🆕 Never Post! Mailbag #7: On Ads, The RSS Resurgence and More

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See what interstitials we need submissions for
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Various Links:

• Head to neverpo.st to see OKRA and Garfies
  
  
• Ultima Thule
• Vivrant Radio — Jeremy Olander
• Above and Beyond — Group Therapy
• Real Synthetic Audio — Todd Clayton
• A State of Trance — DJ Armin Van Buren
• Song of the Day — The Current
• Morning Becomes Eclectic — KCRW
  
  
• Vegetative Electron Microscopy
• Source Article from 1959
• Article with correction
  
  
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff

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

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post. This is a mailbag episode. It's the one for, I don't know, spring twenty twenty five? How's that sound?

Sounds beautiful. Spring has sprung.

Yeah. Spring is here.

Okay. Great. If you are new here, a mailbag episode is where we respond to listener emails, comments, voicemails, and voice messages about our segments. Do you want to get in touch with us and tell us your thoughts about our thoughts? We want to hear your thoughts on our thoughts.

All the ways that can get ahold of us are in the show notes. You can drop us a line. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. Joining me today in order of how uproarious I assume their go to karaoke song is ascending. Hans Buto, never post senior producer.

You've nailed it. Can I tell you something?

Yeah.

Sure.

I've never done karaoke, so I don't have Wow. I don't have a karaoke song.

The maximum on uproarious.

Exactly. Oh my god. First runs. Of the gate.

Jason Oberholzer, Never Post executive producer.

The middle's a good spot for me because it really depends on how my cover of D'Angelo's Untitled is going to go over.

I think we should stop the recording because I just wanna think about that

for a while. Swings wildly depending on the room.

Yeah. Right. Georgia Hampton, never post producer.

Yes. Let me be clear about something. I am a performer first and a podcaster second.

That's what that is.

And my performance of I'm With You by Avril Lavigne. Oh. We're talking I fall to my knees. I'm crying. The whole room is crying.

It's very emotional.

I believe it. Now quickly, do you believe Avril is still with us?

No comment. Okay. I think I think we need more more intel first.

Very smart. It's one of those things, know, you gotta do your own research.

So true.

Our perennial question, where do you fit into this Mike Rugnetta?

I think that I am probably in the mid mid low. My go to is Johnny Cash. Oh. I can do a ring of fire, which I like because everybody knows the words too. Yeah.

It's, you know, it can be uproarious, but there's an upper limit to how uproarious I think ring of fire can be. Fair.

Fair enough. Yeah. I've had people come up to me after a karaoke performance and shake my hand.

That's what I would have wanted.

Is that is that good?

I take it as good. That was after a performance of Lips of an Angel though by Hinder.

Oh, wow. Okay. So how

This is now. We're gonna abandon my bag. Actually, this is now just a karaoke roundtable in which Hans is unable to participate.

Hans, you can just you can just log off if you'd like.

Georgia, are you a singer? Like, do you can you sing?

I think I'm fine. I'm not like I'm not one of those people who's gonna show up to karaoke early and be like, me

me me me me. Like Do those people exist?

Oh, they super exist. At bar karaoke?

Oh, yes. Absolutely.

You hear the first few notes of At Last by Etta James, you're like, oh, Jesus Christ.

Yeah. They're taking this seriously.

You there are other rooms for you to do that.

There's other places. But I mean, I did, like, I did musical theater in, like, middle school. So I was never, you know Mhmm. I can't read music. I never took voice lessons, but I can belt when it is called for.

Got it. This is good intel. Let's talk about some listener stuff.

It's a beautiful transition.

Oh, that god. Seamless. This

mailbag is also of note because it is our first one as a member of Radiotopia. And we got some mail as requested from our longtime listeners about what it means that we are a part of Radiotopia. And one in particular I thought it'd be interesting for us all to weigh in on came from Malcolm Toll. Malcolm says, I write now about one concern I have about podcast ad networks. It unnerves me to hear the hosts read out ads.

Paragons like The Verge have a deliberate firewall between ads in the newsroom. It prevents undue financial influence and bias from impacting reporting. Malcolm provides an example of this that he thought was particularly odious, says that he understands the sort of pressures that places can be under when they are parts of organizations. Goes on to say, could be wrong. I believe the only ads I've ever heard on the member feed are for the show itself.

That's sensible. But if the producers are going to read ads for other companies, I'd like to see a discussion about the practice in the audio industry. And that's what you're gonna get, Malcolm, right now.

Let's go. Let's go.

I mean, I think this is something that we could probably talk about, maybe not in a segment, but in something else that we release and record. Just our experience with, you know, not just to this show, but other shows that we've worked on and been involved in about, like, how advertising works and what those pressures are, at least from my perspective as the nominal host of the show who, you know, when they come to us and they're like, okay. This ad has to be a host read. My name is gonna be at the top of the list. I also don't like it.

I just wanna be right really upfront about that. But I think we have a broad remit in our relationship to say no to ads just in general. So if we are brought ads for things that we don't like, then we can say, oh, no. We don't wanna advertise that. We also have broad sort of like permission to it's like when they're like, we want you to read this ad and we want you to include some of your personal experience with this product.

We get to say, I don't have any. And then, you know, just read the ad. And I think that over time, we're gonna figure out how that works, and we're probably gonna do some stuff that's uncomfortable along the way.

Yeah. That seems fair. I think the other thing that's important to point out here is that Radio Topia has handled this very collaboratively Yeah. Yeah. And sent us a huge list of things to sign no on essentially.

Yeah. Where we were able

to point out all the places that we might have some sort of conflict of interest, things that we are going to have to cover, things that are on our beat, things that we just don't like. And we have a huge list of those we sent over, and they said thanks, and they're not gonna send us those things.

It's great. I mean, this is maybe one of the things we could talk about if we ever explain this at length, but it's like a spreadsheet because it's all standardized. So every ad has to slot into a basically like type, like a tag type.

Category.

Category. Yeah. That's that's the word. Uh-huh. And, yeah, we just went through and we're like, no supplements.

Just no. Just a blanket. No supplements. No. Thank you.

Yeah. And, yeah, they were like, cool. Sounds good. You know? And then probably dozens of other things that we said no to.

Oh, I mean, this list, like, imagine a long list and then times it by, like, 800 of how specific you can get about what kind of ads you don't want.

Think about a list. Now think about a bigger list than the list you're thinking of.

This list is so unimaginably big. But

I think, you know, we are trying to be thoughtful about it, and we would hope that when we miss, you guys will tell us. And, you know, the list of things that we don't wanna read ads for, like financial services and health insurance Yeah. And just all the stuff that make you feel just generally.

The other response we saw a few times to our Radiotopia announcement was fear on the part of the listeners that we would get rid of what has been described many different things, many different ways, the little sonic eye dent at the end of every episode. Oh. You know the sound. I'll put it

crack this.

Right here. What would you all call I

think of it as the egg crack in my brain.

That's what it is. Yes. I completely agree

with that.

Oh, that's interesting. I I

think of it as the snap.

Yeah. It is it is, I think, mostly described as the egg crack and genuine fear from the listeners that the egg crack would go away to make room for the dulcet tones of Radiotopia. Fear not, they are all there. We are cracking eggs and singing opera at the end of every show. I always think of that sound as like pulling out a quarter inch plug.

That's like a little wet.

Okay. I was gonna say. From an uncooked hamburger patty? Yeah. Like

oh my god. Anyway,

it's not going anywhere.

Jason, you also got a bunch of outreach from folks who wanted to let you know that there are in fact podcasts of music, and how dare you not know about them?

Yes. People wanted to let me know that I was wrong. Can you imagine this? No. This is very helpful.

This is exactly what I asked for. I wanted people to send me things that were podcasts that they thought amounted to a musical expression of the form. What if a podcast was music? What if music arrived as if it were a podcast? And we're gonna list off some of the things I thought were more interesting that got sent in.

So thank you, everybody. One of the ones that seemed more interesting was Ultima Thule, an Australian radio show that seems to have gone dormant at the end of twenty twenty four. So it seems like we just missed the window on that, but let me know if I'm wrong about that since you all love to let me know when I'm wrong about things. And some other examples people sent in were real synthetic audio, a state of trance, song of the day from the current, morning becomes eclectic. Turns out there's just a lot of stuff out there that people believe to be music that arrives via podcast.

I actually got a text, Jason, from my brother-in-law, Steven from Brooklyn. Hello, Steven. He's a listener and a fan who feels bad that he doesn't write in and only text me individually. So now I'm forcing him into the show. That's good.

That's good. Yeah. You should

Yeah. Believe in bullying on the show.

Let's let's bully our families. So he suggested a couple of VivaRONT Radio by Jeremy Olander and Above and Beyond puts out something called group therapy. He said there were a lot of these that he has listened to over the years because he listens while he works. He listens to ambient music while he works.

Okay.

And he pointed me interestingly, what I thought was interesting, to the final episode of a podcast called Anjuna Deep Edition. And so they publish this in May 2022, and they open it by explaining a bit about why they're not doing podcasts anymore.

As you might have realized, the weekly Anjuna Deep Edition mixes haven't been appearing in your podcast feed since episode 400 a few weeks ago. Sadly, this isn't a glitch in your app, and we are in fact closing down the podcast feed. When we first launched the Deep Edition and our other radio shows, there were very few options for distributing those kind of mixes. And so like many other labels and artists, we turned to podcasts. Today, there are a whole host of music specific platforms that host our mix content, including YouTube, SoundCloud, and Mixcloud, where you can find the Angunity petition, along with Apple Music, where you can find our new Anguno Mix series, and on Spotify, where we've got various other mixes along with all of our new releases.

These platforms all cater for music in a way that the podcast feed sadly doesn't, in that the musicians and creators behind the mixes can receive royalties for their music being played. So thank you so much for listening.

Suck. I mean, hard to argue. Do you guys know Camp? Mm-mm. No.

It's like a French, like, artist residency for electronic musicians, and they have a radio show sort of radio station, really just a website that collects mixes that people do. And it's all hosted on Mixcloud, which I've never encountered before, you know, like, a couple weeks ago when I found out about this. Mixcloud rules. Okay. So just hearing this now.

It's like this I'm sure this is frequency illusion. You know what I mean? Like, suddenly, this is everywhere, but I'm sure I just never encountered it before. But yeah. I mean, it's compelling.

It's a compelling reason.

Yeah. It makes some sense.

One email I wanted to spend a little bit of time on was one from Jam, who suggested that they're a casual music listener, but the first thing that jumped to mind were DJ sets and playlists, such as Isaac Varzim's Groovy sets, Humano Studios guest sets, Boiler Room sets, made me want to ask the question in the other direction. Rather than what podcast might be music, what music might actually be a podcast and I nominate DJ sets.

Interesting. Yeah. Okay. In a way, opera.

You're right. The original podcast is

talk people talking about their problems.

Yeah. Sorry. The second podcast. First, had cereal, then we had opera.

Traditional Italian opera.

That's actually the perfect answer. Oh, my god.

So up next, in response to an email from Thales Baretto in our last mailbag regarding our segment from last year's live show at xoxo, which is about TikTok shop. We attempted to identify which online business might be the most parasitic. And in Talis's words, the question was, which online business is able to profit while being the least it can be? Jason Mehmel writes in with his contender, which is PayPal. Jason writes, I'm sure there was some level of work to make initial bank connections and such.

But at this point, it's just a middle stop between whatever banks are involved in the transaction. Maybe that initial work deserves credit, but it's devolved into being just a membrane skimming from the transactions moving through it. I'd love to know if there are better methods now. I feel like PayPal is an an entity that seems vaguely evil to me, but I know so little about.

PayPal, don't listen. PayPal, if you're listening, just just fast forward. PayPal sucks. And PayPal

All my homies hate PayPal.

Can only exist because payment infrastructure in The United States is so atrophied and at under the control of, like, corporate interests and doesn't actually benefit people. Whenever you, like, talk to someone who doesn't live in The United States about just, like, sending small bits of money back and forth to your friends, they're like, just use your bank. And our answer is, oh, you can't. Well, yeah. We got PayPal, a third service that is like the money mafia.

It really feels like that. Like, as someone I don't feel like I interface that much with PayPal. I don't know why that is. Maybe just the transactions I'm doing. But usually, in my experience, the methods that are used are like Venmo or Zelle.

PayPal kinda doesn't exist in my life. So I I sort of defer to to you guys.

Well, Venmo is just is owned by PayPal. So it's just it's just another scan on it. It's just a yeah. It's just one level on top of PayPal.

Also, isn't there just they have like a really easy backdoor to get into or something? I feel like I've heard so many stories of people having like, their identity stolen through PayPal, or like their bank information stolen through PayPal. Something horrible happening. The main thing that

they do is they they have an even more sensitive tripwire than, say, Visa does as far as just saying, well, you can't do that anymore. And that they are well known for if they don't like something that you're doing or just mildly suspicious of you, just shutting your account down and taking all your money, which, of course, is in their interest

to So what I'm hearing is maybe this is actually exactly the most parasitic. It's pretty bad. Maybe we just got it. Like, maybe this is it.

Yeah. Okay. PayPal, you can start listening again. And that's why I love PayPal. And that's why the

sponsor, PayPal.

It's it's just it's extremely convenient. And honestly, their trust and safety team, I feel like they go out of their way Above and beyond. Sure. Yeah. To make sure that everybody who uses the service, like, really knows what they're doing.

So to rewind to the beginning of this mailbag, we're gonna get no advertisers. Okay.

Good news. In our last mailbag, Toby called in, and the voicemail got cut off. And then Toby called in again.

Hell, yeah.

Yes, Toby.

Hey, Never Post. I'm so sorry about whatever happened. I think what I was getting at is my social media algorithm in terms of specifically ads has changed significantly since I, like, medically transitioned. And so basically what happened is I started noticing I was getting a lot more gun oriented things, a lot more fitness. I was getting more ads for shitty supplements.

And I was just curious about, like, the sort of gender assigned at social media algorithm idea.

What do you all think?

Is this, like, a legitimate

thing in terms of, like, your ads predicting sort of, like, your gender?

So I would like to just remind everyone that we accept pitches.

Yes. Toby.

And that we pay people to make segments and that this is interesting.

Fascinating. So interesting.

Toby, call us back again.

Just call Hans. Just call Hans.

Just give me a

raise time.

Hans' phone number is Hi. Next up, in response to our segment about section two thirty with Mike Masnik, my pal Guy, and Hans' pal Guy

Oh, Guy.

Called in.

Section two thirty is a US law. Laws have jurisdiction, and I wondered how section two thirty sort of related to the Internet and the the global entity. And I know you guys have talked about, you know, this in other shows about, you know, it's hard to know the Internet from other perspectives other than The US. But I wondered if, you know, if there was anything to say about if section two thirty does go away, how does that impact the Internet in other places? Do other countries follow it?

That would that make The US an outlier, or would then they join more countries that also don't have anything like section two thirty?

So Guy yes. Guy lives in Canada. Mike, I have a question for you. I I wanna predict your answer just a little bit and actually see if I'm at all right about this.

Alright.

That the torch is being passed. Two thirty does affect it at the moment because so many places have to deal with, do business in, and be subject to American laws. However, that source of power has been shifting over the last ten years maybe to the European Union who is coming and being much more strict with all sorts of places that The US is currently choosing not to be strict at all, especially with the demise of net neutrality. Like, the European Union is the only one who is actually doing this and are shaping

the Internet for the rest of us.

Am I sort of right?

So, I mean, the important thing to remember about net neutrality is that that is not a content level decision. Right? That is or or it is content level insofar as its content that goes through infrastructure, which the EU is trying to regulate both both of those things. But the infrastructure is like a completely different thing. Right?

The cables are where the cables are, but the information is everywhere. So I think there is a way to think about this where we get two Internets, essentially, and we see a larger version of what already exists with, say, the right to be forgotten, where every year I think it's every year. The EU gets, like, 50,000,000 requests for results on Google to be removed or to be downranked, and Google adheres to or accepts, like, half of them. I think it is. But that only happens in the EU.

Right? There's no right to be forgotten in The United States. There's just the Internet works in two different ways in two different places. There's a chance that that happens. I think it's probably really unlikely.

The, like, bigger thing to consider is that most of the largest Internet players right? And really, we're talking about, like, social media is really what is what is to be considered here. They're all US companies. They will have to abide by US law. And so in their if section two thirty goes away, right, they have basically two choices.

They can moderate everything. They take the path of, like, we're gonna look at everything. We're gonna approve it before it all goes up, where everything's gonna get the green check mark. Everything's treated very, very equally that way. The things that I've seen written about this is that other countries, especially other authoritarian countries, look at that and they say, oh, so you are looking at every post.

Great. When you come across posts that say Erdogan is bad, could you take all those down? Like, you you're already doing it. You're already looking at everything. Like, why don't you just don't take it all down?

What happens then? Do they agree? Do they stop offering their services in those countries because they don't wanna get involved in that situation? Do they offer a different version of the Internet in those countries? You sort of end up at the two Internets again.

The other outcome is they say, okay, two thirty goes away. Okay. We can't moderate anything. We don't moderate anything. We're not gonna look at anything.

That means the Internet, as Mike Masnik described it, becomes a cesspit for everybody who engages with it. Until the EU then says, well, you can't there are certain uses or posts. There are certain kinds of content that just cannot be seen here, and so fix it. Does that then mean, you know, there's now two versions of the Internet again? There's the one in The US that's not at all moderated, and there's the one in The EU that is moderated to their regulations.

You know? There's so many things that have to happen before we know what happens, but those are the two sort of, like, branching paths that I've seen other people talk about as far as what is the rest of the world like if section two thirty goes away in The United States?

Well, our most recent relevant example is GDPR, which is now fairly old. Yeah. But American companies ended up just by and large becoming GDPR compliant across the board because it's more of a hassle not to have been. So that was EU taking the lead and everyone just opting into the ease of just following along.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think the answer here is

no.

Up next, Jay wrote in about my conversation about having fun on the Internet with Kyle Chaeka. And Jay said, I gave some thought into the ways that I combat algorithmic fun. And this is what I've come up with. And here's a fabulous list of options. Disable auto play or auto preview.

I always manually select the next thing. Yes. I do this too. It's amazing. Click on the subscriptions tab on YouTube.

I also do this. Very smart. Whenever possible, sort only by chronology. Yep. Which interesting.

I hadn't even thought of that. Whenever possible, use RSS in quote unquote quiet apps. Subscribe to newsletters when it's important to me, and RSS is unavailable. I often find cool stuff tag surfing on Mastodon, Tumblr, Bandcamp, maybe soon on Blue Sky. Whenever I go to the library weekly, which wow.

Nice. Thank you. I will grab one comic, one jazz CD, and one movie I've never heard of.

And do them all at the same time,

I assume?

Multiple screens, full While

watching a Subway Surfers video.

That's a really beautiful practice. I really love this. And then finally, they say, anthologies. I enjoy buying things in bundles on itch.io. We're supporting anthologies on Kickstarter, and that's a fun way to discover new creators.

This is a wonderful list.

It's beautiful, Jasmine. It's

Tag surfing on Bandcamp rules. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I do it almost every day.

I want more of these. Where else are people finding intentional interactions with their media and attention?

And then Sam also called in with message about this segment.

I have to say, I have gone back to using RSS feeds for pretty much all of my Internet consumption. And I actually spun up my own RSS server on a web server that I have. And since then, I have been using that and it is so much better. Oh, I know exactly what's there. I want exactly what's there.

And I don't have to deal with some algorithm getting in my way. And it's great.

Mike, I want you to go first.

Mike's Alright. Punching the air that rules so hard. Yes.

All time. Mike, I see the floor to you.

That's it. That's I mean, that's all I have to say is punching the air. Sam, that rules. I I fully I think I don't wanna call it a resurgence because it never really went anywhere, but the refocusing, let's say, on RSS has been a long time in the making, and I think it's only going to continue in focus as people realize what the current way of getting information has done to the information environment and to our brains. And we're gonna go back to calm, as the last comment said, quiet ways of getting information in organized streams in particular places and not having to just sort of, like, live underneath the waterfall.

God. Yeah.

It's real simple. It's real simple.

One other email I wanted to take a look at here for your sake, Georgia, The payment about this piece involves pretty much exclusively Titanium Daydream.

Let's go. Yes.

You wanna tell the folks what Ethan wrote in to say?

Absolutely. It would be my pleasure. Ethan writes in that they are also a huge fan of Titanium Daydream, which is fabulous news for me. Ethan, get in touch. Would love to talk to someone else who's watching.

But they also write that what's interesting is that I think it both shows what's incredible about TikTok and the problem with algorithmic content feeds. I'm thrilled that an equation somehow produced the numbers that served this incredibly niche and esoteric video series to me. But the big caveat is that its weekly output schedule doesn't work well with the platform. You either have to diligently check-in on the account every Tuesday, which I sometimes do, or pray the algorithm brings you the next episode. So far, I haven't missed any episodes.

But this randomness gives the completionist in me a bit of anxiety. They go on to say that this is true for a lot of other serialized content on TikTok, which this is exactly how I feel about Titanium Daydream.

So do you are you a Tuesday viewer? How do you engage?

I kind of have the the other approach, which is just that I regularly use TikTok and kind of hope Yeah. That it will bring Titanium Daydream to me. I also do I will say this. I follow that account on Instagram as well. And so that account will post on their story like, hey, the next episode is up.

So that I can be like, oh, right. And maybe go on TikTok. TikTok's algorithm knows I like Titanium Daydream, and I will Mhmm. Always see it. I I also have not skipped an episode.

It is funny as a counterpoint to the intentional Internet we were just championing a moment ago. I have stopped following new accounts on TikTok even. I am just entirely to the algorithm behold them. I I don't even like things anymore. I forget to heart them.

I just watch something and I'm like, for sure, more of this will get back to me because I have watched it, and I let the numbers do their thing. I have nothing in the middle anymore.

Yeah. I think a lot of this speaks to the kind of fundamental dishonesty of the algorithm whose promise was, hey, don't worry about it. We're gonna bring you the stuff that you like. And then it just doesn't. It just simply doesn't.

It just brings you stuff that's close to the thing that you like, so that you spend more time letting content happen to you as you turn into a puddle on your couch. And I think it speaks to the intentionality and the specificity of RSS where you get to say, I like this. Bring more of it to me. And RSS just says, okay.

Done. I love you.

Alright. On that, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna listen to some ads. For PayPal. Okay.

We are back. Hans, we had some people write in about the just unbelievable number of cameras in the world.

It is a shocking number of cameras, and I appreciate that everybody gets that. Pat wrote in. Pat Reddick wrote in to say that they really appreciated the AP footage that I referenced from April 2006. I found this video of how how amazing it was that there were three traffic cameras being put up in New York City, and they did whole these whole cloth things. And Pat says a little over three years later in 02/2009, I was in a first year computer science studies lecture.

And even by that point, the surveillance state felt like a given. So my jaw nearly hit the floor when the professor told an anecdote about how he had led a push to stop the administration from installing cameras all around the university. I remember him telling the story like his view that the idea of cameras everywhere was a creepy prospect with little upside was obviously correct and, like, everyone in the room would agree. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there like, you mean we have a choice in this matter? We can opt out of this?

Honestly, I hadn't even noticed that the university lacked cameras. I had just assumed that they were like everywhere else. I remained involved in university life until 2016, and they did not install any cameras I was aware of during that time. And I think that timeline makes a ton of sense. So in the research for the piece that I did, I had written an entire section that I wanted to put in that I thought I was gonna put in using the research of Shoshana Zuboff, who's a sociologist from Harvard.

And she has this whole thing about surveillance capitalism that she does, which is about the industry, the money that gets put into surveillance all over the place. And she actually puts the rise of cameras into the late nineties, mid to late nineties with Gore. And there's a we'll put a link to it in the show notes, but she's got this really great talk where she tells these anecdotes of being right around that time and being in conferences and having people be like, the information is everything. We need to surveil. We need to surveil.

And so, like, you're exactly right to have noticed it at that moment that that was really what the ascendancy was. And a lot of it was in response to to nine eleven, but it started even before then.

And I feel like we're only just now starting to see what the people who wanted the cameras might want to and be able to use them for. Yeah. Twenty years ago, they were like, we should install. We should build a horrible machine. Yeah.

And in 2025, they're like, we should turn the machine on. Yeah. For

that 02/2006 AP article, I found a New York Times article also that was talking about that same event from February. And in that, they basically were like, yeah. It's kinda weird, I guess, but, like, the quality of them is so low, and the data is so big, and you have to actually go to, like, pull the data out of the camera. So I don't think it'll ever get big. We laid the groundwork back then, and all we had to do is fix those small.

You really didn't think cameras were gonna get better? You really didn't think connectivity was gonna improve? Like, that was the only way it was gonna be limited, and now here we are exactly like Mike says. Chris also wrote in, and I really I think this is a really striking comment. Chris works at Walmart and says that there are cameras everywhere.

The self checkout area alone has at least two cameras per checkout spot. One is to look at your face as a customer, and the other is to watch your scanning technique waiting for when you make a mistake or you might be trying to steal like the carrot technique. There are very few spots where there is not a camera of some kind. In fact, I tend to take notice of where there is a blind spot or a weird lack of cameras. I feel constantly watched because I'm being constantly watched.

That's true. But I also know from talking to coworkers and customers that they do not really feel this way, which is very interesting. But also, like, I can't say that. That's deeply relatable. Like, that's what my whole piece was about.

Like Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You normalize it. Yeah. I know I'm constantly being watched, but I rarely engage with that knowledge.

Yeah. I don't have feelings about it. And and it took me a lot of looking at it to actually have have any feeling.

I wanna briefly return to this self checkout thing. Because just the fact of the normalization of of watching yourself. Because I even think of this at Target. Right? Like, the self checkout camera is showing you yourself.

Like, you can look at it. You're watching yourself there. And what's interesting to me is, like, I have a lot of friends whose impulse when they see that is to, like, take a picture of themselves, like, with their phone of the self checkout screen that's showing them. Yeah. And it's I don't I just find that's, like, such an interesting reaction in the conversation of this normalization of just like, yep.

That's me, and here's me, and here's my phone, and here's the screen.

Taking the power back. And now I'm the you're I'm making content out of you. So yeah. You're the commodity.

Have you guys tried to buy a power tool at a like a Home Depot recently?

Oh, you know, haven't.

In the in the hardware aisle where, like, you know, the angle grinders or whatever are in the Home Depot, there are cameras now and then small little screens that again show you what camera what the camera that you're on. And that picture is sent to a building somewhere else. I don't I don't know where in another state where there are people who just sit there and watch.

Woah.

It is an outsourced company that looks specifically at the tools in Home Depot to make sure that no one steals them. And I once heard a man, like, talk to someone through the camera to, like, explain because someone was, like, trying to pick up something, and they was like, hey. You can't you're not gonna be able to pick that up. You gotta go get someone.

If you

pull harder, you're gonna set the alarm off.

Woah. Oh my god. This actually transitions perfectly into the voicemail that Carl sent us about an experience that he had at a local restaurant regarding cameras.

I was just in New Haven last weekend and I went to a really great vegan restaurant or vegetarian restaurant called Claire's Corner Copia, which I've been to a couple of times. And it's this really homey, really cute little restaurant with like drawings of farms on the walls. And really, I mean, I think kitsch in a fun way decor. And as I was kind of looking around enjoying my vegan French toast and taking in the environment, I noticed the camera. I was like, okay, that's, I guess, normal.

Normal for a little restaurant to have a camera. As I was looking around enjoying more of the decor, I noticed another camera and another camera and then two more cameras. And by the end of my sort of aesthetic scan, I've identified 11 cameras in a small dining room

Too many.

Of a small restaurant in the middle of New Haven. Mean, I was bothered, obviously, by all these cameras. But the biggest question for me was how can there be this many cameras covering so small a space? And this sort of like surveillance ideology is so invisible that the owner of, like, a homey vegetarian restaurant in New Haven can think it's good and appropriate to to surveil from every angle possible everybody in the restaurant at once.

I saw this happen on my block with Ring cameras. The exact same thing. When people ins people install a Ring camera, and they're like, I can I can finally see all of the horrible nonsense? They become Batman. And they're like, you know, I must surveil Gotham from the rooftops.

And then they install another camera to get this angle, and then a third camera to get the other angle, and then a fourth. And then they're just watching it all day long to be like, who's that person that walked by in this? And I like I had to leave. My block had a group text, and I was like, I had to leave. I left it because everybody was going insane about just, like, normal city shit that happens on every block.

And I think I think it is surveillance ideology. I think people get addicted to it.

Yeah. Once you pop, you can't stop.

I can just one more camera. Just one more. But agree. Yeah. Jason.

I just back to this rest how many different types of behavior are you policing in that restaurant? Like, I don't know. Put one by the door. If someone ditches, you'll be able to, like, see their face and make this is the guy who ditched. Don't let them back in.

Like, are they eating weird? What do you need to know?

Well, that's my thing is that I'm like like, to Carl's point, who's watching? Like, what are they why do they need this? It's too much. It's just undeniably too much.

Noah Hertz writes in in response to George's piece on the impending once and future never resolves TikTok ban Yes. To brag that he deleted TikTok off his phone. Well well well.

Well well, Noah.

Noah, who you all might remember from the David Social segment.

Yes. Right. And so interestingly, Noah remarks that he doesn't really think his average screen time has come down all that much since he deleted TikTok off the phone. Oh. He was hoping that that would be the case.

He just replaced it with using Instagram more. But he finds that the average scrolling session on Instagram is far far shorter than it was on TikTok.

Mhmm. Because it sucks.

Yeah. Because it's bad. Yeah. But your body still needs the same amount of raw

feed. Scrolling.

Yeah. Now it says they learned a lot of cool stuff, saw lots of cute funny videos. Thanks to TikTok, but also felt like they spend a lot of their time watching whatever slop was being fed to them. Now they think they're getting more out of Instagram than it's getting out of them, which they stopped feeling like with TikTok. So I guess that's progress.

Congratulations, Noah. Thank you for bragging, and I hope that you continue to love what Instagram is giving you. But it's a post script, which I found particularly interesting here. In light of some other emails that came in, Noah included a picture of him listening to Never Post on a classic iPod.

Oh my god.

I'm seeing more and more classic iPods, pictures of them refurbished and modified and jailbroken and whatever in the feed, and I support it. I fully support. Yeah. I think it rules.

Oh my god.

And this leads me to some emails we got harkening back to last summer's Sound Files of Summer episode, where we talked about our evolving strategies of music curation and how we stored and streamed and lost and deleted and refound files of music in our lives. We got an email from Lenny who might not be using the iPod Classic still, but is trading USBs with their friends. Living in Canada where music streaming services and phone data plans cost a lot more than The US, it's common to drive or visit places where you lose cell service and there are no radio stations. Old phones, ancient iPods, and visor holders full of CDs are our friends during these stretches. I often wonder if other places have similar experiences, especially with the rise of cheap Android phones and SD cards for storage.

This is basically becoming our reject modernity use old gear and old protocols episode.

Yeah. Really is. I love

the idea of a like a file swap. Yeah. Like you go to a place and you bring your USB, your thumb drive, you swap files. Sounds great.

Lenny's final contribution to the Sound Files of Summer discourse is to tell me for the second time in this podcast that I was wrong about something.

You should reconsider being wrong so much.

I went on the record as a person who used the star ratings on iTunes. My favorite songs were five stars. My least favorite were one star. Lenny tells me that this is wrong, and that the on the go music management system that works the best is one star for your best music, five stars for the ones you wanna delete so that you can quickly mark a song to delete without taking your iPod out of your pocket, which is some next level behavior, Lenny. You keep up literally everything you're doing up there.

Ronald wrote in in response to the segment that I made about real photos that look like AI and what this does to sort of like our sense of being able to know things and what the truth is and what is real. Ronald wrote, thought you might want to know that AI is already well and truly contributing to the erosion of the foundations of modern scientific inquiry. Academic watchdog blog Retraction Watch recently published an article on vegetative electron microscopy, a borderline nonsense phrase that began making its way into publications apparently because an AI algorithm spliced together words across the gap between two justified columns in an article from 1959. Holy shit. Regardless of its origins, the phrase is almost always an indicator that a paper was produced by a publication mill.

One set of authors claims to use the phrase to define a specific analytic technique, but I'm not enough of an expert in microscopy to adjudicate this claim. If you're trained in the STEM fields, searching Google Scholar for vegetative electron microscopy with the quotation marks is good for a chuckle or maybe a looming sense of dread as one of humanity's best tools for fashioning truth from falsehoods falls into fabrications. One of my favorite results, this article, and we'll put a link in the show notes from 2022, which was low key corrected in June 2024 to remove the offending phrase and to renumber most of the citations, which were apparently wrong. See? Hilarious.

Please help. I'm scared. Ronald,

right there

with you. I think, you know, it's you wanna believe that this sort of technology is used for fun, you know, in with a bunch of quotes around it to make weird silly pictures that you couldn't make otherwise, you know, and maybe people don't know what the cost of that is. But, yeah, it's everywhere.

Yeah. Yeah.

Whoops.

Whoops.

Whoops. Some folks also wrote in about my segment on blocking, where I spoke with Caroline Cinders about what it feels like to block people and what the technology is for and its usefulness and the kind of ambivalence that you can feel around blocking. Alex Posten says, please forgive the following tortured metaphors. I will. Like a lot of people, I began the process of jumping ship from Twitter after the Elon takeover and finally permanently deleted my account after the changes to the block function were announced.

Blocking, IMO, is the most important safety feature for a social platform, and when safety features don't function properly, people get hurt. If Kia pushed an update to my car telling me that going forward, my airbags would only sort of work, I'm shopping for a new car that day. To paraphrase a line from doctor who, blocking isn't self care, it's pest control. And so far, as I'm aware, nobody has built a better mousetrap than blue sky. The nuclear block should be the standard for social media.

I'm sure the of blue sky will come eventually, but for now, I'll just sit back and enjoy the sound of my own voice and the voices of folks I actually wanna hear instead of listening to all the rats skittering behind the walls. I mean, I will say the blue sky block is incredible. It's really great. One wonders whether or not it will eventually be nerfed in some way or another as brands show up because, you know, if Blue Sky wants to make money from brand presence and they want if they end up wanting to do in line advertising, you're right. They almost certainly will not allow you to block as effectively those accounts as they do, you know, other posters because that's gonna be part of their business model.

But fingers crossed, you know, whatever solution comes along, it doesn't detract from what is yeah. Like, a really, really just incredibly effective moderation tool. Ellie also wrote in on a difficult decision to block or to not block someone that she knows in meatspace.

You know, I think often we think about blocking as a tool that we can use for harassment, like you like you mentioned on the show. But the only reason I haven't blocked this particular person that I'm thinking about is that they are, to some extent, still within my existing IRL social network. Right? And this is somebody that had sort of career power over me for a while and is still, to my knowledge, relatively well regarded. And so, you know, I the the thing that's kept me from blocking her for so long is like, what if she finds out?

And then she's like, what beef does Ellie have with me? And, you know, could that have consequences in my career or in or or could that be a reason that I don't get an opportunity later? What does it mean to block someone when you can't block them in real life also, you know?

Yeah. This is extremely

relatable. We're all staring at each other uneasily right

Jason doesn't know I have him muted on everything.

I was gonna say, is this is the case for mute. Right?

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Unless you don't like, it depends upon, I think, how well you know the person and how likely it is in conversation. They're gonna be like, oh, you saw that thing I put.

Right? Like, whatever whatever. Sure. Like, you can always say, like, oh, no. Like, I haven't signed in in a couple days, and there's some, you know, plausible deniability.

But, yeah, there's the case for mute. I also like there are people who I haven't unfollowed because I'm like, I don't I feel some pressure to be, like, continuing to follow this person that I like, you know, really have no interest in seeing anything that goes on with them. Mhmm. But I justify it to myself where I'm like, well, I'm like, think the creepiest way to put it is, like, keeping tabs on them. See what they're up to.

Yeah.

Make sure I'm not where they are.

Is this your version of a vegetarian restaurant full of cameras? And finally, as a tradition rounding out the mailbag and update to cool graffiti that people have sent us. I

think isn't it funny graffiti? I think it's funny tags.

Right? Okay. Yeah.

It used to be single word graffiti. Its purest state is single word graffiti that you found funny. And Hans, I think there's a name in here you might recognize.

Oh, Steven Heil.

Eagle eared listeners might recognize from earlier in the program, Steven Heil. Yeah. Who spotted in Brooklyn, a purist's one word answer, which is okra.

Yes. Scrolled on just a regular brick wall. Yes.

And then for those of us who are allowing more words in these things, a beautiful bathroom wall that says watch Star Trek the next generation.

Solid advice.

I didn't get a picture of it, but I will. And then I will formally submit it for the next. But I saw a tag also in Brooklyn yesterday. Very artfully. Clearly, someone spent a lot of time on it.

It said, oh boy, enema.

Oh boy.

That's great. That's great. There's a lot more graffiti in the mailbag. I'm gonna save some of it for next week because we are running out of time that we have for this week to talk. But there's one more graffiti I wanna talk about before send us all home.

And that is friend of the show Talia has found us another Garfies.

Woo. Oh, no. Woo.

It looks like it looks like this is forever. This is a big titty Garfies.

It sure is.

A big titty Garfie holding a bomb? A bomb? Yes. Absolutely.

I did

a little bit

of research. Now that there's two Garfies. This is apparently a thing in Melbourne. Most specifically, there are Garfies everywhere. Garfies across Say right.

Melbourne. Sorry, everyone. For those of you who are new to Garfies, it is Garfield with tits doing things.

Big tittie Garfield.

They're apparently all over Melbourne, and I have no idea why. And no one else does.

I actually like it less when you do that.

But to remind our listeners that we do accept pitches. Yes.

We the line is open, and we're ready to listen to you.

Toby. Toby.

Okay. That's what we got for you in mailbag. Thank you everybody for writing in, calling in, sending us your voice memos, sending us your emails. Thank you friends for the conversation. We're gonna be back in the feed one week from today on April 9.

We'll see you then.

Bye.