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Transcript

Mailbag #8: I will not become food for monsters · Never Post

• 0:06
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello and welcome to the Never Post
• 0:08
  Mailbag episode four rainy season 2025 in which we respond
• 0:12
  to listener emails, comments, voicemails, and voice messages
• 0:14
  about our segments. Folks, you know it because I've said it
• 0:19
  before, but I'm gonna say it again. We love to hear from you.
• 0:23
  It's why we do the show. Please do get in touch and tell us your
• 0:27
  thoughts on our segments.
• 0:28
  All of the ways that you can get a hold of us are in the show
• 0:30
  notes. Drop us a line. And if you don't, Georgia is gonna cry.
• 0:34
  Georgia: I am. I'm crying right now.
• 0:35
  Mike Rugnetta: I've seen it
• 0:36
  happen. She cries.
• 0:39
  Georgia: He said it was
• 0:41
  Mike Rugnetta: I'm your host, Mark McNetta. Joining me today
• 0:43
  in order of their spicy food tolerance, I assume. Woah.
• 0:47
  Ascending Hans Buto, n p s p.
• 0:51
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. I think that's right. I think that's
• 0:52
  right.
• 0:53
  Georgia: I'm the
• 0:53
  Hans Buetow: old man of the group. So I got I got that
• 0:55
  heartburn coming in the night.
• 0:57
  Mike Rugnetta: I didn't I didn't wanna lean really hard into the
• 1:00
  Midwest The Midwest. But
• 1:04
  Hans Buetow: As long as there's also lots of mayonnaise in
• 1:06
  there, I would be like, hey. God. No. Hans. No.
• 1:10
  Take it back. My god.
• 1:13
  Mike Rugnetta: Next in line, Jason Oberholzer, NPEP.
• 1:16
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. I'm probably somewhere in the middle
• 1:18
  here. I'm looking at Georgia and I'm trying to figure out which
• 1:23
  side of the line we're gonna be on. I can do it. I don't always
• 1:27
  seek it out.
• 1:27
  So that's where in the middle I am.
• 1:29
  Mike Rugnetta: Georgia, and then next in line, Georgia Hampton,
• 1:32
  NP, p.
• 1:34
  Georgia: I'm honored to have this position in this order. I
• 1:39
  do like spicy food. Spicy food doesn't really like me. Oh. So I
• 1:44
  do really enjoy it and I have fun eating it.
• 1:48
  Mike Rugnetta: What's your favorite spicy dish that you
• 1:51
  wish you could have more that you don't?
• 1:52
  Georgia: Oh, god. I mean, a lot of like Indian dishes. It's
• 1:57
  Jason Oberholtzer: worth the pain.
• 1:58
  Mike Rugnetta: It is. When it's spicy and tasty, you just
• 2:00
  Hans Buetow: can't you can't do any better than that. Georgia,
• 2:03
  would you do hot ones?
• 2:04
  Georgia: Absolutely not. Okay. No. I hate that, but that's for
• 2:07
  different reasons. I hate food challenges.
• 2:08
  Don't
• 2:09
  Hans Buetow: like big interviews. That's too bad
• 2:10
  because, like, because I saw Sean
• 2:12
  Mike Rugnetta: at the Webby's and I
• 2:13
  Hans Buetow: was like, Sean, Georgia would Georgia would be
• 2:15
  on it. Listen.
• 2:16
  Georgia: I locked eyes with Sean at the Webby's, and I felt we
• 2:19
  had a cosmic connection. So Sean, get at me. Would love to
• 2:21
  talk
• 2:22
  Hans Buetow: to you. As long
• 2:23
  Mike Rugnetta: as it doesn't involve anything spicy, we're
• 2:25
  good.
• 2:25
  Georgia: No. No. No. It's my I just I I hate food challenges. I
• 2:30
  hate them.
• 2:30
  I don't like it. They kinda yuck me out. So I wouldn't I get it.
• 2:33
  Do it.
• 2:34
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Hey, guys. Mailbag. Look at us.
• 2:37
  Georgia: Wow. I
• 2:38
  Hans Buetow: think we're mailing it. I think I did it.
• 2:43
  Mike Rugnetta: I did
• 2:43
  Hans Buetow: a good job.
• 2:45
  Georgia: Mike got
• 2:46
  Hans Buetow: the call.
• 2:48
  Jason Oberholtzer: So you
• 2:48
  Hans Buetow: did it? See you on the other side.
• 2:50
  Mike Rugnetta: Alright. Let's mailbag. up, in response to a
• 2:54
  previous mailbag, and I would just like to aside here for one
• 2:57
  moment to formally acknowledge something that Jason has pointed
• 3:03
  out, which is that we get the most listener mail in response
• 3:08
  to or I shouldn't say in response to, I should say
• 3:11
  immediately following mailbags. Yeah. It's great.
• 3:15
  Yeah. So even though you are writing in and talking to us
• 3:18
  about segments, we get most of this communication immediately
• 3:22
  following the publish of a mailbag. So I just wanna say,
• 3:25
  that's great. Keep doing that.
• 3:26
  Hans Buetow: That's rad.
• 3:27
  Mike Rugnetta: But you don't have to wait. You can reach out
• 3:29
  anytime you have a thought. Okay. So Hern Sushi wrote in
• 3:34
  after the previous mailbag and said, I just listened to the
• 3:37
  latest mailbag, and I wanted to say, fuck yes, RSS. Now I'll
• 3:40
  pause here and say, fuck yes, RSS.
• 3:42
  Hans Buetow: RSS. We did Yes. RSS.
• 3:45
  Mike Rugnetta: I am also still using a beautiful turquoise iPod
• 3:48
  mini and a Tungara gay open hardware iPod. Oh, yes. To
• 3:55
  listen to podcasts and music from Bandcamp. There are dozens
• 3:58
  of us. Dozens.
• 4:01
  And I just wanted to acknowledge or maybe not acknowledge, but to
• 4:05
  request. I wanna know about all of the weird, like, open
• 4:09
  hardware RSS gadgets.
• 4:11
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. Definitely.
• 4:12
  Mike Rugnetta: Because like, this rules.
• 4:14
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. This is awesome. And I'm glad that we
• 4:16
  are slowly inculcating everyone into the RSS feed life. Okay.
• 4:23
  Mike Rugnetta: Next up, on the subject of platforms and hentai,
• 4:26
  Gabriel wrote in and said this, I've recently seen a chart on
• 4:30
  how ChatGPT is gobbling up the traffic from the biggest
• 4:33
  websites. I didn't verify it, but it seems right to me.
• 4:35
  ChatGPT doesn't really feel like the Internet to me. It's more
• 4:39
  like a tool that just happens to use the Internet, But I already
• 4:42
  had trouble thinking of some of the other sites as Internet
• 4:45
  websites, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, etcetera, are
• 4:49
  more like apps to me. I think that the Internet shouldn't be
• 4:52
  apps, but I guess I'm just old school.
• 4:54
  For me, the Internet is a website that I access in a
• 4:57
  browser on my PC laptop on my desk. Shout out to Mike who has
• 5:01
  to sit down with his laptop to write important emails. Still
• 5:03
  true. It seems like increasingly how people use the Internet is
• 5:07
  through apps on phones, and it just makes me wonder, what is
• 5:10
  the Internet? Am I just a boomer who is used to browsing actual
• 5:13
  websites like forums and blogs, and I should consider everything
• 5:16
  that needs an Internet connection to function?
• 5:19
  Is any app that I have on my phone the Internet? Podcasts,
• 5:22
  chat GPT, console games, torrenting. What else is the
• 5:25
  Internet that I didn't consider? Bonus question. When I'm at work
• 5:29
  and I open an app on my phone to turn on the AC and the lights at
• 5:32
  home, which are all connected to my Wi Fi, is that the Internet?
• 5:35
  When my printer refuses to print because I stopped paying a
• 5:37
  subscription, is that the Internet? When I have to wait
• 5:40
  for ten minutes before I can start my car because of a
• 5:42
  software update, is that the Internet? Gabriel? Gabriel. I
• 5:46
  think those things are the Internet.
• 5:47
  Georgia: I think it's all the Internet. It's all the Internet.
• 5:49
  But like derogatorial.
• 5:51
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. Internet open parentheses not
• 5:55
  complimentary. Yeah. Internet parentheses threat.
• 5:59
  I mean, this reminds me of the there was discussion that
• 6:03
  happened many many years ago where it was like, what's the
• 6:08
  Internet versus the World Wide Web? Yeah. Like, back when this
• 6:11
  was like, you know, we were still sort of figuring out what
• 6:14
  this delimiter was. It was like you would go on Usenet, right,
• 6:19
  would be the Internet, but like www.yahoo.com was the World Wide
• 6:25
  Web. That was the and like, are all of these things the
• 6:28
  information superhighway?
• 6:30
  Georgia: Oh, boy.
• 6:31
  Mike Rugnetta: Getting to your question, the immediate thing
• 6:34
  that I thought was like, yeah, all the things that need an
• 6:37
  Internet connection to function are the Internet, including like
• 6:39
  the Internet of Things. And then you call out the Internet of
• 6:42
  Things, which yeah. I think it's like the global network of
• 6:46
  machines, even if they're your refrigerator, it's all the
• 6:49
  Internet.
• 6:50
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. I agree.
• 6:51
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Yeah. There's a good decade there,
• 6:52
  where like the Internet of Things was always looming in the
• 6:56
  think pieces as coming and arriving and life changing. And
• 6:59
  it turns out it just like kind of came and arrived and became
• 7:02
  everything and nothing really feels any different.
• 7:04
  Mike Rugnetta: And now my air conditioner is connected to the
• 7:07
  Internet and it's got a timer on it that I can change via an app
• 7:10
  on my phone to time when it turns on and off, but it doesn't
• 7:14
  it doesn't ever apply. Like no matter how many times I do it in
• 7:17
  the app, the actual appliance never behaves any differently.
• 7:21
  And that feels like the Internet. You know I mean? Like,
• 7:23
  that feels thematically right.
• 7:25
  Georgia: But I do think there's sort of different designations
• 7:27
  worth being made here of the Internet of things, the social
• 7:33
  Internet.
• 7:34
  Jason Oberholtzer: Right.
• 7:35
  Georgia: I mean, it's all the Internet, but the app Instagram
• 7:38
  on my phone feels like a different Internet than the app
• 7:42
  on my phone I use to change the color of the light bulbs in my
• 7:45
  light fixtures.
• 7:46
  Mike Rugnetta: But I think it's like, this is where this like
• 7:48
  the psychogeographic metaphors are useful.
• 7:50
  Hans Buetow: You know, like
• 7:52
  Jason Oberholtzer: Like it does.
• 7:52
  Mike Rugnetta: Pittsburgh and Palm Springs are both The United
• 7:55
  States, but they're very very different places. I think, you
• 7:59
  know, the Internet feels similarly sometimes.
• 8:02
  Georgia: Definitely. Well, I think this dovetails very nicely
• 8:07
  into some messages we got around my segment around tactility and
• 8:11
  buttons and smartphones. And we got this message from Alec that
• 8:17
  says, hi, Neverpost. I finished Georgia's segment on tactility
• 8:21
  and smartphones with a thick yellow electrical wire in my
• 8:24
  hands. I was steadily coiling it in wide circles around a vacuum,
• 8:31
  finishing my nightly janitor work at Seattle based tech mega
• 8:35
  corp and wondering why I couldn't relate to this lack of
• 8:39
  touch, this void that needed to be filled.
• 8:42
  The answer came almost immediately. Rubbery plastic
• 8:45
  wire running through my fingers, threatening to burn them through
• 8:49
  the friction of its passing. Touch is a major sense in my
• 8:53
  line of work, only to sight. I can feel the coffee stain on
• 8:57
  your desk as well as I can see it. And more importantly, I can
• 9:01
  feel when I've wiped it away.
• 9:03
  Touching a sticky mess is not satisfying, but what I like
• 9:07
  about my job is the act of reaching out and changing the
• 9:10
  world around me bit by tiny bit. With each bag of trash, each
• 9:15
  stroke of the toilet brush, not only do I know I am doing
• 9:19
  something impactful, but my body knows it too. When I spend too
• 9:23
  long on my phone, some part of myself feels adrift in the sea
• 9:27
  of content, floating further and further away from the pile of
• 9:30
  meat and bones lying in my bed. I think the need for tactile
• 9:34
  experiences is very high, both as a way for our minds to stay
• 9:38
  grounded within our bodies, and as a way for our bodies to get
• 9:42
  the feedback that they have a purpose. That they are not just
• 9:45
  for ferrying a brain and a thumb around to look at the next
• 9:49
  screen.
• 9:50
  That's a very long way of saying that I love buttons, and I think
• 9:53
  they're fun to press. Thanks for the thought provoking episode as
• 9:57
  always.
• 9:58
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. of all.
• 9:59
  Mike Rugnetta: Fucking shouts to Alex.
• 10:00
  Hans Buetow: That was great.
• 10:02
  Georgia: Beautifully beautifully written.
• 10:05
  Mike Rugnetta: Yes.
• 10:05
  Georgia: And I mean, I completely agree with you. I
• 10:07
  think what you're describing when you start feeling adrift
• 10:11
  from your actual physical body is something I struggle with
• 10:14
  constantly because I am online so much, because I'm interfacing
• 10:17
  with screens so much more than I'm doing something, I would
• 10:22
  say, like intentional with my body, with my hands, with my
• 10:26
  physical self.
• 10:28
  Hans Buetow: This reminds me of when I used to work in
• 10:30
  restaurants a lot. And my wife, who was then my girlfriend, we
• 10:35
  were just starting to date, worked in an office, and she
• 10:38
  would say, sometimes I really like doing dishes, and I would
• 10:41
  say, no. And she would say, all of my projects are long term
• 10:45
  projects that never have any resolution, but when I do a
• 10:48
  dish, I wash it, I put it down, I dry it, and it's done. And
• 10:53
  it's like that same sort of impulse of, ugh, I think I can
• 10:55
  touch rather than the thing that swirls around me, I think is a
• 10:58
  is a strong inclination.
• 11:00
  Georgia: This is something I think about a lot with jobs I've
• 11:03
  had in the past. When I was an undergrad, I was the lab
• 11:06
  assistant in a dark room for multiple years and was
• 11:10
  responsible for mixing the chemistry together that was used
• 11:14
  in the black and white darkroom. And even I mean, the act of
• 11:18
  printing a photograph in a darkroom is so physical. You
• 11:21
  specifically cannot have a phone out because it will destroy your
• 11:24
  paper. Even I was a barista when I moved to Chicago, and the the
• 11:30
  experience of that job is so physical and so physical in a
• 11:33
  way that kind of negates the possibility of using screens,
• 11:38
  which is something I find exponentially more helpful for
• 11:41
  me when it's like, no, actually, you can't.
• 11:44
  Jason Oberholtzer: Mhmm. I think part of what feels good when I
• 11:47
  spend like a weekend making music with the fellows that I
• 11:50
  record with is that I cannot touch my phone because my hands
• 11:54
  are busy. Like Mhmm. They're on instruments. I cannot use it.
• 11:59
  And that is very satisfying. The other thing that's made me think
• 12:01
  of sort of like in a psycho spatial sense, if not psycho
• 12:04
  geographic, is that when I started doing podcasts after
• 12:08
  being a writer for a while, podcasting felt more spatial and
• 12:12
  tactile to me in a way that's sort of like reminiscent of the
• 12:16
  way Hans, your wife was saying that like dishes is a job you
• 12:19
  can finish. Like podcast is a job you can finish because
• 12:22
  there's so much raw material and you move it around and you drag
• 12:24
  it and you cut it. You do all these things that like writing
• 12:27
  is just the moving of ideas around and they could be
• 12:29
  anything. Like podcast has material.
• 12:32
  There's actually materiality to it. So I felt more grounded
• 12:36
  doing also just stare at my screen digital work because it
• 12:39
  was a different kind of stare at my screen digital ideal work.
• 12:42
  Hans Buetow: That's interesting.
• 12:44
  Georgia: Yeah. Mean, sort of materialize writing
• 12:47
  Jason Oberholtzer: Right.
• 12:47
  Georgia: Into clips that you have to move around, that you
• 12:51
  cut, that you place, that you organize. Yeah. There's
• 12:55
  something to that that makes it feel much more Yeah. I mean,
• 12:57
  tactile
• 12:58
  Hans Buetow: Yeah.
• 12:58
  Georgia: In a way.
• 12:58
  Jason Oberholtzer: Much more satisfying.
• 13:01
  Georgia: So we actually got a lot of messages around mods and
• 13:05
  add ons that you can attach to your devices to make them feel
• 13:10
  more tactile and have more sensation to them. And one in
• 13:13
  particular that I wanted to bring here is an audio clip from
• 13:17
  Tim.
• 13:18
  Tim: As a motion graphic artist, I do a lot of your digital
• 13:20
  illustrations so that I can get into my animation software of
• 13:23
  choice faster. And within the last few years, swapped to
• 13:27
  Procreate on the iPad for that specifically because of how
• 13:29
  powerful the Apple Pencil is versus, you know, using your
• 13:32
  finger or just being on a Wacom which doesn't have a screen in
• 13:35
  it, which was my go to for many years. And initially those touch
• 13:39
  interface buttons where you're zooming in and out with pinches
• 13:41
  and touching four fingers at once to do certain things felt
• 13:44
  like magic and I really enjoyed that experience. But then no
• 13:47
  matter what I changed in the settings, would always be
• 13:49
  undoing by accident with the palm registration turned off and
• 13:52
  it was infuriating that all these touch commands actually
• 13:54
  became a hindrance to my process and after a bit of googling
• 13:57
  found out that there's a large contingent of the illustration
• 14:00
  community that uses a party controller called the eight Bit
• 14:03
  Do because you can map different key shortcuts to each button. So
• 14:08
  there are like number pads, bluetooth number pads that you
• 14:10
  can buy from Amazon but they're pre programmed and I didn't like
• 14:13
  the bulkiness of it and this tiny little controller just
• 14:16
  seems so much more appealing to me so I got one recently, mapped
• 14:20
  all of the keyboard shortcuts and Procreate to it and
• 14:22
  honestly, like my illustration process is so much better for it
• 14:25
  because you still need to, you know, pinch the zoom, that's
• 14:27
  still natural part of it, but being able to like press buttons
• 14:30
  to swap the brushes, swap the colors, really enhance the
• 14:32
  drawing process for me specifically, and it was such an
• 14:35
  interesting thing because this eight bit do is like completely
• 14:38
  programmable.
• 14:38
  It's something that was made for gaming and now is becoming a way
• 14:42
  to act activity back to other processes on the device. And me,
• 14:45
  I'm going, you can add different profiles to this thing. What
• 14:48
  else can I actually add keyboard shortcuts to to improve my
• 14:50
  experience with the touchscreen interface? And it's like, can I
• 14:53
  use this to start driving music when I'm listening in the next
• 14:56
  room or something? Like, it's actually opened a lot of
• 14:58
  opportunities that I just wanna start experimenting with after
• 15:00
  it enhanced my illustration experience so much.
• 15:03
  Georgia: I think this is so interesting, specifically
• 15:05
  because the world of digital illustration is one where
• 15:09
  tactility is so at the forefront of the conversation. I mean, the
• 15:13
  mention of, like, Wacom tablets, the the texture of the screen
• 15:20
  that you're using is often something that people will like
• 15:22
  modify. So you can find tablets or even almost like films that
• 15:28
  you can put over tablets that make it feel more like you are
• 15:31
  drawing on paper, even if you're not.
• 15:33
  Mike Rugnetta: I believe that.
• 15:34
  Jason Oberholtzer: That's cool. Mike, you're a big route your
• 15:37
  own keypads macros sort of guy, aren't you?
• 15:41
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I was gonna say, I relate to this really
• 15:44
  hard because I spent probably about a full year, maybe like
• 15:50
  three or four years ago, trying to figure out what the most
• 15:54
  efficient way for me to edit audio and sound design is. And
• 15:58
  like, it turns out, yeah, that it's like it really is like
• 16:02
  having one hand that is the tool's hand. So, you know,
• 16:06
  that's like on the trackball mouse. And then the other hand
• 16:09
  is just is switching tools.
• 16:12
  So I just have a bank of buttons and a few knobs that switch
• 16:16
  between what the tools are, and it's just like I remember when I
• 16:21
  got it set up and I started doing it, I was like, oh, shit.
• 16:24
  Okay. Yeah. Like, this is sort of how you're supposed to do
• 16:28
  this. And it really it drove home for me this idea that it's
• 16:31
  like, there is no knowing things without the body.
• 16:36
  That, like, the body is just really so intimately involved in
• 16:41
  knowledge. And, like, not just, like, getting the work done, but
• 16:46
  in, like, knowing what to do next and feeling what the next
• 16:49
  step in your process is and knowing the solutions to
• 16:53
  problems and, like, building your skills. It's all just so
• 16:58
  embodied, and so much of technology just throws all that
• 17:02
  out the window.
• 17:02
  Georgia: It says, like Yeah.
• 17:03
  Mike Rugnetta: Flat nothing, touching nothing, all chick lit
• 17:07
  Feeling nothing.
• 17:08
  Jason Oberholtzer: Smooth. And also, like, freeze cognitive
• 17:10
  load because, like, when you are just interacting with an
• 17:13
  interface with, like, a mouse or a touch pad or only that, like,
• 17:16
  you are making cognitive level they give to think through, oh,
• 17:19
  I'm switching to the faders for this and then it's going down by
• 17:23
  however many d b's I can pull rather than, like, left hand
• 17:27
  turns knob down. Like, loud knob go down.
• 17:29
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. And that knob does and like the important
• 17:32
  Jason Oberholtzer: thing And that's the only thing that knob
• 17:33
  does.
• 17:33
  Hans Buetow: That knob does. Make it go down.
• 17:35
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. And so your body can just be like, go
• 17:36
  down. Yeah. And you can focus on thinking about like creative
• 17:39
  ideas or the other thing you're supposed to be thinking about
• 17:41
  rather than like, okay. So sub menu three.
• 17:43
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Exactly. So I think I got to this point
• 17:45
  because I was like, know, production and stuff and like
• 17:50
  worked in recording studios, and I was like, a mixing desk is
• 17:53
  stupid. It is like an ancient piece of technology that does
• 17:57
  not represent the way that I work or the way that I wanna
• 17:59
  work. However, it is a thing that has one not like, each
• 18:05
  thing that's on it has a function and that's important.
• 18:08
  And so, yeah, like recapturing that is is great.
• 18:11
  Georgia: I think also in the opposite way, that's what drives
• 18:15
  me so nuts about, you know, your printer having an app and the
• 18:21
  idea of having to wait for your card at work because there's a
• 18:25
  software update. Like, you conceptualize everything and
• 18:31
  separate it from the physical that much, it's too much. It's
• 18:35
  too I I I long for a return to one button do one thing.
• 18:40
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Your printer is never gonna work, but
• 18:43
  at least it's not working in a one to one relationship with
• 18:46
  you.
• 18:47
  Georgia: Yes. Exactly. Last thing on this is a message from
• 18:52
  Tom.
• 18:53
  Tom Lum: Hey, Never Post Gro. It's Tom Lum. Miss you guys.
• 18:56
  Regarding touchscreens from episode 32, Smooth Moves, I just
• 19:00
  wanted to share a parable that I always think of when it comes to
• 19:05
  bad touchscreen interfaces, especially touchscreens on
• 19:09
  keyboards like the Apple Touch Bar that I I despise. So at the
• 19:14
  Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, formerly the EMP
• 19:17
  Museum, there is a small silly video game called Tenya Wanya
• 19:22
  Teens.
• 19:23
  It was created by Keita Takahashi, who was the director
• 19:26
  of Katamari Damacy, one of the best games ever made. And in
• 19:30
  this game, Tenya Wanya Teens, you play a teenager going
• 19:33
  through a speedrun of their day, but your controls are a grid of
• 19:38
  16 colorful arcade buttons, with each color corresponding to a
• 19:43
  hyper specific action. Like red might be brushing your teeth,
• 19:48
  green might be playing guitar, and blue might be confessing
• 19:52
  your love. These are all actual actions in the game, and there
• 19:55
  are so many more. And as you are speedrunning through your day as
• 19:58
  a teenager, you have to do the right action at the right time.
• 20:02
  The catch being that randomly, the colors of the buttons will
• 20:06
  swap out from beneath them, so you'll go to hit the button to
• 20:10
  confess your love to your crush, but then it will have switched
• 20:12
  to brushing your teeth, or you will accidentally confess your
• 20:16
  love in front of the whole class. It's a really great
• 20:19
  playable metaphor for the awkwardness of being a teen,
• 20:23
  that you don't feel quite in control of your body, or that
• 20:26
  you feel like you're always doing the wrong thing at the
• 20:28
  wrong time. But the thing is, that's exactly what a bad touch
• 20:34
  interface is, but not on purpose. Like, here it was used
• 20:38
  as a pastiche and a joke, but like, any touch interface that
• 20:41
  changes when you're not looking is a Tenya Wanya teen situation.
• 20:46
  And of course it's even worse in a car.
• 20:48
  So, of course, touch surfaces can be great, especially when
• 20:51
  what you're looking at is what you're touching. But you have to
• 20:55
  be careful, you're not literally creating a teniawanya teen
• 20:59
  situation. Anyway, congrats on the Webby. I don't want to take
• 21:02
  all the credit, but if we're being honest, I think my intro
• 21:05
  at the start of the episode really did a lot of heavy
• 21:07
  lifting in that episode, so you're welcome for the Webby.
• 21:11
  That was a joke.
• 21:12
  God, that was sad.
• 21:13
  Mike Rugnetta: I think I think we should chisel off a part of
• 21:16
  the webby and send it to Yeah.
• 21:18
  Georgia: Break off
• 21:18
  Mike Rugnetta: It's only fair, really.
• 21:21
  Georgia: So I have amazing news, which is that I looked up Tenya
• 21:24
  Wanya Teens, and it's so cute and amazing. Okay.
• 21:28
  Mike Rugnetta: But I mean, what a great metaphor for like it's
• 21:31
  yeah. So, you know
• 21:32
  Georgia: It's perfect.
• 21:32
  Mike Rugnetta: Bad touchscreen interface is just recreating the
• 21:36
  awkwardness of not knowing how to use your body as a teenager.
• 21:39
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. It's perfect.
• 21:40
  Georgia: Confess your love. Confess your love. No.
• 21:44
  Hans Buetow: No. I just wanna sign in. I'm just gonna send an
• 21:48
  email.
• 21:48
  Georgia: You're just my printer. Next
• 21:53
  Jason Oberholtzer: up, we got an email in response to my segment
• 21:58
  on charts and the turn of the century. This comes from Jack
• 22:02
  who says that that reminded him of the way that being able to
• 22:06
  graphically present research via chart, infographic, or diagram
• 22:09
  almost always makes it resonate more with an audience and or
• 22:12
  client. This places huge pressure on researchers like
• 22:15
  myself specializing in qualitative methods where the
• 22:17
  aim is to understand different experiences, perspectives, and
• 22:20
  values, not just count them. Reflecting on my work, I can't
• 22:23
  help but link the trend for quantitative charts with the
• 22:26
  trend for research methods that promise being able to quantify
• 22:30
  qualitative data. In particular, the abundance of workshops and
• 22:34
  public engagement methods centered around the post it
• 22:37
  note.
• 22:38
  These are activities that promise to capture the breadth
• 22:40
  and depth of human perspectives into neat digestible visualized
• 22:44
  forms. He then references the brilliant Shannon Mattern. And
• 22:48
  goes on to say, it feels like there's definitely a link
• 22:51
  between the proliferation of charts as the go to research
• 22:53
  output and the proliferation of post it note based methods as a
• 22:57
  way of performing qualitative research. Being able to point at
• 23:00
  a pile of post it notes, group them, count them, visualize them
• 23:03
  on a Miro board feels like an attempt of qualitative
• 23:06
  researchers to condense their work into charts as a format. I
• 23:12
  agree, Jack.
• 23:13
  And I have been in a lot of meetings where we move a lot of
• 23:16
  post it notes around because somebody came back in with a lot
• 23:19
  of qualitative sociological research, and it's not real
• 23:24
  until it is visualized, and that is the post it note phenomenon.
• 23:28
  There are anguished looks in the chat right now. I think everyone
• 23:32
  Hans Buetow: just thinking of like, hey. You know,
• 23:35
  Mike Rugnetta: I'm not looking at anyone in particular, by
• 23:37
  which I mean none of none of our clients that we all work on
• 23:40
  shows for. But like
• 23:41
  Jason Oberholtzer: And love.
• 23:42
  Hans Buetow: I think about this a
• 23:43
  Mike Rugnetta: lot when people are like, you know, we're really
• 23:44
  data driven here. So really, our decisions are very data driven.
• 23:49
  And then and then the conversation turns to what does
• 23:53
  the audience like?
• 23:56
  Hans Buetow: You're like, I don't
• 23:57
  Mike Rugnetta: we you know, it's hard to explain to people that
• 23:59
  it's like so much of what you are using to make very big, and
• 24:05
  in certain cases important, you know, at least as far as
• 24:07
  decisions related to media are important. Decisions are like
• 24:12
  ciphers for things. You know, you're like slapping a mask on
• 24:16
  top of something and then only ever talking about the mask
• 24:20
  Right. And not the thing that is on the other side of it. But
• 24:23
  it's like, yeah, it's how so much of this industry and how so
• 24:30
  many people really just like it's what they feel like is the
• 24:34
  closer way to access the truth.
• 24:35
  Yeah. The truth has numbers associated with it, and that
• 24:38
  just makes things complicated.
• 24:40
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. And in other ways, it's just like a
• 24:42
  continuation of this grand conflict between magic and
• 24:47
  science that is sort of always spooling out across time and
• 24:51
  various methods.
• 24:53
  Mike Rugnetta: Next up friend of the show, George Rohawk wrote in
• 24:56
  about my segment on blocking, and George said, in the mailbag,
• 24:59
  there was a brief discussion about blocking folk that you
• 25:02
  know directly slash personally, and muting was briefly
• 25:04
  discussed. But I don't think muting gets as much credit as it
• 25:07
  deserves. I have so many people muted. The mute is the unsung
• 25:11
  hero of social media. I mean, this is hard to argue
• 25:15
  Georgia: with. I completely agree.
• 25:18
  Hans Buetow: I'm a
• 25:18
  Georgia: huge fan of muting.
• 25:20
  Mike Rugnetta: I I don't mute as much as I should. But like,
• 25:26
  there's a reason that it, you know, like, the days of IRC or
• 25:29
  whatever, it was just the main tool. Right? Like, someone's
• 25:32
  bothering you or someone is causing trouble in a channel or
• 25:37
  something, just mute them. Like, they'll you just don't see them
• 25:39
  anymore, and, like, that's the end of it.
• 25:43
  And I think, you know, we talked about this a little bit in the
• 25:45
  segment that, you know, Caroline pointed out that sometimes a
• 25:49
  mute isn't a solution when you don't want someone to be in
• 25:53
  possession of information about your life in any way.
• 25:55
  Hans Buetow: Right.
• 25:55
  Mike Rugnetta: At least you wanna provide some friction to
• 25:57
  them getting that information. And I think that's true. But,
• 26:00
  yeah, like, 90% of the time probably, a mute goes a long
• 26:05
  way. On Blue Sky, at least, when when I get an irritating at
• 26:08
  reply, I have started just muting those people. It, like
• 26:12
  Yeah.
• 26:12
  It's like one and done. Like, I don't I don't need this.
• 26:14
  Georgia: It's just a softer blow. Obviously, there's
• 26:17
  different layers of this because, yeah, if someone is
• 26:19
  harassing you, if someone is using access to, for example,
• 26:25
  your Instagram profile, which if you muted someone, you're just
• 26:28
  not seeing what they're posting, but they can still look at your
• 26:31
  profile. They might not be able to see your story, but they can
• 26:33
  look at your photos that you've posted. Like, if there's danger
• 26:38
  or a problem with them even have axing having access to that,
• 26:42
  muting is not gonna be enough. Yeah.
• 26:44
  But I do appreciate it as kind of a a softer pushing away.
• 26:51
  Mike Rugnetta: I actually I have started using it more like
• 26:53
  Twitter for all the things that were wrong with it had a great
• 26:56
  feature in the the soft block of blocking someone and unblocking
• 27:00
  them forced and unfollow. That doesn't work on Blue Sky, and I
• 27:05
  would often use that on Twitter for someone who it like it
• 27:11
  seemed like them following me caused them distress. That like,
• 27:16
  they would only ever
• 27:17
  Jason Oberholtzer: I'm replies for you.
• 27:19
  Mike Rugnetta: When they were mad about something.
• 27:21
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
• 27:22
  Mike Rugnetta: And like, all of their replies to me would just
• 27:24
  be angry. And I'll be like, listen, I'm gonna do you a
• 27:26
  favor, and I'm just gonna get me out of your timeline.
• 27:29
  Hans Buetow: I'm just I'm just gonna get out of here.
• 27:31
  Mike Rugnetta: Now, I just block those people on Blue Sky just,
• 27:35
  you know, because I can't unfollow them. I can't force
• 27:38
  them to unfollow me. But people who are just like sort of low
• 27:41
  level irritating or who do the blue sky thing of like, well,
• 27:44
  actually ing constantly. Yeah. That's a mute.
• 27:47
  Hans Buetow: Like, those people get muted.
• 27:48
  Georgia: And that's fine. It's a gentle way of being like, hey.
• 27:51
  Yeah.
• 27:51
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. I just shut the fuck up.
• 27:53
  Jason Oberholtzer: But truly, as always, the only real virtuous
• 27:56
  path is to get out of everyone's timeline, and so never post.
• 28:00
  Mike Rugnetta: Just don't do it. Yeah. With that, we're gonna
• 28:03
  take a little break. Okay. So joining us is Kurt White.
• 28:25
  Kurt, thanks for coming on.
• 28:27
  Kurt White: Kurt. Good to see you guys again.
• 28:31
  Mike Rugnetta: Alright. Everybody may remember Kurt from
• 28:33
  our segment about the Internet and the sense of self and using
• 28:37
  technology to construct the sense of self. So, Kurt, thanks
• 28:41
  for coming on for us to read some listener communications to
• 28:45
  you. Our one is from Paul from Sweden. Is this is was this
• 28:51
  furnished in the email as germane information, Jason?
• 28:54
  Jason Oberholtzer: This is how Paul would like to be described.
• 28:57
  Hans Buetow: Okay. This is Paul from Sweden.
• 28:58
  Mike Rugnetta: We honor that. Paul writes, I was just
• 29:01
  listening to your latest mailbag episode when a thought struck
• 29:04
  me, and I had the idea to write this message. As I was hearing
• 29:07
  the questions and perspectives of the listeners of the show, I
• 29:09
  suddenly became aware of a thought process that I've
• 29:12
  maintained for most of my life. I realized the general apathy
• 29:15
  that I had towards my opinions. Every time I heard something
• 29:19
  that interested me or that I related to, I would get the
• 29:21
  instinct to write it with my own thoughts only to tell myself
• 29:25
  that no one would listen before I could even finish the thought.
• 29:28
  I've even noticed this in other people my age with barrenous
• 29:32
  chat rooms and overly vague conversations. I wonder if the
• 29:36
  Internet has anything to do with this as the anonymous nature of
• 29:39
  social media can make posting feel like screaming into a
• 29:42
  pillow. I wonder if it has always been like this, as I am
• 29:46
  only 17 and have never known an Internet without social media.
• 29:51
  What do you think? Has our expanded worldview led to the
• 29:54
  views of ourselves shrinking?
• 29:57
  I'm sure I'm not the person to write about this, but at least
• 29:59
  it feels good to get this thought out of my head. Paul,
• 30:02
  that does feel like a good thought to get out of
• 30:04
  Hans Buetow: your head. Mhmm.
• 30:06
  Kurt White: That's wonderful. I I would have I was pegging Paul
• 30:09
  as a fellow Gen Xer here. Yeah, same. That was the most
• 30:13
  impassioned defense of apathy I've heard in a while. I felt
• 30:18
  myself relaxing into it.
• 30:20
  But then I also thought, you know, it's a feeling I can
• 30:22
  remember when I was 17, interestingly enough, where I
• 30:26
  think you're sort of confronted at that time of life with the
• 30:29
  sort of all the thoughts in your head and the sort of world that
• 30:34
  seems much larger than it actually is in some ways. And I
• 30:37
  think it can feel overwhelming and stifling. I think that's a
• 30:41
  sort of creativity problem, actually. I think it's something
• 30:43
  that has to be kind of born with community. And I don't know that
• 30:48
  the internet either seems to me as a positive or negative in
• 30:51
  that.
• 30:52
  I think it's just something that is. I mean, I didn't have the
• 30:56
  internet I had at 17 was so much less. But I think I still had
• 31:01
  that strong feeling. And I think one has to sort of learn how to
• 31:06
  trust one's own thoughts and feelings as valuable. And very
• 31:10
  often, if you can do that, you'll find that other people
• 31:13
  will respond to them and take them seriously.
• 31:16
  And the world will seem a little smaller, but in a good way. I
• 31:19
  always sort of envied the millennials in a way, because
• 31:23
  guys What?
• 31:23
  Jason Oberholtzer: You hate money?
• 31:24
  Kurt White: You guys took it. Well, it's a
• 31:25
  Hans Buetow: love hate.
• 31:26
  Kurt White: It's a love hate thing. It's Same, to be honest.
• 31:29
  You seemed to have an easier time of that, take it seriously,
• 31:35
  and the world will make room. And I don't know that we really
• 31:38
  thought know what I mean? But now it's so full, maybe people
• 31:41
  have come back around, and they're not so sure if there's
• 31:43
  any room anymore.
• 31:44
  But I think there is room, was room, and will be room.
• 31:47
  Mike Rugnetta: I do think I was gonna say my my main thought,
• 31:50
  both hearing from Paul and hearing you talk about it, Kurt,
• 31:53
  was like, you know, we can all argue about whether or not the
• 31:56
  generational divide really makes a difference, but, like, I I
• 31:59
  wonder if that is at play here because I remember growing up,
• 32:03
  you know, in the early nineties. Right? We're we're just sort of
• 32:06
  getting out of the the Gen X apathy, but we're still in this
• 32:11
  kind of like, you know, the most important thing is to be cool,
• 32:16
  and there was nothing less cool than caring about stuff.
• 32:20
  Kurt White: Mhmm. Yeah.
• 32:21
  Mike Rugnetta: And so for me, like, it felt almost like a
• 32:26
  little rebellious to care about things and to, like, have
• 32:31
  strongly held opinions and to, like, you know, defend them and
• 32:36
  advocate for them. And I wonder now if, like, the Internet is a
• 32:41
  place where, like, everybody's got an opinion. They're
• 32:44
  constantly advocating for them. They're all irritating as shit.
• 32:47
  Is a way for you to, like, look at the world and be like, uh-uh.
• 32:50
  Like, that sucks. No. Thank you.
• 32:54
  Georgia: I mean, kind of to then add to this chronology we're
• 32:57
  creating. When I was growing up in the February, the feeling was
• 33:02
  very different than that. That being online was very much like,
• 33:06
  oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna tell everyone. And it was a, you
• 33:12
  know, a very embarrassing time, but one that was sort of enacted
• 33:19
  upon by my peers and certainly by myself. I was profoundly
• 33:23
  sincere online, very publicly.
• 33:27
  And I do I do struggle a bit with the cacophony of voices now
• 33:36
  and feeling a little paralyzed by it.
• 33:39
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. It's interesting. I in pitch meetings
• 33:43
  and in discussion, there are so many moments where we pause and
• 33:46
  try to think, like, we're assuming the Internet has
• 33:50
  something to do with this in some, like like, catalistic way.
• 33:56
  But is this just how, you know, insert thing works? Is this just
• 34:01
  what it feels like to be a human?
• 34:03
  Like, independent of the Internet? Is this just like how
• 34:05
  this concept exists on the world? Would a
• 34:07
  Hans Buetow: medieval merchant recognize this Yeah.
• 34:10
  Jason Oberholtzer: Exactly. And so I feel like, yeah, I'm sort
• 34:13
  of struggling on this particular question with that. In some
• 34:15
  ways, like, yes, this is a just a reasonable way to fuel that a
• 34:20
  lot of people feel. But in some ways, I think this is tied into
• 34:23
  the chronology we're setting up of sort of caring and posting on
• 34:26
  the Internet. As somebody who posted a lot on the Internet and
• 34:29
  stopped, I think not just because I burned out from having
• 34:31
  a public persona, but because there was a bit of frustration,
• 34:37
  cynicism, despondency that creeped in, having been in a
• 34:41
  space that was like forwarding ideas and agendas and
• 34:44
  understanding of the world, and with some vague goal in the
• 34:48
  future that if we just understood things enough and
• 34:51
  sorry to the charts question from before, if we could put
• 34:54
  them graphically enough, if we could just explain them
• 34:57
  correctly, if we had enough post its to move around, clearly,
• 35:00
  like, wisdom would win out, and we would like make correct
• 35:03
  decisions because we had better and more information.
• 35:06
  And as that's became increasingly difficult to see
• 35:09
  positive outcomes from, or even like ways in which it impressed
• 35:13
  the world, it became more difficult to consider posting.
• 35:18
  In some ways, that does start to reflect on like contributing my
• 35:22
  ideas to a discourse, or having an idea worth sharing, and some
• 35:26
  sort of resentment of people who assume that their ideas are
• 35:29
  worth sharing in any way that I have to like get over a knee
• 35:31
  jerk response of like, why would you why would you tell anyone
• 35:34
  anything you're thinking? It's not gonna fucking matter, which
• 35:37
  is a bad place to land.
• 35:39
  Georgia: I mean, I think there's a happy medium here. Because at
• 35:42
  least personally, my frustration is often with the belief that
• 35:47
  you are now automatically an expert on whatever topic. I get
• 35:51
  frustrated by all these people basically, actualing each other
• 35:58
  until it becomes this ouroboros that just sort of collapses in
• 36:01
  on itself. But I think I think there is space, Kurt, to kind of
• 36:06
  what you were saying of, like, not taking it to that place, but
• 36:11
  also not taking in the other direction where it's like, well,
• 36:13
  why even say anything at all? Like, I think there's a space to
• 36:16
  just be like, to make room to have observations, to talk to
• 36:22
  each other, to communicate without it either being, and
• 36:26
  this is the definitive end of the story decision about this.
• 36:32
  Hans Buetow: Mhmm.
• 36:33
  Georgia: And also feel additive. It's it's more communal. It's
• 36:37
  more conversational.
• 36:38
  Kurt White: Mhmm. I was reminded, and I hope this is a
• 36:41
  building adjoining, but if not, we have editors. I want to read
• 36:46
  a little quote from a little book. It was a little book of
• 36:50
  Georgia O'Keeffe paintings. Just a tiny little book of Georgia.
• 36:54
  And there's a wonderful quote in the front that I always have
• 36:57
  loved. A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many
• 37:02
  associations with a flower, the idea of flowers. You put out
• 37:06
  your hand to touch the flower, you lean forward to smell it,
• 37:10
  maybe touch it with your lips, almost without thinking, or give
• 37:13
  it to someone to please them. Still, in a way, nobody sees a
• 37:18
  flower, really.
• 37:20
  It is so small. We haven't time, and it takes time, like to have
• 37:24
  a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I
• 37:29
  see it, no one would see what I see because I would paint it
• 37:33
  small, like the flower is small.
• 37:37
  Jason Oberholtzer: Well, there you have it, Paul from Sweden.
• 37:40
  Here's
• 37:40
  Hans Buetow: your answer.
• 37:43
  Kurt White: I mean, means something. Every person's
• 37:46
  something means something, right? We have to find a way to
• 37:49
  not be the cliche of ourselves. And we do have to do that
• 37:53
  publicly somehow. There's no correction for that but to sort
• 37:57
  of bungle into it.
• 37:58
  Mike Rugnetta: And it's and that's probably even harder when
• 38:01
  you're 17. You know? Like, it's not easy when you're 40. But No.
• 38:05
  It's it's I I've at least got a a couple iterations of seventeen
• 38:10
  years under my belt.
• 38:12
  Doing the seventeen is particularly hard.
• 38:15
  Kurt White: Yeah. That's right. And before long, you have an
• 38:17
  award winning podcast. You
• 38:21
  Mike Rugnetta: know, you hit 40, they just hand them out
• 38:22
  Hans Buetow: to you. They hand them out to you. That's right.
• 38:27
  Jason Oberholtzer: Kurt, this next question I found here is
• 38:29
  particularly plucks to appeal to the Gen X in you. So we'll get
• 38:34
  back to that.
• 38:35
  Hans Buetow: Very good. Very good.
• 38:37
  Jason Oberholtzer: Chris writes it and says, finally getting
• 38:40
  around to writing you about shutting down my PC. My
• 38:43
  emotional response to this simple act changed as the
• 38:45
  interface did. For reference, I'm 45 years old. My PC was an
• 38:49
  Apple two e.
• 38:50
  Hans Buetow: Oh, yeah. I hope.
• 38:53
  Kurt White: Had one myself. It wasn't my but I did have one.
• 38:56
  Yeah.
• 38:58
  Jason Oberholtzer: My early PCs had dedicated single function on
• 39:01
  off switches. Often these came with a satisfying clunk. That
• 39:05
  sound Right. The time I found myself with a PC where the
• 39:09
  default method of shutting down was to click a menu option, I
• 39:12
  felt genuinely offended. Especially since that process
• 39:16
  took a bit of time, none of the instant feedback of a switch.
• 39:19
  I didn't like that it felt more like a request than a command.
• 39:23
  Maybe it was because PCs used to freeze up rather more often than
• 39:26
  they do now. I didn't trust the technology fully. PCs usually
• 39:30
  still have an instant off switch hidden away at the back, but now
• 39:33
  on the rare occasions I need to use this, it somehow feels
• 39:36
  violent. Even switching my phone all the way off seems, if not
• 39:41
  extreme, then unnecessarily forceful.
• 39:45
  I've noticed my language reflects this as well. What I
• 39:47
  would once call a reboot, I'd now call a hard reboot. If this
• 39:51
  turns out to be a broader phenomenon than just myself, I
• 39:54
  wonder what has contributed to the attitude change.
• 39:56
  Anthropomorphizing language like putting things in sleep mode? Do
• 40:00
  our devices feel more like extensions of ourselves?
• 40:03
  I'd love to hear your thoughts. Even if it's to tell me,
• 40:06
  hopefully gently, that I'm alone in this. Kurt, is Chris alone in
• 40:10
  this? Oh, no.
• 40:12
  Kurt White: I I loved all that. Those old noises live in my soul
• 40:16
  somewhere. I just love it. I have a collection of them in my
• 40:21
  head and heart. And I think that's a good that's extensions
• 40:25
  of oneself.
• 40:26
  It does feel like that. And maybe we're a little more
• 40:30
  hesitant to sort of do violence to it for that very reason.
• 40:34
  Know, it's meant to be always shining like a beacon in the
• 40:38
  background or something like that. There's something lost
• 40:41
  when we do that and something sort of hard when we have to do
• 40:44
  it. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it myself in a violent way, but I
• 40:50
  can easily imagine it.
• 40:52
  I can easily imagine. My current PC that I'm sitting here with,
• 40:55
  it hides the button so thoroughly that every every time
• 40:58
  I need to press it, I need to shine a bright light on it
• 41:01
  because it's it's so hidden that I can't even I can't even see
• 41:04
  it. I don't know what that means, but it it does it does
• 41:07
  conjure a certain amount of violence in me when I have to
• 41:09
  look for the goddamn things.
• 41:11
  Jason Oberholtzer: Well, I think that means like, this is these
• 41:12
  are conscious design choices made by people who don't want
• 41:15
  you to turn these things off ever. And like the relationship
• 41:19
  that we had at one point with the machines where you had to
• 41:23
  turn them on before engaging is it's gone. Like, they are always
• 41:27
  there. We are always engaging.
• 41:29
  Georgia: Well, I think there's something here about access and
• 41:32
  accessibility in terms of having access to this device and the
• 41:35
  device having access to you. Because I cannot remember the
• 41:39
  last time I consciously turned off my phone.
• 41:42
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. And it's for the same purpose that
• 41:44
  it always has been, which is like, it starts doing too many
• 41:47
  weird things and I don't know why. And then I try to turn it
• 41:49
  off, and I found that, like, I haven't turned off this model of
• 41:51
  the phone enough, so I don't actually know how to do it
• 41:53
  quickly. Yeah. I have to, like, figure out which combination of
• 41:56
  buttons starts to turn it off again.
• 41:58
  Kurt White: You have to look it up.
• 41:58
  Jason Oberholtzer: And it's like a two stage process.
• 42:01
  Kurt White: You you get a lot of screenshots of you trying to
• 42:03
  Jason Oberholtzer: set up
• 42:03
  Hans Buetow: the phone. Yeah.
• 42:06
  Georgia: But and it does Jason Jason, to your point of the
• 42:10
  times I've had to turn my phone off are when it's, yeah, it's
• 42:12
  glitching, something's not working. And back to the
• 42:15
  violence point, it does kind of feel like you're slapping
• 42:18
  someone in the face because they're freaking out, and you're
• 42:21
  like, snap out of it. Like, you're just like slapping.
• 42:23
  Hans Buetow: I'll work you I'll wake you up again soon, buddy.
• 42:25
  Just for a couple of seconds. Don't don't worry about it.
• 42:28
  Mike Rugnetta: Well, it's like you're you're severing your
• 42:30
  connection to the world. You're like, well, I'm you know, like,
• 42:33
  it it you disconnect. But that has an embodied feeling to it
• 42:37
  now. We are. As opposed to just an an emotional psychological
• 42:41
  one.
• 42:41
  Right?
• 42:41
  Jason Oberholtzer: Right. And also because there's a sense
• 42:43
  like, it feels like the software is turning it off, not the
• 42:45
  hardware, because there's not a big clunk button Mhmm. To turn
• 42:49
  it off. Like, I'm I'm mad, like, I'm touching the screen and
• 42:51
  swiping the thing and it's turning itself off, and I always
• 42:54
  fear that it will never let me turn it back on.
• 42:56
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Where do each of you keep your phones when you
• 42:59
  come in of a night and you're kind of done?
• 43:02
  Mike Rugnetta: Oh, no. The face that Kurt made?
• 43:05
  Kurt White: Oh, god. I've turned into the person I never wanted
• 43:08
  to be with this. It's turned into such a multifunction device
• 43:14
  that I'm very often trying to wake myself up without waking
• 43:17
  Emily up. And so, I'll slip it under my pillow with the hope
• 43:22
  that my non noise alarm will wake me and not her before the
• 43:27
  noise alarm. So I I literally sleep with it like a child
• 43:31
  sleeps with a with a tooth that's just come loose under its
• 43:34
  pillow.
• 43:35
  No fairy has ever visited me in the night, however.
• 43:41
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Well, then yes, it is an extension of
• 43:43
  ourselves. I think that answers
• 43:45
  Kurt White: the I will make a note about the violence of
• 43:48
  processes. You know, the old Unix machines had all kinds of
• 43:51
  violence built into the language. You know, you would
• 43:54
  kill things, kill as a command, right? I mean, this language,
• 43:58
  they had a TV series, not a bad one, a halt and catch fire, you
• 44:03
  know, named after a real catastrophic process that would
• 44:06
  happen at that time. So I think we were sort of used to a
• 44:10
  certain level of violence built into our devices that's maybe
• 44:14
  it's been sort of sublimated.
• 44:17
  Mike Rugnetta: Kurt, thank you so much for taking some time out
• 44:19
  of your busy professional real job to join us for some some
• 44:24
  good old fashioned podcasting.
• 44:26
  Kurt White: No. No. The world needs podcasts like this.
• 44:28
  Hans Buetow: Don't you dare?
• 44:31
  Kurt White: I believe it. I believe it. You know? Don't
• 44:33
  trust me. We need to send a good message to our listeners here.
• 44:37
  Right? We trust your instinct that you have something to
• 44:40
  offer.
• 44:41
  Jason Oberholtzer: There you go. So you heard it here from Kurt.
• 44:43
  I want you to, before you go to sleep, turn the podcast on, put
• 44:45
  it under
• 44:46
  Mike Rugnetta: your pillow. Kurt, what are you guys working
• 44:50
  on over at Unraveling these days? What do got coming up?
• 44:52
  Kurt White: Oh, man. Some wild and wonderful stuff. We're in
• 44:56
  the middle of a series of three episodes in honor of Pride
• 45:00
  Month. We just did an episode on queer theory. And then next,
• 45:04
  talked to a colleague in Singapore who's a music
• 45:06
  therapist about all kinds of different aspects of expression
• 45:11
  and protection and identity, and then resilience in trans youth,
• 45:15
  and then some great stuff coming up in July, too.
• 45:18
  Mike Rugnetta: Hell, yeah. All right. We'll put some links in
• 45:19
  the show notes.
• 45:39
  Hans Buetow: Up next, we got a message from Alex about our
• 45:44
  segment that we did. It was actually a whole episode that we
• 45:47
  did about whether or not the Internet is driving you. Yes.
• 45:50
  You absolutely to the brink of your mental capacity. And Alex
• 45:57
  said to us, I am an ex smoker.
• 46:00
  And while I haven't had a cigarette in over a decade, I
• 46:03
  still think of myself as a recovering drug addict. I have
• 46:06
  to. It's basically the only thing that keeps me from
• 46:09
  starting up again. Shame can be a powerful motivating force. You
• 46:13
  know?
• 46:13
  Unlike a lot of ex smokers, I never had a problem with a lack
• 46:16
  of constant oral fixation. Me, I could never figure out what to
• 46:20
  do with my hands. While listening to the episode, I
• 46:24
  checked for my own stats of the day, and I was shocked to find
• 46:28
  that I unlocked my phone 57 times and spent nearly two hours
• 46:33
  on TikTok and thirty six minutes on blue sky during a workday at
• 46:38
  a job that in no way requires any use of my phone. Is two
• 46:44
  hours on TikTok worse than 20 or so cigarettes a day? Maybe not.
• 46:47
  What I'm trying to say is I think TikTok and whatever else
• 46:50
  you consider, quote, unquote, the feed are like cigarettes.
• 46:55
  Like cigarettes, the feed makes you think you need it to get
• 46:59
  through your day.
• 47:01
  Georgia: I do really resonate with this idea of feeling like
• 47:03
  you have to do something with your hands.
• 47:05
  Jason Oberholtzer: Me too. Me too. As Hans was reading that, I
• 47:08
  was like, feeling the impulses go down to my arm of like, you
• 47:11
  should grab that phone, dude.
• 47:13
  Georgia: Oh, wow. Yeah.
• 47:14
  Kurt White: A lot
• 47:14
  Hans Buetow: of the time Yeah.
• 47:15
  Georgia: A lot of times, I will notice myself just grabbing my
• 47:18
  phone and, like, opening the weather app for, like, no reason
• 47:23
  just to physically do it.
• 47:25
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Or it's like that thing where you're
• 47:26
  like, oh, I'm gonna check I'm gonna check Instagram. Like,
• 47:29
  okay. I checked Instagram. I'm gonna check TikTok.
• 47:31
  Okay. I checked TikTok. I'm gonna check blue sky. Okay. I
• 47:33
  checked blue sky.
• 47:33
  Okay. I'm gonna check Instagram. I check Instagram.
• 47:35
  Jason Oberholtzer: Oh, yeah.
• 47:36
  Mike Rugnetta: I'm done checking Instagram. I'm gonna check
• 47:37
  TikTok.
• 47:38
  Georgia: Mean, I've done it even worse where I'd be like, now
• 47:41
  that I'm done checking Instagram, I'm gonna close the
• 47:44
  app and it's time to check Instagram.
• 47:47
  Hans Buetow: I'll,
• 47:49
  Georgia: like, look at my own photos. Like, I don't know what
• 47:52
  I'm doing. Like, and I will you know, kind of to what we had
• 47:55
  talked about in that actual episode. It's almost like I've
• 47:59
  been sleepwalking. I'll just be like Yeah.
• 48:04
  Am I in the shower? Like, what no. Like, I'm just like, how how
• 48:09
  did I get here? Like, what am I looking for? That that's the
• 48:11
  question I asked in the the episode and it's something that
• 48:14
  I use a lot as a barometer where I'm like, wait a I feel like I'm
• 48:17
  doing this with such frenetic energy and then I have to be
• 48:21
  like, maybe we just maybe we just fold our hands neatly in
• 48:25
  our lap for a couple minutes.
• 48:27
  Hans Buetow: I have a question for the three of you. How would
• 48:30
  you describe, in what terms, metaphors, however you want to
• 48:34
  think about it, the feeling of being interrupted by something
• 48:38
  else and being forced to hard eject out of the feed
• 48:42
  Jason Oberholtzer: That's great.
• 48:43
  Hans Buetow: Before that cycle has completed. Is it great? Is
• 48:46
  it great, or do you feel like a like, oh god.
• 48:48
  Jason Oberholtzer: No. I don't need anything that's happening
• 48:49
  in a cycle. Like, there's no complete need to complete an
• 48:52
  activity. There's nothing. It is just time passing because and I
• 48:56
  really do think like, Alex, like, I think you're on to
• 48:59
  something.
• 49:00
  Like, I really do think it it started because my hand hadn't
• 49:02
  done a thing in a while. And it's like, well, maybe there's
• 49:05
  something on the thing that I grab. And then you're just like,
• 49:08
  in it a little bit. But when I'm interrupted, I'm not like, no. I
• 49:10
  need my I was like, oh, okay.
• 49:12
  Sure. What are we what am I doing with my life?
• 49:14
  Georgia: Yeah. It feels like waking up. Like, feels which is
• 49:17
  maybe dark to say. But, yeah, it really feels that way. Because
• 49:22
  otherwise, I mean, I'll be on TikTok looking at TikToks, and
• 49:25
  maybe they're not especially funny or I'm not finding my my
• 49:28
  algorithm's not, like, picking up what I want or something.
• 49:31
  And I will have the thought while looking at TikTok, like,
• 49:34
  oh, after this, I should open TikTok.
• 49:37
  Hans Buetow: Like, wear my glasses? They're on your head.
• 49:39
  Yes. Yeah.
• 49:40
  Georgia: Where I'm like, well, if I go on TikTok, I'll find
• 49:43
  what I'm looking. And then I'm like,
• 49:44
  Hans Buetow: oh my god. I'm on TikTok. Oh god. No.
• 49:47
  Georgia: But, yeah, if if for example, someone calls me on my
• 49:50
  phone and I'm scrolling TikTok and it just, you know, pauses
• 49:53
  the video, that is the thing that shows up on my screen. I'm
• 49:56
  like, oh, my dad's calling me. Whatever feeling I feel of like,
• 50:01
  hey, I was watching that or whatever is vanishingly small.
• 50:06
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I think what Alex is describing is like
• 50:09
  idle phone use. Right? Like, this is like the the hands are
• 50:13
  not busy with other things and so I busy them or, you know, in
• 50:18
  a sense, they busy themselves with with the phone. And really
• 50:22
  what it is is that it's like the phone the phone is a is the
• 50:29
  easiest at the moment avenue to just filling minutes and to
• 50:33
  occupying the brain, or to having the brain occupied for
• 50:37
  you.
• 50:38
  Like, you know, you don't you don't have to expend the energy
• 50:41
  of practicing an instrument for ten minutes or reading a book
• 50:45
  for fifteen minutes or whatever. You can just pick up a device,
• 50:50
  look at it, and have things happen to you that are, you
• 50:54
  know, entertaining or informing or whatever. And I was gonna say
• 50:58
  to sort of extend Alex's metaphor a little bit, like, I
• 51:01
  do think that, you know, a lot in a lot of ways, apps are like
• 51:06
  cigarettes. It's just like if each individual cigarette was
• 51:10
  also able in text to say to you, it's very important that you do
• 51:15
  this as often as possible. You this is sort of how you are
• 51:19
  defining who you are as a person.
• 51:22
  If you don't do this, you're gonna miss out on things that
• 51:25
  are happening in the world. Please consider paying money to
• 51:29
  do this too. It would be nice if you supported this individual
• 51:33
  cigarette with a crowdfunded donation. If you don't, we could
• 51:38
  go away at any moment. Yes.
• 51:40
  We depend on how good you feel.
• 51:41
  Hans Buetow: And now
• 51:42
  Jason Oberholtzer: is a great time to talk about membership at
• 51:44
  night.
• 51:47
  Georgia: Up next, we have a message from Tyver Foucault
• 51:51
  about our roundtable on leaving social media platforms. And
• 51:56
  Tyver writes, I left Twitter at the end of twenty twenty two.
• 52:00
  There was one other sadness that I experienced before I left. In
• 52:04
  the strange Twitter sphere, adjacent to weird Twitter, it
• 52:08
  was common for micro fiction authors and general weirdos to
• 52:11
  make themselves a bot. Not AI as we know it now, but a Markov
• 52:15
  chain bot, which remixed the corpus of your posts in the
• 52:19
  style of at horse ebooks.
• 52:22
  They were sweet little guys happily puttering along, mashing
• 52:26
  together pieces of your voice to make their own thoughts, growing
• 52:29
  as you grew. They often didn't make sense, but sometimes they
• 52:33
  would say something very profound. Not unlike when a
• 52:36
  toddler shares a perspective that surprises and delights. My
• 52:40
  bot had been there beside me for six years. He had a personality.
• 52:45
  I read every post he made. Elon said he would kill the bots, and
• 52:50
  he did. He killed mine, and he killed the bot of my dear friend
• 52:54
  and fellow author, Tiny Obscure, and we mourned. To honor them,
• 52:59
  we made a zine.
• 53:01
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. The I think the bot the bot ecosystem on
• 53:05
  Twitter at its height was one of the best parts about it.
• 53:08
  Georgia: That's why that's so interesting. It
• 53:09
  Mike Rugnetta: ruled. It was really really good. Man. And I
• 53:12
  totally understand like mourning. You know what mean?
• 53:14
  Like, suddenly, you know, like, there was mourning for horsey
• 53:16
  books. Like, would be I can see why there would be mourning for
• 53:19
  this. Yeah.
• 53:20
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. It's interesting because it's like a
• 53:21
  deletion of a like a content type and as well as like the
• 53:25
  community that it lives in. Yeah. But I mean, honestly, the
• 53:29
  coolest thing you could do after that is magazine. So
• 53:32
  Georgia: Oh my god. That's such a cool idea. I'm so glad you did
• 53:35
  that. And then Tyver also shared with us the final tweet before
• 53:42
  leaving Twitter, which goes as follows. The Twitter leavers
• 53:47
  oath.
• 53:48
  I will not be terminally online. My friendships and community
• 53:53
  will outlive this website. My heart cannot be monetized. I
• 53:58
  will not become food for monsters. Should their claws
• 54:01
  find my flesh, may they drown in my blood.
• 54:05
  Hans Buetow: Fuck yes. Holy shit.
• 54:07
  Mike Rugnetta: Every word of it true and hard
• 54:09
  Hans Buetow: as fuck.
• 54:10
  Jason Oberholtzer: That's the hardest shit I've read all year.
• 54:12
  Georgia: We should start saying this together before we do live
• 54:15
  shows.
• 54:18
  Mike Rugnetta: Fuck it. I'm just gonna get it tattooed on my
• 54:20
  chest.
• 54:20
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Sick as hell. Oh my god.
• 54:23
  Jason Oberholtzer: Hell yeah. Timer. Alright. And finally,
• 54:28
  it's what you've all been waiting for, an update on cool
• 54:30
  graffiti. Now I'm gonna have to go over the ground rules again.
• 54:34
  This was supposed to be your favorite one word graffiti
• 54:37
  instances.
• 54:39
  Georgia: The rules have changed.
• 54:40
  Jason Oberholtzer: But I'll allow that you just give me good
• 54:42
  graffiti, but I'm mad about it.
• 54:44
  Hans Buetow: Now it's now
• 54:45
  Mike Rugnetta: it's just sick photos of funny things on walls.
• 54:47
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Exactly. Including the one,
• 54:49
  which is a sticker. They sent me a sticker from Dylan that says
• 54:54
  fuck Yelp.
• 54:55
  Mike Rugnetta: Although the sticker doesn't just say fuck
• 54:58
  Yelp.
• 54:59
  Georgia: It also says pure madness.
• 55:01
  Mike Rugnetta: Yes. It's unclear if they're related. Right? In my
• 55:05
  mind in my mind, they absolutely are.
• 55:08
  Georgia: Yeah. Think they're different because the font is
• 55:11
  different.
• 55:12
  Jason Oberholtzer: But they're so close.
• 55:13
  Georgia: Tonally, they are the same.
• 55:15
  Hans Buetow: Somebody thought that putting them together was
• 55:17
  funny, and they were.
• 55:18
  Jason Oberholtzer: They're right.
• 55:18
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. And I like this as, one thought that
• 55:20
  follows another. Like, premise, fuck Yelp. Conclusion, pure
• 55:24
  madness.
• 55:26
  Georgia: Yeah. Well then, Jason, how do you feel about the next
• 55:28
  one, which has, in fact, no words at all?
• 55:31
  Jason Oberholtzer: I hate this, but I'm gonna allow it. Fabie
• 55:34
  Fakes sent us a graffiti Among Us guy.
• 55:37
  Georgia: Yeah. Just one of the Among Us guy.
• 55:38
  Jason Oberholtzer: From Italy. That's the surprising part about
• 55:40
  this. Well Some Italian youths are spraying Among Us guys on
• 55:45
  their walls. Mamma Mia. No.
• 55:48
  Alex Alex Morris sent a phrase, which is really stretching my
• 55:53
  credulity here. He moved back to Chicago Let's go. When he says,
• 55:57
  when I moved back to Chicago a few years ago, my night out, we
• 56:00
  went to Pequads for deep dish. I saw this written on the bathroom
• 56:05
  wall and I knew I was home. Wayne Gretzky killed my uncle.
• 56:09
  Sad face.
• 56:10
  Hans Buetow: The sad face really sells it.
• 56:12
  Georgia: I was gonna say, it's like, oh, man.
• 56:16
  Jason Oberholtzer: Does does this mean something to you
• 56:17
  Chicago people? Like, at all?
• 56:21
  Georgia: I mean, I I I'm the worst person ever to ask about
• 56:26
  this. Having lived here for almost a decade,
• 56:28
  Mike Rugnetta: I Does Wayne Gritsky killed any of your
• 56:30
  Jason Oberholtzer: family members? Not
• 56:32
  Georgia: yet, though. The possibility is always there. He
• 56:35
  has a thirst for blood.
• 56:39
  Jason Oberholtzer: Kieran Rex sends in a famed piece of local
• 56:43
  folklore graffiti on a bridge over a highway that says, give
• 56:47
  peas a chance, as in multiple vegetables. Peas, that's fun.
• 56:51
  That's a pun. That's not one word graffiti, but thank you for
• 56:54
  sending it in.
• 56:55
  Georgia: Personally, I think the Brits have given peas enough
• 56:57
  chances, frankly.
• 56:59
  Mike Rugnetta: There's they're
• 57:00
  Hans Buetow: they're Give seasoning a
• 57:01
  Mike Rugnetta: chance. Confounding. The confounding
• 57:03
  Yeah.
• 57:03
  Georgia: Give sees hey. How about
• 57:05
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Josh Pelton gave me a one word
• 57:08
  submission. It's 50. 50. This is what
• 57:11
  Hans Buetow: you want, Jason? This is what I want. This is
• 57:14
  Georgia: what you want. You like this
• 57:15
  Jason Oberholtzer: This is great.
• 57:16
  Mike Rugnetta: A single word that you kinda cannot giggle at.
• 57:18
  50.
• 57:19
  Jason Oberholtzer: 50.
• 57:20
  Georgia: That's great. Scarf.
• 57:21
  Jason Oberholtzer: He also sent in chicken jockey,
• 57:24
  Hans Buetow: which is two two people joining forces, it looks
• 57:26
  like.
• 57:27
  Jason Oberholtzer: It does. It's yeah. Two different colors.
• 57:29
  Mike Rugnetta: Chicken jockey is a Minecraft reference.
• 57:31
  Georgia: Oh, really? Yeah. Finally in this list is someone
• 57:35
  who I believe is a friend of mine, unless they have the exact
• 57:38
  same name as him, Max Himmelho. Hi, Max. Your mom was my grade
• 57:41
  teacher.
• 57:43
  Who wrote in to say, it pains me that this could be my
• 57:47
  contribution to such a thoughtful, insightful show, but
• 57:51
  here's Speedo fart.
• 57:54
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Hell yeah. Word. One word, Max. Speedo
• 57:58
  fart.
• 57:59
  Georgia: One word. Speedo fart is one word. So Max, well done.
• 58:02
  Mike Rugnetta: Next to a sleeping
• 58:05
  Georgia: Yeah. Yeah. Dick? Is that
• 58:08
  Hans Buetow: a sleeping
• 58:08
  Mike Rugnetta: dick? Is that a
• 58:09
  Georgia: dick that's asleep? Seems to be.
• 58:11
  Mike Rugnetta: Wearing a little sombrero?
• 58:13
  Georgia: Yeah. Yeah.
• 58:14
  Hans Buetow: Wearing a little hat.
• 58:14
  Jason Oberholtzer: He's doing something fun. You tell his
• 58:16
  mom's a teacher because he knows how to follow directions. One
• 58:20
  funny word spray painted on a wall. That's what I like. Well
• 58:24
  done.
• 58:24
  Put pictures of them on my desk.
• 58:29
  Mike Rugnetta: Alright, folks. We mailbagged. We did it. Thank
• 58:32
  you, friends, for joining. Thank you, Georgia, Jason, Hans,
• 58:39
  Georgia: for chanting. I got scared.
• 58:41
  Hans Buetow: Oh, spicy.
• 58:43
  Mike Rugnetta: Hans, what spicy food are you gonna try next? And
• 58:45
  then tell us in the next mailbag how it went.
• 58:47
  Hans Buetow: Oh, next mailbag? Okay. I'm gonna try tuna fish.
• 58:53
  With a little bit of ranch powder in it.
• 58:56
  Mike Rugnetta: Wow. I'm gonna show it a packet of cracked
• 59:00
  pepper.
• 59:01
  Hans Buetow: And then point point to it across the room.
• 59:06
  Jason Oberholtzer: Now, like we always say at the end of the
• 59:08
  episode, should their claws find my flesh, they may drown in my
• 59:12
  blood?
• 59:13
  Hans Buetow: See you all next time. Yes.
• 59:16
  Mike Rugnetta: Okay. Bye. Bye.