their associated pages, which makes research and therefore prevention more difficult. The lab calls on Meta to better archive scam ads and their associated pages after taking them down so that researchers can work to prevent further fraud. Twenty three and Me has sold to the multibillion dollar New York based biotechnology company Regeneron for $256,000,000, 4 0 4 media reports, which means the genetic data for the roughly 17,000,000 people who used the company's services is worth about $15 a pop. No word yet on what exactly Regeneron plans to do with this vast repository of genetic info, but they have said they expect 23 and me will, quote, continue all consumer genome services uninterrupted.

In a statement on the sale, Regeneron writes, Regeneron intends to ensure compliance with 23andMe's consumer privacy policies and applicable laws with respect to the treatment of customer data. As the successful bidder, Regeneron is prepared to detail the intended use of customer data and the privacy programs and security controls in place for review by a court appointed independent customer privacy ombudsman and other interested parties. And finally, COSA is back. We talked about the kids online safety act in episode 22, don't panic, from November of last year. It failed a house vote then, but co sponsors Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have reintroduced it.

The bill nominally requires platforms to more effectively behave in the interest of kids using their services, but in fact could enable political targeting and the removal of resources crucial to groups like transgender teens. This is a complicated issue and a big story larger than we have time for in the news, which is why in this episode, in our interstitials, we're talking again with Avery Dame Griff, the historian and lecturer from episode 22, about the return of Xhosa and what you need to know about its reintroduction. That's the news I have for you this week. First, how platforms ate the Internet with the exception of hentai, apparently. Then, will the tariffs come for your little treats?

Spoiler alert, they already have. But now in our interstitials, Hans talks with Avery Dame Griff for our first edition of Ask An Expert about the Kids Online Safety Act.

Avery Damegriff, thank you so much for joining us for the first ever ask an expert. You truly are an expert. You are a lecturer in women, gender, and sexuality studies at Gonzaga University. You also founded and you serve as the primary curator for Queer Digital History Project, which is an independent community history project, and it catalogs and archives pre twenty ten LGBTQ spaces online. You also maintain the archival Internet video index, which indexes video footage of pre Internet and early Internet communication platforms.

Your award winning book, the two revolutions, a history of the Transgender Internet from NYU Press in 2023, it tracks how the Internet transformed gender political organizing from the nineteen eighties to the contemporary moment. In 2022, you were selected to be a public humanities fellow for the Humanities Washington, developing a series of interactive online exhibits, teaching guides, and workshops about the history of LGBTQ plus communities in online spaces. And last autumn, you and I both worked together on an episode, that helped us, and I think our audience, understand the moral panics that are driving the push for COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. Avery, COSA is back in the news, so we wanted to come to you and ask you, our COSA expert, is this bill gonna make kids safe online?

Nope.

Asking what comes after platforms is a bit like asking what comes after cities. They define our landscape so much that I struggle to picture a horizon that doesn't feature their hulking shape. If not platforms as they are now, per se, then surely we'll continue on inside their hollowed out shells, dystopic squatters in the ruins of the old Internet. To misquote Frederic Jamison, it's a bit easier to imagine the end of the Internet than the end of platforms. I ask this because it feels, to run the risk of overstating it by putting it very plainly, like the age of the platform is ending and has maybe even ended.

Facebook, x, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etcetera, they all came in a short amount of time to define my understanding at least of the global network. Even from a critical perspective, realizing that they and the Internet are not one in the same, it became more difficult than it should have been for me to think of the Internet outside of the totalizing infrastructural ideal of the platform and platforms themselves. They began to feel a bit like the AOL and the CompuServe of my youth, walled gardens enclosing much larger and freer territory. But what once felt ubiquitous and frankly, untoppable is now the subject of increasing, though insufficient regulation, and more significantly, public suspicion. And rightfully so, given that this sub era of the platform Internet has been defined by social, economic, political, and emotional turmoil, which if it can't be blamed on the platforms themselves, portions of that blame can certainly be placed at the feet of the people who run them.

Do these circumstances predict the demise of the platform? It has been perhaps difficult to imagine an Internet without them, but now can we? Must we? What could we stand to gain in the demise of the platform is a question that may help answer if there is some chance to the possibility of its disappearance. Let's consider what we lost in the platform's rise to prominence and what we value about it so that it was allowed to become the organizing principle of the last two decades online.

Along the way, we're gonna talk to journalist Morgan Sung

I I do love to cover the weird.

And academic Aurelie Petit

It's a it's a very European perspective on media.

About how things got this way and whether they think there's any chance they'll change.

Like, the platform is just a middleman, which would be a good definition of platform. It's like a middleman for content between a producer and, you know, a consumer.

I don't know if a world without platforms is possible, and maybe that's just me being, you know, really myopic because I've I've only known a world with platforms.

In a 2010 New Media and Society paper titled The Politics of Platforms, researcher and communications professor Tarlatan Gillespie helped solidify what exactly a platform is. He lays out four senses of the word platform to ask how each applies to the eponymous piece of Internet infrastructure. The senses are computational, architectural, figurative, and political. We'll take each of those in turn. X, Flickr, eBay, etcetera are above all and first pieces of software.

Quote, infrastructure that supports the design and use of particular applications, end quote. Like Macintosh and PC are platforms so too are WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Weibo. They are next, quote, human built structures. They're elevated, if not actually, then conceptually such that one may be better noticed, better reach an audience perhaps. Platforms are then also a starting point for further building or growth or action on the part of developers and on the part of users.

And finally, they are political. They define or comprise core beliefs from which a whole constellation of positions or assumptions follow. So what happens when we put all this together? Tech companies form something between a product and a place with an aim, a piece of software that masquerades as a public space where multiple disparate groups meet around some collective, though often asymmetric purpose that is usually economic. A platform is a place for people to connect and share and learn and entertain, but it is only those things unceasingly as long as it is also a place to connect brands, people, advertisers, data brokers, and increasingly governments, their stooges, and agents.

To render this as succinctly as we can, a platform is a mutable programmable interface which elevates some portion of users, though that may or may not be the most public facing group, thus allowing the formation or participation in a hierarchy which creates or recreates a political order. This takes us back to the last of Gillespie's platform senses. They define some core set of political beliefs. What might those beliefs be for, say, Reddit, Pinterest, Threads, Discord, Tumblr? And having decided on those, what sorts of rules, policies, actions, or inactions reflect those beliefs?

And how does this help create or recreate a political order that exists in a much larger sense outside the bounds of the platform itself? The answers to these questions fall under a distinct area of consideration known as platform governance. It feels safe to say that the most well known tool in the belt of platform governance is moderation. Decisions made concerning what is allowed to be posted and what is not, according sometimes to terms of service, to community guidelines, and so on. But in a lot of cases, according to vibes, it is a perennial story online to have been deleted, suspended, banned, limited for posts which pass in some circumstances, but not others.

There is the ban hammer, but there is also the vibe axe. Charting these vibes, looking carefully at things which should trigger moderation but don't, or which do but it's unclear why, can help us in the aim of figuring out what kind of world those designing and running platforms imagine, what sort of society they desire or feel for their own continued existence they must create. One content type that can help us look deeply into this vibe abyss is hentai, which means something more broad in Japanese than it does in English, but which for most of our audience will indicate a genre of media at the edges of both pornography and illustration or animation. I talked with Morgan Tseng about this, about what we can learn about platforms through their treatment of hentai in the West and what we can learn about hentai through its treatment by platforms. Morgan is a journalist and culture writer who covers all things weird, wild, and Internet in many places, including on her podcast with KQED called Close All Tabs with whom we have collaborated for this segment.

The first thing I asked her just to get on the same page is what is hentai exactly?

Hentai is in Japan just under the umbrella of anime and manga and video games, where it's just animated. Anything animated is anime, manga, video games. Hentai just means that it's sexually explicit. And hentai occupies this weird space in the content ecosystem because it's not considered porn. It's very rarely prioritized on porn sites, but it's also too explicit for mainstream streaming platforms.

So it's kind of shunned.

Hentai doesn't really have a home on the internet in the West. There's Pornhub, where it was the number one search term for the past four years running, and yet remains a second class content type in ways we'll discuss in a moment. There's DeviantArt, sort of. There are a lot of pirate sites, and there's FAKU, arguably the single platform that made a go at being the western Internet's go to hentai platform. But that proved really tough.

You know, I was talking to Jacob Grady and he's a CEO of Faku. Faku is a subscription platform for hentai manga. They tried to launch a hentai anime platform and ultimately could not pull it off. Part of it was licensing issues, like their licenses expired. It's it's very complicated and expensive to license anime versus licensing manga, but a lot of it was pirating.

He was like, we just can't compete with pirates.

Why? Why? If something is so popular, has it proven so difficult to platform? At a moment that platforming things is what we do on the Internet. It is the hammer of a network lousy with nails.

We talked to Arly Petty about this. Arly is a researcher of animation and technology and PhD candidate in the film studies department at Concordia University Montreal. She wrote the 2024 paper, the hentai streaming platform wars, published in porn studies, and had this to say on the uphill battle hentai has had finding its own platform and running afoul of governance on more general use platforms.

You're taking a media and you're making it entered like a new ecology and and also a new infrastructure. Like, for example, you make a film, like you're a filmmaker and you're gonna make a film, and then you want your film to go on YouTube. Well, suddenly there's a lot of restrictions because YouTube in itself is not just a platform for you to go and like scream at the town and scream at your fellow citizen. It's actually like its own space that is its own policies, its term of uses, its own like, you know, if it's a platform where people can leave comments, it has its own sociability. So you kind of have to make up for this.

Animation has many platforms, of course. But when the animation is pornographic, it doesn't fit within the restrictions, policies, and rules of those platforms. There's a governance mismatch. And pornography has a

lot of

platforms, but when it's animated, it doesn't fit within the restrictions, policies, and rules of those platforms. There's a governance mismatch. Take, for instance, something as base as identity verification, which is required on Pornhub both to post content and to make the most money from that content. Here's Morgan again.

Pornhub, to monetize your content on Pornhub, if it's animated, you actually have to send, like, videos of yourself, like, animating and drawing the content to

prove

that it's you. Yeah. To prove that it's you.

Like, like time lapse work in progress.

Pretty much. Yeah. You have to show that you're actually, like, making the content to be able to, like, verify it and monetize it. And if you're monetized, if you're verified, you can like opt into this additional level of like protection where if you're going to upload your content exclusively to Pornhub, you get higher revenue shares and they'll like send out copyright infringement notices on your behalf. But animated content can't do that because they can't verify that someone else is actually uploading the content, not the original creator.

Orly summarizes an aspect of this difficulty. Animated pornography, she says

Doesn't answer to this logic of live action governance. It's not about real people. You cannot ask for biometrics data for a a cartoon character. You cannot ask for consent. So, like, that's where struggle is attention.

Not everything can be platformed or not everything can be platform everywhere.

And in fact, this unwillingness to answer to the logic of live action governance is part of Hentai's deep history.

I mean, even hentai itself, like Mhmm. A lot of it is so weird because it was to get around Japan's censorship laws. Like, the OG tentacle porn, the creator fully admitted, like, no, they're tentacles because you can't show penetration with, like, genitalia without getting censored in Japan. But if you're using tentacles like or monstrous appendages, what's stopping you?

The difficulty that animated pornography has in finding its own platform is the result multiple compounding issues. There are cultural forces like the conflict that surrounds explicit media generally and conservative groups working to ban, restrict access to, make it difficult to make a living from any kind of pornography, They do this by pressuring both Internet platforms and payment processors used by those platforms like OnlyFans and Patreon. Then there are legal and compliance and regulatory challenges. It forced at the state and federal levels with half measure laws like SESTA FAFSA, as well as, again, by the businesses and industries required to make and sustain a living in The United States. Think like banks and stuff, sometimes who have their own ideas of governance and many of whom are themselves attempting to remain compliant with unclear, unevenly enforced regulation.

This, of course, creates an environment where an army of pirates flourish. And we haven't even gotten to the further ambivalence that surrounds hentai specifically, a largely foreign media type that struggles to find a legitimate place of its own online in the West in the age of platforms because there's no governance structure into which it neatly fits. How do we chart these vibes? Unsurprisingly, it seems media which exists or is pushed towards the edges will be kept there and won't be proactively furnished with accommodation regardless even if the audience for that media is sizable. It's hard to know in which direction even to be cynical.

The promise of profitability, which is great, is not enough to overcome the subalternity, the suppressedness, the undergroundedness of this media. As predicted, the political order of the world at large is in some ways created by, but in other ways reinforced by platforms. So why keep trying? Why even attempt to platform this work? Why not forego this hassle altogether?

Not everything can be platformed everywhere, Aurelie says. Maybe not everything can be platformed, period. The answer to this is what one gets with a platform.

I think people will always use these platforms to drive audiences to places where their work is safe, whether that's physical media, whether that's, you know, these kind of paywalled walled gardens for their content. I don't think a lot of people have the the opportunity to opt out of these platforms. Or I don't think that they have that kind of safety net to totally opt out. But I think that a lot of artists are just making it work by, you know, trying to have as many avenues for attention for their work as possible, and then having like a safe place for their work to actually exist.

The platform here becomes an island, not something which infinitely extends, not a place from which to build and expand, but a place with an undefeatable limit, a bounded territory that is nonetheless connected as all things are online. What platforms offer is convenience above all else. Everything under one earl, an audience, communication, community, and sometimes if you're lucky, a paycheck. That is until your own politics or those of your work challenge or transgress the political order the platform attempts to uphold. Media at the edges may push to the center, but only so far until the winds of governance, the tides of vibe push them back to the periphery.

This is the constant dance of moderation that I think we all feel online even if we are not fans of or creators of this kind of media.

How can you be as normative as you can be so nobody is gonna look too close into you? I was talking to this content creator who suddenly, yeah, Patreon decided that his content was too problematic. One step too far, but instead of having a conversation with him, they just cancel his accounts and it's his entire income that disappear. As long as we don't have like official platform that are actually have a model to pay content creators who do animation, you know, or like partnership with studios. It's it's always gonna like Paris, Paris is always gonna be a very attractive form of it.

So what comes after the platform? It could always be more platforms iterating on the design until asymmetrical aims and the economic incentives balance out to form a governance paradigm that doesn't or doesn't unilaterally, recreate existing political hierarchies. Or maybe after platforms, we'll find what was here before, the rest of the Internet, reached via a breadcrumb trail of links and hints and suggestions wherever people congregate, platforms and not. I think here about the idea that post modernism names not an end to modernism, but a confrontation with the problems of modernism. Post meaning crisis of, not after.

And so perhaps a post platform internet names an epoch where there is a wide scale recognition of the shortcomings of platforms while they continue to persist. In a way, the difficulty of hentai finding its own platform provides a kind of hope to any and every other artist, writer, media maker, person, people everywhere whose work and lives run afoul of only ever increasingly skittish platforms, kowtowing to brands, advertisers, and governments.

So I went into this hentai episode thinking that I would be telling the story about like some weird curvy dudes and their tentacle porn. What I actually found on talking to people involved in the industry and also fans is that there is actually, like, a real love for experimentation in hentai. And a lot of that is because a lot of people felt very othered. A lot of people are queer and didn't fit into the mold anyway.

Yeah.

I was really surprised, finding out how queer and how provocative hentai really is, which makes sense. I mean, queer art is always going to be provocative. This industry is more than just some dudes trying to get off to cartoon girls. It's really it it really is a space to experiment and explore like your relationship to the world around you.

To hear more about this side of the story, please go listen to the 05/21/2025 episode of close all tabs, which you can find at npr.org, k q e d Org, and wherever you get your podcasts, just search for close all tabs. I talked to Morgan in more detail about the regulatory environment which keeps explicit media suppressed and she talks at length about hentai's cultural position. It's a great episode. Please go listen. Thanks to Morgan Sung, Christopher Agusa, Maya Cueva, and Jen Chen for co producing this segment with us and inviting me to talk with them on close all tabs.

It was a huge pleasure and thanks also to Arly Petit for chatting with us. We'll put links to her work in the show notes. There were easily a dozen or more ideas that didn't make its way into this segment. I feel like we've just barely sketched an outline of what's possible to be said here. Like, didn't get to, how does the position of being a hentai artist online right now possibly predict the position of all digital creators in a post platform Internet?

How do the governance structures of platforms inform or shape wider culture, if they are in fact the powerful arbiters of popularity that so many of them claim to be and that so many of us, I think, give them credit as being. What does creative community look like on an internet defined by separate but connected websites versus platforms where, you know, if not everybody, then big communities of people gather. I would love to hear your thoughts on the post platform Internet and what explicit media might predict of its arrival. Related to these ideas or not, you can email us, leave us a voice memo, all the ways you can get ahold of us are in the show notes.

So Avery Dame Griff, is this new version of the bill meaningfully different from the one that died last fall in which supporters said it would protect children by forcing platforms to deal with, quote, unquote, harms that they faced? But critics were saying of it that it would have given overly broad license for politically motivated targeting of marginalized groups. Have the authors addressed those criticisms at all in this new bill?

Not really.

What do you think is the oldest piece of clothing you have?

Oh my god. That's such a good question. I have a pair of pants. I have a pair of pants that I inherited from my grandfather when he passed away. And they're a pair of perfectly good jeans and I wore them a whole bunch.

And then they got a tear in them And I have sewn them back up and patched them. And it's a little unsightly, but I still wear them when I'm not, like, going to work or anything because it's a it there is sentimental value in that pair of pants. So I and I don't know how long he had them before I started wearing them, but it they're they're they're pretty old.

That's Boone Ashworth. He's a staff writer at Wired's Gear Desk. A lot of his reporting covers sustainability and repairability, and it's those two things that made me want to talk to him for this segment. I've been curious how the ongoing tariff situation in The United States is going to affect the way we buy clothing online. And by that, I really mean on specific Chinese based sites like Shein.

This Black Friday, shop crazy low prices on Shein and see why Shein is America's top fashion destination.

From the jump, the Trump administration has been constantly moving the goalposts on its tariff plans on Chinese goods entering The US. Back in February, the goal was a 10% tariff across the board. In March, it changed to 20%. On what Trump ridiculously called Liberation Day on April 2, his administration tacked on an additional 34% tax on Chinese products. Then, a few weeks later, the administration announced that it will actually impose a 125% tariff on Chinese products effective immediately.

As of me writing this segment, there's tariffs ranging from that 125% to 145%, or a package fee of a hundred dollars. But that's also going to change on June 1 when the package fee is set to double to $200.

We've done a lot of reporting here on Wired about how just it's going to be, you know, months later is when these effects are really going to start kicking in. I mean, you're you're seeing price increases now across the board. But it will be a bit before, you know, shelves are empty if we get to that point. But we are rapidly approaching it.

And as these changes happen, a lot of Chinese companies have tried to swerve the worst of these tariffs in a few ways, such as shipping products like iPhones to India in order to get a more favorable rate, or relying on what's already stored in US based facilities.

All of these retailers have large stockpiles, like months worth of stockpiles of whatever products they're trying to sell that they're probably gonna be able to go through for a little bit of time. I think as we get closer to the end of the year is when we're gonna start really seeing things not be able to be produced in quite the same way if tariffs are still at the levels they are.

For consumers, the vibe in response to the tariffs, at least on my feeds, has been buy now before it's too late. And a lot of the panic I've been interested in centers specifically around fast fashion brands.

I'm not typically one to crash out on TikTok, but what do you mean I have to pay $277.90 in duties on an outfit that's a hundred and $70.

The tariffs are shaking and I'm really not kidding.

I get it that we're not supposed to shop at Sheen anymore. I get it. But where am I supposed to go for cheap clothes now? Where am I gonna go? Amazon?

Is that much better? I can't shop at Zara. I can't shop at Revolve all the time. It is too expensive. So where do I go just for some cheap cute clothes?

Make it make sense.

Shein and other budget sites like it, such as TEMU, have previously benefited from the de minimis exception, a tariff loophole that allows goods that cost less than $800 to come into The US duty free. And that's great for a brand like Shein, where you can basically buy anything for a price that is unbelievably low. Like, unnervingly, I am begging you to think about why this is so cheap in the first place low. The cheapness of Sheehan's clothing has also made it virtually essential to the online trend cycle, especially during the peak of micro trends. With prices so cheap, you can really try on whatever style is in right now without worrying about investing in clothing that might be out of fashion in a matter of weeks.

Want to put together a mob wife aesthetic fit? Great. Because you can buy a floor length bodycon dress in cheetah print on Shein with a purse to match for the low, low price of $18.99. If I type in office siren into the Shein search bar, one of the top results is a $15.23 2 piece set titled, Cosmina two Pieces Elegant Outfit for Business Casual Women Office Siren Style Similar to Influencer Design, coquette old money style sexy. There is no presumption that the clothes you order from Shein will be high quality or even necessarily look like the pictures online.

The point is the price. Regardless of the trend du jour, Shein has something for you at a price so unimaginably affordable that it almost feels ridiculous not to buy it. And if something falls apart, you can just buy another pair of $9 Palazzo pants and call it a day. It encourages a shopping experience that is all about buying new, buying cheap, and buying a lot.

The whole promise of these sites was, you know, buying something so incredibly cheap and feeling like you, you know, shopping like a billionaire. You're you're getting these incredible deals. I think if that goes away a little bit, then just that sentiment, that feeling of, oh, I'm getting this crazy deal for all of these clothes will go away. And then I think that kind of just like takes away a little bit of the value prop for sites like this. So I don't I I I think that prices might not skyrocket all that much quite yet, But I don't know if they need to get all that much higher before people start to feel the pinch a little bit more.

And if that happens, where will people go?

You know, back Amazon. I mean, maybe we maybe we all pull a Macklemore and go to the thrift shop. Sorry.

But I mean, yeah, that is kind of what's happening on some corners of the Internet. Beyond your brick and mortar vintage stores, resale apps like Depop and Poshmark have been exploding in popularity. Last year, Depop grossed $85,000,000 in revenue. And you can actually buy a lot of Sheehan clothing on Depop. And it's still, like, single digits price point cheap.

So sure. Yeah. We should all be buying secondhand more in general. It's usually more economical. It's a nice way to avoid contributing to the overproduction of new clothing.

It's also a much more intentional way of shopping. On Shein, using their website is like scrolling TikTok, an endless list of garments that you can just page through forever, add to cart, and purchase without really thinking about what you're even buying. It creates this online shopping landscape that overvalues the performance of having stuff at the cost of any individual piece of clothing. A single pair of pants isn't special in this ecosystem. Having the ability to buy 12 pairs of pants is the thrill you get here.

Volume is the name of the game. The people I saw worrying about the possible price hikes on Shein were overwhelmingly people who make haul content. And the emotional payoff of making those videos doesn't come from finding that one dress you love. It's about having this huge bag of stuff that's trendy right now because that's also crucial to this performance based shopping experience. On Shein, you can buy an entire closet's worth of office siren inspired clothing at the drop of a hat, instantly cementing you as an authority on that trend or whatever trend is hot right now.

And trendy in this context just means single use clothing destined to go out of style and be doomed for the donation pile. More clothes for the trash island in the Pacific Ocean. So what happens is this feedback loop of trends and content around shopping that is built on this foundation where clothing is just as important to you as how much of it you're able to get. But with the incoming tariffs threatening to disrupt this ecosystem of mass purchasing, I think something's gotta give. I wanna answer the question I asked Boone at the top of this segment.

What's the oldest piece of clothing you own? I do have some hand me downs that are older than I am, but the oldest item that I bought are a pair of plain black Doc Marten leather boots. I got them when I was 19, and they're perfect. They've traveled around the world with me. They've been waterlogged and caked with mud and dust and left scarred and nicked by who even knows what.

I've replaced the laces multiple times. And honestly, I should probably do that again soon. This winter, I finally resoled them. They're my favorite shoes. They carry a lot of sentimental weight for me.

And with the deal's forward mentality of mass ordering from Shein, you just won't get that. There's no sentimentality there. And I just wonder if in the midst of these conversations about tariffs and the changing costs of everything, if what might be worth looking at is how we emotionally relate to the clothing we buy. Or frankly, the clothes we already have in the first place. So this dovetails quite nicely into something you've written about before, which is the right to repair.

Could you give me a sense of what that factors in to dealing with the ongoing tariff situation?

Yeah. So so the right to repair is sort of the broad term for a general movement of people who want it to be easier to fix the stuff that you already own. Cars are a great example of this. If your windshield breaks, you don't replace the whole car. You get to replace just the windshield.

And, yes, that costs money, but it's cheaper than buying a brand new vehicle. So the idea is kind of having that, for all the devices that we own, whether it's computers, smartphones, you know, smart watches, heck, even clothes.

When I resold my Docs, it wasn't cheap, but it was definitely cheaper than buying a new pair of boots and breaking them in. Plus, I could never replace them because, I mean, I did spend a lot of time breaking them in, but also because they're special. I don't want to replace them. Following the conversation around the tariffs and clothing in particular, I've been wondering if repairing instead of buying could become, I mean, the trend du jour. Or better yet, break us out of the trend dominated shopping cycle entirely.

But that also goes completely against the kind of shopping that Sheehan and its cohort of sites have built their entire empires upon.

You know, I guess what value you find in the clothes that you are wearing will will change based on, you know, how much new stuff you're able to buy, what the options are. And I also think it's gonna depend on the product too. Right? It's gonna depend on if it's something that is easily repairable. Something that you already got cheap might not be the best quality and so it might just not last longer.

And that's that's the problem with something like that.

That's the thing. Right? Like, is it even worth it to try to mend your paper thin miniskirt you got for $3 when you could just buy another one, even for a slightly more expensive price. And that's the lure of Shein. Right?

It's so easy. It's so cheap. It's like breathing. You don't have to think about it. But I do think there's merit here in thinking beyond what a site can sell us.

And instead, consider how we interact with what we buy in a way that isn't about the promise of volume, but instead the promise of longevity. Where value is not determined by how much you buy, it's about having an active relationship with the clothing that you have. Whether you buy it or got it in a clothing swap or had it handed down to you by a parent, looking at clothing through a lens of longevity encourages you to think about what garments you actually want to come along with you as you live your life. It's about what clothing has real emotional value to you. Now, if I bought that Cosmina two pieces elegant outfits for business casual women suit set from Shein and the stitching fell apart, I wouldn't care about it because I know I never cared that much about it anyway.

But if my beloved pair of Docs needed new laces, I wouldn't think twice about replacing them. If the leather started to crack, I would learn what kind of wax I needed to condition it, and I would do that because they're important to me. They're worth mending. And listen, I genuinely don't know if I really believe that the tariffs are somehow going to magic away these fast fashion heavy hitters that openly use sweatshop labor and produce clothing that is destined for a landfill. That just doesn't seem realistic.

But I do think that right now, we have a chance to look more closely at our online shopping ecosystem and ask ourselves if it's even working for us. Buying more and more clothing chains you to a trend cycle that is always moving faster than you. In that kind of system, more is just never going to be enough. You are never going to catch up. And maybe it's time to just stop chasing.

There's a lot about our society that makes you feel like you are not good enough because you don't have the newest thing. Right? I mean, that's just that's just capitalism. That's just how the the system works. And, you know, sometimes they're right.

Sometimes you do need a newer thing. It's okay. But also, I think this gets us into a space where if we have to deal with these increases in prices and all these tariffs as nuts as this whole thing is, if we can kind of take control of it in a way by keeping control of fixing our own stuff, I think that's a more positive way to look at it than just kind of wallowing in the anxiety as I was doing earlier, you know.

Boone, thank you so much for chatting with me. Where else can people find more of your work?

You can find my work on wired.com. If you got a tip for me, hit me up at boon dot ten on signal.

Before I go, I'd love to ask you the question that started segment. What's the oldest piece of clothing you own? What's worth keeping around? The links for how to reach us are in the show notes.

Avery,

what does the reintroduction of COSA, the kids online safety act, what does it mean?

Well, COSA is basically just as bad a bill as the last time it was introduced, and it still likely won't effectively solve any of the problems it claims to address. These are things that are complicated. They're infrastructural and social issues, and they require a lot more than government regulation, but especially not regulation that looks like COSA. Because even with some of the changes that the sponsor co sponsors have added, other political actors like the Heritage Foundation have already made it clear that they aim to use this regulation as a way and quoting from them to guard kids against, again, quoting, from the harms of transgender content. And this is an argument made by Evan Greer of of fight from the future, and I agree with it.

As she's pointed out, this focus on kind of content neutral elements we see in COSA, things like algorithmic recommendations, they can still be used to because the bill focuses on it to restrict access to a variety of content, including LGBTQ content on the grounds that this content makes youth depressed or anxious. I'm also sort of concerned about the possibilities that platforms will just engage in anticipatory compliance again by making it harder for youth to encounter anything that could fall under this duty of care provision or sort of, like, trigger any of the elements of it. And we see this, like, with recent rollbacks of protections related to sexuality and gender identity by YouTube and meta platforms suggests that they're willing to shift their policies and practices in ways that are demonstrably worse for their queer and trans users, but will appease those in power. Ultimately, COSA doesn't solve the problems it claims to. It's likely just gonna become a weapon to push LGBTQ folks further out of public life.

Even if it fails though

Mhmm. Do you

think this is the last time that we see legislation like this proposed?

Oh, absolutely not.

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Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer. And the show's host, that's me, is Mike Grignetta. Luminary of the systems of pleasure, toddlers' tea time in the Noah's Ark.

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