🆕 Never Post! Posting From the American Car [Archive Pull]

Originally published on April 26th, 2024, enjoy this episode where Mike looks at how the car has become a default setting for vertical, short form video. 

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The American Car 

• Garlic Naan And Butter Chicken Fountain?! – Tiktok
• David After Dentist – YouTube
• Taco Reacts – Tiktok
• The American Room – Paul Ford, Medium
• It is NOT My day – Tiktok
• forget a rage room, ima just rent out my car so y’all can scream in it – Evelyn, Tiktok
• Shanin Blake – Tiktok
• Dear single parents ~ when I was 18 I got pregnant with my daughter and her dad went to prison right after she was born, so I was on my own. – Shanin Blake, Instagram
• This is our home her name is Nancy 🚐 – Shanin Blake, Instagram
• Good morning! I love living in a mom van!!! – Shanin Blake, Instagram

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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.

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. And in this archive poll episode, we revisit episode seven of Never Post from April 2024 in my segment, the American car, about how the automobile became one of the default filming locations for short form vertical video. Question I pose at the end of the segment, I think, remains mostly open. What development is in store for the car as a filming location?

Will more people engage in more extreme personalization, or will we move on from the car as we did, at least in some senses, from the bedroom? And if we do move on, what location is next? One half answer that I have, at least, is that we have, I think, moved on slightly from the car, and the new filming location that has replaced it or augmented it is everywhere. I think below the technical conveniences of the car's privacy as a filming location, it also generally protects against something not really discussed in the segment, embarrassment. There is or maybe was at this point, a kind of low level mortification inherent to filming in public, to being seen in your desire to be seen on the sidewalk, in the restaurant, at the grocery store, in the gym, and so on.

As the practice of creating short form vertical video has normalized for all sorts of reasons, it has maybe ironically become less cringe to film yourself wherever you happen to be with technology racing to meet this willingness in things like wireless battery powered Bluetooth microphones and camera glasses. All this is to say nothing of the age at which one desires to make short form video, the age where one can get or reasonably needs a car, and the, I think, probably increasing gap between those two numbers. So does the moving outside of short form video spell the death of the car as a filming location? I don't think so. Just this week, I saw a newscaster reporting on the cyclosporiasis parasite outbreak in The US with a lot full of freshly purchased veggies in the passenger seat of her car.

A few days ago, I'm sitting in my car like I am now. It's 04:30 in the afternoon. I've arrived early to our daughter's daycare for pickup. I have fifteen minutes to kill, the most unshapely amount of time. Neither a fleeting ten nor a productive twenty.

Fifteen is the perfect interval to simply lose. So I open TikTok. Fried Indian Before long, I'm watching a man in a slightly too large lilac dress shirt and matching striped necktie. He's in his mid twenties, I'd wager with brown hair and a thin beard. It's a food review with all the gusto and overstatement one expects from short form social video about eating.

This

is the peak of my life right here.

He says, of the butter chicken coated naan that he's folding into his mouth. He moves on to spoonfuls of rice slathered with the same. The curry oozing out of Take our whole bean a fountain

come to my

like you might see on the dessert table of an office function, burbling chocolate to be drizzled on strawberries pre poked with toothpicks. The appliance is two feet tall ish, a gurgling spout on top and two plastic domes with a recirculating reservoir below.

But you know what? It adds flavor. Maybe next time I'll dip

He tilts an aluminum container of rice, squeezing it under the lowest dome. And I notice he's managed to avoid getting any of this on his shirt and tie. Miraculous given that this whole scene has played out in the driver's seat of his car. I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great gothic cathedrals, Roland Barthes writes in the opening line of his 1957 essay, The New Citroen. I mean, the supreme creation of an era, he continues.

Conceived with passion by unknown artists and consumed in image, if not in usage, by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. Barth was writing about the Citroen DS 19, designed by a sculptor and an aeronautical engineer, considered one of the more beautiful vehicles ever manufactured and a significant milestone in the mechanical development of the automobile in the twentieth century. But Barth may as well have been writing about Luke Food's car, the one with the butter chicken fountain in it, which appears to be an undercover green Kia Soul. The car is a magical object in that it is unbelievable even when directly beheld. Like a magic trick, endless effort is expended in some out of sight place to make the work done in public seem as impossible as it is also inevitable.

A lady cannot be sewn in half and that the image is so well known, it practically defines the performance of magic. We assent to its contradiction. A pickup truck cannot be angry, but yet we've all been in suburban grocery store parking lots on a Saturday afternoon staring down these embarrassing behemoths. This is what Bart means when he says cars are consumed in image and usage. They're machines which serve a purpose, but they're also maybe more so symbols which signify things about themselves and so then more significantly, about the people who drive them.

The first time I noticed the car was David After Dentist in 2009, in which David DeVore junior, having had anesthesia to remove an extra tooth, asks his father filming on a flip cam. Is this real life?

Yeah. This is real life.

He's seven years old in the video and buckled into the back seat of some stationary vehicle. The large rear window frames blown out trees in the afternoon light. The black leather of the car looks new. When David screams

Stay in your seat.

And slumps explaining that he doesn't feel tired. I don't feel tired.

You don't?

No? The deadened sound of the car interior is unmistakable and evocative. This video needs the car. David is enclosed, protected, in transit, between states. The car is in public yet its own kind of private space where his father films this first surgery for the benefit of his mother before he uploads the video to YouTube for the rest of the family, not realizing there's an option to make the video, like the car itself, private.

The intertwining of social media and the automobile makes some sense. The web remade a world only recently remade by cars. Both are used to navigate infrastructure which is now integral to mandatory for in many ways, contemporary life. The car was the engine of early travel vlogs. It was the safe space of cap wearing, sunglass clad, tough guy conspiracy theorists.

It remains the thrumming heart of van life and alongside the bathroom, it's become a default setting for short form vertical video.

Just you know mean? Because here's the deal. Right? Come here. In the great words of little John, what?

It's four thirty eight in the afternoon. I continue to scroll. And not long after Luke Foods, I arrive at Taco Reacts, known mostly for reaction videos. He shows a clip of someone else's content before inserting his own commentary.

The last time you saw someone with an Audi?

Early two thousands, It's been a while.

It it it it depends because the neighbors got one that he drives every day unless you're talking about the other one and then in that case, you're damn right.

He's a bearded white guy seated almost always in a four door Ford f one fifty pickup. Out of the rear windows of his truck, you may see a house across a suburban street, a parking lot, a tree line. We often join him for lunch as he unwraps fast food packages. The interior roof of the truck features a growing number of morale patches. The easiest of which to make out is for Montana Knife Co.

There's also a polar bear and what looks like a fighter jet. Taco, known elsewhere as Paul b, for whom Taco is a kind of character. Taco looks like a Ford f one fifty owner insofar as such a thing has a look. His beard is long, dark, and manicured. He wears a structured baseball cap with an elk on it and an arrowhead necklace and sometimes reflective sunglasses.

In the back seat of his truck, you can occasionally see arrows with their bright fletching. Scrolling through Taco's videos, reacting to a woman holding a snake, reacting to someone smashing a camera lens, a man saying he wouldn't allow his wife to go to the club, a cat eating a french fry, I find myself surprised. Taco seems non confrontationally accepting is maybe one way to put it. He looks confused and dismayed at the guy saying he won't let his wife go to the club, but he remains silent, like he doesn't wanna cause trouble. Elsewhere, he quips with classic millennial affliction about D and D and Harry Potter.

Are these the reactions of a Ford f one fifty owner? One with a baseball cap and reflective sunglasses? What do I think the reactions of a Ford f one fifty owner should be?

As a representative of to boop or not to boop, boop the fuck out of that thing. Give it all the love in the world. Make sure nothing can ever harm it. Ever. Ever.

In 2014, writer and programmer Paul Ford wrote The American Room, an essay chronicling the background environments of YouTube videos. The first time I noticed the room, he writes in the opening line of his essay, was in the Pneuma Pneuma video of 2004, circulated pre YouTube in which a New Jersey man named Gary Brolzma danced in his chair to a Moldovan pop song called Dragosta Dinte. Ford notes the sameness of the rooms depicted in many YouTube videos. Their emptiness, their off white color, their size, large. The rooms look the way they do for a few reasons.

First, he explains, because of standards. Sheet rock is cut in certain sizes. Certain house plans are easier to come by, which are themselves easier to come by than skilled labor to build them. The rooms are empty, he suggests, simply because such large rooms are difficult, meaning expensive, to fill with art, knickknacks, furniture. Quote, you could judge those rooms and say that America has a paucity of visual imagination, that we live in a kind of wasteland.

Or you could draw another conclusion and note that America might be a little more broke than it wants to show, end quote. And so the empty American room emerges and inside it, the viral YouTube star. The American room has lost its primacy in the last decade. First, because the frequency of sudden and unexpected viral mega hits.

The

one off video produced ad hoc like Pneumonuma and without a manicured background.

Hi, guys. So this is my first video blog.

Has waned. YouTube is now known for its creators.

Once again, behind me are a 100 people.

Professionals who seek notoriety and influence repeatedly on purpose. YouTube videos are no longer posts. They're weightier than that and with that weight, they exhibit increasingly TV like production, makeup, lighting, sets. On television shows, the characters rooms are filled with art, knickknacks, ephemera and signifiers, Ford writes. Continuing, think of the rooms in the Big Bang Theory, constant visual stimulus.

Always something for the eye to do. YouTube audiences too need something for their eyes to do now. If not a full set, at the very least, a shelf with some stuff on it. The beige wall just doesn't cut it anymore. The American room has fallen from favor, thanks also to the ascendancy of the mobile phone and a locale even more suited for casual video production.

The car is a natural setting for social video, less so for podcasts. Not only do its qualities obviate the need for additional production equipment, you couldn't fit most of it in a car anyway. Neither could you fit a bookshelf of Funko Pops, your sword collection, or a grid of old LP sleeves. It's a filming locale that excuses and addresses the stress of bare beige walls of producing constant visual stimulus. The American room is stationary, but the American car is action, movement, motion.

Even while parked, it's always in media race going, arriving, like David after Dentist between states, and so always already a place of excitement and progress before the action even begins. It's also no less a personal space. Jean Baudrillard in the system of objects called the car an eccentric relative to the household. In the new Citroen, Bart notes that car interiors were becoming increasingly homely, abandoning the mechanoscientific design language suggesting a quote, the alchemy of speed for a more domestic feel. Quote, more like the working surface of a modern kitchen than the control room of a factory.

The car, Baudrillard writes, makes it possible to be simultaneously at home and further away from home. A lot of people make videos in their car, but I think principally of the videos I see of mostly women screaming.

Do you ever just

And crying inside of them. Sometimes ironically. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Often, hold a large beverage.

This is my Starbucks drink today. I don't know if you guys have tried this.

This is a media type of such specificity. You might bulk at the idea that it comprises a genre until you hear Evelyn from the Internets ask

If you don't have an automobile, where do you scream? Like, where do you just let the proverbial chopper sing? Because, baby, within these walls, in this Toyota, in my Corolla, oh, I don't play. I gets down.

A projectile and a domicile is how Baudrillard describes the automobile. The car too is an abode, he writes, but an exceptional one. A closed realm of intimacy, but one released from the constraints that usually apply to the intimacy of the home. In some ways, for some people, the car is more home than home. My fifteen minutes are nearly up.

I land on Shannon Blake. One of Blake's videos has been going around lately. She's seated in a car with a white cowboy hat on. There are fake leaves and moss pinned to the roof of her car. A dream catcher hangs over one shoulder and a Nazar over the other.

She wears at least five necklaces of beads, shells, feathers. Her hands are covered in rings with rocks and crystals. Her wavy platinum hair fans out from under the hat. She wears three nose rings, one lip ring, and at least six earrings. She raps about taking Ayahuasca and about how the pyramids were built for time travel.

Someone interrupts Rick, ah, this is a stitch. An archaeologist enters the frame, noting that since this video has become so popular, he sees fit to set a couple things straight. The pyramids, for one, were not built by aliens. They are not time travel devices. This is one of the reasons Shannon's video has been so ubiquitous.

Endless people lining up to pick apart her new age clap trap. Why I wonder have I not seen anyone pick apart her car? Shannon at one point lived in her car. She posted pictures of her car, her home, which she named Nancy in 2016, a few years after her daughter was born. I put links in the show notes if you wanna go look.

People joke that Shannon is the final boss of Burning Man, but she may very well be the final boss of short form vertical videos shot in a car. Say what you must about her bedazzled co opted shamanism obscured by weed smoke. Her frames are amazing. Having taken the American car, in this case, a late model white Ford Bronco as a filming location to its logical endpoint, customizing, communicating with the interior of her vehicle as much and possibly more than its exterior. The Ford Bronco is gone, transformed by whatever aura Shannon is at the center of.

Her frame feels very purposeful. Not at all like an automobile, but like a home. Personal. Lived in. Full.

I think of Paul Ford. I think of the emptiness of the American home. The rooms in the Big Bang theory, constant visual stimulus, always something for the eye to do. For Ford and Barth, home is marked by less visual complexity, not more. Blake no longer lives in her car.

I've seen videos of her house. It's huge. But her car nonetheless feels lived in. Another vehicular visual magic trick. Another contradiction to which I ascent.

I wonder what Shannon presages. The professionalization of YouTube spelled the demise of the American room popularly. What does the professionalization of TikTok spell for the American car? Will we look back on the empty automobiles of TikTok? No morale patches.

No dream catchers. Just screaming women in their cups. As quaint artifacts of a simpler time before we realized what those spaces could accommodate and what space will arrive to address the stressors of not wanting to deck out ones? Corolla, or Kia Soul, or Ford Bronco, or Ford f one fifty. I look back into my own car.

I see dog blankets, a child's car seat, an empty cooler that I should clean. My timer goes off. My fifteen minutes are up. Lost thoroughly. Do you make videos in your car?

Do any of your favorite creators make videos primarily in their cars? Why do you think it makes for such an effective filming location and what does it signify? Also, outside the scope of this segment, but something I mentioned briefly and I'm still curious about, how did the bathroom become another default video setting for vertical videos in the last few years? Surely, there's something more to it than the presence of a mirror and good lighting. Call us at (651) 615-5007.

Email us at theneverpost@Gmail.com. Drop a voice memo in our air table or leave a comment on the website. There are links in the show notes, and let us know what you think. We may respond to your comment in a future mailbag episode. That is the archival episode we have for you today.

If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news and interstitials, you can find a link in the show notes. Never Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo.st. You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping us keep the show going. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name.

Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.