🆕 Never Post! Mailbag #9: Don't Livestream at The Club

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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.

Graffiti!

Hey, folks. A little news right up front here before we get to the mail. We are in the midst of our member drive, and holy moly, y'all are crushing it. We still have a while to go to hit our goals, which we're gonna mention soon during our member drive stream week. Please imagine that emblazoned on a big LED screen, perhaps surrounded by igniting pyrotechnics as though you are at a monster truck rally.

Maybe Jason can pitch me down here and put a MIDI guitar solo in.

Member drive stream week. That's right, folks. Starting at 10AM eastern on Monday, August 18 and going until Friday evening, August twenty second, the Neverpost team will be streaming. Not the entire

time because we have families and need to eat food and stuff, but for a lot of that time

Streaming. Do you wanna know how we write music for the show? Do you wanna see inside Georgia's closet in a

not at all creepy way, but with, like, permission?

Do you wanna find out what the best quote in the world is? Do you want to see Jason play NBA Jam? He's so funny.

Then join us for Member Drive Stream Week. Full schedule to follow. Admission is free, but you can get a bundle. Follow us on Twitch at twitch.tv/theneverpost.

Okay. I'm not gonna lie. When I sat down to make this topper for the mailbag, I did not expect it to go in the direction of fake monster truck rally, but here we are. Member drive stream week, the week of August 18. Twitch.tv/theneverpost.

Go follow us now so you get notifications when we go live. See you there. Friends, hello, and welcome to the Never Post Mailbag episode four, Dog Days twenty twenty five, in which we respond to listener emails, comments, voicemail, and voice messages about our segments. We love hearing from you. Well, most of you.

You know who you are.

You know who you are.

Is it Mom. Please

just kidding, mom. Love you. You send an email whenever you want. Do get in touch. Tell us your thoughts on our segments.

All the ways you can get a hold of us are in the show notes. Drop us a line and maybe Hans will respond with some of the things he ate most recently at the state fair. Anything anything sticking out to you as a teaser?

Well, we haven't we haven't gone yet. I mean, it's we're gonna wait. It starts twentieth.

So

Oh, really? Oh, I thought it already started.

No. Twelve days Mike, come on. It's the twelve days before Labor Day.

Every Like, we all know that. We We do so.

Know. Wait. How far in advance of the state fair do they publish the menu?

Quite a while. It's a it's a big old deal. That's hilar okay. I had no clue. Yeah.

Alright. Yep. I'm your host Mike Rugnetta. Joining me today paired with who I assume their go to characters in Mario Kart world are are Never Post producer Georgia Hampton. I'm calling Dry Bones.

I'm gonna say Dry Bones.

Yes. Wow.

Got it in one?

Yes. Yes. I love tripods. Love

and I love my little skeletal boy.

I'm going entirely on vibe here, not like, Yeah. You know,

This is more just like who each of us are as people.

What a

well, okay. We'll see how Jason responds to this next one. Never post executive producer, Jason Oberholzer, Waluigi.

So I'm right.

Yeah. It's either Bowser or one of the was.

My brother-in-law is a big Bowser devotee, and I'm gonna say he's probably right. Bowser is actually probably the correct choice.

It is. But, you know, I'll take any of the bad boys. I like to be a bad boy when I'm on the track.

And finally, never post senior producer Hans Buto, lack it too.

I do love to drop a spiny shell. Love it. You're not wrong.

Wait, Mike. Who are you then?

Yeah. My go to is Shy Guy.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm a

little upset. Seems like you can no longer pick the color of your Shy Guy, which is sad to me. Sorry, bud. You know what's gonna help me take my mind off of this? Bagging some mail.

Okay.

Okay. Kick us off. We wanna set the mood. We wanna settle us into kind of the vibe of the day. And let's see let's see if we can do this with Michael Bukino, who sent us this poem saying that has been rattling around in their head on long bike rides around.

Well, I'll let you guess where.

The bugs in my beard I bring back from my bike ride are just souvenirs from failed attempt flybys, buzzing and bumping and flipping and flapping, jittering, jumping, slithering, slapping. One proboscis, two antennae, 6,000 or so limbs, shiny shells, wondrous wings, and a slimy trail of mucin. Each camouflage colorful, cute, creepy crawly hitching a lift on the fuzzy face trolley can look like a lot at the end of my hall, but these little critters don't bug me at all.

Bug beard. Bug beard.

Bug beard. Bug beard. Michael. So good. Is that

fuzzy face trolley? What's that?

Into it. Good mood set.

That's I feel like we're ready to go.

Okay. Let's bring it right down.

I don't get too excited.

So we got a few comments about AI Mike, who everybody will remember took over for me while I was on vacation. One thing regarding AI Mike that we, I guess, did not make clear enough is that Jason wrote the words. Yes.

I am at fault. I did it.

There were some folks who were concerned that maybe we had used an LLM. We didn't. Jason wrote it. It was a script. Mhmm.

I also like I don't know how much LLM output you've seen, but I encounter a fair amount of it online now. And I don't think I think Jason's far funnier than a than a than a computer.

I love to clear a low bar. The

voice of AI Mike was AI generated based on, I assume, me reading the news. Hans, is that true?

You know what? It's actually a model made of you reading copy for the first pilot segment that we ever did that no one but us has ever heard.

Interesting. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. I I mess with it a lot.

Why did you why that as raw material?

That's just the one that I made, and I feel like it doesn't quite sound like you in a way that I really, really love. Like, it kinda it sounds enough like you that it's recognizable, but I really like pushing it and making it sound weird. One of the things I enjoyed about this instance of using it use Eleven Labs to do it, and they are they have an they're an alpha for a brand new version of it, which allows you to add in tags for mood. And so I got really into using the wrong mood tag for your for what you were supposed to be experiencing in that moment and just seeing what it would do. And I turned the variability, like, all the way up and, like, the comic express or, like, I don't remember all the the the different things, but, like, I really ratchet it.

And I really believe in that. Like, I really believe in having Mike AI Mike announce itself Yeah. As AI, and that it was done with permission. You gave us permission to make an AI model of you. And then just like messing with it because it's I think way more funny that way.

Jay Springit on Blue Sky asked, could you speak or reflect a little bit on how it felt to listen to and experience AI Mike like as me? And I think that factors into factors heavily into my experience of it, which is that it's I enjoy it, maybe not entirely, but significantly because of how strange it is. Mhmm. I wonder I was wondering as I was listening to it. I was like, could we ever actually use this as a tool when we like have to retract something?

I would be curious to know what you think Hans, but my feeling is that it might not be as easy as one might think it should be.

I think that's right. I think

at the moment, no. Yeah. And I wanna be clear parenthetically that we actually had access to you. We chose to make

Yes.

That is true.

Even though we had full access to you to

be able to record this. We thought it was funny. Yes.

And it was out of deference to your vacation. You did the thing that, you know, you're not supposed to do.

Took a real vacation.

You took a real vacation. Yeah. And you should

be punished for that. Yes.

You were.

And you were. Yeah.

No. The thing you did that you're not supposed to do is you brought a microphone on vacation just in case we needed any punch ins or anything there. And when we did, you were going to set up and we said, no. You go have your stupid vacation.

Go enjoy your

family. Yeah. That we instead we're gonna do this because it would be fun for us and would force you to not stop vacationing.

And I think that this would be hard to to earnestly make a mic because it just doesn't sound enough like you. No. I think we retrained it on a little bit better copy, it would work like we're more in gave it more intentional training material

It could get closer.

Than yeah. To make it closer to you, and then really like worked at it maybe, and definitely in like a year, because a year ago, the technology was wildly different. This is also why I like to use it is because I think it's really important to kind of understand what state the the technology is in, and it changes so quickly that I mean, I was making fun of the the emotion tags, but it's pretty incredible what it can do. It can sigh. It can laugh.

It creates mics laugh weirdly. It can, like, cluck. It can do all sorts of things. I can make it sing. I made it sing.

What mood is Yeah.

Feeling barnyard.

And that's just gonna get more that's just we're gonna have have more and more nuanced control where we're gonna be able to do more and more nuanced things with it. So I think eventually, yes. I don't think it's there yet.

Yeah.

To me, there's a distinction where this does not feel like generative AI. I would not call this generative AI. Yeah. To me generative AI is something that is performing the facsimile of creativity. Yeah.

That is being marketed as AI. This to me is an audio tool wielded by humans, the same way that the iZotope suite of plugins includes a lot of audio tools that are AI marketed and motivated that are used by us to do things that we cannot do on our own.

And that's you mean things like, you know, that's noise reduction.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Like finding the profile of the reverberations of a room and then showing me that profile so that I can take it out.

I mean, I do realize the intrusion of AI into everything is incredibly frustrating. You know, we hate it too. So I hope it's balm enough to know that we didn't use any big gross generative AI tools in this episode nor any other episode. So, you know, we understand. I totally understand.

We only got a few emails about this, but, you know, I wanted to make sure that

we take them seriously. Let's dive back into more meta mailbag action. As predicted, mailbags beget mailbags topics. In response to the previous mailbag, there were two emails I wanted to pull out. One, a piece of gear recommendation.

Wait. Dude, you just lifted your cat over your head when you said that. Was that is that is Robert being recommended to us?

He's Bluetooth enabled.

We got an email from Manuel who says, friends, I wanna share my dumbified, I'd rather use that term, not frictionless, way to consume audio media. I got one of those bone conducting earphones which are also waterproof, so I can use them while running or swimming. They have an internal memory, so I can go around and listen to stuff without having to constantly carry my phone with me, which has drastically reduced how much time I spend looking at it. But I think the best feature, in my opinion, is how little options this device has. Volume up, volume down, skip forward, skip backward, pause.

No shuffle, no playlist or anything. As soon as the last file is played, the loop starts from the beginning. This forces me to regularly curate my content which I find very refreshing. It still feels weird not to have the weight of the phone in my pocket, or not having to worry about how far from the phone I'm going before the Bluetooth signal drops, but I'm getting used to moving freely.

I've had to get

getting used to moving freely. The only downside listen, this is important. I get this. The only downside is that I can't skip ads. But oh no, wait.

This is not an issue at all. Because for only $4 a month, I can get Never Post without ads. And I can guarantee you that listening to pet sounds while underwater is really something.

Oh, Manuel. Oh, Manuel. VIP.

That is

incredible with the plug. Mhmm.

That's so rad. I've never heard of that.

Have you have you ever experienced have you have you has anyone ever tried bone conduction headphones?

People have told me this happens. I've never done it.

I've never heard of this before. I'm so curious.

So this is if you ever look at, like, if you watch, like, military movies and stuff, these are the headphones that they often have on. So what they do is it it attaches to your jaw or around your jaw, and it sends the vibrations of the audio through your skull, through the bones, which keeps your ear canal open so you can fully hear everything that's still happening with full fidelity. But what happens is your head becomes a resonating chamber, and you hear the whatever's happening kind of in the center of your

head. What?

Yeah. I used to wear one I used to wear one when I was a bike messenger so that I could keep my ears clear and I could hear traffic, but I could still hear the like, whatever was happening on the radio.

I think of them as being popular for folks who work in offices. Right? And you can't, you know, you have to be present and like, listen listening to your environment, but also listen to Neverpost and the ad free feed only $4 a month.

This actually relates in some ways to the other email I wanted to pull out that responded to last mailbag from Oliver, who is responding to a comment Mike made while we were chatting that said, there is no knowing things without the body. The body is so really intimately involved in knowledge. This made Oliver think. He says, it made me think about how much of our communication online is flattened to the written word or to emojis, and the added importance of good written communication education and literacy. Years ago, I wrote my master's thesis on written education and literacy, ostentatious title incoming.

Yes. Let's go.

Writing do. The way of writing, the instructional effectiveness of kinesthetic teaching methods as called from martial arts.

That sounds sick as hell.

Yeah. In it, I discussed how physical movements can inform our methods of communication, and you can take the teaching methods from a physical art like karate, capoeira, or tai chi, and transfer them to the analytical art of written communication, or learning critical pedagogy, or learning eco composition. The big thrust of my argument, which I still stand by decades later, is a punch and a sentence are fundamentally the same thing. As both are delivering an idea or feeling from the creator to the recipient. Both speaking and sparring are dialogues.

For many students, thinking of grammar is tricky, but when you tell them that when a happens, do b, much like when punch comes to chest, do this block, the simplicity can click for some. I firmly believe that more people should learn the distinction between learning and knowing. My best example is a physical one. You can learn that a knife is sharp all you want by studying it, by looking at the blade profile, but the moment you accidentally nick yourself, you know it is sharp, and that will stick with you for all your days.

A sentence and a punch are fundamentally the same thing, goes hard.

It really does.

In two ways.

True.

I think about this sort of thing all the time, because I I read a lot, and over the last couple years, I have really gone to great lengths to try to cut down on how much I read that's like important to me. Like, I I wanna know it just, know, for my own knowledge or for work on a screen. I try really really hard to not read things on a screen that I need to remember because I find that I just don't remember them as well. Mhmm. Mhmm.

And I was actually thinking about this, like, this morning. I gotta go get a book from the library, and I was thinking about, like, my schedule of, when and how I'm gonna read it, and, you know, how I'm gonna fit it into my day. And I started thinking about I was like, am I should I choose somewhere unique to go and read this in the hopes that that lets me remember things about it easier. I wonder if my, like, embodied knowledge of this text will have, like, greater resolution if I'm somewhere that I am not normally. Is Hans is making all kinds of hand motions.

Yeah. My this is a thing. This I find this amazing. I think about it all the time. My editor at the New York Times, who's incredible, she would not take notes when she would listen.

So I would send her audio of something, and then she would go and she would walk. We all know about, like, how walking stimulates the brain and all of that, but she would geolocate her notes. So when she got back to her computer, she would remember her walk and be like, okay. Green Volkswagen. That was the part where Hans did this thing, and I wanted to change it to this thing.

Broken mailbox. Okay. Like, that's how she did her notes was by locating them geographically in physical space, which I always, like, is so fascinating to me to, like, really embody, really locate information in space.

Yeah. I think this is really interesting thinking of the way communication exists in different three d or four d forms. Because I have a version of this sometimes with music where I can remember things better because I was listening to a certain part of a song when I was writing something, or if I was taking notes on something. Like, it it, like, recalls that memory to me easier because of the auditory connection I've made.

Mhmm. Yeah. I believe that.

And I'm also curious, Oliver, if in your writing in this piece, like, if at all and how maybe dance can be another example of this. Because to me, like, dance is an interesting physical version of this where it's less confrontational. You're not physically fighting each other, but you are still physically communicating to each other. It is also something you can do by yourself in the way that you can be talking to yourself. You can be dancing alone.

And I don't know. I'm I'm interested in knowing more about the physical manifestation of communication beyond just physical fighting.

Well, this is not gonna be the last time we talk about dance. So dance heads, get ready. Because there's a bunch of emails that came into Georgia about dance we'll do later. The final thing this reminds me of, I haven't thought about this in a long time, Back when I had to remember more phone numbers because you just had to remember more phone numbers. I started linking the numbers to notes of the scale, so that I could sing somebody's phone number and that's how I remember them.

What? You'd make a melody out of it?

You would make a melody out of it. Oh.

I love that.

Because you're only ever getting up to like a tenth. Right? Yeah. I would make a little melody and I could the melody or if it's like an easy to remember harmonic structure, I'd remember that and someone's number would be a harmonic structure.

Cool. Next up is a comment from Matt Storm, who sent us a voice mail message about the story that I did about animating photos using AI. So taking still images, moving them into moving images.

And this reminds me of something I've been seeing a lot on TikTok lately, which is this AI tool that turns people into mermaids or makes your pets dance. I've seen them both, and I block every account I see using them because they just unsettle me. There's something about forcing an image, even if it's your own image, into a situation that's not real through AI that just makes my skin crawl. And I don't even know that I could tell you why. Right?

And Hans talks about this in his piece. But I'm curious if you guys have seen this trend and what you think about it. You know, I just there's something about manipulating images. The one that really gets me that I've seen on TikTok is making two people kiss in an image. Like, that goes against everything that consent represents.

Right? You are forcing two people who you cannot ask if they wanna kiss to kiss. It drives me bonkers. Sorry. I'm getting heated.

Anyway, I'm curious how you think this connects to consent and basically your thoughts on that as well. Thanks. Keep up the awesome stuff.

Matt, incredible. That is a huge part of the reason that people have been talking about making a new Humphrey Bogart movie or something or, like, animating our historical figures into things is, oh, well, the dead can't consent. But, like, I think we've seen it's not just the dead anymore who, can you consent or not consent? Do you have to this is the thing that that Tory brought up. Do you have to actively opt out of having anything done with your image?

Do we have to make this a part of our wills? Georgia, have you seen these? You're our you're our TikTok maven. Have you seen these things that Matt is talking about?

So I haven't actually seen videos of, like, people turning themselves into mermaids or making people kiss as much, but it reminds me a lot of this music video that Kanye West did, like, years ago called Famous, in which he portrayed himself in bed with a bunch of other famous people, including Taylor Swift, and it engendered this huge response and a lot of controversy. And I believe Taylor Swift maybe taking legal action against him, or there at least being this very huge outcry against this kind of act. And it reminds me a lot of this because there is a question of consent here. And at the time, I think there was so much fixation on like, oh, well, you're super famous. Like, do you own the image of yourself?

Do you have to like, do you have the right to tell someone that they can't represent you in a certain way? Yeah. If you're making someone kiss or do anything, frankly, there's this question of consent. And what makes me even more uncomfortable is this suggestion that maybe consent, like, isn't required for someone to do this, especially if they think it's funny. So up next, we got a very interesting message from Josh, in regard to a segment I did on tactility and the general lack of buttons on our devices and how interfacing with the smoothness of technology leaves us wanting.

A couple years ago for Christmas, I got this fantastic gooseneck kettle electric kettle for boiling water that you can program to set the water to specific temperatures for your various snobby high end coffees and teas. This gooseneck kettle is perfect. It does exactly what I needed to do. Nothing more, nothing less. However, the buttons on the front of it, they're not touch screens, they're, touch capacitive buttons that don't actually go down.

But they also look like buttons and feel like buttons and that there's crevices and they're different shape and color than the surrounding area of the the base of the kettle. So there's a very serious design flaw here that I didn't discover until I had the thing for a couple weeks, which is water makes touch capacitive buttons get touched. Yes. So, like, anytime water from the kettle or was coming into or out of or close to the kettle would drip down, it would touch the button and make it go off. And because it was wet and it had crevices like a real button, the water would just sit in there and I had to wait for it to dry itself out before I could actually make the thing work again, which often postponed getting my water to the perfect temperature for five or ten minutes and, being a very frustrating experience.

Oh my god.

I'm so proud of Josh for not just screaming that entire time.

I mean, again, it's it's this hubris of technological quote unquote advancement. The blind trudging forward of certain kinds of technological fads, which I think honestly is what this is, is it just is endlessly telling on itself. Like, it's ridiculous. That doesn't make any sense. Like, yeah, it it should be something wherein, product testing that comes up immediately.

I think it's so interesting that they don't actually save anything. Like, the whole point of being touch sensitive is you wouldn't have

to have the you wouldn't have

to make it look feel like a button, but they wanted it to look and feel like a button, but also have that like, why not just make them buttons then? Why Yeah. Why make

it a

different thing?

Yeah. But you can't market a kettle with a button in the description on the Amazon page. It's kettle with touch sensitivity that goes right in Yeah. The title description, which is how we buy things now.

Yeah.

It's a psyop. It's a psyop.

It's a psyop. Psyop.

It's unraveling society. One cup of coffee at a time. Speaking of psyops, I did a segment a little while ago about how everything is increasingly feeling like a gamble or like gambling, and that feeling is really prevalent online. And we got a voice mail from Tom about this.

As an artist, you know, I feel like over the last decade, we're being bombarded with all these different, you know oh, if you wanna make a living online, you need to be posting at these times. You need to be posting this often. Use hashtags. Don't use hashtags. Go.

Twitter's blocking hashtags. Go. X hashtags. In the blue sky, they work. It's it's this this constant deluge of information.

At a certain point, it starts to feel like, does anyone actually know what these what you know, if these tips work? Like No. Because the platform changes how the rules work from one day to the next without even letting us know. It just feels like we're we're sort of thrown to see, I guess, dealing with all this. And at a certain point, for your own mental health, I feel like you need to just say fuck it and just post what you want to post when you wanna post it.

You know, if if you if you worry about all of the different possible factors, then you're gonna be so petrified. You wanna be able to to create anything. It's sad out here, but but not caring about those things had done wonders for my mental health. And my followers have gone up. So yay.

Yay. I think yay. Yes. Yay. Yay.

Yay, Tom.

Yeah. I agree. I think trying to imagine the world that the algorithm wants, wherever algorithm it is that you're, you know, trying to imagine is just such a trap. I think if you're like a really particular kind of person, it can be like a fulfilling challenge. Like if I think, you know, there are some people who I've met in my life online who are really good at just figuring out, like, having an intuitive sense of like what to put up when and where and with what metadata around it.

But

like, that's what they do. You know what I mean? Like, they really really invest a lot of time into building that skill and staying up on, like you say, all of the algorithm changes. And I think that's not for everyone. I think it's not for the vast majority of people.

I think the other secret to this is that it's like, you I don't necessarily think that making and posting things that the algorithm likes, wherever that is, is going to be the thing that makes a particular poster or account popular. It is something that can assist in reach on a platform and thus help you become more popular, but it's not like the make or break thing. And in that way, it really is just so much more fulfilling and less crazy making to just focus on the thing itself. And then, you know, let all that other stuff just sort of like, if you can't think about it, sure, why not? But like, don't force yourself to do it.

You're just gonna you're just gonna go nuts. We also got a voicemail from user friendly sounds.

Before I start, I would just like to sort of make it clear that I generally agree with what Mike is saying in the piece and overall think social media is bad. With that out of the way, being somewhat of a semi pro content creator, I suppose, and more from an artistic standpoint, I just wanted to mention a couple of things. In regards to the few times that it seems like there's a suggestion that maybe posting is just a slot machine like as scrolling. I think I kind of agree with the idea in some ways, but to other creators out there, I just sort of wanted to to at least defend it a little bit. And the main point is that it is fairly low effort to scroll.

It's really high effort in a lot of cases, obviously not all cases. In a lot of cases, it's high effort to post. And regardless of how many views or clicks or likes or whatever the thing is that you get, you still made the thing and that's valuable. And if you continue to make the thing, it's gonna improve over time just by default. But I think, this sort of idea of a writer or a painter or a musician practice your craft every day, write something every day, make a beat every day, whatever the thing is, that is a really good technique.

But I think it can actually be improved if you make a thing every day and then show it to people. Because you're gonna create a little bit differently when you know that you're gonna be putting in front of somebody, whether that's 50 people or a million people, it doesn't matter. It's for a lot of us, it's gonna we're gonna think a little bit differently about how we're making what we're making if we're planning on sharing it.

So first things first. If you don't know, User Friendly's work, he's on Instagram, I think mostly, and his work rules. User Friendly Sounds is great. He's like a great glitchy sound designer, like music maker, makes great visuals. So one, highly recommend User Friendly's work.

Second, like I agree broadly with all of these things. I think we were generally in agreement. I know that it doesn't seem this way, but I don't want the point of that segment at least to fully come across as like social media is bad. I think the thing that I'm trying to figure out how to say is that it's like, social media is bad when you surrender too much of your agency to it. It's really really easy to forget that like, we have agency in these relationships that we have with technology, and like that's the thing that's bad.

And it's bad that the software is designed on purpose to like siphon that to siphon that agency away from you or to give you excuses to give it up and to reward you with these paltry things to do so. I can understand the idea that, like, posting is high effort and scrolling is low effort, But I think the moment we're in now, we have a lot of people who talk about just like getting trapped in social media. You know, this started as like, oh, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, right, like a decade or two ago. And you like lost a bunch of hours reading interesting things. Now, it's like, well, I'm, you know, really just deleted two hours scrolling through TikTok, which is itself, I think, a kind of high effort activity.

It it's a it's a lot of energy being spent, But, yeah, it doesn't have the outcome of like, well, then at least you made something. I think sometimes we like dilute ourselves a little bit and thinking like, well, now I know more about what's happening on the Internet or like, I've experienced the sort of media or information environment for a little bit, and that's good for me for reasons. But, yeah, for the most part, you don't come out with anything, but you do, I think, expend a lot of effort.

Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about this before specifically with TikTok. And I know I've said the thing that I experience all the time with TikTok where I'll just be sort of sucked into it and then kind of zap myself out and be like, what am I looking for right now?

Yeah. Because I've realized that over however long that I've been on TikTok, I feel this, like, growing frenzy, within me of, like, where is it? Where is it? Like and, like, I'm not looking for anything, but there is yeah. This sort of boiling a frog situation where maybe at first, scrolling through TikTok especially seems low effort, kind of relaxing, just like I wanna kind of go down the lazy river of my mind.

And then it it changes. It never stays like that.

Yeah. The yeah. The feeling I get is like, I'll be like, where am I going? Where do I Yeah. Think I'm headed?

And Yes. Have I have I arrived there?

Is there a destination at all, in fact? Mhmm.

I also think that his point about repetition of showing creativity to people, or in this case, a defensive posting, which I'll allow. Showing it to people in the form of a post is well taken. That is true. You do create differently when a perceived audience stops being imagined and starts becoming real.

100%.

And I think it's probably beneficial whether or not your endgame involves showing things to people as posts for remuneration. I think it's probably valuable even if it's just to make better paintings or whatnot. So I think it's about taking point. There's one more email in here about the gambling segment from Gustav. He says he's been thinking about the old expression, the house always wins.

Gustav says, the reason why casinos design their spaces and games to keep people playing is because they, over the long run, get more out of you than you get out of them. I think it holds true for online platforms though as astute media savvy folks, e g listeners have never post, $4 a month if you don't remember. We might believe we're gaming that system in some way. Like because we maybe use ad blockers or VPNs and curate our feeds well, we can get more out of the platform than it can extract from us. On an individual level, it might be true.

Even casinos will have customers who get in when a small amount get out in time. But on a societal level, the level of these massive platforms, those cases are probably insignificant. The question then is, what does winning look like for the owners of these platforms? If Google decided to weigh their algorithms to favor anti regulation messaging, or Meta decided to subtly back right wing reactionaries, would we have any way of stemming the tide of public opinion? Would we even know what was going on, and could we prove them culpable?

I think what's happening with Elon's takeover Twitter might just be a more visible and incompetent version of a process that is shaping world politics already in less obvious ways. Gustav, I think the question of what does winning look like for a particular platform is a very good question. The extent to which we can guess about what is already happening, I will leave to any individual mind. But I think it's very instructive to think about, whereas a casino has a very obvious definition of what winning is, extracting money from people who walk in their doors. Platforms, I think have a more complicated version of what winning ends up looking like.

Ultimately, course, separating us from our money, but there are a lot of other games they are playing, especially as their vestigial tendencies from their ZERB funded beginnings still play themselves out.

Yeah. I mean, to it's I think the comparison to the house holds and I think yeah, Jason, your point about like, really they separate people from their time and their money, separate them from their their time to get their money Mhmm. Is true. But like the big difference is that a casino, it's not like gray goo. You know, like it doesn't the casino doesn't grow.

Yeah. Casinos rule.

That's the difference.

You can smoke cigarettes in there.

In defensive casinos. Yeah.

I never smoked a cigarette in my phone.

Just, you know, imagine if, like, Caesar's Palace just grew one inch every minute and just swallowed swallowed the entirety of The United States and then the world.

I mean, that's kind of what it is. Right? Like, thinking about this when, Jason, you were reading it, it feels very much like, yeah, that the notion of winning when it comes to online platforms is exists in my mind as the way that universe is endlessly expanding. There is kind of no end point. It's always growing in the same way our individual experience on platforms is this feeling of kind of chasing something or following something.

There's no satisfying, I've reached the end of the stack of stuff, like, that's never going to happen. I think the same is true for platforms,

but in

a more evil way.

Well, you know one thing that does have a clear ending? The first half of this podcast episode.

We're gonna go to a break

and come back with more emails and voice messages. Welcome back, gamblers. We have an email from Crow in response to the leaving social media roundtable. Crow says, whenever I feel the urge to check Instagram and Twitter, I have to do it through my phone's browser app, because Crow has deleted the applications themselves. The browser app, which is a terrible experience just because of how bizarre it feels.

And I think it really works for me because I'm just so much more aware of how awful social social media is when the act of browsing is also awful. Twitter is already a terrible website, but intentionally making my own user experience worse is actually kind of liberating. I know y'all have talked about the tactic of using your phone screen time function to limit social media use, but that's still a product of design. I think maybe we should be using anti design tactics. Yeah.

This is like using hostile architecture on yourself. Yeah. Exactly.

I used to do this and it works really well.

Okay.

I use Firefox Focus, which is the mobile browser that only has one tab. You can't open more than one tab in it. And when you quit What? It's and it's a permanent private mode. So it doesn't save any cookies.

It doesn't keep you logged into things. It deletes your history. When you quit the app, it loses the page, and when you reopen it, it's just blank. There's nothing there.

It roots out the page code, deletes the page itself. It comes to

your house and smacks

you around a little.

It goes back in time.

Cheese your car.

Yeah. It

rules. I it is like, you know, I worry about the day that it is no longer maintained because it is the fact that it has no features is its best feature, and it does really help me, like, deal with, you know, this kind of thing, like staying off of stuff.

So like you open something up into this delicate ecosystem that you know will fail. Like, does that change how you interact with it? You can't be like, oh, I'll come back to this later, or oh, saving this, and like letting it like, do you have to resolve everything as you're doing it? What does it change for you?

Yeah. I don't well, like, means that I'm not, let's say, like, logged into Bandcamp constantly. Right? So I can't if I wanna buy a record, right, I have to log in to Bandcamp and add it to cart and then what what you know, I can't just go to the tab where I have Bandcamp open already logged in. Yeah.

So like that's just a recent example of like, you know, putting putting roadblocks in my way so that I don't like spend too much money, so that I don't spend too much time online.

I feel like what we're kinda talking about here is just removing convenience.

Yeah. I think so.

It turns things into this featureless, smooth, frictionless experience. And I I really like this idea of of adding friction.

You gotta get yourself a browser that stands in your doorway and goes, uh-uh.

No. No. No.

Gotta get you a bone conducting earphone. It has its own memory.

This conversation actually ties into the next comment that we got, which is from our friend, best friend, we love you, Tom Lum.

Yes. We love you.

Love Tom. Tom.

Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom sent us something saying, quote, I wanted to share these two TikToks that I leave the app on whenever I need to focus to stop myself from mindlessly opening the app and scrolling. And Georgia, you are the resident.

TikTok I'm already there, baby.

Can you

tell us tell us what I haven't even opened these yet. Tell us what's going on.

Okay. The first link. It's person on a couch. The text above them says, that moment when you're done rotting and ready to be a human. It's exactly what I've described.

Basically, what they're doing is sitting there and then they kinda go like, and throw their phone like onto the floor or just stand up and are like, alright. Alright. Alright. Alright. That's enough.

And yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what it feels like. And then the second one interesting. Okay.

This is good. I like this.

Single image of a big old block of what looks like cheddar cheese with text over it that reads, if you're looking at this block of cheese, you have scrolled to the bottom of your FYP, and it's time for you to get off TikTok and go to sleep. Your eyes are getting heavy, and you need to go to sleep and get some rest for whatever you're doing tomorrow. You have been on TikTok way too long. I hope you sleep well and have sweet dreams. Good night.

Perfect. Perfect. There's typos, which make it even better.

Yeah. They're sure. It's even better.

Yep. Thanks, Tom. In our next set of questions, we got some questions slash stories from some folks asking about how many cameras are there. From the segment, how many cameras are there, where I ask the question, how many

How many

cameras are there?

Keep it going. One more time.

Just how many cameras are there?

The first one was anonymous, and they said, I worked at a small location with a very small number of employees, about three to five, and an overbearing micromanaging boss who was there almost every day. About a year into working there, he installed cameras in the store, ones that he could view the feed from his phone. Shrugging it off as security, we went about our workdays just like normal. He would come into the store less, and when he was away, we would talk shit as coworkers often do. Somehow the tension and horrible vibes in the store became increasingly worse than usual whenever the boss was in.

One day, I was complaining about him when one of my coworkers pulled me aside and showed me a sheet of paper that said, quote, I think he's listening to us. The immediate shock I felt, exclamation point. I felt embarrassed too because, of course, I had said things that I wouldn't say to his face. I then looked at the laws in my state regarding surveilling employees and found out that, yeah, it was in fact okay to listen in on employees.

Oui.

The idea of him watching and listening to us on his phone, found upsetting. It was a real invasion of privacy in my opinion. What I wear, whether or not I can use my phone at all, and the time I have to be at work and confined to a specific building are already controlled by my employer. My speech being controlled as well felt like an insult to injury. I think a time before security systems like that was a time where you could be more human, slack off a little, joke around with coworkers.

I don't want to be forced to be a robot just because I know someone is watching. I think this is harrowing. Like, that's just really, really hard to realize how much you're being surveilled, And there's a lot in this. There is, however, one thing in here that I wanna point out that I think is important for people to think about that people probably know, but I think people know but don't know, which is what is a reasonable expectation of privacy? I think we get really it's it's a thread that I think goes through some of the things we've already talked about in this episode.

But when anonymous tells us that it was they looked up state laws regarding surveilling employees that, yeah, it is okay, in fact, okay to listen in on employees. That's true. If you're in a public space or if you're in a privately owned space with rules to that says it is possible, if there's a sign at the door, it depends on where you are. These things are completely legal and allowed to happen. What is your expectation of privacy is quite low, actually.

And places that we haven't really figured out is what if you bring a device in or is giving away a bunch of data an a breach in privacy in other ways. I can for example, Minnesota, where I live, is a one party consent state. Not all are, which means if I do an interview, I can legally record it as long as I know I'm recording it. One party in the conversation has to know it's being recorded, and that party can be me doing the recording. Please note I would never do this.

This is not a tactic that I use, but it is legally allowed. And that's just one example of many of how the right to privacy is pretty sticky, and actually when you confront where we are allowed to be surveilled is is pretty gross and doesn't feel good.

It should be a law that you can talk shit about your boss. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just put it right in the constitution.

We're we're working. That thing's a work in progress right now anyways. Let's just put it in there.

For real.

I feel

like it's I feel like it's open.

We could

somebody opened the door.

Maybe it's a requirement, actually. Article one. You are legally required to talk shit about your boss.

Article one. Your boss is a herb.

Fuck that guy.

Anonymous also pointed us to a website, instacam.org, which is insecam, instacam.org, on which anyone can access any video feed of any unsecured surveillance camera that has a connection to the Internet, which I have not looked at and cannot verify, but woah. Click Let's all go check that out. Yep. Yeah.

Everyone click until you can see Georgia.

We also got a comment from Stevie, who said in response to a comment that Carl made in the in the two mailbags ago about counting 11 cameras in a famous vegetarian restaurant and musing about what do they need all of that surveillance for.

So I used to work in fine dining, and we used to have cameras essentially over every table in the dining room so that, we could see the rate at which people were eating. We served, like, tasting menus. We served, like, prefix menus. So we wanted to know as soon as people were done, so we could clear their tables and drop the new dishes.

There you go, folks. Reasonable expectation of privacy. Woah.

God. Woah. Fuck

that. Yeah. Oh my god.

This sucks, dude. Yeah.

Talk about a seafood dinner. Hey.

Oh my god.

It's good now. I like it now.

The last one we got on this was from Dean, who sent us a, something about phone cameras.

The phone camera has obviously become ubiquitous, and I think a angle that I can't remember if it was in the original story or not, is this fear that comes with the phone camera of, at least for me, ending up viral without noticing. The idea that has, like, escalated since, like, twenty ten's prank videos of anybody could be filming you for their funny TikTok or making fun of you or something. And yikes.

Well, dude. Oh,

You great minds. Georgia, why don't you take this?

You got a big storm coming.

I think just as a quick aside, I think about every time I'm walking around the city carrying something weird. Yes. Where I'm like, am I gonna be am I gonna be a what is New York? Is this the time that someone from their window is taking a is taking a video of me? Yep.

This is the perfect transition to the submissions that we got about my segment, about why nobody dances at the club anymore. And the answer, obviously, is because of this exact thing of people either being on their phones and just scrolling through Instagram or TikTok or whatever, texting. But also that people are on the dance floor recording things, recording each other, recording the DJ, recording someone dancing, perhaps, a little too extravagantly for their taste. And before we get into it, I will tell you guys, I literally lived this this weekend.

Okay.

I went out dancing with my friend. It was early in the night. The dance floor was, you know, pockmarked with people. It wasn't super busy yet and there was this couple that had come together and we're standing on the outskirt of the dance floor, just recording the dance floor. People dancing.

And my friend and I both noticed it and we're like, this makes me super uncomfortable. What are you doing? Why are you doing this?

You said this to them?

No. No. No. No. No.

Oh, you just said this to the to the air.

No. I'm not trying to get got. But it was no. Was my friend and I were basically just commenting on that to each other of how instantly uncomfortable it is to actually witness this. And it was kind of the first time I'd really seen it myself.

I knew this was a thing, but it was it's incredibly unsettling.

God, that sucks.

Anyway, I wanna start us with a voicemail we got from Travis at about a potential form of dance that might be a nice balm for this.

My spouse, Ruby, and I go to contra dancing, which is like a country style dance. It's like line dancing and square dancing kinda combined. It's very nerdy and queer, but there's a lot of diversity in age. It's one of the things I like about it. And it's something where, like, it's partnered dancing, but you're actually encouraged not to dance with the person you came with.

You absolutely can. But you're encouraged to do new partners every song. But one of the things that we've really liked about this is that it's, like, two and a half hours that we just don't think about our phones. We put it in a bag and just forget it. And even when people take breaks in between dance like, you know, if they're skipping a dance, they don't look at their phones.

Like, people just, like, engage with each other. It is, like, so fantastic the way that that works.

Love it. Line dancing is the solution for everything. Every problem we've outlined in this mailbag so far.

Yeah. I can't think of one that won't be solved that way. Yeah. Good call.

We also got a message from Kay who writes, as a DJ, phones are a double edged sword. I want people to feel connected to the music I'm playing, but I also do need videos of people capturing the tracks I'm blending together. It's important so that I can, a, hear how it sounded on the sound system if I'm not recording the set with other means, and b, use it to advertise myself for gigs. Performative, for sure. However, here's my experience as someone in the Chicago scene.

Oh my god. Hi, first of all. Hello. They continue saying, dance floors of people from diverse backgrounds with house and techno playing have little issue with the lack of dancing. While the lack of dancing generally is due to phones to some degree, in my view, any lack of dancing or communal engagement with the DJ is a straight people problem.

Or wait, is it a straight people problem?

Got them.

There's a feeling of collective joy with the DJ as the leader, but it's a much more relational experience than simply being analogous to an audience viewing a band on stage. The DJ is selecting tracks and responding to the dancers, But it's a relational bond that I and many other DJs view as sacred. The biggest difference I've noticed is that as electronic music becomes more mainstream, beyond dubstep, you find at EDM festivals, some bastardization of house, techno, and rave music, I've heard DJs call it corporate techno, has emerged that you can find young, white, straight, West Loop types playing. It is a straight people problem. Those are the environments where people don't dance out of fear of being watched or captured on video.

Or they really want to be seen on video, as Tim articulated, for influencing purposes. I think there's something here about performance and wanting to signal to people online that you have done something interesting. There's this currency that starts getting generated when you see online a way of performing as cool. And it's being the person in an interesting outfit next to the DJ booth who is live streaming their set. And that is so much more about the performance of being at this event, of looking interesting at this event, of acting in a way that suggests that you're the kind of person who would know about this, but blah blah blah.

Like, it's it's this play acting. It's not actually participating.

Yeah. Which seems to actually be a particular loss because there are things that as I'm learning from like the beautiful responses some folks are sending us, as well as what you articulate in your piece. Like, there are some things about these clubs that are, to some people, sacred. I don't think that's like, you know, an overly ambitious word they're throwing around. But also like, these spaces like have jobs to do outside of just being the backdrop for people's social lives.

Definitely.

One one email that we got that stuck out to me, that sort of helped me understand this about these dance faces was from Philip, who grew up in a small town in Germany. And it was actually a very nice accounting of what it was like going to clubs when you were growing up in a small town in Germany, and the ways we would do photo dumps, usually on the Facebook at the end of every night out with our shitty little digital cameras, which is certainly something that I remember. He says, because of that, the first time I went to a club with a no photo policy, it felt strangely serious. No foolery, no innocent fun. This is a place for grown ups, I thought.

You're allowed to be whoever you wanna be, but there are rules. Rules I had to abide by, rules everyone else seemed to already know and silently agree to follow. I was 25 years old and still doubted whether I was even old enough to be here. I was nervous and afraid of doing something wrong, but once I was on the dance floor, I had one of the best nights of my life. He then goes on to describe how in contemporary German culture, the club scene has started shifting a little bit to his read of it.

He says that beyond substance only, the no photo policy helps reinforce club culture as a safe space for marginalized communities, especially the LGBTQIA plus community. I've noticed that the standard German club experience tends to be catered primarily to a gay male able-bodied audience. Because of that, more and more events are working to include all people, establishing broader guidelines to improve well-being and safety for everyone. It's common for clubs to have accessible entrances, gender neutral, and flinta toilets, awareness teams patrolling the premises, dedicated rest areas, free water stations, and medical staff on-site. Does it all work?

Possibly not. It only takes one bad actor and things can go to shit, but it helps to know there's someone you can turn to for help. All of this exists to create a space where people can be who they are and do what they love with no shame or guilt attached. That's only possible when no cameras are allowed. No pictures are taken and there's no social media aftermath to be dealt with.

Disregarding these rules, especially by taking and posting photos online feels almost sacrilegious. There it is again, the sacred. So for me, the no photo policy has become not just a rule, but a seal of approval for a proper night out.

I'm so glad someone wrote in from Germany, specifically. Yes. Because

The subject matter experts.

In general, it's just it's an incredibly powerful and efficient practice in terms of self expression in general, especially for marginalized communities. To be able to be like, yeah, you can come here and dress how you want. You can engage in certain kinds of sexual activities if you want to. You can come here and do drugs with your friends. Like, you can act out things you'd like to act out and behave how you wanna behave, dress how you want, and there's no documentation of it.

That agreement is crucial for this kind of self expression.

There's some interesting thing here about, like, how in a location where all of those things happen, you know, the engagement in so many different vices, the thing that is truly profane ends up just being a document. Yeah. Like, wonder if that's like, you know, there's there's maybe an interesting line of thought there about the sacred being sort of necessarily ephemeral. And that as soon as it becomes fixed in a way, it's you've you've ruined it or dirtied it.

Alright, kids. There is one last thing to do. You know it. You love it. You were waiting for it even though you can't remember the rules.

It is one word graffiti.

Wow. Chase and

Come on.

I gotta be fair. Were you appropriately chastised after the last mailbag because you all did a much better job sticking relatively close to the prompt of one word graffiti that is funny. Starting with Taylor from Oklahoma City who sent in two.

Okay. First one, we got your standard residential sign that has a picture of a bicycle, and then underneath it, it says, may use full lane. So bicycles may use full lane. But someone has taken it upon themselves to cross off the picture of the bicycle and just write the word punks under it. So it says punks may use full lane.

Do we think this is celebratory of punks or trying to dunk on cyclists?

Oh. I never even considered it. And you know what? I support it either way.

Why does he have to

do only one?

He's gonna drill once. Alright.

And we're down to the second submission. Personally, my favorite of the two, in which we see a little pyramid guy with some shoes and two little stick arms, both reaching upwards, one closed eyelid and a bit of a a jagged smile. And right next to it, it just says, forget about it.

Yes. As one word, they slammed those letters together to make one word out of it, which makes this admissible.

Yes.

I love it.

You know, I never would have expected when I woke up this morning, I would see a happy pyramid doing the two step. But here we are.

Yes. Next, we got one in from Lily. Mike, what do we got going on here?

So this is it looks like we're looking in the window of maybe a ceramics shop and underneath that window on a piece of stone has been scribbled a picture, a side view of a rat inside the body of the rat. It says, rat with the Anarchist There

you go. Yeah.

And I've got a suspicion that this might be one of those Anarchist listeners that we have. Because they also included this little snippet of text under the image. Mike?

Kind gut, kind stat, kind patriarch cat, patriarch chat.

That's better than I could do.

Kind, kind, kinda, kinda means none. No. Right? No god, no state. Yeah.

It can mean no, not not any, none, nobody, no one. So no god, no state, no patriarchy. Alright. It's a good rat. It's a very

It's a

great rat.

Yeah. It's a really, you know, approachable rat.

Next up, friend of the show, Talia, who always follows the rules, sends in w e r m s worms.

Worms. Worms. Worms.

Worms.

Worms.

Hans, what's next?

Next, we have on a salmon dirty salmon colored wall. This does not qualify, Jason. I'm so sorry.

Hang on.

You gotta say it the way it's written too.

Yes, please. It is no. La Polizia. No. La Polizia.

No. No. No.

And then, like, sort of half a raised penis.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta

get one in every show, you know.

Delightful. Technically, words. Technically. This is balanced out by Tedder who sent the purest of all submissions.

This is pretty good.

One letter. This is good. Yes. Apparently, there's a lot of streets. I believe these to be around Portland.

Laurelhurst is what I'm reading.

Northeast Flanders Street. Northeast, N E Space Flanders Street. Into which space you can drop a single letter d. Ned Flanders Street. One letter graffiti.

Tedder's the

winner right now.

It's good. It's funny.

The final two we have here, I think our first for us, two people decided to send in their graffiti in the form of a video. The first one I don't think really needs it, but there's something kind of nice about the ambiance of the slow crawl of this across the screen and the scoring of what I assume they were listening to in the car. Georgia, what's going on here?

First of all, I am attacked by the sound of Fade Into by Mazi Star. And then, yes, we're we're seeing sort

of a

skyline, a billboard upon which someone has written what does that say?

I think it says Oprah.

I think it

says Oprah. Oh my god. Of course, it says Oprah. Oh my god. Says Oprah.

Sorry. Sorry, guys. Fonts aren't

my It's

a it's a whole billboard.

Oprah's huge. It's huge.

Would have been done with, like, like, a rolling like a paint roller.

It's

like, this is enormous. Takes up the entire rectangle of the billboard. Oprah. I find

it deeply satisfying. I just keep looping this. I find this very nice.

I don't know. Some of

us aren't ready to receive as it turns out.

And then the final one here is three words, which made me not want to include it because that makes me mad. But what made me happy is

It's the same two words twice in a row.

You know, no matter how you slice it, I hate it. But you went to the effort and this can only really be seen by taking a video of it. Jordan sent in this video. Mike, what's going on?

We're in a car and the car is on the highway and we see a sign that says Nikolai Street and a building in the background, in front of a hill that says Montgomery Park. We're approaching, we are in the left hand lane with the Jersey barriers right next to us. We approach a bunch of green bollards that are on top of the Jersey barrier and on the first four are spelled out one letter per bollard f u c k bollard bollard y o u. Three more bollards, another fuck. Two more bollards, another u.

Looking almost like they were painted while in motion. Yeah.

Is like scary serial killer font also.

Yeah. It's like white paint. It's all drippy. It's a very Yeah.

It's all lowercase.

Yeah. So, yeah, driving by six miles an hour or whatever it is. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Fuck you. Very dangerous. Four words. Hate everything about it. But gotta give it up to you for putting in the effort.

So thank you, Jordan.

Now, who's the Polizia?

No.

Alright. Before we sign off, there is one more very important thing we have possibly learned. You know, we all know the thing that we all say at the end of every episode. Right? Do their claws find my flesh?

May they drown in my blood?

Oh, yes. Of course.

Well, Daniel t says the only place that they can find this online is at techteesusa.com.

This website is horrible.

Very American. Sounds legit.

Most American of websites were in the description for a t shirt that says exactly that. It says, the should their claws find my flesh, may they drown in my blood shirt is a powerful and evocative statement of defiance. This bold declaration adorns a shirt that serves as a wearable symbol of courage and resistance. The words attributed to legendary warrior, queen Budoka, reflect a fierce determination to fight back against those who would seek to harm or oppress. We have a potential candidate here for who has said this phrase which we were not able to find.

I have looked no further than this website considering it the universal source source of truth.

If you can find better, let us know.

Please do. And until that time comes, all together now kids.

Should claws find my flesh. May they

drown in

my blood. Bye, everybody. Bye.