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

• 0:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:13
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
• 0:15
  Rugnetta, and this intro was written on Tuesday, 07/29/2025
• 0:20
  at 09:34AM eastern. We have a fresh episode for you today. I
• 0:28
  talk with media and communications researcher Emily
• 0:30
  Owens and Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day and Panic World
• 0:34
  about brain rot. Then Hans talks with four librarians about their
• 0:40
  work rescuing and preserving datasets that are under threat
• 0:45
  by the United States government.
• 0:47
  And also on ask an expert, we talk with on the media's own,
• 0:51
  Micah Loeinger. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break.
• 0:55
  You'll listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And
• 0:58
  when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that
• 1:00
  have happened since the last time you heard from us. Man,
• 1:05
  it's a hot one, like five stories this week from the
• 1:08
  midday sun.
• 1:10
  The Internet Archive is now a federal depository library. What
• 1:17
  does this mean? It means it's a library that will house federal
• 1:21
  documents. Writing for KQED, Morgan Sung, who you'll remember
• 1:25
  from our hantai segment, writes that the Internet Archive,
• 1:28
  quote, will join a network of more than a thousand libraries
• 1:32
  around the country tasked with archiving government documents
• 1:36
  for public view. The status is particularly notable, some
• 1:40
  continues, as the Trump administration has
• 1:42
  systematically removed information from federal
• 1:45
  websites under new anti woke executive orders.
• 1:49
  Archive visitors will now have access to primary government
• 1:52
  sources in addition to materials uploaded by users or saved
• 1:56
  through accessible websites, end quote. You're gonna hear Hans
• 2:00
  talk more about this sort of thing this episode. You stopped
• 2:07
  clicking things when you Google. Pew Research finds that only 8%
• 2:11
  of people are likely to click on search results if they are shown
• 2:15
  an AI summary of those results compared to 15% who are not
• 2:20
  shown an AI summary. Furthermore, folks shown AI
• 2:24
  summaries are more likely to simply close the browser window
• 2:28
  after their search versus those who are not.
• 2:31
  Pew says about one in five searches in their study produced
• 2:34
  an AI summary.
• 2:36
  Clip: Oh, man.
• 2:37
  Mike Rugnetta: Hackers leaked data they stole from Tee, the
• 2:41
  women only dating safety app, twice at the time of writing.
• 2:45
  Four zero four media reports it was able to access millions of
• 2:49
  messages containing sensitive data drawn from what is
• 2:52
  nominally an anonymous platform. Highly personal details
• 2:56
  including names, addresses, phone numbers, social media
• 2:59
  handles, and as one might expect, hellishly hot gossip are
• 3:03
  all included. It's unclear who else may have discovered the
• 3:07
  security issue and downloaded any data from the more recent
• 3:10
  database, four zero four media rights, continuing members of
• 3:15
  4chan found the first exposed database last week and made tens
• 3:19
  of thousands of images of t users available for download. T
• 3:23
  told four zero four media it has contacted law enforcement, end
• 3:27
  quote.
• 3:28
  Okay. Deep breath before this next one. Itch, the indie games
• 3:37
  publisher, last week search banned its sizable offering of
• 3:42
  not safe for work and otherwise explicit games. Also removing
• 3:46
  them from browse functionality and restricting the sale of many
• 3:51
  with almost no warning to game makers and publishers. This
• 3:56
  because of pressure from payment processors like PayPal and
• 4:00
  Stripe following pressure they received from a very small group
• 4:04
  of Australian based activists calling themselves collective
• 4:08
  shout, which self describes as a grassroots campaigns movement
• 4:13
  against the objectification of women and the sexualization of
• 4:17
  girls.
• 4:18
  IGN reports that users estimate nearly 20,000 adult games may be
• 4:23
  affected by this de indexing. On July 24, Itch released a
• 4:28
  statement reading in part, our ability to process payments is
• 4:32
  critical for every creator on our platform. To ensure that we
• 4:35
  can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all
• 4:38
  developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our
• 4:42
  payment partners and take immediate step towards
• 4:44
  compliance. An update posted on the twenty eighth further
• 4:48
  elaborates saying that to retain the ability to pay anyone, Itch
• 4:53
  will be working on stronger age gating, more specific terms of
• 4:57
  service, and will begin a search for more lenient payment
• 5:01
  processors. There's a grassroots counter campaign underway
• 5:04
  seeking to exert equal force in the opposite direction on
• 5:08
  payment processors.
• 5:10
  We're gonna put a link to more information about that in the
• 5:12
  show notes if you're curious. And finally, polling by YouGov
• 5:22
  shows a majority of respondents and 60% of those aged 18 to 24
• 5:28
  in Europe would prefer locally based social media platforms
• 5:32
  over current US based options. I wonder why. Recently, a number
• 5:38
  of developers have launched EuroSky, a European alternative
• 5:42
  to BlueSky. Its website reads, built in Europe, run on our
• 5:46
  cloud, ruled by our laws.
• 5:49
  Users choose the content, businesses control their brand
• 5:52
  environment, people control the algorithms. Social media is
• 5:56
  crucial infrastructure and a vital piece of the European tech
• 5:59
  sovereignty agenda. We need to regain structural control over
• 6:03
  our information ecosystems, end quote. Developers include Sherif
• 6:08
  El Sayed Ali, the executive director of the Future of
• 6:11
  Technology Institute, a self described think and do tank, as
• 6:16
  well as Sebastian Voglesong, developer of the AT Proto
• 6:19
  compatible photo sharing app Flashes. In show news this week,
• 6:25
  we released a funding announcement one upload ago.
• 6:29
  If you missed it, please go back and give it a listen. But the
• 6:31
  long and short is we're about to do some fundraising to assure
• 6:35
  that we will be able to continue making this show past the 2025.
• 6:40
  What does that mean? It means that you should keep an eye out
• 6:43
  for T shirts and a live streamed membership drive, which is
• 6:47
  happening the week of August 18, so please put that in your
• 6:51
  calendars. We're gonna release a more detailed schedule in the
• 6:54
  coming weeks, that's what I can tell you so far.
• 6:56
  Week of August 18, we're gonna be doing a bunch of stuff. I
• 6:59
  think that Thursday is gonna be particularly busy. Hey. Also,
• 7:03
  just as an aside here, the response to the funding
• 7:06
  announcement has been sort of unbelievable, honestly. Welcome
• 7:11
  to a bunch of new members listening to the show in the ad
• 7:15
  free feed.
• 7:16
  We are extremely happy and excited to have you. And to
• 7:20
  everyone who sent us along a tip, it is so so, so appreciated
• 7:24
  and extremely helpful. I can't even be begin to say how much. I
• 7:31
  think we're you know, it's a tough time to be an indie show
• 7:35
  doing the weird sorts of things that we do, and so far, your
• 7:40
  response to us asking for help is just it's incredibly
• 7:44
  encouraging. So thank you, really.
• 7:47
  Thank you. Thank you. Alright. That's the news I have for
• 7:49
  you this week. In this week's episode, Hans, Jenny, Kate,
• 7:52
  Molly,
• 7:53
  and Linda on tactical archiving. Then me, Emily, and Ryan on
• 7:59
  Brain Rot. But first, in our interstitials this week, we're
• 8:03
  gonna talk with Micah Loeinger of On the Media and get his
• 8:07
  expert opinion on what happens now that the US government has
• 8:12
  drastically cut funding to the Corporation for Public
• 8:17
  Broadcasting. Michael Lowinger, thank you so much for joining us
• 8:30
  on Ask An Expert. You are truly an expert.
• 8:33
  You are the cohost of WNYC's On the Media, a nationally
• 8:36
  syndicated public radio show that can be heard on over 400
• 8:40
  stations across the country. You worked as a producer and then as
• 8:44
  On the Media's first staff reporter, and your investigative
• 8:47
  and human interest stories have focused on political extremism,
• 8:50
  Internet culture, and the evolution of the news industry.
• 8:54
  You have won the John m Higgins Award for best in-depth slash
• 8:57
  enterprise reporting. You were a finalist for Third Coast's best
• 9:01
  news feature, a finalist for a Livingston award, and a finalist
• 9:06
  for a Mirror award for best commentary. In 2019, the New
• 9:11
  York Times wrote about your experiment on the use of
• 9:13
  restorative justice in moderating the Internet's
• 9:16
  largest Christian forum.
• 9:18
  Your radio and written work has appeared in The Washington Post,
• 9:22
  The Guardian, NPR, Death, Sex, and Money, and Gothamist. You
• 9:27
  have worked in public media, reported on public media, and
• 9:31
  are now the host of a public media show about media. On July
• 9:37
  18, Congress passed house resolution four, which took back
• 9:41
  1,100,000,000 that had already been allocated via legislation
• 9:45
  to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This money
• 9:49
  was slated to go from the CPB to local public media radio and TV
• 9:53
  stations in all 50 states. And despite two thirds of Americans
• 9:57
  supporting the use of that money in that way, Congress has now
• 10:00
  eliminated federal funding for public media.
• 10:04
  Is this defunding going to change the American media
• 10:07
  landscape?
• 10:09
  Micah Loewinger: Yes.
• 10:27
  Hans Buetow: Alright. Here we go. Wilson Lever, U of M. As the
• 10:31
  clock tolls noon. Isn't that exciting?
• 10:38
  Okay. Here go. Here we go. Here we go. A recent, gorgeous July
• 10:47
  afternoon, I was very on time, no big deal, for an appointment
• 10:52
  to meet a trio of librarians.
• 10:54
  Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi.
• 10:57
  Jenny McBurney: Jenny. Jenny. Yeah. Welcome.
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  Hans Buetow: Thank you.
• 11:01
  Jenny McBurney: Go find our room.
• 11:02
  Hans Buetow: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love a
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  library. I love a library.
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  There's just this feeling when you walk in like, I'm smarter
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  with all of this collected info around me. Like, these resources
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  and ideas are available to me. Could just grab them, take them
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  in, and synthesize them all for free.
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  Jenny McBurney: So this is what we were thinking. Yeah. It
• 11:25
  sounds weird in here. It's so quiet.
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  Hans Buetow: Good. Perfect. Change anything.
• 11:29
  Jenny McBurney: I can
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  Hans Buetow: Love it.
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  Jenny McBurney: Want tables or chairs or
• 11:30
  Hans Buetow: whatever they want. This is great. We got plenty of
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  chairs. I'm gonna have us all sit awkwardly close to each
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  other That's fine. Because that's just
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  Jenny McBurney: I'll sit way back.
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  Hans Buetow: How we do. Yeah. And even though it's the middle
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  of summer and this university library is basically empty, it
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  feels very cool. I mean, maybe even more cool to be hanging out
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  with three librarians.
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  Jenny McBurney: I'm Jenny McBurney. I am the government
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  publications librarian here at the University of Minnesota Twin
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  Cities. Mainly, my job is to steward our collection and make
• 12:05
  sure that the public has access to government information.
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  Kate Sheridan: I'm Kate Sheridan. I'm the publishing
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  librarian at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and I run
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  the library's scholarly publishing program.
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  Molly Blake: I'm Molly Blake. I'm a social sciences librarian
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  at the University of Minnesota. And along with Jenny and some
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  other fabulous people, I helped launch the Tracking Gov Info
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  Project.
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  Hans Buetow: The Tracking Government Information Project?
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  That's why I'm here. Jenny, Kate, and Molly, they'll help
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  run it along with Sangah Sung of University of Illinois Urbana
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  Champaign and Ben Amada from California State University in
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  Sacramento. So these five librarians and their project,
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  which tracks what changes are being made to the public
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  information online, is a volunteer effort that is just
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  one of a group of volunteer efforts that are currently on
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  the front lines of data and information rescue and
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  preservation. There have been data rescue efforts in play for
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  literally thousands of years, from the burning of the library
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  of Zimri Lim in ancient Mesopotamia, the destruction of
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  the Maya codices by Diego de Landa in 1532.
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  You've got the deliberate arson of US Library of Congress in
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  1812. You got lots of libraries destroyed in World War two.
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  Information has always and is always at risk of being lost,
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  and part of the work of librarians is to make sure that
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  it isn't.
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  Jenny McBurney: So there's always been librarians and
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  members of the public who want to help to preserve government
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  information, and there's super long standing efforts to make
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  that happen.
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  Hans Buetow: But this year feels different. This year, The US has
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  entered what for it is a new era of information threat. Alright.
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  So I'm gonna start. I'm gonna read you all a headline, and
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  then I'm gonna ask you what this headline makes you think of, how
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  it makes you feel.
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  This is from 03/20/2025, 04:48PM, from Politico. Trump
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  signs executive order to dismantle education department.
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  You all work in information sciences in the library. And so
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  when you read that, you open up your paper. What people don't do
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  that anymore.
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  You open up your browser. And you read that. What like, what
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  do you think from your perspective as librarians, as
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  data information folks?
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  Jenny McBurney: I mean, my first thought is, is that legal? My
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  second thought then is, uh-oh. Where is all of the stuff that
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  those people are working on gonna go? Is it gonna disappear?
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  Are we not gonna have access to that those reports, that data,
• 14:51
  any of that stuff anymore?
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  Molly Blake: And the Department of Education produces just an
• 14:56
  amazing amount of data that is used by grant writers, that's
• 15:00
  used by researchers. I think right away of the Institute for
• 15:03
  Educational Sciences, which is in charge of ERIC, which is
• 15:07
  probably the most popular educational database of
• 15:10
  scholarly articles and gray literature, conference papers,
• 15:13
  things that are extremely useful for educational researchers.
• 15:17
  Hans Buetow: ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center,
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  ERIC, is a searchable online database of about 2,000,000
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  pieces of education research. Molly and her social sciences
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  colleagues rely on ERIC.
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  Molly Blake: I work with a lot of researchers that do
• 15:33
  systematic reviews and evidence synthesis. So they have a topic
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  and their goal is maybe their topic is reading in third grade,
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  for example. And they then want to figure out what is everything
• 15:44
  that has been published over the years on this topic. Because of
• 15:48
  the cuts of the Department of Education, ERIC is likely not
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  going to be indexing the same number of journals. It's gonna
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  be cut by almost half in years to come.
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  Hans Buetow: Which means the researchers that are relying on
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  it can't go back and replicate their searches, and you lose not
• 16:05
  just the materials, but the metadata, the indexing of
• 16:07
  information, where the information is stored, how it's
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  discovered. There's just gonna be less to find. But it also
• 16:14
  means that there's gonna be downstream effects. Here's Kate
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  Sheridan.
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  Kate Sheridan: Eric feeds into so many other things. Right?
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  Eric records get pulled into commercial databases. Eric
• 16:24
  records get pulled into Google Scholar. If Eric is affected,
• 16:28
  many other things are affected as well.
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  If the researchers who come to Mali are gonna have their
• 16:37
  systematic reviews impacted by this, that's literally going to
• 16:40
  reshape the knowledge we're able to have moving forward. That's
• 16:43
  going to reshape our ability to make new discoveries, to make
• 16:46
  progress, to innovate. Like, you have to look at what's been
• 16:49
  previously done, design a new experiment, test it, report back
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  on it, and other people will read it and design new
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  experiments. We're gonna be missing part of that.
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  Molly Blake: Once we lose that information, we lose the ability
• 17:02
  to understand things about issues such as school
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  segregation, issues such as equity. It's taking away data
• 17:11
  that people can use to make education better for everyone.
• 17:21
  Jenny McBurney: So what was happening in the early days of
• 17:23
  the Trump administration is that librarians started getting
• 17:27
  questions from researchers saying, my article's gone. Why
• 17:31
  is it gone? Help. Other people were saying, wait, this dataset
• 17:33
  that I was using is gone. What do I do?
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  How do I find it? How do I complete my research project?
• 17:39
  And there was a super interesting article, which I
• 17:41
  brought along today just in case, from The Lancet that was
• 17:45
  talking about how an important part of this data is
• 17:50
  transparency. In normal practices, if you make a change
• 17:53
  to something, you document it. You say, this was changed to
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  this.
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  But that's not what's happening here. Changes are just happening
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  without anyone knowing, without any documentation, without any
• 18:04
  recording. How do we even know what's an accurate dataset
• 18:08
  anymore?
• 18:14
  Hans Buetow: So Jenny, Kate, Molly, and their colleagues
• 18:18
  started the tracking government information project, which is a
• 18:22
  crowdsourced spreadsheet that helps everyone be able to track
• 18:26
  what's being changed on any federal websites and where you
• 18:29
  can go to find what it used to say before the changes.
• 18:33
  Jenny McBurney: Say, okay. I'm looking for everything relating
• 18:35
  to COVID. You can find everything that has to do with
• 18:38
  it. You can see which websites, which documents have been
• 18:41
  removed, and find where it is pointing you to. So where is the
• 18:45
  preserved copy of the covid.gov website, for example.
• 18:50
  Molly Blake: And part of what we're doing in addition to
• 18:53
  pointing people to preserved copies, which is super
• 18:56
  important, is we want to raise awareness about the scope of
• 19:00
  this problem. Like, what does it mean that the Department of
• 19:03
  Education may be dismantled? What information is being
• 19:07
  collected? What is their expertise? What types of work do
• 19:10
  they do?
• 19:11
  Because even if we can preserve information that goes away, what
• 19:14
  we can't do is we can't write a report that's not going to get
• 19:17
  written this year.
• 19:21
  Jenny McBurney: That's one of
• 19:22
  Kate Sheridan: the things that stresses me out the most. I
• 19:24
  think there was, like, two weeks when the mortality weekly report
• 19:29
  didn't come out. It's the morbidity and mortality weekly
• 19:32
  report. The MMWR is intended to publish information that is
• 19:37
  timely and related to public health. So if there was, like,
• 19:40
  an E.
• 19:40
  Coli outbreak happening and they had some new information about
• 19:44
  the outbreak source or about something to do with the actual,
• 19:47
  like, B. Coli bacterium, something to do with that, you
• 19:51
  could find that in the MMWR. And so we don't know what was lost
• 19:55
  necessarily, not just because the articles weren't published,
• 19:59
  but because we don't necessarily know what they were about.
• 20:01
  Jenny McBurney: We will never get those two weeks back. We
• 20:04
  will never get those reports back. That is a seventy year old
• 20:07
  dataset that has a gap for the rest of eternity. Even if
• 20:12
  everything was snap fixed tomorrow moving forward, that's
• 20:15
  never gonna come back. That's gone forever.
• 20:17
  It it was never created because people weren't able to create
• 20:21
  it.
• 20:25
  Hans Buetow: This was a big revelation for me in
• 20:28
  understanding all of the layers to what's happening. It's not
• 20:32
  just that we need to be concerned with the data being
• 20:35
  actively taken out of the public view, but also the impact of the
• 20:39
  government efficiencies in heavy scare quotes that have all
• 20:44
  eliminated data gathering by shutting down research. They've
• 20:47
  canceled server contracts to host and store the data, and
• 20:51
  they've fired the people with the expertise that's needed to
• 20:56
  contextualize it.
• 20:57
  Lynda Kellum: If I can't, like, be assured that I'm gonna be
• 21:00
  able to access this website because those people aren't
• 21:03
  there or the, you know, there there's link issues or the API's
• 21:07
  down or the contract's been ended, I wanna be able to access
• 21:11
  that data, and there's no reason why people shouldn't be able to
• 21:14
  access that data.
• 21:16
  Hans Buetow: This is Linda Kellum. Linda is a data
• 21:19
  librarian with expertise in qualitative data research and
• 21:22
  software. And Linda is a leader in the field of data rescue, so
• 21:27
  much so that just the mention of her name Tamale prompted She's a
• 21:31
  big deal. She's a big deal. She's a big deal.
• 21:33
  Yeah. I wanted to talk with Linda in her capacity as
• 21:39
  founding organizer of the Data Rescue Project, which is a
• 21:42
  volunteer group that works on emergency archiving of datasets.
• 21:47
  And I have to say I was a little surprised. Maybe I shouldn't
• 21:51
  have been, but I was a little surprised by Linda's reaction
• 21:54
  when I read her that March headline, Trump signs executive
• 21:58
  order to dismantle education department.
• 22:00
  Lynda Kellum: First thing I thought about was I was happy
• 22:03
  that we had actually done something. So in a lot of ways,
• 22:06
  I felt satisfaction at least we had tried to do something. Wow.
• 22:10
  But you're you're right. I mean, I it was it was it's also
• 22:14
  disheartening and it's really dismaying to see, you know, that
• 22:18
  considered as something that
• 22:19
  Hans Buetow: could be thrown away, You know, not
• 22:20
  Lynda Kellum: it's something that's not worth preserving for
• 22:24
  the long term.
• 22:26
  Hans Buetow: That's a very surprising answer to me. Not the
• 22:31
  second part. The second part is kind of what I expected. Yeah.
• 22:35
  You know.
• 22:35
  It's made in things. Let's talk about the first part of that
• 22:38
  answer, though, where you said you felt satisfied that you had
• 22:42
  done work. When you say that as a data librarian, when you say
• 22:45
  that as someone who works with a data rescue project, what does
• 22:49
  that mean? What what work have you done already when you read
• 22:52
  that announcement in in March?
• 22:54
  Lynda Kellum: For us, we were just this was rapid response, so
• 22:57
  it was really just get what we can. We knew that the Department
• 23:00
  of Education had a target on its back and wanted to go ahead and
• 23:04
  do as much as we could at that time.
• 23:06
  Hans Buetow: Was there anything specific that that led you to
• 23:09
  see that target? Like, how did you know that target was there?
• 23:11
  Lynda Kellum: Project twenty twenty five.
• 23:13
  Hans Buetow: Oh, that was
• 23:14
  Lynda Kellum: that's the road map.
• 23:15
  Hans Buetow: Oh, you mean they told you?
• 23:16
  Lynda Kellum: Yeah. Yeah. They told all of us what they were
• 23:18
  gonna do. So we were looking to see where they had explicitly
• 23:24
  said it would target agencies. We started with the Department
• 23:29
  of Education.
• 23:29
  That was the very first department we even looked at,
• 23:33
  just to figure out what data sets would be publicly
• 23:35
  accessible for us to download and preserve.
• 23:40
  Hans Buetow: The first step was to understand what information
• 23:43
  they're even looking for.
• 23:45
  Lynda Kellum: And that's what we did. We went, you know, with a
• 23:47
  spreadsheet and started documenting inventorying, if you
• 23:52
  will, the different datasets and surveys that were available on
• 23:55
  that website. What's there? What's the size? What do we can
• 23:59
  we get it?
• 24:00
  Are there alternative sources that are not government based?
• 24:03
  Hans Buetow: As full a catalog as possible was made of what
• 24:07
  needed rescuing, adding metadata and documentation to everything.
• 24:11
  Lynda Kellum: We want everything that's associated with that.
• 24:14
  Once we felt we had everything we could find, we asked others,
• 24:19
  people who had expertise in those areas to add additional
• 24:21
  datasets, and then we could start the process of a rescue.
• 24:26
  Hans Buetow: Getting the actual data can be either simple or
• 24:29
  complex. Some datasets, you can just click and download. Easy
• 24:33
  peasy. Other datasets, not so easy. Some are so big that they
• 24:38
  need to be scraped, and there are others that are just
• 24:41
  idiosyncratic.
• 24:42
  Lynda Kellum: Department of Education has this thing called
• 24:45
  the Data Lab, which has wonderful data sets, but they're
• 24:49
  all in tables and there are about 900 tables for each data
• 24:52
  set. And there's no way to download the entire we just
• 24:56
  can't get it out of the system. There's no API access for it. So
• 25:04
  Right.
• 25:04
  Kate Sheridan: We've been working
• 25:05
  Lynda Kellum: on projects where we just go through and download
• 25:07
  each individual table.
• 25:09
  Hans Buetow: What? That's like archaeology. That's like dusting
• 25:12
  dusting grains of sand in the middle of a desert.
• 25:15
  Lynda Kellum: Yeah. It's it's definitely tedious work, and I
• 25:19
  thank all of the volunteers who've worked on it.
• 25:23
  Hans Buetow: Once data is downloaded or scraped, it has to
• 25:26
  go somewhere as quickly as possible. Somewhere that has the
• 25:30
  space to store it, isn't controlled by corporations in
• 25:33
  terms of service, and is publicly accessible.
• 25:37
  Lynda Kellum: When we take the dataset, we don't keep it. We
• 25:40
  put it into ICPSR's DataLumos, which is a crowdsourced
• 25:45
  repository for public data. It was in 2017 in response to
• 25:51
  concerns about the loss of public data. And from there, it
• 25:55
  becomes publicly accessible quite quickly and it has all the
• 25:59
  fields that are needed for datasets to include the metadata
• 26:03
  in the documentation. The role of ICPSR is long term
• 26:06
  preservation so that they can, you know, help make ensure that
• 26:11
  that dataset, that package will be accessible in the long term,
• 26:16
  which is a very different thing from just web crawling and, you
• 26:19
  know, in mass amounts.
• 26:20
  So it's a supplement to what Internet Archive and others do,
• 26:24
  but geared around data.
• 26:31
  Hans Buetow: So that's the process that Data Rescue Project
• 26:33
  has been doing with the Department of Education since
• 26:37
  February. But the Department of Education are not the only ones
• 26:42
  who have been targeted across the government. We have seen
• 26:46
  huge changes to government agencies like Health and Human
• 26:49
  Services, CDC, NOAA, Department of the Interior, and some
• 26:53
  nongovernmental like USAID and lots, lots more. This same
• 26:58
  crisis is happening all over the government all at once, and all
• 27:03
  of it is in need of the same levels of response. How how wide
• 27:11
  is the aperture for this?
• 27:13
  Lynda Kellum: Yeah. I think that's a great question and
• 27:15
  something we're still figuring out, certainly. Interesting.
• 27:18
  Hans Buetow: So, yeah, we don't really have a sense?
• 27:20
  Lynda Kellum: Yeah. Because we don't know like, somebody's
• 27:22
  asked us how much data have you captured, and we don't have a
• 27:26
  way of knowing because there was no one inventory for all the
• 27:29
  federal government data. Even data.gov is not an inventory for
• 27:32
  and and data.gov has its own issues. I think agency by
• 27:37
  agency, we have a sense of what has happened. And, you know, in
• 27:41
  the coming months, this would be a project we could do is look at
• 27:44
  the agency by agency and kind of detail what has occurred.
• 27:48
  And but even then, it's it's it may be office to office within
• 27:52
  an agency. So it's really challenging to have a sense of
• 27:56
  kind of that whole picture at this particular point in time.
• 28:00
  But in terms of scale, like, I don't know at this point. I
• 28:02
  can't even say.
• 28:17
  Hans Buetow: I find all of this upsetting, not the efforts of
• 28:21
  all these wonderful people. That is the only thing that's keeping
• 28:24
  me from just laying down on the floor, letting the fates take
• 28:27
  me. What I find upsetting is that all this work, all this
• 28:32
  data that we're scrambling to save, it already belongs to us.
• 28:37
  Jenny McBurney: Yes. This is our data. We are all it's it's for
• 28:42
  the people, by the people, of the people. Right? Like, that's
• 28:44
  the whole point of our government.
• 28:45
  And so the government creates things for us and we have a
• 28:49
  right to access it. The role
• 28:51
  Lynda Kellum: of the federal government really is to help us
• 28:54
  understand ourselves. That's I believe. Right? It's it's the
• 28:59
  federal government is the only real entity that can has the
• 29:02
  mission to collect public data and make it accessible to the
• 29:06
  public. It's built into our constitution that we take a
• 29:09
  census.
• 29:10
  Collecting data is is part of our who we are.
• 29:12
  Molly Blake: Certainly, a democratic ideal is that we
• 29:15
  should all have unfettered access to information that then
• 29:17
  we're able to get and interpret both as private citizens and in
• 29:21
  the work we do in any way that we see fit.
• 29:24
  Lynda Kellum: It's how we hold the government accountable. It's
• 29:26
  how we inform ourselves about our communities. It's how we
• 29:28
  understand who we are as a people. Yeah. Yes.
• 29:33
  That's an informed electorate is a fundamental part of democracy.
• 29:41
  One institution, my institution, my my library can't replace that
• 29:45
  mission on the scale that the government can do it. A private
• 29:48
  company can try, but their role isn't to do that. Their role is
• 29:54
  to to make money. And so when it comes to losing access to any of
• 29:59
  the public data that we've had, it's a shame not just from a
• 30:03
  from a topic level in the sense of this is what this Department
• 30:06
  of Education dataset is for, but in a sense of of this is what
• 30:10
  the government should do.
• 30:12
  It is gather information about us, help us understand
• 30:15
  ourselves, help us be able to project into the future about
• 30:18
  ourselves, help us build services for our people. That's
• 30:22
  the role of the government in my opinion.
• 30:26
  Hans Buetow: One of the hard parts about this moment is that
• 30:29
  these ideals, which represent an idea of how the country has been
• 30:34
  run, maybe since it became a country, these ideals are not at
• 30:39
  all being met by the actions of the people who currently run it.
• 30:44
  And that means that, like Linda, Kate, Molly, Jenny, the
• 30:49
  volunteers they work with, and the teams building and running
• 30:52
  theirs and other data rescue projects, these are the people
• 30:56
  working to build systems that hold up our ideals and keep our
• 31:00
  information free and available. As I was listening to Linda talk
• 31:06
  about all this, I started actually to see a picture
• 31:10
  forming in my head. And this was a picture of, like, pipes being
• 31:14
  laid. It was a picture of structures being designed and
• 31:17
  pathways being paved.
• 31:20
  And it suddenly occurred to me that even though this hurts to
• 31:25
  feel such a letdown, We might be laying some kind of groundwork
• 31:31
  for something new. Are we creating new infrastructure with
• 31:40
  this project that we haven't seen and that might undergird
• 31:43
  longer than just to the next administration?
• 31:46
  Lynda Kellum: Yeah. I oh, I think there's there's a building
• 31:48
  awareness of the existing infrastructure. Certainly,
• 31:52
  people now know about DataLumos beyond just a few data
• 31:56
  librarians. And I give you an example of that. There were only
• 32:00
  a 100 data sets in DataLumos from 2017 to 2025.
• 32:05
  Since 2025, we have put 700 in. So Wow. Yeah. It gets doesn't
• 32:12
  seem like a lot, but each one of those takes a lot of time and
• 32:14
  and effort. And it is the creation of maybe a new way of
• 32:18
  thinking about what we're doing.
• 32:21
  And we're still figuring this out. Certainly with Data Rescue
• 32:24
  Project, one of the things we would like to do is create a
• 32:28
  infrastructure for rapid response for digital objects.
• 32:32
  Right? So it's not just that every time something happens, we
• 32:36
  have to spin up this thing, but we actually have an ongoing
• 32:39
  documented, understood way or best practices and as well as
• 32:43
  well as technical infrastructure for people who who need to do
• 32:46
  this.
• 32:54
  Hans Buetow: Even if we have an eye toward the long term, there
• 32:57
  is a lot of information being threatened and a lot of need to
• 33:01
  fulfill right now. Luckily, there are people working on it,
• 33:06
  and there are plenty of ways that we can all get involved in
• 33:10
  helping them.
• 33:11
  Jenny McBurney: So for example, we've talked a lot about the
• 33:14
  Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. Those started, like, in
• 33:17
  the nineties, early two thousands. Those are essential
• 33:21
  tools. They're doing such a great service. And I would
• 33:24
  encourage anybody anywhere to add the Wayback Machine browser
• 33:28
  extension to your browser.
• 33:30
  And if you see something, save something.
• 33:32
  Molly Blake: Could be on a government website or could be
• 33:34
  anywhere that you're just worried about what would happen
• 33:36
  if this information goes away. It just takes a second to click
• 33:39
  and to save it.
• 33:41
  Hans Buetow: This sort of flagging and identifying, this
• 33:43
  is exactly the work that they're hoping everyone can do. Like
• 33:47
  contributing, for example, to their tracking government
• 33:49
  information project.
• 33:50
  Molly Blake: We have a really simple form where you can just
• 33:53
  report this is the link I wanna, share. This is what I know
• 33:57
  hasn't been removed or modified. And, again, we know everybody
• 34:00
  uses these websites in different ways, and so we need everyone's
• 34:02
  expertise. Like, need to hear from teachers that are using
• 34:05
  lessons plans on these websites, anyone who's using reports on
• 34:09
  this website. If there's something that you've used and
• 34:12
  you you notice it's gone or changed or even if you're not
• 34:15
  sure if it's changed, go ahead
• 34:16
  Hans Buetow: and submit it, and we
• 34:17
  Molly Blake: can kind of, investigate on our end.
• 34:20
  Hans Buetow: And if you're really curious and you wanna go
• 34:21
  see what data has already been rescued, you can go to the data
• 34:25
  rescue project's tracker to see all 1,200 data sets and
• 34:31
  counting. And that doesn't just include their rescues, but
• 34:34
  everyone's.
• 34:35
  Lynda Kellum: One of our the main things that we wanted to do
• 34:37
  is make sure that we were amplifying what other people
• 34:40
  were doing. Mhmm. So it's not just about us. We we want people
• 34:43
  to know about University of Chicago's data mirror or the
• 34:47
  Federal Data Forum or America's Essential Data. Right?
• 34:51
  All of those are great things that are doing similar but
• 34:54
  different work. And so we wanna make
• 34:55
  Hans Buetow: sure Yeah.
• 34:55
  Lynda Kellum: To amplify those. And that's what's great about
• 34:58
  this community is we're not It's not about territoriality. We're
• 35:01
  trying to amplify each other and work together because I don't
• 35:05
  want people doing what you described to going and just
• 35:07
  hoarding things and putting it in their servers. That's not
• 35:11
  useful. And so we wanna make sure that everybody knows where
• 35:15
  they can go for the things that they are working on.
• 35:21
  Hans Buetow: Everyone I talked to, Molly, Kate, Jenny, Linda,
• 35:25
  everyone assured me that you do not need to be a data person or
• 35:32
  a programming expert or a background in library sciences
• 35:37
  to do this work to be able to support and pitch in. You just
• 35:41
  need to be willing to join in.
• 35:44
  Molly Blake: Speaking for myself, I was like, is somebody
• 35:46
  a little more experienced than me starting this project
• 35:49
  already? And I kept kind of waiting. And eventually, I think
• 35:52
  we kinda decided, well, we have to be the ones that start this
• 35:55
  project. And we're gonna learn as we go, and we're gonna get
• 35:57
  other people involved, but somebody has to be doing this,
• 36:01
  and it might as well be us.
• 36:16
  Hans Buetow: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to
• 36:19
  Jenny McBurney, Molly Blake, Kate Sheridan, and Linda Kellum.
• 36:23
  I had long conversations with all these folks, and they were
• 36:27
  incredible.
• 36:28
  Y'all, librarians are the best. Full stop. Unqualified. I will
• 36:35
  be publishing, those longer conversations to our members,
• 36:39
  later in August. If you are not a member, but you wanna hear
• 36:42
  those conversations, you can always sign up for just $4 a
• 36:45
  month and get access to all of the extended interviews, not
• 36:49
  just from this episode, which will be there, but also previous
• 36:52
  episodes.
• 36:53
  You can go deep on a lot. You can also go deep by looking in
• 37:00
  the show notes for this episode. I'm gonna link to all of the
• 37:03
  projects that were mentioned in this piece, to the Wayback
• 37:06
  Machine if you wanna start archiving websites, to the Data
• 37:10
  Rescue Project, to the Tracking Government Information Project,
• 37:13
  and lots, lots, lots more. If you think you might be
• 37:16
  interested in learning more or possibly joining the cause and
• 37:21
  volunteering some of your time to help, you can find a great
• 37:24
  starter in the show notes or head on over to neverpoe.st.
• 38:14
  Mike Rugnetta: Michael Lowinger, this removal of funding for the
• 38:17
  Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the latest and
• 38:20
  most concrete escalation of a battle that has been waging
• 38:23
  about public media since it started in 1967. When this
• 38:28
  amendment passed, Republican house speaker Mike Johnson said,
• 38:31
  this is, in our view, a misuse of taxpayer dollars. They're
• 38:36
  biased reporting. They're not objective. They pretend to be
• 38:40
  so, and the people don't need to fund that.
• 38:44
  In your expert opinion as a media reporter reporting on
• 38:48
  media, is public media any more biased than CNN, NBC, Fox News,
• 38:55
  or any other nationally broadcast news outlet?
• 38:59
  Micah Loewinger: No.
• 39:17
  Ryan Broderick: I've seen it used a lot now in tandem with,
• 39:21
  like, AI content, like, particularly, like, that weird
• 39:23
  Italian crocodile that's popular on TikTok. That's Ryan
• 39:27
  Broderick. You might
• 39:28
  Mike Rugnetta: know him from well, here. I'll just let him
• 39:31
  tell you.
• 39:31
  Ryan Broderick: Hi. My name is Ryan Broderick. I am the author
• 39:34
  of the Garbage Day newsletter and the host of the Panic World
• 39:37
  podcast. And if you like this show, you'll like those slightly
• 39:42
  less, but like them probably.
• 39:45
  Mike Rugnetta: Ryan's being glib. You would love his work if
• 39:47
  you don't already know it, but you probably do. We are huge
• 39:50
  fans at Neverpost at least. And the crocodile that he's talking
• 39:54
  about is called Bombardero crocodillo and it's maybe the
• 39:58
  most well known character, I guess, in a lineup of characters
• 40:05
  featured in a series of now slightly passe TikToks
• 40:09
  collectively called Italian brain rot. He brought it up
• 40:27
  because I asked him to tell me what exactly brain rot is.
• 40:33
  Ryan Broderick: It's ugly. Like, it's it's it's almost always
• 40:36
  ugly. It feels lazy and it feels unfulfilling beyond just sort of
• 40:42
  understanding the references. This feeling of like you're just
• 40:45
  consuming this stuff, but it doesn't really add up. It
• 40:47
  doesn't really stay in your mind.
• 40:49
  It sort of pleases you in a sensory way, but it's not great,
• 40:53
  and you know that deep down. And people really like watching the
• 40:56
  videos, but they know that they're bad and and and
• 41:01
  unfulfilling. The way I see people use it seems to be
• 41:05
  similar to the way you would talk about, like, eating a lot
• 41:07
  of junk food. Like, there's a pride to it, but the pride is
• 41:11
  kind of making fun of the compulsive aspect to it.
• 41:17
  Mike Rugnetta: I wanted to ask Ryan about brain rot because it
• 41:20
  seems to be front of mind for a lot of people at the moment,
• 41:24
  even if that mind is diminishing in its faculties. And it also
• 41:28
  seems to be like three different things. It's a verb, which is
• 41:33
  what happens to your brain looking at, as Ryan calls it,
• 41:37
  unfulfilling content. It's also an adjective, the label given
• 41:42
  generally to unfulfilling content. Celebrity gossip, weird
• 41:46
  food challenges, those livestreams where they try to
• 41:49
  very carefully remove the shell from a raw egg while keeping the
• 41:54
  shell membrane intact, you might reasonably call all of that
• 41:58
  brain rot, which is also a noun, a genre label for Tralolero
• 42:04
  Tralolot, Skibbitty Toilet, Le Poisson Steve, and others.
• 42:09
  All media with this shared and specific kind of irreverence or
• 42:14
  inanity almost. All of that also is brain rot, maybe with a
• 42:20
  capital b. To put this as succinctly and confusingly as
• 42:24
  possible, not all brain rot is brain rot, but it may all rot
• 42:29
  your brain all the same. So how do we get these three different
• 42:38
  but related senses of brain rot? And what sort of anxieties or
• 42:43
  compulsions does brain rot as a concept confront?
• 42:48
  Why was this term coined and why is it useful is what I'm curious
• 42:53
  about in this segment. The contemporary Internet usage of
• 42:57
  brain rot, of course, echoes a phrase I grew up hearing
• 43:00
  sometimes in earnest, but mostly ironically as a throwback to a
• 43:04
  very similar set of anxieties also related to technology. TV
• 43:09
  rots your brains.
• 43:10
  Clip: But you
• 43:10
  should know that watching TV rots your brain. Rot your
• 43:13
  brains.
• 43:14
  Mike Rugnetta: This is a very well worn worry that some new
• 43:18
  type of media is somehow destroying the minds of its
• 43:22
  audience, especially if that audience is young.
• 43:31
  Emilie Owens: We have evidence to show that when the novel was
• 43:35
  introduced as a format for the every person to read in Denmark,
• 43:40
  the newspapers or and and public commenters at the time were
• 43:43
  like, kids can't be reading books. They will essentially rot
• 43:47
  their brains.
• 43:47
  Mike Rugnetta: This is Emily Owens.
• 43:49
  Emilie Owens: Like, this is a very old tradition of young
• 43:51
  people doing something, adults finding it abhorrent, it making
• 43:55
  its way into the mainstream and becoming our culture in whether
• 43:59
  we like it or not, and often in ways which are really cringe.
• 44:02
  Mike Rugnetta: Emily is a doctoral research fellow at the
• 44:04
  University of Oslo working in the Department of Media
• 44:07
  Communications.
• 44:08
  Emilie Owens: Broadly, I am interested in teenagers' lives,
• 44:12
  meaning their social experiences and their identity development,
• 44:16
  and how, if at all, those are shaped by digital media broadly
• 44:19
  and in the case of my research, TikTok specifically.
• 44:23
  Mike Rugnetta: In June, Emily published an article in the
• 44:26
  journal New Media and Society titled, It Speaks to Me in Brain
• 44:31
  Rot, theorizing brain rot as a genre of participation among
• 44:37
  teenagers. In it, she points out that when brain rot was named
• 44:41
  word of the year by Oxford University Press in late twenty
• 44:44
  twenty four, a parade of hand wringing followed with headlines
• 44:49
  like, I'm a neuroscientist. Here's the surprising truth
• 44:53
  about TikTok brain rot from BBC News. Smartphone addiction is
• 44:57
  leading to brain rot, doctors say from CBS. Pope warns of
• 45:03
  brain rot from phone scrolling from Catholic news website
• 45:06
  Alethea.
• 45:07
  Brain rot, the new generation's epidemic from the cub. And, of
• 45:12
  course, more.
• 45:19
  Emilie Owens: People were freaked out about it. They
• 45:21
  thought it was a a genuine mental health condition
• 45:23
  affecting young people who use the Internet too much, but also
• 45:26
  older people who use the Internet too much or the type of
• 45:30
  content that causes that mental health condition. So that it was
• 45:34
  overwhelmingly, like, negative, very little sort of tongue in
• 45:38
  cheek. That's maybe emerged more now as we get more comfortable
• 45:41
  with the term, but certainly at the beginning, it was real,
• 45:44
  like, panicky vibes.
• 45:47
  Mike Rugnetta: In the midst of all this, Emily is conducting
• 45:49
  research with, quote, a small group of teenagers at an
• 45:53
  international school in Oslo, as she writes, and something
• 45:56
  happens.
• 45:57
  Emilie Owens: And in, workshop three, since the third time I'd
• 46:00
  seen them all, they were starting to get a bit more
• 46:01
  comfortable. And that was the first time that Brain Rot
• 46:04
  actually came up, and it was brought up by a a young woman
• 46:08
  named Yari, 16 years old. And she is the self proclaimed
• 46:13
  TikTok expert of the group.
• 46:15
  Hans Buetow: And I say self proclaimed, but others often
• 46:17
  also referred to her as the TikTok expert in the group.
• 46:20
  Emilie Owens: And so we were in the middle of a discussion about
• 46:23
  why TikTok is valuable to her, why she likes it so much. And
• 46:27
  she she started saying to me, like, well, there's
• 46:30
  controversies going on in the world, and there's always
• 46:32
  someone explaining it on TikTok. And I went, yeah. And she said,
• 46:34
  or I've seen, like, Russian ladies describe math to me, and
• 46:37
  Hans Buetow: I understand it. And then another boy, Adrian,
• 46:39
  checked in and said, oh, yeah.
• 46:40
  Emilie Owens: I've seen that. I know her. And that's when Yari
• 46:42
  said, yeah. It's like it speaks in, like, brain rot to me. I
• 46:47
  understand it.
• 46:49
  And I embarrassingly responded just by repeating slowly, it
• 46:53
  speaks in brain rot. But I think you you can see that in that
• 46:57
  excerpt, I was I was sort of computing this concept. Like, I
• 47:03
  couldn't even take it in. I just had to say it back to her. And
• 47:06
  that's where it essentially started.
• 47:08
  And I went on to ask, if you come across a video on TikTok
• 47:11
  explaining something, would you find it easier to understand in
• 47:14
  school? And every single one of them nodded or said, yeah. And
• 47:17
  then a 16 year old boy, Lennox, said exponentially. And when I
• 47:21
  said, really? Yari went on to say, yeah, and everybody is on
• 47:24
  it.
• 47:31
  Mike Rugnetta: Emily asked the kids in the next session what
• 47:34
  they mean when they say brain rot. They say that it's stuff
• 47:38
  for younger kids, stuff that maybe isn't, quote, cognitively
• 47:42
  beneficial, but they also say that's kinda the point. She
• 47:47
  boils down their stew of responses in the paper like
• 47:51
  this. Brain Rot can perhaps be defined as a piece of slang
• 47:56
  referring to a way of engaging with childish memes and general
• 48:01
  TikTok content which is nonproductive or time wasting by
• 48:06
  nature and is humorously understood to rot the brain of
• 48:10
  the user. From this definition emerge some of the key
• 48:14
  characteristics which make up brain rot as a genre for
• 48:18
  engaging meaningfully with TikTok, following its mention by
• 48:21
  Yari in the previous example.
• 48:24
  One, brain rot is childish or unserious. Two, brain rot
• 48:28
  provides no cognitive or developmental benefit. And
• 48:32
  three, brain rot is deliberately nonproductive. Brain rot is
• 48:38
  therefore a conscious rejection of self development and
• 48:42
  productive activity in favor of a childish enjoyment, end quote.
• 48:49
  So it turns out teens, like everyone else, live in the world
• 48:53
  and are under a lot of pressure from school, home, friends,
• 48:59
  stuff they see on the Internet ironically, more on that in a
• 49:03
  minute.
• 49:03
  And so they, like you, like me, get some scrolling in as a way
• 49:08
  to release some of that pressure. But crucially, they,
• 49:11
  we still wanna be engaged. We don't want nothing. We just
• 49:19
  don't want anything asked or expected of us in contrast to
• 49:25
  every other part of life and there is only a particular
• 49:29
  stripe of media that can really walk that line. In an attempt to
• 49:39
  capture all this, Emily calls Brain Rot a decompression driven
• 49:44
  genre of participation.
• 49:47
  I asked her to take me through what that means exactly.
• 49:50
  Emilie Owens: To start, I wanna say that that term actually came
• 49:52
  from my childhood best friend's mom, Kathleen Moore. I was like,
• 49:56
  I don't know what to call this thing. I don't have the right
• 49:58
  term. And she was like, sounds like this is a a like, you're
• 50:01
  these kids are trying to decompress. It's not necessarily
• 50:04
  about relaxing.
• 50:06
  That's not the right word. It's not about, like, switching off
• 50:10
  entirely. It's more to do with sort of not not trying to
• 50:16
  improve in any way or not trying to produce anything. Not you're
• 50:21
  not seeking out a new friendship, and you're not
• 50:23
  seeking out an interest. You just wanna you just wanna
• 50:26
  decompress.
• 50:27
  Mike Rugnetta: Emily explained to me that genre of
• 50:30
  participation is based on the work of cultural anthropologist,
• 50:32
  Mizuki Ito, and is a way of centering the idea that people
• 50:37
  do things with media. They look for it to play a role in their
• 50:41
  lives to solve problems, and it exists in a complex aggregate
• 50:45
  with the rest of their experiences versus how media is
• 50:49
  often framed and talked about, especially on the news, as being
• 50:52
  this monolithic thing that flies in and changes an audience, that
• 50:58
  it has some effect on them after they've experienced it, and then
• 51:02
  both they and the media move on. To sit down, scroll through
• 51:06
  TikTok, and let one's brain rot isn't the comatose welcoming of
• 51:11
  cognitive decline the headlines would have you believe, but a
• 51:15
  purposeful activity which fits in alongside others that make up
• 51:19
  a highly social aggregate. As Emily says
• 51:23
  Emilie Owens: It's more like this is something they kind of
• 51:25
  want or need to do anyway, and now it has this digital
• 51:29
  component.
• 51:34
  Ryan Broderick: Yeah. Like, I I I we we love to believe that the
• 51:37
  Internet is this really addicting, dangerous force, and
• 51:40
  there's this really, like, intense wave of millennial
• 51:43
  Ludditeism right now that's, like, I find very
• 51:46
  counterproductive. And so there's this feeling of, well,
• 51:49
  you know, the Internet is this dangerous thing. And, I mean, we
• 51:53
  we've been talking about that in regards to every media type
• 51:56
  throughout history, like, you know, go watch David
• 51:59
  Cronenberg's Videodrome, like, if you wanna see how VCRs could
• 52:01
  be evil. Like, this is just this isn't new.
• 52:04
  But right now, we're really interested in this idea of the
• 52:07
  Internet changing our behavior, changing the way we think. So
• 52:10
  brain rot,
• 52:10
  Mike Rugnetta: I think, has become popular as an expression
• 52:12
  of that. A tale of two rots, basically. To butcher an old
• 52:18
  rhetorical classification, not if by whiskey, but if by rot. If
• 52:24
  by rot, you mean the cognitive decline of a generation of young
• 52:28
  people whose attention spans and appetite for involved tasks or
• 52:32
  consuming long texts has been diminished by short form video
• 52:36
  and a bottomless feed of clips expecting nothing from them,
• 52:40
  then of course, I am against it. But if by rot, you mean the
• 52:45
  ability to manage one's emotional state through the
• 52:48
  selective viewing of low stakes feel good media available at all
• 52:51
  times in which has the possibility of forming or
• 52:55
  reinforcing social bonds amongst peers, then of course, I am for
• 53:01
  it.
• 53:06
  I wondered aloud to both Ryan and Emily, does this mean Brain
• 53:11
  Rot is more of a lens? A framework one brings to media
• 53:16
  over and above it being a type of media that one sits down and
• 53:20
  is able to make or find on purpose? Ryan and Emily both
• 53:26
  kind of agreed. It's found, and being able to find it may be
• 53:32
  circumstantial. Ryan's response was dialogical.
• 53:36
  I I
• 53:36
  Ryan Broderick: think in many ways, it's like brain rot is
• 53:38
  always being defined by someone else in a way. Like, it's it's
• 53:43
  it's it's it's a label you put on something, or it's like a
• 53:46
  label you put on what you're looking at as a way to kind of,
• 53:49
  like, digest what you've just spent twelve hours looking at
• 53:52
  online. I would be surprised if someone could sit down and
• 53:56
  effectively make brain rot to make brain rot. Like, I I feel
• 53:59
  like it it's it's almost like outsider art in that way. It has
• 54:02
  to kind of be discovered and labeled rather than I'm gonna
• 54:05
  sit down and make something really insane, and people are
• 54:07
  gonna, like, watch hours and hours of it.
• 54:09
  Mike Rugnetta: For Emily, this question became one about if
• 54:12
  there is a need for teens to decompress, what's the reason
• 54:16
  they're going to content, to social media to do that? Why is
• 54:21
  the activity they're engaging in scrolling or searching or
• 54:26
  watching and not anything else? What does it mean that
• 54:31
  decompression, as important as it may be, happens in
• 54:35
  environments like social media platforms, which adhere to a
• 54:40
  very strict hyper capitalist logic?
• 54:44
  Emilie Owens: One of the themes that emerges in my data a lot, I
• 54:47
  which am finding hard to write about because I don't know how
• 54:50
  best to do it, is that these kids feel like grown ups do not
• 54:55
  give a shit at all, and that they are they are left to their
• 55:00
  own devices in terms of everything that they are warned
• 55:03
  about. So they you know, I brought up, you know, data and
• 55:06
  digitalization. And the first thing they said was, oh, no.
• 55:09
  Companies are taking our data. We know, but there's nothing we
• 55:12
  can do.
• 55:12
  So, like I wrote this article because I was annoyed at how the
• 55:19
  grown ups were understanding Brain Rock. I was like, you got
• 55:22
  it wrong, and you're replicating this media panic that we've seen
• 55:26
  over and over and over and over again. There are problems to do
• 55:30
  with TikTok and BrainRot, but they are not BrainRot. It's not
• 55:34
  that young people are going to BrainRot to turn their brains
• 55:37
  off. It's that young people don't have other places to go to
• 55:40
  switch off.
• 55:40
  They don't have the tools to do that. There's not a lot of
• 55:44
  public spaces to go enjoy. It's not like you can go out to a
• 55:48
  park and just switch off and do dumb stuff and be a kid in that
• 55:53
  way. To be trapped in a phone when you're trying to decompress
• 55:58
  because someone makes money from the fact that your eyes are on
• 56:01
  that phone, I think that's really grim. And I think that
• 56:04
  these kids, these teenagers that I was working with, they don't
• 56:07
  say it explicitly because maybe they haven't cognitively
• 56:11
  recognized it as such, but I think they feel that that's not
• 56:14
  good.
• 56:15
  There are loads of things you could do to decompress.
• 56:17
  Sometimes it is use your phone, but oftentimes it's go for a
• 56:21
  walk, like go for a swim, take your bicycle out, paint a
• 56:26
  painting, write a little story. And we're, I think,
• 56:30
  systematically discouraged from doing those things because those
• 56:34
  things don't make anybody any money. And that's yeah. That's
• 56:38
  my that's my beef with Brain Rot.
• 56:40
  It's not that it exists or that young people are doing it. I
• 56:44
  think that's fine. We should let kids do what they want. If
• 56:45
  they're enjoying it, who cares? It's more that there's this
• 56:50
  bigger systematic problem that all of our time is being
• 56:53
  capitalized on, and that's not nice.
• 56:57
  Such a lame button to on.
• 57:00
  Hans Buetow: Not nice.
• 57:00
  Mike Rugnetta: But that's a great button to end on. Thanks a
• 57:21
  million times over to both Ryan Broderick and Emily Owens for
• 57:26
  chatting with me. You can find Ryan's newsletter at
• 57:28
  garbageday.email and his podcast Panic World wherever you listen
• 57:32
  to pods. You can find Emily's work at emily owens, that's e m
• 57:37
  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
• 57:48
  put links to all these things in the show notes.
• 57:52
  What happens to your brain when it rots? Is there something
• 57:57
  that's particularly effective at rotting your brain? How do you
• 58:02
  feel about that? Would you admit it to us? Send us an email, a
• 58:07
  voice mail, leave us a voice memo about your rotting brain
• 58:10
  and we may include it in an upcoming Mailbag episode.
• 58:56
  Micah, what does the change in funding for the CPB mean for
• 59:00
  media over the next few years in The United States?
• 59:03
  Micah Loewinger: Well, we don't know for sure what's going to
• 59:06
  happen. We can only guess. But it helps to have some
• 59:09
  understanding of how this ecosystem works. Essentially,
• 59:13
  we're talking about money that has been taken away from the
• 59:16
  Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Federal funds
• 59:19
  appropriated by Congress, given to an agency that, in this case,
• 59:24
  doles out money to public radio stations and public television
• 59:27
  stations around the country.
• 59:29
  Some 300 plus TV stations, over a thousand public radio
• 59:33
  stations. Now that that money is gone, those stations will have
• 59:37
  to ask themselves, what do we really value? Do we value these
• 59:41
  national programs that our audience really likes that helps
• 59:44
  us fundraise? Do we value local news? Do we value keeping an
• 59:49
  environmental reporter?
• 59:51
  Somebody going to the courthouse? Somebody hanging out
• 59:54
  in the State house all day? What do we value? Because we are
• 59:58
  seeing that there are gonna be heterogeneous effects. Some
• 1:00:02
  urban radio stations, for instance, they only rely on,
• 1:00:05
  say, you know, less than 5% of their overall revenue coming
• 1:00:09
  from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
• 1:00:11
  Really rural radio stations, some of them rely on it like
• 1:00:14
  99%, 90%, 80%. I saw one estimate from this guy named
• 1:00:19
  Alex Kerley, who's a former product manager who worked at
• 1:00:22
  NPR. He created a tool called adoptastation.org to help
• 1:00:26
  people, like, figure out how much their local radio station
• 1:00:29
  is at risk of losing because of these cuts. He estimates that
• 1:00:33
  15% of public radio stations might shut down in the next
• 1:00:36
  year, because 15% of public radio stations rely on more than
• 1:00:41
  50% of their revenue traditionally coming from the
• 1:00:43
  Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That would be
• 1:00:46
  disastrous.
• 1:00:47
  I do think in the short term, we're already seeing this, lots
• 1:00:51
  of huge surges in funding for radio stations and public media
• 1:00:56
  organizations, particularly ones in urban areas. But you know how
• 1:01:00
  it is, like, when there's a crisis, people show up and open
• 1:01:03
  up their wallets, but then life goes on and it gets harder to
• 1:01:06
  get people to care.
• 1:01:08
  Mike Rugnetta: With all this in mind, Micah, do you feel like
• 1:01:10
  we're seeing the end of public media?
• 1:01:14
  Micah Loewinger: No.
• 1:01:39
  Mike Rugnetta: Okay. That is the show we have for you this week.
• 1:01:42
  We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, August
• 1:01:45
  13. Friends, listeners, now is the time. If you've been waiting
• 1:01:51
  for a moment to support Neverpost with a membership, we
• 1:01:54
  could use your help right now more than ever.
• 1:01:58
  Our runway is quickly ending. We need to find a way to make the
• 1:02:01
  show financially sustainable by the end of the year to keep
• 1:02:04
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  Synth solos?
• 1:02:15
  Become a member at neverpo.st at $4.07, or $12 a month for which
• 1:02:21
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  knowledge that you're helping an indie podcast to do weird,
• 1:02:28
  wonderful work so off the beaten path, even we are not exactly
• 1:02:32
  sure what to call it. Neverpost's producers are Audrey
• 1:02:36
  Evans, Georgia Hampton, the mysterious. Doctor first name,
• 1:02:38
  last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive
• 1:02:42
  producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me,
• 1:02:45
  is Mike Rugneva.
• 1:02:50
  The green color of the Cheshaco smells of fresh recollections of
• 1:02:57
  what once has been in the distant, remote past. Cha No Yu
• 1:03:04
  by Katherine Christer Annex. Neverpost is a production of
• 1:03:09
  charts and leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.