🆕 Never Post! Rescuing Public Datasets the U.S. Gov't Deletes

Hans looks into the tactical archiving efforts of our nation’s librarians, and Mike unboxes a bussin glow-up of an alt big mood to brainrot. Also: Ask an Expert!

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

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Intro Links

• SF-Based Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library. What Does That Mean?
• Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
• A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating
• Itch.io Suddenly Pulls NSFW Adult Content From Browse and Search Pages, After 'Critical' Pressure From Payment Partners
• Update on NSFW content
• YouGov poll results
• European project Eurosky aims to reduce reliance on US tech giants
• https://www.eurosky.social/

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Ask an Expert!

• Micah Loewinger
• On The Media
• Adopt-A-Station

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Tactical Archiving

• Tracking Government Information
• Data Rescue Project
• UChicago Data Mirror
• Federal Data Forum
• Harvard Library Law School Innovation Lab
• End of Term Crawl Archive (EOT)
• America’s Essential Data
• data.gov
• Government Documents Roundtable’s 2025 Presidential Transition LibGuide
• Public Environmental Data Project (PDEP)
• Curating for Data Rescue
• UNM Federal Data and Website Resources
• Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library
• Internet Archive’s CDC Data Backup
• Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

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Tralalero Tralarot

Find Ryan:

• https://www.garbageday.email/
• https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/panic-world/id1740187810

Find Emilie:

• ‘It speaks to me in brain rot’: Theorising ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation among teenagers
• https://emilieowens.ca/
• https://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/emilyow/index.html

Brainrot Handwringing:

• BBC
• CBS
• Aleteia
• The Cub

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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.

The green color
of the chashaku
smells of fresh
recollections

of what once has been
in the distant
remote past

CHA NO YU by Catherine Christer Hennix

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and this intro was written on Tuesday, 07/29/2025 at 09:34AM eastern. We have a fresh episode for you today. I talk with media and communications researcher Emily Owens and Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day and Panic World about brain rot. Then Hans talks with four librarians about their work rescuing and preserving datasets that are under threat by the United States government.

And also on ask an expert, we talk with on the media's own, Micah Loeinger. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You'll listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Man, it's a hot one, like five stories this week from the midday sun.

The Internet Archive is now a federal depository library. What does this mean? It means it's a library that will house federal documents. Writing for KQED, Morgan Sung, who you'll remember from our hantai segment, writes that the Internet Archive, quote, will join a network of more than a thousand libraries around the country tasked with archiving government documents for public view. The status is particularly notable, some continues, as the Trump administration has systematically removed information from federal websites under new anti woke executive orders.

Archive visitors will now have access to primary government sources in addition to materials uploaded by users or saved through accessible websites, end quote. You're gonna hear Hans talk more about this sort of thing this episode. You stopped clicking things when you Google. Pew Research finds that only 8% of people are likely to click on search results if they are shown an AI summary of those results compared to 15% who are not shown an AI summary. Furthermore, folks shown AI summaries are more likely to simply close the browser window after their search versus those who are not.

Pew says about one in five searches in their study produced an AI summary.

Oh, man.

Hackers leaked data they stole from Tee, the women only dating safety app, twice at the time of writing. Four zero four media reports it was able to access millions of messages containing sensitive data drawn from what is nominally an anonymous platform. Highly personal details including names, addresses, phone numbers, social media handles, and as one might expect, hellishly hot gossip are all included. It's unclear who else may have discovered the security issue and downloaded any data from the more recent database, four zero four media rights, continuing members of 4chan found the first exposed database last week and made tens of thousands of images of t users available for download. T told four zero four media it has contacted law enforcement, end quote.

Okay. Deep breath before this next one. Itch, the indie games publisher, last week search banned its sizable offering of not safe for work and otherwise explicit games. Also removing them from browse functionality and restricting the sale of many with almost no warning to game makers and publishers. This because of pressure from payment processors like PayPal and Stripe following pressure they received from a very small group of Australian based activists calling themselves collective shout, which self describes as a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualization of girls.

IGN reports that users estimate nearly 20,000 adult games may be affected by this de indexing. On July 24, Itch released a statement reading in part, our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform. To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate step towards compliance. An update posted on the twenty eighth further elaborates saying that to retain the ability to pay anyone, Itch will be working on stronger age gating, more specific terms of service, and will begin a search for more lenient payment processors. There's a grassroots counter campaign underway seeking to exert equal force in the opposite direction on payment processors.

We're gonna put a link to more information about that in the show notes if you're curious. And finally, polling by YouGov shows a majority of respondents and 60% of those aged 18 to 24 in Europe would prefer locally based social media platforms over current US based options. I wonder why. Recently, a number of developers have launched EuroSky, a European alternative to BlueSky. Its website reads, built in Europe, run on our cloud, ruled by our laws.

Users choose the content, businesses control their brand environment, people control the algorithms. Social media is crucial infrastructure and a vital piece of the European tech sovereignty agenda. We need to regain structural control over our information ecosystems, end quote. Developers include Sherif El Sayed Ali, the executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, a self described think and do tank, as well as Sebastian Voglesong, developer of the AT Proto compatible photo sharing app Flashes. In show news this week, we released a funding announcement one upload ago.

If you missed it, please go back and give it a listen. But the long and short is we're about to do some fundraising to assure that we will be able to continue making this show past the 2025. What does that mean? It means that you should keep an eye out for T shirts and a live streamed membership drive, which is happening the week of August 18, so please put that in your calendars. We're gonna release a more detailed schedule in the coming weeks, that's what I can tell you so far.

Week of August 18, we're gonna be doing a bunch of stuff. I think that Thursday is gonna be particularly busy. Hey. Also, just as an aside here, the response to the funding announcement has been sort of unbelievable, honestly. Welcome to a bunch of new members listening to the show in the ad free feed.

We are extremely happy and excited to have you. And to everyone who sent us along a tip, it is so so, so appreciated and extremely helpful. I can't even be begin to say how much. I think we're you know, it's a tough time to be an indie show doing the weird sorts of things that we do, and so far, your response to us asking for help is just it's incredibly encouraging. So thank you, really.

Thank you. Thank you. Alright. That's the news I have for

you this week. In this week's episode, Hans, Jenny, Kate, Molly,

and Linda on tactical archiving. Then me, Emily, and Ryan on Brain Rot. But first, in our interstitials this week, we're gonna talk with Micah Loeinger of On the Media and get his expert opinion on what happens now that the US government has drastically cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Michael Lowinger, thank you so much for joining us on Ask An Expert. You are truly an expert.

You are the cohost of WNYC's On the Media, a nationally syndicated public radio show that can be heard on over 400 stations across the country. You worked as a producer and then as On the Media's first staff reporter, and your investigative and human interest stories have focused on political extremism, Internet culture, and the evolution of the news industry. You have won the John m Higgins Award for best in-depth slash enterprise reporting. You were a finalist for Third Coast's best news feature, a finalist for a Livingston award, and a finalist for a Mirror award for best commentary. In 2019, the New York Times wrote about your experiment on the use of restorative justice in moderating the Internet's largest Christian forum.

Your radio and written work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, NPR, Death, Sex, and Money, and Gothamist. You have worked in public media, reported on public media, and are now the host of a public media show about media. On July 18, Congress passed house resolution four, which took back 1,100,000,000 that had already been allocated via legislation to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This money was slated to go from the CPB to local public media radio and TV stations in all 50 states. And despite two thirds of Americans supporting the use of that money in that way, Congress has now eliminated federal funding for public media.

Is this defunding going to change the American media landscape?

Yes.

Alright. Here we go. Wilson Lever, U of M. As the clock tolls noon. Isn't that exciting?

Okay. Here go. Here we go. Here we go. A recent, gorgeous July afternoon, I was very on time, no big deal, for an appointment to meet a trio of librarians.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi.

Jenny. Jenny. Yeah. Welcome.

Thank you.

Go find our room.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love a library. I love a library.

There's just this feeling when you walk in like, I'm smarter with all of this collected info around me. Like, these resources and ideas are available to me. Could just grab them, take them in, and synthesize them all for free.

So this is what we were thinking. Yeah. It sounds weird in here. It's so quiet.

Good. Perfect. Change anything.

I can

Love it.

Want tables or chairs or

whatever they want. This is great. We got plenty of chairs. I'm gonna have us all sit awkwardly close to each other That's fine. Because that's just

I'll sit way back.

How we do. Yeah. And even though it's the middle of summer and this university library is basically empty, it feels very cool. I mean, maybe even more cool to be hanging out with three librarians.

I'm Jenny McBurney. I am the government publications librarian here at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Mainly, my job is to steward our collection and make sure that the public has access to government information.

I'm Kate Sheridan. I'm the publishing librarian at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and I run the library's scholarly publishing program.

I'm Molly Blake. I'm a social sciences librarian at the University of Minnesota. And along with Jenny and some other fabulous people, I helped launch the Tracking Gov Info Project.

The Tracking Government Information Project? That's why I'm here. Jenny, Kate, and Molly, they'll help run it along with Sangah Sung of University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and Ben Amada from California State University in Sacramento. So these five librarians and their project, which tracks what changes are being made to the public information online, is a volunteer effort that is just one of a group of volunteer efforts that are currently on the front lines of data and information rescue and preservation. There have been data rescue efforts in play for literally thousands of years, from the burning of the library of Zimri Lim in ancient Mesopotamia, the destruction of the Maya codices by Diego de Landa in 1532.

You've got the deliberate arson of US Library of Congress in 1812. You got lots of libraries destroyed in World War two. Information has always and is always at risk of being lost, and part of the work of librarians is to make sure that it isn't.

So there's always been librarians and members of the public who want to help to preserve government information, and there's super long standing efforts to make that happen.

But this year feels different. This year, The US has entered what for it is a new era of information threat. Alright. So I'm gonna start. I'm gonna read you all a headline, and then I'm gonna ask you what this headline makes you think of, how it makes you feel.

This is from 03/20/2025, 04:48PM, from Politico. Trump signs executive order to dismantle education department. You all work in information sciences in the library. And so when you read that, you open up your paper. What people don't do that anymore.

You open up your browser. And you read that. What like, what do you think from your perspective as librarians, as data information folks?

I mean, my first thought is, is that legal? My second thought then is, uh-oh. Where is all of the stuff that those people are working on gonna go? Is it gonna disappear? Are we not gonna have access to that those reports, that data, any of that stuff anymore?

And the Department of Education produces just an amazing amount of data that is used by grant writers, that's used by researchers. I think right away of the Institute for Educational Sciences, which is in charge of ERIC, which is probably the most popular educational database of scholarly articles and gray literature, conference papers, things that are extremely useful for educational researchers.

ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center, ERIC, is a searchable online database of about 2,000,000 pieces of education research. Molly and her social sciences colleagues rely on ERIC.

I work with a lot of researchers that do systematic reviews and evidence synthesis. So they have a topic and their goal is maybe their topic is reading in third grade, for example. And they then want to figure out what is everything that has been published over the years on this topic. Because of the cuts of the Department of Education, ERIC is likely not going to be indexing the same number of journals. It's gonna be cut by almost half in years to come.

Which means the researchers that are relying on it can't go back and replicate their searches, and you lose not just the materials, but the metadata, the indexing of information, where the information is stored, how it's discovered. There's just gonna be less to find. But it also means that there's gonna be downstream effects. Here's Kate Sheridan.

Eric feeds into so many other things. Right? Eric records get pulled into commercial databases. Eric records get pulled into Google Scholar. If Eric is affected, many other things are affected as well.

If the researchers who come to Mali are gonna have their systematic reviews impacted by this, that's literally going to reshape the knowledge we're able to have moving forward. That's going to reshape our ability to make new discoveries, to make progress, to innovate. Like, you have to look at what's been previously done, design a new experiment, test it, report back on it, and other people will read it and design new experiments. We're gonna be missing part of that.

Once we lose that information, we lose the ability to understand things about issues such as school segregation, issues such as equity. It's taking away data that people can use to make education better for everyone.

So what was happening in the early days of the Trump administration is that librarians started getting questions from researchers saying, my article's gone. Why is it gone? Help. Other people were saying, wait, this dataset that I was using is gone. What do I do?

How do I find it? How do I complete my research project? And there was a super interesting article, which I brought along today just in case, from The Lancet that was talking about how an important part of this data is transparency. In normal practices, if you make a change to something, you document it. You say, this was changed to this.

But that's not what's happening here. Changes are just happening without anyone knowing, without any documentation, without any recording. How do we even know what's an accurate dataset anymore?

So Jenny, Kate, Molly, and their colleagues started the tracking government information project, which is a crowdsourced spreadsheet that helps everyone be able to track what's being changed on any federal websites and where you can go to find what it used to say before the changes.

Say, okay. I'm looking for everything relating to COVID. You can find everything that has to do with it. You can see which websites, which documents have been removed, and find where it is pointing you to. So where is the preserved copy of the covid.gov website, for example.

And part of what we're doing in addition to pointing people to preserved copies, which is super important, is we want to raise awareness about the scope of this problem. Like, what does it mean that the Department of Education may be dismantled? What information is being collected? What is their expertise? What types of work do they do?

Because even if we can preserve information that goes away, what we can't do is we can't write a report that's not going to get written this year.

That's one of

the things that stresses me out the most. I think there was, like, two weeks when the mortality weekly report didn't come out. It's the morbidity and mortality weekly report. The MMWR is intended to publish information that is timely and related to public health. So if there was, like, an E.

Coli outbreak happening and they had some new information about the outbreak source or about something to do with the actual, like, B. Coli bacterium, something to do with that, you could find that in the MMWR. And so we don't know what was lost necessarily, not just because the articles weren't published, but because we don't necessarily know what they were about.

We will never get those two weeks back. We will never get those reports back. That is a seventy year old dataset that has a gap for the rest of eternity. Even if everything was snap fixed tomorrow moving forward, that's never gonna come back. That's gone forever.

It it was never created because people weren't able to create it.

This was a big revelation for me in understanding all of the layers to what's happening. It's not just that we need to be concerned with the data being actively taken out of the public view, but also the impact of the government efficiencies in heavy scare quotes that have all eliminated data gathering by shutting down research. They've canceled server contracts to host and store the data, and they've fired the people with the expertise that's needed to contextualize it.

If I can't, like, be assured that I'm gonna be able to access this website because those people aren't there or the, you know, there there's link issues or the API's down or the contract's been ended, I wanna be able to access that data, and there's no reason why people shouldn't be able to access that data.

This is Linda Kellum. Linda is a data librarian with expertise in qualitative data research and software. And Linda is a leader in the field of data rescue, so much so that just the mention of her name Tamale prompted She's a big deal. She's a big deal. She's a big deal.

Yeah. I wanted to talk with Linda in her capacity as founding organizer of the Data Rescue Project, which is a volunteer group that works on emergency archiving of datasets. And I have to say I was a little surprised. Maybe I shouldn't have been, but I was a little surprised by Linda's reaction when I read her that March headline, Trump signs executive order to dismantle education department.

First thing I thought about was I was happy that we had actually done something. So in a lot of ways, I felt satisfaction at least we had tried to do something. Wow. But you're you're right. I mean, I it was it was it's also disheartening and it's really dismaying to see, you know, that considered as something that

could be thrown away, You know, not

it's something that's not worth preserving for the long term.

That's a very surprising answer to me. Not the second part. The second part is kind of what I expected. Yeah. You know.

It's made in things. Let's talk about the first part of that answer, though, where you said you felt satisfied that you had done work. When you say that as a data librarian, when you say that as someone who works with a data rescue project, what does that mean? What what work have you done already when you read that announcement in in March?

For us, we were just this was rapid response, so it was really just get what we can. We knew that the Department of Education had a target on its back and wanted to go ahead and do as much as we could at that time.

Was there anything specific that that led you to see that target? Like, how did you know that target was there?

Project twenty twenty five.

Oh, that was

that's the road map.

Oh, you mean they told you?

Yeah. Yeah. They told all of us what they were gonna do. So we were looking to see where they had explicitly said it would target agencies. We started with the Department of Education.

That was the very first department we even looked at, just to figure out what data sets would be publicly accessible for us to download and preserve.

The first step was to understand what information they're even looking for.

And that's what we did. We went, you know, with a spreadsheet and started documenting inventorying, if you will, the different datasets and surveys that were available on that website. What's there? What's the size? What do we can we get it?

Are there alternative sources that are not government based?

As full a catalog as possible was made of what needed rescuing, adding metadata and documentation to everything.

We want everything that's associated with that. Once we felt we had everything we could find, we asked others, people who had expertise in those areas to add additional datasets, and then we could start the process of a rescue.

Getting the actual data can be either simple or complex. Some datasets, you can just click and download. Easy peasy. Other datasets, not so easy. Some are so big that they need to be scraped, and there are others that are just idiosyncratic.

Department of Education has this thing called the Data Lab, which has wonderful data sets, but they're all in tables and there are about 900 tables for each data set. And there's no way to download the entire we just can't get it out of the system. There's no API access for it. So Right.

We've been working

on projects where we just go through and download each individual table.

What? That's like archaeology. That's like dusting dusting grains of sand in the middle of a desert.

Yeah. It's it's definitely tedious work, and I thank all of the volunteers who've worked on it.

Once data is downloaded or scraped, it has to go somewhere as quickly as possible. Somewhere that has the space to store it, isn't controlled by corporations in terms of service, and is publicly accessible.

When we take the dataset, we don't keep it. We put it into ICPSR's DataLumos, which is a crowdsourced repository for public data. It was in 2017 in response to concerns about the loss of public data. And from there, it becomes publicly accessible quite quickly and it has all the fields that are needed for datasets to include the metadata in the documentation. The role of ICPSR is long term preservation so that they can, you know, help make ensure that that dataset, that package will be accessible in the long term, which is a very different thing from just web crawling and, you know, in mass amounts.

So it's a supplement to what Internet Archive and others do, but geared around data.

So that's the process that Data Rescue Project has been doing with the Department of Education since February. But the Department of Education are not the only ones who have been targeted across the government. We have seen huge changes to government agencies like Health and Human Services, CDC, NOAA, Department of the Interior, and some nongovernmental like USAID and lots, lots more. This same crisis is happening all over the government all at once, and all of it is in need of the same levels of response. How how wide is the aperture for this?

Yeah. I think that's a great question and something we're still figuring out, certainly. Interesting.

So, yeah, we don't really have a sense?

Yeah. Because we don't know like, somebody's asked us how much data have you captured, and we don't have a way of knowing because there was no one inventory for all the federal government data. Even data.gov is not an inventory for and and data.gov has its own issues. I think agency by agency, we have a sense of what has happened. And, you know, in the coming months, this would be a project we could do is look at the agency by agency and kind of detail what has occurred.

And but even then, it's it's it may be office to office within an agency. So it's really challenging to have a sense of kind of that whole picture at this particular point in time. But in terms of scale, like, I don't know at this point. I can't even say.

I find all of this upsetting, not the efforts of all these wonderful people. That is the only thing that's keeping me from just laying down on the floor, letting the fates take me. What I find upsetting is that all this work, all this data that we're scrambling to save, it already belongs to us.

Yes. This is our data. We are all it's it's for the people, by the people, of the people. Right? Like, that's the whole point of our government.

And so the government creates things for us and we have a right to access it. The role

of the federal government really is to help us understand ourselves. That's I believe. Right? It's it's the federal government is the only real entity that can has the mission to collect public data and make it accessible to the public. It's built into our constitution that we take a census.

Collecting data is is part of our who we are.

Certainly, a democratic ideal is that we should all have unfettered access to information that then we're able to get and interpret both as private citizens and in the work we do in any way that we see fit.

It's how we hold the government accountable. It's how we inform ourselves about our communities. It's how we understand who we are as a people. Yeah. Yes.

That's an informed electorate is a fundamental part of democracy. One institution, my institution, my my library can't replace that mission on the scale that the government can do it. A private company can try, but their role isn't to do that. Their role is to to make money. And so when it comes to losing access to any of the public data that we've had, it's a shame not just from a from a topic level in the sense of this is what this Department of Education dataset is for, but in a sense of of this is what the government should do.

It is gather information about us, help us understand ourselves, help us be able to project into the future about ourselves, help us build services for our people. That's the role of the government in my opinion.

One of the hard parts about this moment is that these ideals, which represent an idea of how the country has been run, maybe since it became a country, these ideals are not at all being met by the actions of the people who currently run it. And that means that, like Linda, Kate, Molly, Jenny, the volunteers they work with, and the teams building and running theirs and other data rescue projects, these are the people working to build systems that hold up our ideals and keep our information free and available. As I was listening to Linda talk about all this, I started actually to see a picture forming in my head. And this was a picture of, like, pipes being laid. It was a picture of structures being designed and pathways being paved.

And it suddenly occurred to me that even though this hurts to feel such a letdown, We might be laying some kind of groundwork for something new. Are we creating new infrastructure with this project that we haven't seen and that might undergird longer than just to the next administration?

Yeah. I oh, I think there's there's a building awareness of the existing infrastructure. Certainly, people now know about DataLumos beyond just a few data librarians. And I give you an example of that. There were only a 100 data sets in DataLumos from 2017 to 2025.

Since 2025, we have put 700 in. So Wow. Yeah. It gets doesn't seem like a lot, but each one of those takes a lot of time and and effort. And it is the creation of maybe a new way of thinking about what we're doing.

And we're still figuring this out. Certainly with Data Rescue Project, one of the things we would like to do is create a infrastructure for rapid response for digital objects. Right? So it's not just that every time something happens, we have to spin up this thing, but we actually have an ongoing documented, understood way or best practices and as well as well as technical infrastructure for people who who need to do this.

Even if we have an eye toward the long term, there is a lot of information being threatened and a lot of need to fulfill right now. Luckily, there are people working on it, and there are plenty of ways that we can all get involved in helping them.

So for example, we've talked a lot about the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. Those started, like, in the nineties, early two thousands. Those are essential tools. They're doing such a great service. And I would encourage anybody anywhere to add the Wayback Machine browser extension to your browser.

And if you see something, save something.

Could be on a government website or could be anywhere that you're just worried about what would happen if this information goes away. It just takes a second to click and to save it.

This sort of flagging and identifying, this is exactly the work that they're hoping everyone can do. Like contributing, for example, to their tracking government information project.

We have a really simple form where you can just report this is the link I wanna, share. This is what I know hasn't been removed or modified. And, again, we know everybody uses these websites in different ways, and so we need everyone's expertise. Like, need to hear from teachers that are using lessons plans on these websites, anyone who's using reports on this website. If there's something that you've used and you you notice it's gone or changed or even if you're not sure if it's changed, go ahead

and submit it, and we

can kind of, investigate on our end.

And if you're really curious and you wanna go see what data has already been rescued, you can go to the data rescue project's tracker to see all 1,200 data sets and counting. And that doesn't just include their rescues, but everyone's.

One of our the main things that we wanted to do is make sure that we were amplifying what other people were doing. Mhmm. So it's not just about us. We we want people to know about University of Chicago's data mirror or the Federal Data Forum or America's Essential Data. Right?

All of those are great things that are doing similar but different work. And so we wanna make

sure Yeah.

To amplify those. And that's what's great about this community is we're not It's not about territoriality. We're trying to amplify each other and work together because I don't want people doing what you described to going and just hoarding things and putting it in their servers. That's not useful. And so we wanna make sure that everybody knows where they can go for the things that they are working on.

Everyone I talked to, Molly, Kate, Jenny, Linda, everyone assured me that you do not need to be a data person or a programming expert or a background in library sciences to do this work to be able to support and pitch in. You just need to be willing to join in.

Speaking for myself, I was like, is somebody a little more experienced than me starting this project already? And I kept kind of waiting. And eventually, I think we kinda decided, well, we have to be the ones that start this project. And we're gonna learn as we go, and we're gonna get other people involved, but somebody has to be doing this, and it might as well be us.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to Jenny McBurney, Molly Blake, Kate Sheridan, and Linda Kellum. I had long conversations with all these folks, and they were incredible.

Y'all, librarians are the best. Full stop. Unqualified. I will be publishing, those longer conversations to our members, later in August. If you are not a member, but you wanna hear those conversations, you can always sign up for just $4 a month and get access to all of the extended interviews, not just from this episode, which will be there, but also previous episodes.

You can go deep on a lot. You can also go deep by looking in the show notes for this episode. I'm gonna link to all of the projects that were mentioned in this piece, to the Wayback Machine if you wanna start archiving websites, to the Data Rescue Project, to the Tracking Government Information Project, and lots, lots, lots more. If you think you might be interested in learning more or possibly joining the cause and volunteering some of your time to help, you can find a great starter in the show notes or head on over to neverpoe.st.

Michael Lowinger, this removal of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the latest and most concrete escalation of a battle that has been waging about public media since it started in 1967. When this amendment passed, Republican house speaker Mike Johnson said, this is, in our view, a misuse of taxpayer dollars. They're biased reporting. They're not objective. They pretend to be so, and the people don't need to fund that.

In your expert opinion as a media reporter reporting on media, is public media any more biased than CNN, NBC, Fox News, or any other nationally broadcast news outlet?

No.

I've seen it used a lot now in tandem with, like, AI content, like, particularly, like, that weird Italian crocodile that's popular on TikTok. That's Ryan Broderick. You might

know him from well, here. I'll just let him tell you.

Hi. My name is Ryan Broderick. I am the author of the Garbage Day newsletter and the host of the Panic World podcast. And if you like this show, you'll like those slightly less, but like them probably.

Ryan's being glib. You would love his work if you don't already know it, but you probably do. We are huge fans at Neverpost at least. And the crocodile that he's talking about is called Bombardero crocodillo and it's maybe the most well known character, I guess, in a lineup of characters featured in a series of now slightly passe TikToks collectively called Italian brain rot. He brought it up because I asked him to tell me what exactly brain rot is.

It's ugly. Like, it's it's it's almost always ugly. It feels lazy and it feels unfulfilling beyond just sort of understanding the references. This feeling of like you're just consuming this stuff, but it doesn't really add up. It doesn't really stay in your mind.

It sort of pleases you in a sensory way, but it's not great, and you know that deep down. And people really like watching the videos, but they know that they're bad and and and unfulfilling. The way I see people use it seems to be similar to the way you would talk about, like, eating a lot of junk food. Like, there's a pride to it, but the pride is kind of making fun of the compulsive aspect to it.

I wanted to ask Ryan about brain rot because it seems to be front of mind for a lot of people at the moment, even if that mind is diminishing in its faculties. And it also seems to be like three different things. It's a verb, which is what happens to your brain looking at, as Ryan calls it, unfulfilling content. It's also an adjective, the label given generally to unfulfilling content. Celebrity gossip, weird food challenges, those livestreams where they try to very carefully remove the shell from a raw egg while keeping the shell membrane intact, you might reasonably call all of that brain rot, which is also a noun, a genre label for Tralolero Tralolot, Skibbitty Toilet, Le Poisson Steve, and others.

All media with this shared and specific kind of irreverence or inanity almost. All of that also is brain rot, maybe with a capital b. To put this as succinctly and confusingly as possible, not all brain rot is brain rot, but it may all rot your brain all the same. So how do we get these three different but related senses of brain rot? And what sort of anxieties or compulsions does brain rot as a concept confront?

Why was this term coined and why is it useful is what I'm curious about in this segment. The contemporary Internet usage of brain rot, of course, echoes a phrase I grew up hearing sometimes in earnest, but mostly ironically as a throwback to a very similar set of anxieties also related to technology. TV rots your brains.

But you

should know that watching TV rots your brain. Rot your brains.

This is a very well worn worry that some new type of media is somehow destroying the minds of its audience, especially if that audience is young.

We have evidence to show that when the novel was introduced as a format for the every person to read in Denmark, the newspapers or and and public commenters at the time were like, kids can't be reading books. They will essentially rot their brains.

This is Emily Owens.

Like, this is a very old tradition of young people doing something, adults finding it abhorrent, it making its way into the mainstream and becoming our culture in whether we like it or not, and often in ways which are really cringe.

Emily is a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo working in the Department of Media Communications.

Broadly, I am interested in teenagers' lives, meaning their social experiences and their identity development, and how, if at all, those are shaped by digital media broadly and in the case of my research, TikTok specifically.

In June, Emily published an article in the journal New Media and Society titled, It Speaks to Me in Brain Rot, theorizing brain rot as a genre of participation among teenagers. In it, she points out that when brain rot was named word of the year by Oxford University Press in late twenty twenty four, a parade of hand wringing followed with headlines like, I'm a neuroscientist. Here's the surprising truth about TikTok brain rot from BBC News. Smartphone addiction is leading to brain rot, doctors say from CBS. Pope warns of brain rot from phone scrolling from Catholic news website Alethea.

Brain rot, the new generation's epidemic from the cub. And, of course, more.

People were freaked out about it. They thought it was a a genuine mental health condition affecting young people who use the Internet too much, but also older people who use the Internet too much or the type of content that causes that mental health condition. So that it was overwhelmingly, like, negative, very little sort of tongue in cheek. That's maybe emerged more now as we get more comfortable with the term, but certainly at the beginning, it was real, like, panicky vibes.

In the midst of all this, Emily is conducting research with, quote, a small group of teenagers at an international school in Oslo, as she writes, and something happens.

And in, workshop three, since the third time I'd seen them all, they were starting to get a bit more comfortable. And that was the first time that Brain Rot actually came up, and it was brought up by a a young woman named Yari, 16 years old. And she is the self proclaimed TikTok expert of the group.

And I say self proclaimed, but others often also referred to her as the TikTok expert in the group.

And so we were in the middle of a discussion about why TikTok is valuable to her, why she likes it so much. And she she started saying to me, like, well, there's controversies going on in the world, and there's always someone explaining it on TikTok. And I went, yeah. And she said, or I've seen, like, Russian ladies describe math to me, and

I understand it. And then another boy, Adrian, checked in and said, oh, yeah.

I've seen that. I know her. And that's when Yari said, yeah. It's like it speaks in, like, brain rot to me. I understand it.

And I embarrassingly responded just by repeating slowly, it speaks in brain rot. But I think you you can see that in that excerpt, I was I was sort of computing this concept. Like, I couldn't even take it in. I just had to say it back to her. And that's where it essentially started.

And I went on to ask, if you come across a video on TikTok explaining something, would you find it easier to understand in school? And every single one of them nodded or said, yeah. And then a 16 year old boy, Lennox, said exponentially. And when I said, really? Yari went on to say, yeah, and everybody is on it.

Emily asked the kids in the next session what they mean when they say brain rot. They say that it's stuff for younger kids, stuff that maybe isn't, quote, cognitively beneficial, but they also say that's kinda the point. She boils down their stew of responses in the paper like this. Brain Rot can perhaps be defined as a piece of slang referring to a way of engaging with childish memes and general TikTok content which is nonproductive or time wasting by nature and is humorously understood to rot the brain of the user. From this definition emerge some of the key characteristics which make up brain rot as a genre for engaging meaningfully with TikTok, following its mention by Yari in the previous example.

One, brain rot is childish or unserious. Two, brain rot provides no cognitive or developmental benefit. And three, brain rot is deliberately nonproductive. Brain rot is therefore a conscious rejection of self development and productive activity in favor of a childish enjoyment, end quote. So it turns out teens, like everyone else, live in the world and are under a lot of pressure from school, home, friends, stuff they see on the Internet ironically, more on that in a minute.

And so they, like you, like me, get some scrolling in as a way to release some of that pressure. But crucially, they, we still wanna be engaged. We don't want nothing. We just don't want anything asked or expected of us in contrast to every other part of life and there is only a particular stripe of media that can really walk that line. In an attempt to capture all this, Emily calls Brain Rot a decompression driven genre of participation.

I asked her to take me through what that means exactly.

To start, I wanna say that that term actually came from my childhood best friend's mom, Kathleen Moore. I was like, I don't know what to call this thing. I don't have the right term. And she was like, sounds like this is a a like, you're these kids are trying to decompress. It's not necessarily about relaxing.

That's not the right word. It's not about, like, switching off entirely. It's more to do with sort of not not trying to improve in any way or not trying to produce anything. Not you're not seeking out a new friendship, and you're not seeking out an interest. You just wanna you just wanna decompress.

Emily explained to me that genre of participation is based on the work of cultural anthropologist, Mizuki Ito, and is a way of centering the idea that people do things with media. They look for it to play a role in their lives to solve problems, and it exists in a complex aggregate with the rest of their experiences versus how media is often framed and talked about, especially on the news, as being this monolithic thing that flies in and changes an audience, that it has some effect on them after they've experienced it, and then both they and the media move on. To sit down, scroll through TikTok, and let one's brain rot isn't the comatose welcoming of cognitive decline the headlines would have you believe, but a purposeful activity which fits in alongside others that make up a highly social aggregate. As Emily says

It's more like this is something they kind of want or need to do anyway, and now it has this digital component.

Yeah. Like, I I I we we love to believe that the Internet is this really addicting, dangerous force, and there's this really, like, intense wave of millennial Ludditeism right now that's, like, I find very counterproductive. And so there's this feeling of, well, you know, the Internet is this dangerous thing. And, I mean, we we've been talking about that in regards to every media type throughout history, like, you know, go watch David Cronenberg's Videodrome, like, if you wanna see how VCRs could be evil. Like, this is just this isn't new.

But right now, we're really interested in this idea of the Internet changing our behavior, changing the way we think. So brain rot,

I think, has become popular as an expression of that. A tale of two rots, basically. To butcher an old rhetorical classification, not if by whiskey, but if by rot. If by rot, you mean the cognitive decline of a generation of young people whose attention spans and appetite for involved tasks or consuming long texts has been diminished by short form video and a bottomless feed of clips expecting nothing from them, then of course, I am against it. But if by rot, you mean the ability to manage one's emotional state through the selective viewing of low stakes feel good media available at all times in which has the possibility of forming or reinforcing social bonds amongst peers, then of course, I am for it.

I wondered aloud to both Ryan and Emily, does this mean Brain Rot is more of a lens? A framework one brings to media over and above it being a type of media that one sits down and is able to make or find on purpose? Ryan and Emily both kind of agreed. It's found, and being able to find it may be circumstantial. Ryan's response was dialogical.

I I

think in many ways, it's like brain rot is always being defined by someone else in a way. Like, it's it's it's it's it's a label you put on something, or it's like a label you put on what you're looking at as a way to kind of, like, digest what you've just spent twelve hours looking at online. I would be surprised if someone could sit down and effectively make brain rot to make brain rot. Like, I I feel like it it's it's almost like outsider art in that way. It has to kind of be discovered and labeled rather than I'm gonna sit down and make something really insane, and people are gonna, like, watch hours and hours of it.

For Emily, this question became one about if there is a need for teens to decompress, what's the reason they're going to content, to social media to do that? Why is the activity they're engaging in scrolling or searching or watching and not anything else? What does it mean that decompression, as important as it may be, happens in environments like social media platforms, which adhere to a very strict hyper capitalist logic?

One of the themes that emerges in my data a lot, I which am finding hard to write about because I don't know how best to do it, is that these kids feel like grown ups do not give a shit at all, and that they are they are left to their own devices in terms of everything that they are warned about. So they you know, I brought up, you know, data and digitalization. And the first thing they said was, oh, no. Companies are taking our data. We know, but there's nothing we can do.

So, like I wrote this article because I was annoyed at how the grown ups were understanding Brain Rock. I was like, you got it wrong, and you're replicating this media panic that we've seen over and over and over and over again. There are problems to do with TikTok and BrainRot, but they are not BrainRot. It's not that young people are going to BrainRot to turn their brains off. It's that young people don't have other places to go to switch off.

They don't have the tools to do that. There's not a lot of public spaces to go enjoy. It's not like you can go out to a park and just switch off and do dumb stuff and be a kid in that way. To be trapped in a phone when you're trying to decompress because someone makes money from the fact that your eyes are on that phone, I think that's really grim. And I think that these kids, these teenagers that I was working with, they don't say it explicitly because maybe they haven't cognitively recognized it as such, but I think they feel that that's not good.

There are loads of things you could do to decompress. Sometimes it is use your phone, but oftentimes it's go for a walk, like go for a swim, take your bicycle out, paint a painting, write a little story. And we're, I think, systematically discouraged from doing those things because those things don't make anybody any money. And that's yeah. That's my that's my beef with Brain Rot.

It's not that it exists or that young people are doing it. I think that's fine. We should let kids do what they want. If they're enjoying it, who cares? It's more that there's this bigger systematic problem that all of our time is being capitalized on, and that's not nice.

Such a lame button to on.

Not nice.

But that's a great button to end on. Thanks a million times over to both Ryan Broderick and Emily Owens for chatting with me. You can find Ryan's newsletter at garbageday.email and his podcast Panic World wherever you listen to pods. You can find Emily's work at emily owens, that's e m I l I e o w e n s, dot c a and at h f dot u I o dot n o. We'll put links to all these things in the show notes.

What happens to your brain when it rots? Is there something that's particularly effective at rotting your brain? How do you feel about that? Would you admit it to us? Send us an email, a voice mail, leave us a voice memo about your rotting brain and we may include it in an upcoming Mailbag episode.

Micah, what does the change in funding for the CPB mean for media over the next few years in The United States?

Well, we don't know for sure what's going to happen. We can only guess. But it helps to have some understanding of how this ecosystem works. Essentially, we're talking about money that has been taken away from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Federal funds appropriated by Congress, given to an agency that, in this case, doles out money to public radio stations and public television stations around the country.

Some 300 plus TV stations, over a thousand public radio stations. Now that that money is gone, those stations will have to ask themselves, what do we really value? Do we value these national programs that our audience really likes that helps us fundraise? Do we value local news? Do we value keeping an environmental reporter?

Somebody going to the courthouse? Somebody hanging out in the State house all day? What do we value? Because we are seeing that there are gonna be heterogeneous effects. Some urban radio stations, for instance, they only rely on, say, you know, less than 5% of their overall revenue coming from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Really rural radio stations, some of them rely on it like 99%, 90%, 80%. I saw one estimate from this guy named Alex Kerley, who's a former product manager who worked at NPR. He created a tool called adoptastation.org to help people, like, figure out how much their local radio station is at risk of losing because of these cuts. He estimates that 15% of public radio stations might shut down in the next year, because 15% of public radio stations rely on more than 50% of their revenue traditionally coming from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That would be disastrous.

I do think in the short term, we're already seeing this, lots of huge surges in funding for radio stations and public media organizations, particularly ones in urban areas. But you know how it is, like, when there's a crisis, people show up and open up their wallets, but then life goes on and it gets harder to get people to care.

With all this in mind, Micah, do you feel like we're seeing the end of public media?

No.

Okay. That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, August 13. Friends, listeners, now is the time. If you've been waiting for a moment to support Neverpost with a membership, we could use your help right now more than ever.

Our runway is quickly ending. We need to find a way to make the show financially sustainable by the end of the year to keep doing whatever it is we do here. Media criticism? Tech theory? Synth solos?

Become a member at neverpo.st at $4.07, or $12 a month for which you will get access to a bunch of bonus content, but mostly knowledge that you're helping an indie podcast to do weird, wonderful work so off the beaten path, even we are not exactly sure what to call it. Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, 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 Rugneva.

The green color of the Cheshaco smells of fresh recollections of what once has been in the distant, remote past. Cha No Yu by Katherine Christer Annex. Neverpost is a production of charts and leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.