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Assigned Male At Login · Never Post

• 0:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:14
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
• 0:16
  Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 08/12/2025 at
• 0:21
  09:10AM eastern, and we have an harmonious show for you today.
• 0:28
  Contributing producer Toby Martin takes a deeper look at
• 0:31
  why and how his online ads have changed throughout his
• 0:36
  transition. Then in our second ever edition of terms and
• 0:41
  conditions, I talk in detail about RSS, what it is, how it
• 0:46
  works, and why it's having a moment.
• 0:49
  For that, I chat with Justin Jackson, cofounder of podcast
• 0:52
  host transistor.fm and member of the podcast standards project
• 0:57
  about the future of RSS and also Internet instruments. But right
• 1:03
  now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to
• 1:05
  some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return,
• 1:08
  we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened
• 1:10
  since the last time you heard from us. Johnny's in the
• 1:14
  basement mixing up the five stories for you this week.
• 1:19
  Reddit will block the Internet Archive's wayback machine from
• 1:25
  scraping a majority of the site. This, the social media platform
• 1:29
  states, is because they've caught AI companies scraping the
• 1:33
  archive to build datasets for training. Speaking to The Verge,
• 1:37
  Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says, until they're
• 1:40
  able to defend their site and comply with platform policies, e
• 1:45
  g respecting user privacy regarding deleting removed
• 1:49
  content, we're limiting some of their access to Reddit data to
• 1:52
  protect Redditors, end quote. Notably, in the last year,
• 1:57
  Reddit has partnered with both OpenAI and Google. The Google
• 2:01
  partnership brought in $60,000,000 for Reddit and The
• 2:04
  Verge reports that it was explicitly to quote, give Google
• 2:07
  more efficient ways to train models.
• 2:10
  No dollar amount was made public concerning the OpenAI
• 2:13
  partnership with both companies touting AI powered features
• 2:16
  on-site for Reddit and no explicit mention of training
• 2:19
  data was made at the time either. Some speculate that deal
• 2:23
  brought in $70,000,000 for Reddit. Wikipedia or more
• 2:29
  specifically the Wikimedia Foundation has lost its suit in
• 2:33
  a UK high court wherein it claimed that the identity
• 2:37
  verification required by the UK government would be both
• 2:39
  unnecessary and damaging to the site where a large portion of
• 2:43
  editors desire anonymity for reasons we discussed with
• 2:47
  Stephen Harrison in Neverpost episode 29 fucking around and
• 2:51
  finding out. The UK's new online safety act was passed to address
• 2:56
  the proliferation of harmful content online, but has faced
• 3:00
  much criticism for being both harsh and draconian. At question
• 3:04
  here is if Wikipedia should be classified as a category one
• 3:08
  site, a determination based upon its user base size and features.
• 3:12
  Wikimedia foundation says no, but The UK's office of
• 3:15
  communication may say yes, now that a judge has ruled Wikipedia
• 3:20
  is not de facto exempt. All this while Wikipedia also fights
• 3:27
  slop. The Washington Post reports that editors are
• 3:30
  battling an on onslaught of AI generated nonsense. Daniel Wu
• 3:34
  writes quote, suspicious edits and even entirely new articles
• 3:39
  with errors, made up citations and other hallmarks of AI
• 3:42
  generated writing keep popping up on the free online
• 3:45
  encyclopedia. Deep in Wikipedia's message boards and
• 3:48
  edit logs, the site's stewards are toiling for long hours to
• 3:53
  find them and stamp them out, end quote.
• 3:56
  A study last October, Wu continues, estimates some 5% of
• 4:00
  entries contain AI generated text. Illinois becomes the first
• 4:09
  state in The US to ban AI therapists. Governor Pritzker
• 4:14
  signed the bill into law on August 5, which says that only
• 4:17
  licensed therapists can provide counseling and that chatbots are
• 4:21
  not to assume the role of mental health professionals in any way.
• 4:26
  The eight page law reads in part quote, an individual corporation
• 4:29
  or entity may not provide advertise or otherwise offer
• 4:33
  therapy or psychotherapy services including through the
• 4:36
  use of internet based artificial intelligence to the public in
• 4:39
  this state unless the therapy or psychotherapy services are
• 4:43
  conducted by an individual who is a licensed professional, end
• 4:47
  quote. The law also puts limits on a licensed professional's use
• 4:51
  of AI as a supplementary tool in treatment.
• 4:58
  And finally, this year alone, 22 states have enacted mobile phone
• 5:03
  bans in all or part of the k through 12 range of their public
• 5:08
  schools. The laws range in severity from suggestions that
• 5:11
  schools do something about access to devices to outright
• 5:15
  bans in states like New York, Vermont, Texas, and Florida.
• 5:19
  Ballotpedia points out there's a variance amongst states
• 5:23
  concerning if phones are allowed during medical emergencies,
• 5:26
  break periods, and so on. Ballotpedia also reports that
• 5:30
  quote, of the 26 total states with laws banning or limiting
• 5:34
  cell phone use, 17 have republican trifectas, six have
• 5:39
  divided governments, and three have democratic trifectas. A
• 5:44
  trifecta here meaning a party that controls all three branches
• 5:48
  of state government.
• 5:49
  One, two, three. In show news, I was on episode 51 of the
• 5:57
  Tasteland podcast talking about the Internet, making never post
• 6:01
  hentai, the attention economy, and the Internet media
• 6:05
  environment as I've seen it over the last couple decades and
• 6:07
  more. I had a really great time chatting with Francis and Daisy,
• 6:11
  so please go check that out. Tasteland wherever you get your
• 6:14
  podcasts, and we'll also throw a link in the description. And we,
• 6:19
  in case you haven't heard, are in the midst of a member drive.
• 6:23
  That's right, folks. We are driving members crazy, reminding
• 6:27
  them that now is the time to support Neverpost to help us get
• 6:31
  financially sustainable by the start of next year, which is a
• 6:34
  little bit away. But you know what's very soon? The member
• 6:38
  drive stream week, which is next week, August. If you missed it
• 6:44
  in George's newsletter, which lots of updates go in there, so
• 6:47
  please make sure you're subscribed.
• 6:49
  There is a whole schedule waiting for you with a Monday
• 6:52
  morning eastern kickoff. I hope you'll join us then and then at
• 6:56
  various points throughout the week for chitchats, q and a's,
• 7:00
  game streams, a tour of Georgia's closet, special
• 7:03
  guests, giveaways, and more. Please check the newsletter or
• 7:07
  go to neverpoe.st for the schedule next week. Member drive
• 7:10
  stream week. Okay.
• 7:12
  Next, Toby on the Internet doing gender at you, then RSS. But
• 7:20
  first, in our interstitials this week, three Internet
• 7:24
  instruments, two of which are entrants in the twenty twenty
• 7:28
  five tiny awards, which are amazing and we've put a link to
• 7:32
  that in the description. Please go check it out. In our
• 7:34
  interstitials, we have Maximo Neely Cohen's 10,000 Drum
• 7:38
  Machines, Rafael Bastides Nest, and ErrorZero's Three zero three
• 7:45
  Gen. Links to all of these in the show notes.
• 7:50
  Hans Buetow: Okay. Here we go. 10kdrummachines.com.
• 8:02
  10kdrummachines.com. Oh, list of drum machines.
• 8:11
  Here we go. Here we go. What do I want? Let's do Nights Tour
• 8:15
  Drum Sequencer. Number nine.
• 8:18
  It's a chess board. It's a chess board. Okay. Knight two is
• 8:22
  snare. How I play?
• 8:27
  It's playing chess. Okay. Let's start with White Album Noise
• 8:47
  Machine. Cool. Cool.
• 8:50
  Cool. So we got four tracks to let's just click some random
• 8:56
  patterns here. Let's do a random sequence, and let's do the bpm
• 9:01
  at a 190. Just for just a 180. 180 is as high as it goes.
• 9:07
  Alright. Here we go. Alright. Let's refresh the sounds.
• 9:23
  Alright.
• 9:23
  Let's break it down a little bit slower. Let's do let's do it in
• 9:27
  half. Let's do 90.
• 10:19
  Georgia Hampton: Hello, everybody. It's producer
• 10:21
  Georgia. I'm just jumping in here because I am so stoked
• 10:25
  about the segment that you are about to listen to. Eagle eared
• 10:28
  listeners might remember this pitch from our April mailbag,
• 10:32
  where listener of the show Toby Martin sent in a voicemail about
• 10:35
  this strange experience he's had online. I'm not giving anything
• 10:40
  away.
• 10:41
  Since then, Toby and I, along with additional support from
• 10:44
  Hans, have been working together to shape that pitch into what
• 10:49
  you're about to listen to. I am so so excited for you to hear
• 10:55
  this. I'll let Toby take it from here.
• 11:08
  Toby Martin: I wanna paint a picture for you. I'm 22 years
• 11:10
  old. It's been three weeks since my top surgery, and all I can
• 11:13
  bring myself to do is lay in bed on my laptop. I'm on the
• 11:17
  subreddit r slash what is this rock looking at an impressive
• 11:20
  sedimentary rock comprised of a bunch of crinoid fossils from
• 11:24
  Lake Michigan. When I see this jarring ad in the middle of my
• 11:28
  screen.
• 11:29
  Clip: Most men don't need more testosterone. They need more h g
• 11:34
  h.
• 11:35
  Toby Martin: I am no stranger to ads on the internet, but as a
• 11:38
  trans man, it felt weirdly timely to be getting served
• 11:41
  alpha male ads on Reddit after my top surgery. This wasn't
• 11:45
  gender euphoria. It was more like a type of gender euphoria,
• 11:49
  spelled with an e w. This ad represented a type of macho man
• 11:54
  that icked me out, the type of guy I would steer clear from at
• 11:57
  a bar. I couldn't figure out why I got this ad in the first
• 12:01
  place, so I started to obsess over my targeted content to see
• 12:05
  if I might be able to get more of the same.
• 12:08
  And I did. A majority of my content was geared at cis
• 12:12
  straight men. I was being advertised shitty supplements,
• 12:15
  hair loss treatments, and my personal favorite, erectile
• 12:19
  dysfunction cure alls. These guys were everywhere. When did
• 12:24
  my ads become this hyper masculine, and what did I change
• 12:28
  to make that happen?
• 12:32
  In pursuit to answer these questions and the many more that
• 12:35
  would come up along the way, I started talking to my fellow
• 12:39
  trans folks. I wrote out a message saying, has anyone
• 12:43
  noticed a change in their targeted ads or content as they
• 12:46
  transitioned? I am mainly trying to vibe check if I'm an isolated
• 12:50
  experience or not because for me, it's a night and day
• 12:53
  difference on some platforms. I pressed send and waited
• 12:57
  anxiously for a response. Turns out, yes.
• 13:04
  A lot of folks had things to say. I got permission to share
• 13:08
  these messages, but to protect everyone's privacy, you'll be
• 13:11
  hearing from some fantastic trans writers and artists to
• 13:14
  read these messages on their behalf.
• 13:19
  Guest Reader: Yes. My ads shifted over time. And it was
• 13:22
  pretty clear what kind of sites integrate with Facebook because
• 13:24
  my ads would change almost immediately after visiting
• 13:27
  certain sites, like for clothing or post op care, etcetera.
• 13:31
  Facebook also likes to show me transition before and afters,
• 13:34
  which are really annoying, and I always hide those to try to get
• 13:37
  it to stop. And it also likes to show me a lot of lesbian
• 13:41
  content.
• 13:44
  Toby Martin: This made total sense to me because, I mean, I
• 13:47
  had a very similar experience through my transition. After I
• 13:51
  bought some fleece lined sweatpants and a body pillow for
• 13:54
  my top surgery recovery, my ads responded very quickly.
• 13:58
  Suddenly, I got a ton more ads trying to sell me scar tape or
• 14:02
  wedge pillows. But stuff like recovery kits and transition
• 14:06
  before and after ads wasn't really my focus for the segment.
• 14:10
  I was especially interested in how much of my own targeted
• 14:13
  content was advertising a certain kind of gender.
• 14:17
  More specifically, your prototypical manosphere cis het
• 14:21
  man. Where did he come from? And I think I remember. It was my
• 14:31
  freshman year of college. At the time, I still presented as a
• 14:34
  very femme version of myself.
• 14:37
  I sold my hair in wet set curlers. I dressed in skirts and
• 14:41
  wore a full face of makeup. A lot of my ads reflected this. I
• 14:45
  got ads for Benefit Cosmetics, Unique Vintage, and a lot of
• 14:49
  women's skincare brands. These ads were hyper feminine,
• 14:54
  presenting me with a version of womanhood that was smooth and
• 14:57
  perfectly made up with foundation and eyeshadow.
• 15:00
  I was used to seeing ads like this, of the hyperfem variety.
• 15:05
  But one day in my engineering class, I got fed something very,
• 15:09
  very different. I remember I was working on this three d model
• 15:15
  with some YouTube videos playing in the background. I wasn't
• 15:18
  really paying much attention to the video until this ad for the
• 15:22
  US army started playing. I'd never been delivered a military
• 15:26
  ad before.
• 15:27
  It was the exact opposite of what I was used to seeing. No
• 15:31
  more soft focus. No more makeup. Instead, I saw a buff soldier
• 15:36
  piloting a drone with the caption
• 15:39
  Clip: Join the team that makes a difference.
• 15:42
  Toby Martin: I felt conflicted. I didn't care about the US
• 15:47
  military or drones, but it made me feel like something had
• 15:50
  shifted. Remember, I saw this ad when I was in my engineering
• 15:55
  class where I was one of two girls in the 23 person class.
• 15:59
  And something about being in this very masked place changed
• 16:03
  the way my ads saw me. I wanted to talk to someone who could
• 16:27
  help me understand this.
• 16:29
  Adam Aleksic: Hi. My name is Adam Aleksek. I'm a linguist and
• 16:31
  content creator posting videos as the etymology nerd to an
• 16:34
  audience of over 3,000,000, and I just finished writing the
• 16:36
  book, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of
• 16:39
  Language, which is now available for order.
• 16:41
  Toby Martin: I wanted Adam's help in making sense of how
• 16:44
  algorithms target content to users, specifically when it
• 16:48
  comes to gender. He explained to me that in order to better
• 16:52
  understand the algorithms, we have to understand how we use
• 16:56
  them and how it makes a profile of us.
• 16:59
  Adam Aleksic: It comes out of everything you've ever liked,
• 17:03
  commented on, everything you've ever posted, the way your thumb
• 17:05
  rests on your screen, your basic demographic information, the the
• 17:09
  activity you have on other apps that they can track, whether
• 17:12
  your phone's on the same WiFi network as another phone that's
• 17:15
  recently engaged in the kind of content. So even if you're not
• 17:17
  you haven't looked up Coquette video in your life and you just
• 17:20
  had a conversation with the Kochette person, your phone's
• 17:22
  not actually listening to you, but they they might know that
• 17:24
  you were in the same room as this person because you're on
• 17:26
  the same WiFi network. So they they build through a lot of
• 17:29
  these things. Oftentimes, they yeah. Through cross app
• 17:32
  tracking, they can tell from your search history and all
• 17:35
  that's built into your user profile and ends up influencing
• 17:37
  what videos get recommended to you.
• 17:39
  Toby Martin: The idea that my real life interactions affect my
• 17:42
  targeted content can feel nice. When my friend sends me a TikTok
• 17:47
  I've already seen or sends me a post about a TV show I talked
• 17:51
  about, I feel more connected to them. Our algorithms overlap,
• 17:56
  which makes it feel like we have a mutual common language. When I
• 18:00
  started learning to play piano, my algorithm started sending me
• 18:03
  ads for sheet music. Soon, I was getting recommended videos about
• 18:07
  music theory or banner ads for free teaching apps and top 10
• 18:10
  best keyboards for beginners.
• 18:12
  Piano was just a hobby for me, but my algorithm was acting like
• 18:16
  piano was the only thing I cared about. For a month, all I saw
• 18:20
  was piano content. So sure, I didn't click on every keyboard
• 18:26
  ad I saw, but it did feel nice that my feed was reflecting
• 18:30
  something about me that was true, even if it was a little
• 18:33
  exaggerated. Getting that hyper masculine military ad wasn't
• 18:46
  exactly the kind of masculinity I identified with, but it also
• 18:50
  felt kind of affirming. I wasn't going to click on the ad.
• 18:54
  I didn't want to join the army, but it did kind of make me feel
• 18:58
  like I was one of the guys. So all my data and my search
• 19:02
  history and what I buy gets compiled together, and then I've
• 19:06
  got my gender assigned at algorithm. But it's definitely
• 19:17
  not perfect.
• 19:19
  Guest Reader: I started getting targeted binder ads after I got
• 19:22
  top surgery. I get a lot of ads for like alternative women's
• 19:27
  underwear companies that target mostly gender nonconfirming
• 19:31
  queer women. I think the algo thinks I'm a tomboy. I'm a trans
• 19:36
  man.
• 19:37
  Toby Martin: The algorithm doesn't seem to be good at
• 19:39
  nuance when it comes to gender. Getting top surgery means you
• 19:42
  don't need binders anymore. And being a trans man could get
• 19:46
  garbled up by the algorithm and turned into some vague idea of
• 19:50
  being a tomboy. It feels less like my gender is what defines
• 19:54
  my algorithm and more like what I'm buying. Like, okay.
• 19:58
  Fantastic. So I bought a suit, looked up hockey stats, and
• 20:01
  calculated my macros. Now the algorithm sees me as a man TM.
• 20:07
  But once I got stamped with the you're a dude label by my feed,
• 20:11
  I noticed that the algorithmic understanding of manhood was
• 20:15
  really specific. Maybe I'd start with getting ads for cargo
• 20:22
  shorts and boxer briefs, but it wouldn't take long before I'd
• 20:25
  start seeing sports betting ads, then an ad for Drew Peterson's
• 20:29
  new book, and suddenly I'm in a different world, down the rabbit
• 20:33
  hole of Red Pills and Mig Tau bros.
• 20:36
  And I'm not alone in this experience.
• 20:39
  Guest Reader: I've been openly trans for six years now, and
• 20:42
  these are the main ads that get pushed to me now with me being
• 20:45
  more openly manly. Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA, Super Sexy
• 20:49
  Gacha Games, Gambling, the occasional penis enlargement
• 20:53
  product. I cannot stress the uptick in right wing slash MAGA
• 20:56
  content that keeps being pushed regardless of me blocking or
• 21:00
  saying I don't want these specific ads.
• 21:02
  Toby Martin: The algorithm is optimizing for this one type of
• 21:06
  guy. A guy who would see military ads and think, that
• 21:10
  could be me. I could make a difference. But that wasn't me,
• 21:13
  and it's never going to be me. But for some reason, I couldn't
• 21:17
  escape this super bro who's haunting my ads.
• 21:21
  I asked Adam about this, and he explained that a part of this
• 21:25
  has to do with the way that algorithms feed certain kinds of
• 21:28
  content out to different groups of people.
• 21:31
  Adam Aleksic: In the traditional model of communication and
• 21:34
  linguistics, I talk to you, I'm the encoder, you get my message,
• 21:37
  you decode it. Now if I'm talking to you as a social media
• 21:41
  influencer, I am encoding a message. The algorithm decodes
• 21:45
  the message, encodes a new message, and then sends it out,
• 21:48
  and then you decode it. So there's an extra layer there.
• 21:51
  And when I say the algorithm, like, encodes a new message, it
• 21:54
  may send it to an unintended audience.
• 21:56
  I may want my video to reach a certain demographic of people,
• 21:59
  and the algorithm might reassign it.
• 22:01
  Toby Martin: So maybe someone like Jordan Peterson gets the
• 22:03
  attention of a certain kind of guy, like a huge community full
• 22:07
  of that one kind of dude. That content goes to the top of the
• 22:11
  list to advertise to men online just because it's really popular
• 22:14
  among men. But it's still a traditional version of
• 22:17
  masculinity, one I certainly don't ascribe to. And isn't my
• 22:21
  algorithm supposed to get to know me specifically? Why does
• 22:25
  it insist on pushing out this one version of hypermasculinity?
• 22:30
  Adam Aleksic: We can't avoid talking about algorithmic bias
• 22:32
  here, which naturally amplifies social bias. Algorithms tend to
• 22:36
  compound and amplify what natural human social behaviors
• 22:39
  are. Unfortunately, humans tend to trust more or want to view
• 22:44
  more videos from people who are in the gender binary, like, kind
• 22:48
  of stereotype, like, presentation. So algorithms
• 22:52
  reflexively are going to reinforce that, and more
• 22:56
  heteronormative kind of perspectives are gonna be pushed
• 22:58
  because that's what's going viral.
• 23:03
  Toby Martin: The manosphere just has a huge online presence.
• 23:07
  There's a lot of money to be made there. So from an
• 23:09
  algorithmic perspective, it's a no brainer. If you're a dude on
• 23:13
  the Internet, you're gonna get these kinds of ads. Look up
• 23:15
  cargo shorts one time and bam, here comes Jordan Peterson.
• 23:19
  Adam Aleksic: There is a really interesting sort of algorithmic
• 23:22
  performativity as well, where an influencer isn't just performing
• 23:26
  for their audience, they're performing for what they think
• 23:28
  is gonna go viral.
• 23:31
  Toby Martin: So in this case, ends up happening is this
• 23:33
  compounding situation where certain kinds of content go
• 23:36
  viral, get a lot of algorithmic attention, and then the people
• 23:40
  making that content see how popular their stuff is, and they
• 23:43
  make more of it. The cycle keeps going and going, and that
• 23:47
  hypermasculine content keeps getting pushed out to more and
• 23:50
  more people, even people like me who are very much not the
• 23:54
  intended audience for it. This version of manhood isn't
• 24:00
  something I want for myself. It feels like hearing a dissonant
• 24:03
  chord, an interpretation of gender that feels totally off
• 24:06
  the mark to what I actually feel about myself. But those super
• 24:10
  masculine ads also came to me at a time where I was in the middle
• 24:13
  of figuring myself out, where my own understanding of how I felt
• 24:17
  about manhood was developing.
• 24:18
  And like I said before, at first, it felt kind of nice to
• 24:22
  be treated like a guy by the algorithm, even if it wasn't the
• 24:26
  right kind of guy. When I first got that macho military ad, I
• 24:34
  was still presenting as a woman in the real world. And as I
• 24:36
  began coming out to my friends and exploring my trans identity
• 24:40
  through online channels, that wasn't always true IRL. I was
• 24:44
  constantly bargaining with my own identity. Maybe I could chop
• 24:47
  my hair off into a more androgynous cut or wear more
• 24:50
  pants, less dresses, but it was a process.
• 24:53
  And in a way, my ads reflected this period where I was changing
• 24:57
  myself constantly for myself and others. Online, I spent a lot of
• 25:03
  time trying to figure out what being a man looked like for me.
• 25:07
  Maybe I'm a cargo shorts guy or an Overwatch guy, and its
• 25:10
  imperfect way, my algorithm served as another way to try
• 25:14
  stuff on. It was like it was asking me, do you want to become
• 25:18
  a Manosphere guy? Do you
• 25:20
  Georgia Hampton: wanna listen to Joe Rogan?
• 25:22
  Toby Martin: When I first got those kind of gendered ads, they
• 25:25
  really freaked me out because, no, I don't wanna be that kind
• 25:29
  of guy. I never have been that kind of guy. But in the process
• 25:33
  of working on this segment, I've started to look at it another
• 25:36
  way. The algorithm was performing with me as I started
• 25:40
  to unravel who I was.
• 25:44
  Adam Aleksic: Well, I mean, all identity is performance. Right?
• 25:47
  That's historically always been true. It depending on our
• 25:50
  audience, we are constantly embodying a role or an idea of,
• 25:54
  like, who we are supposed to be. And that's the thing.
• 25:56
  Even without the algorithms even without the algorithms, if a
• 25:59
  label is out there, it'll always affect our identity because now
• 26:02
  we know once we know it's there, we're either going to perform
• 26:05
  toward it or we're gonna perform against it.
• 26:11
  Toby Martin: As I continue living as a man and learning
• 26:13
  what that looks like for me, the grip the ads have on me has
• 26:16
  loosened. I'm not performing for my ad profile. I don't need it
• 26:20
  anymore. The gendered algorithm is simple and uncomplicated. It
• 26:23
  has no depth, and it doesn't even know what a man is.
• 26:27
  It only knows that a lot of guys click on ads for male growth
• 26:30
  hormone. I'm breaking up with my gender assigned algorithm
• 26:35
  because being transgender, or for God's sakes, human, can't be
• 26:39
  easily partitioned away. I'm a man, and I get to decide what
• 26:44
  that means for me. To me, manhood looks like wearing green
• 26:48
  cargo shorts and watching hockey. It looks like a lot of
• 26:52
  things, but I get to choose.
• 27:06
  Thank you to Adam Alexic for sitting down to chat with me.
• 27:10
  Check out his book AlgoSpeak wherever you buy books. And
• 27:13
  thank you to my friends for offering their voices to read
• 27:15
  the quotes folks sent in, and everyone who submitted their
• 27:18
  experiences with the algorithm and gendered ads.
• 29:43
  Mike Rugnetta: In this, our second ever terms and conditions
• 29:46
  segment, where we explain things that you, our dear listeners,
• 29:50
  maybe never got around to understanding and are now too
• 29:54
  afraid to ask or too busy to learn on your own, I'm gonna
• 29:58
  tackle your most requested topic by far, RSS. That's right. The
• 30:06
  very technology that you used to get this and probably every
• 30:11
  other podcast that you listen to. The technology that allowed
• 30:15
  the once mighty Google reader to thrive. The technology that
• 30:20
  launched and arguably sustained countless blogs in the early two
• 30:24
  thousands in which in the era of the platform internet is
• 30:28
  currently having a bit of a resurgence.
• 30:31
  You have maybe read about RSS recently. For instance, in April
• 30:36
  2024, Alex Sujon Laughlin published, if you love podcasts,
• 30:40
  dump Spotify on Defector, in which she pits the walled in
• 30:44
  audio platform giant against the open RSS standard. This
• 30:49
  February, it's FOSS News published, why I still love and
• 30:53
  use RSS feeds in 2025. Just last month, Molly White published a
• 30:59
  citation needed newsletter titled curate your own newspaper
• 31:03
  with RSS And the subtitle, escape newsletter inbox chaos
• 31:08
  and algorithmic surveillance by building your own and
• 31:12
  shitification proof newspaper from writers you already read.
• 31:16
  In January, Jason Snell at long running Apple news blog
• 31:20
  6colors.com published the post reading newsletters via RSS
• 31:25
  reader is still great.
• 31:27
  And in April 2024, Scott Gilbertson at Wired published
• 31:31
  the best RSS feed readers for streamlining the internet with
• 31:35
  the subtitle, the internet is a mess. Ignore the algorithm and
• 31:39
  distill the web down to the things you already care about.
• 31:44
  Reddit, blue sky, x are all awash with love posts to RSS, so
• 31:50
  we're gonna talk about it. What RSS is in hopefully not too
• 31:54
  excruciating technological detail, but some technological
• 31:58
  detail. How the conditions of its development made it what it
• 32:01
  is, a standard which has not really changed in twenty plus
• 32:05
  years, and will chart the aforementioned down and then
• 32:08
  upswing in interest, which would seem at first glance to be the
• 32:12
  inverse of an up and then downswing in public sentiment
• 32:16
  regarding the social internet.
• 32:21
  Probably just a coincidence. So what is RSS? RSS is a
• 32:35
  standardized open format web feed based on XML. We're gonna
• 32:41
  go through each of those things. A web feed isn't normally
• 32:45
  something you interact with directly.
• 32:47
  It's a document made by one service, say, a podcast host,
• 32:52
  and decoded by another service, say, your pod catcher. One
• 32:56
  service makes and maintains the feed based on the things that
• 32:59
  you publish, and then the other pulls information from it in
• 33:03
  order to serve it in a useful format, like, say, sound files
• 33:06
  to listen to and information about those sound files. This
• 33:10
  means that RSS is what is called machine readable, not human
• 33:16
  readable. I mean, you could read it, but no one would expect you
• 33:19
  to. And by simply reading it, you don't benefit from its
• 33:22
  existence because your brain can't download audio files or
• 33:27
  metadata.
• 33:28
  And if it can, please call the show. Now there are a bunch of
• 33:33
  web feed formats. JSON feed, Atom, and RSS are the most
• 33:38
  common. Both RSS and Atom, which is, like, sort of based on RSS,
• 33:44
  kind of, are written in what's called XML. XML is a markup
• 33:50
  language, sort of similar to HTML, which is used to make web
• 33:53
  pages, but XML can make, kind of whatever you want.
• 33:58
  It has many many uses. In fact, it stands for extensible markup
• 34:02
  language. So what is a markup language? A markup language
• 34:06
  generally, envelops or enrobes. It goes around other pieces of
• 34:12
  information.
• 34:13
  Usually, though not always, plain text and media or links to
• 34:18
  media. So images, video, audio. It goes around those things and
• 34:23
  it helps to organize and sometimes display them, and that
• 34:27
  organization is done within a hierarchy of nodes. So we're
• 34:32
  gonna talk about this practically because I think it's
• 34:34
  gonna be a bit easier to understand than talking about it
• 34:36
  abstractly. So I know I just told you not to do this, but if
• 34:42
  you were to download and open and then read the RSS file for
• 34:48
  this podcast for Never Post, which you could do, in any,
• 34:52
  plain text reader.
• 34:54
  So like, you know, notepad should do it, by going to
• 34:57
  neverpo.st and then in the middle of the page, you'll see
• 35:01
  the orange RSS icon that says listen via RSS. Click on that or
• 35:07
  right click on it and just save the file that pops up and then
• 35:10
  open it. Scroll down a little bit to see the entry for this
• 35:14
  episode. You'd see open angle bracket item, the word item I t
• 35:19
  e m, closed angle bracket, which for simplicity I'm just gonna
• 35:23
  call those brackets from now on. This marks the beginning of a
• 35:27
  node.
• 35:27
  The word item is defined by the RSS standard and it means
• 35:32
  everything that follows until this node is closed describes
• 35:36
  one post in the feed. Then you'll see open bracket, title,
• 35:40
  close bracket. Title also defined by the RSS standard
• 35:44
  means everything in this node is the title of the post. Then it
• 35:49
  will say the title of this episode in plain text. I don't
• 35:52
  know what that title is at the time of recording, but let's say
• 35:56
  it's a feed me Seymour.
• 35:59
  That would go right here followed by open bracket forward
• 36:04
  slash title closed bracket. The addition of the slash means that
• 36:09
  this is a closing tag. This node is done. Everything before this
• 36:13
  was the title. Everything after this is something else.
• 36:16
  Next up is open bracket, pub date, close bracket. Everything
• 36:21
  in this node is the date and time that this item, this
• 36:25
  episode was published. So it's gonna be Wednesday, 08/13/2025
• 36:30
  and then whatever time we end up publishing in UTC. Then open
• 36:35
  bracket forward slash pub date close bracket. This is a closing
• 36:39
  tag which means as we already know, this node is done.
• 36:43
  Everything before this closing tag was the pub date. Everything
• 36:46
  after this is something else and so on and so forth for
• 36:49
  everything useful that you would want in a feed with many node
• 36:54
  names defined by the RSS standard. These are things like
• 36:57
  description and summary, enclosure which in a podcast RSS
• 37:02
  is the link to the actual audio file and more including a bunch
• 37:06
  of nodes that begin iTunes, which is maybe gonna seem kind
• 37:10
  of strange. This is because Apple as arguably the most
• 37:14
  powerful player in the podcast space has helped to establish a
• 37:18
  bunch of conventions, but they've added those conventions
• 37:22
  on top of the RSS standard using something that's called
• 37:26
  namespace. We're gonna talk more about that later.
• 37:29
  That's a sort of deep technical detail that you don't really
• 37:31
  need to know yet or perhaps ever. All of these nodes are
• 37:37
  included inside each item node which is then closed with a open
• 37:41
  bracket forward slash item closed bracket tag. Meaning, at
• 37:45
  that point, we're done talking about this item, this episode
• 37:49
  and we're ready to move on either to the next or the end of
• 37:52
  the feed. The whole thing is kinda like a train. The engine
• 37:56
  at the front says, here comes an episode.
• 37:59
  And then each car is filled with specific information about the
• 38:04
  episode loaded by the service that publishes it. So you get
• 38:09
  the description car, then you get the runtime car, then the
• 38:15
  post body text car. The Internet is the track that moves this
• 38:20
  information from publisher to reader or pod catcher where
• 38:24
  everything is then unloaded and organized according to that
• 38:27
  station's specific operations. Now in order to work right, an
• 38:37
  RSS feed, which remember is really just a document listing
• 38:40
  things that have been published elsewhere, has to adhere to two
• 38:44
  standards. Syntactically, an RSS feed has to contain parsable
• 38:49
  XML.
• 38:50
  Tags need to be opened and closed correctly, nested
• 38:52
  properly, etcetera, etcetera. And it also has to follow the
• 38:55
  RSS standard. Use the right node names, contain the required
• 39:00
  nodes, and so on. This is what we mean when we say that RSS is
• 39:04
  standardized, but confusingly, there are a couple different RSS
• 39:10
  standards. The most common requires only three pieces of
• 39:15
  info.
• 39:16
  A title for the feed, so for example, never post, a home page
• 39:20
  URL, so neverpoe.st, and a description, a podcast for and
• 39:26
  about the Internet hosted by Mike Rugnetta. That's it. An RSS
• 39:30
  feed doesn't need items to be valid. It can be empty. This is
• 39:34
  how you can subscribe to a newsletter, say, or a blog
• 39:38
  before it has any posts.
• 39:40
  Podcasts work a little differently, but that's a
• 39:42
  convention, not a requirement. And all of this is incidentally
• 39:46
  what makes RSS open. You can just go to where the standard is
• 39:51
  kept and see in plain text, human readable, what's required.
• 39:56
  And then you can go and implement that yourself. You
• 39:59
  don't need to pay a fee.
• 40:00
  You don't need to ask anyone permission, not the folks who
• 40:03
  publish the standard nor the folks who made it. But okay.
• 40:07
  Wait. This may make you wonder, who are those people? Who
• 40:11
  decided that this works this way?
• 40:13
  Who standardized this standard? Well, that's something of a long
• 40:18
  story, but we're gonna cover the broad strokes of it because
• 40:21
  understanding how RSS was made can help us understand why it
• 40:25
  feels like something of an antidote to the impersonal
• 40:30
  algorithms heavy social internet. In the introduction of
• 40:37
  the 1995 O'Reilly book Developing Feeds with RSS and
• 40:41
  Adam, Ben Hammersley begins like this. It's an extended quote,
• 40:45
  but it's good, so I'm gonna read the whole thing. In the
• 40:48
  developers bars of the world, those dark sordid places filled
• 40:53
  with grizzled coders and their clans, a special corner is
• 40:58
  always reserved for the developers of content
• 41:01
  syndication standards.
• 41:03
  There, weeping into their beer, you'll find the veterans of a
• 41:08
  long and difficult process. The standards you will read about in
• 41:13
  this book were not born fresh and innocent of a streamlined
• 41:18
  process overseen by the wise and good. Rather, the following
• 41:24
  chapters have been dragged into the world and tempered through
• 41:28
  brawls, knife fights, and the occasional riot. Incredible. I
• 41:37
  mean, obviously tongue in cheek, but all of this melodrama for
• 41:40
  making a piece of tech that collects posts in a feed so they
• 41:44
  can be syndicated elsewhere.
• 41:46
  Why? Why so much torment and strife and conflict and pain?
• 41:51
  Well, I mean, are nerds that we're talking about, and
• 41:55
  development on what would become RSS began in 1995. So these are
• 42:01
  early Internet nerds, or I guess early modern Internet nerds.
• 42:05
  Maybe there was a lot of ego involved.
• 42:08
  I mean, probably there was, but there was also a lot of
• 42:11
  principle at work. The developers of RSS were trying
• 42:15
  generally, I think, to follow the steps of Tim Berners Lee and
• 42:19
  the development of what is arguably the Internet's base
• 42:21
  technology, the hyperlink. The development of something so open
• 42:26
  and yet at the same time so narrow isn't easy, especially
• 42:31
  when you don't know exactly how it will be used yet. So that
• 42:35
  quote is pointing us even further back to Apple earlier in
• 42:41
  the mid nineties and a product called hot sauce developed by
• 42:46
  Ramanathan g Guha that was intended to allow users to
• 42:49
  browse documents like websites, for instance, in three d space.
• 42:57
  Yes.
• 42:57
  Really. Steve Jobs mothballed that project in 1997 when he
• 43:02
  returned to Apple, and Guha went to Netscape. And what followed
• 43:07
  was a flurry of activity over about two or three years between
• 43:11
  Apple, Netscape, Microsoft, and independent developers who saw
• 43:16
  the promise of these nascent syndication technologies for
• 43:22
  bloggers. This would have been in the depths of the browser
• 43:25
  wars, if that's meaningful to anyone. Though if it's
• 43:28
  meaningful to you, you probably already know this history.
• 43:31
  Dan Libby of Netscape authored what would become the first RSS
• 43:34
  standard based upon a string of technology leading all the way
• 43:38
  back to hot sauce. But even though this was a momentous
• 43:42
  occasion, some folks were frustrated, and they saw this
• 43:45
  implementation as lacking. It could syndicate headlines, a
• 43:50
  list of links, basically, but not site content. So Dan Weiner
• 43:56
  of the software development company Userland and later and
• 44:00
  currently scripting.com would follow this first implementation
• 44:05
  of RSS with an update to his own scripting news feed format. Dan
• 44:12
  Weiner took a bunch of the stuff that was implemented in this
• 44:14
  first RSS standard, and he added the ability to syndicate whole
• 44:19
  paragraphs of content.
• 44:22
  This edition was really meaningful, and so then the next
• 44:26
  version of RSS 0.91 incorporated those features. This back and
• 44:32
  forth exemplifies a lot about what's great and messy about RSS
• 44:37
  specifically and open standards generally. We talked about this
• 44:42
  and all things RSS with Justin Jackson, cofounder of Transistor
• 44:46
  dot FM, the host we use for Never Post's member feed, but
• 44:50
  Justin is also a member of the Podcast Standards Project. This
• 44:54
  is what he had to say about the trade offs involved when
• 44:57
  building something that's open.
• 44:59
  Justin Jackson: The benefit of having a centralized platform is
• 45:02
  you can just have a CEO decide, we're gonna do this, and that's
• 45:07
  what we're doing. And with anything in the open protocol
• 45:10
  world, you have to create alignment. You have to do all of
• 45:15
  this groundwork with human beings, all this coordination
• 45:19
  work.
• 45:19
  Mike Rugnetta: A standard like RSS is not a piece of software
• 45:23
  that's made and then distributed. It's more just like
• 45:26
  a way of doing things that people can adopt or not. The
• 45:30
  standard is only really useful if the folks who use it, who
• 45:34
  bake it into their software, agree and coordinate with one
• 45:38
  another and align on when and where and how everything is
• 45:43
  implemented. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but getting
• 45:47
  people to agree to work together, especially in tech, is
• 45:51
  not easy. So this is where we get into the brawls and the
• 45:54
  knife fights and the riots.
• 45:56
  After Dan and Dave agree on RSS 0.91, a rift develops over
• 46:02
  effectively how extensible RSS should be. Should it do a small
• 46:07
  number of very specific things or should it do whatever people
• 46:12
  want it to as long as it follows a broad standard? The second
• 46:15
  approach relies on something called namespace. Effectively
• 46:20
  saying, if you want to add new nodes beyond the standard
• 46:23
  assortment that's already there, that's fine, but you have to put
• 46:26
  your name in front of it. Like say, iTunes.
• 46:29
  Hey, you already know how that works. Nice. One group says no
• 46:34
  to namespaces. It's gonna make things too complicated if you
• 46:37
  can stack whatever you want on top of the standard. And the
• 46:40
  other group says, yes.
• 46:42
  It's basically needed to make RSS useful and to give it
• 46:46
  longevity so people can expand on it. For those of you that
• 46:50
  know portions of this history, this is also around the time
• 46:53
  that a 14 year old Aaron Swartz gets involved with RSS. The
• 46:58
  solution ends up being, as we've mentioned, two standards which
• 47:02
  in recent years really have drifted closer and closer to one
• 47:06
  another in their feature set. But RSS two point o, the
• 47:09
  copyright for which was assigned to Harvard's Berkman Klein
• 47:12
  Center for Internet Law is by far the most implemented with
• 47:16
  over 70% of RSS feeds aligning to its standard which allows
• 47:22
  namespaces. This standard was finally solidified in 02/2003.
• 47:28
  We asked Justin, why hasn't RSS changed since then? Aren't there
• 47:35
  technical limitations inherent to a standard as old as this
• 47:39
  one?
• 47:40
  Justin Jackson: The original spec is probably not going to be
• 47:43
  changed much, because it doesn't really need to. Inside
• 47:47
  podcasting, we've continued to innovate on top of it. And that
• 47:53
  was one of the beautiful things about it. I would argue there's
• 47:57
  actually no technical limitations. I think you could
• 48:01
  anything that you want to build on top of RSS, you can.
• 48:05
  Even things that people have traditionally said don't work
• 48:09
  with RSS. Things like people will say, well, it's a typically
• 48:12
  one way. Right? I publish a blog post, or I publish a podcast
• 48:18
  episode. You refresh your app, and it, you know, picks up the
• 48:22
  new episode, and you pull it down to your RSS feed reader or
• 48:26
  your podcast app.
• 48:27
  But there's no reason we couldn't add two way
• 48:31
  communication to that. One one example of this is Transistor
• 48:36
  uses something called the social interact tag, which is this new
• 48:40
  podcasting two point o tag. And it allowed us to build on top of
• 48:46
  Blue Sky and the AT protocol. It allows people to add comments to
• 48:51
  podcast episodes. And these comments can be shared across
• 48:56
  networks.
• 48:57
  They can work in some ways, they're agnostic. They don't
• 49:00
  need a particular social network or platform. And so, you know,
• 49:05
  that that was a fairly simple implementation on top of RSS. So
• 49:09
  it's all possible.
• 49:11
  Mike Rugnetta: So then why isn't RSS constantly evolving? Adding
• 49:15
  video to podcast episodes or comments directly in the feed?
• 49:19
  Based upon what we've said already, you can probably guess
• 49:21
  the answer.
• 49:22
  Justin Jackson: I think everything has just come down to
• 49:25
  coordination. You have to coordinate between three
• 49:29
  different groups, really. You have to coordinate between the
• 49:33
  podcast hosting companies, which are largely generating the RSS
• 49:38
  feeds and XML. You have to coordinate between the apps, and
• 49:42
  not just like independent apps, like Overcast or Podcast Guru,
• 49:48
  but bigger apps like Apple Podcasts. And then you have to
• 49:53
  coordinate between with creators.
• 49:56
  And creating alignment between those three groups is a
• 50:01
  challenge. What do creators actually want? There's figuring
• 50:07
  out how are we going to coordinate on between all these
• 50:11
  groups? How can we create alignment when everyone's
• 50:15
  motivated by something different?
• 50:16
  Mike Rugnetta: Now, as complicated and maybe as
• 50:19
  torporous as this process is, I do think it really is the
• 50:24
  beating heart of why RSS has persisted for as long as it has
• 50:29
  and is having something of a moment right now as we perhaps
• 50:33
  crest and then begin to descend the other side of the mountain
• 50:37
  that is the era of the social Internet. Ten to twelve years
• 50:41
  ago, RSS was considered outdated, if not dead. For Vice,
• 50:46
  in 2019, Sinclair Target writes of that era, people never felt
• 50:50
  comfortable using RSS. It hadn't really been designed as a
• 50:54
  consumer facing technology and involved too many hurdles.
• 50:58
  People jumped ship as soon as something better came along.
• 51:02
  Target's not wrong. It's not easy for people to make RSS
• 51:06
  feeds from whatever they happen upon. The hoi polloi benefits
• 51:09
  from their existence as long as the folks doing the publishing,
• 51:12
  making the podcasts, the blogs, the news stories, the weather
• 51:15
  updates, photographs, videos, whatever else might reasonably
• 51:19
  be found in a feed, are willing to put the effort into
• 51:22
  syndicating those things via an RSS feed, which has its own set
• 51:26
  of technological requirements and restrictions. And also
• 51:29
  incidentally tends to keep people off of the publishing
• 51:33
  site and therefore not looking at ads. Google Reader, the
• 51:38
  storied RSS aggregator was shut down on 07/01/2013, citing a
• 51:43
  slow and steady dwindling of its user base.
• 51:46
  The press release that announced the shuttering read, quote,
• 51:49
  while Google reader has a passionate user base, the
• 51:52
  product has not seen the growth or engagement that we had hoped
• 51:55
  for. We would like to refocus our efforts on more popular
• 51:58
  products that our users currently enjoy. The something
• 52:06
  better that Target hints at? Social media. Twitter,
• 52:10
  specifically.
• 52:11
  The cynical amongst us may also think that Google killed Reader
• 52:14
  in the hopes of boosting adoption of Google plus.
• 52:18
  Remember Google plus? No one else does either. We might
• 52:22
  consider 2013 ish the nadir of RSS's history to date, after
• 52:28
  which it seems there's been a slow and similarly steady
• 52:31
  increase in interest around what the format provides. It's
• 52:35
  possible even that we've yet to see the zenith of RSS's
• 52:39
  popularity.
• 52:39
  Justin Jackson: If there's gonna be a resurgence of RSS used for
• 52:43
  other things, like video, like articles, like social media
• 52:50
  posts, I think the problem to solve there is with app
• 52:56
  developers. How are we going to harness this fire hose and make
• 53:06
  it make it helpful, useful.
• 53:11
  Mike Rugnetta: RSS is the way that it is and operates the way
• 53:14
  that it does and is supported in the ways that it is because
• 53:18
  disparate far flung groups of people decided actively that it
• 53:23
  should be that way, and that sort of agency is then passed on
• 53:26
  to the people who use it for better and worse. RSS isn't an
• 53:30
  algorithm. It does no curation. It doesn't collect information
• 53:33
  about you nor require a subscription fee. It allows you
• 53:36
  simply to know when your stories are on, which means to Justin's
• 53:41
  point, if you're not careful or if you want to, you can very
• 53:45
  easily overwhelm yourself with RSS.
• 53:48
  But if implemented and used in a certain way, it can also be an
• 53:52
  antidote to the overwhelm that we experience elsewhere on the
• 53:57
  Internet.
• 53:58
  Justin Jackson: I don't think it's mainstream, but there could
• 54:02
  be a world where Gen Z and maybe other generations as well just
• 54:07
  say, you know what? I'm kind of done with this centralized
• 54:14
  commercial ad driven Internet that's just designed to give me
• 54:20
  brain rot, and designed to addict me. And I want something
• 54:28
  that's more mindful. And I think we already saw this with email.
• 54:33
  You know, there's this resurgence of email newsletters.
• 54:37
  So much of what made culture great in the sixties and
• 54:42
  seventies and eighties and nineties was that you had to
• 54:45
  work for it. There was friction. And I think maybe our culture is
• 54:54
  starting to wake up to this idea that we need a bit more
• 54:59
  friction. We need a little bit more mess. We need not
• 55:03
  everything to just be perfect, but, you know, maybe it's worth
• 55:09
  working to find a podcast you really like, even though it's
• 55:14
  not easy.
• 55:15
  Maybe it's worth having an episode of Radiotopia show up in
• 55:22
  your feed and you're like, that sounds boring. But then it auto
• 55:27
  plays when you're on a long road trip, and you're like, actually,
• 55:30
  that was really great. I'm glad I'm glad I didn't just swipe
• 55:36
  away from that after listening. You know, I that is my hope is
• 55:42
  that if anything, I think we're just gonna go back to some of
• 55:48
  the old ways of doing things because we just realize we need
• 55:52
  it.
• 55:57
  Mike Rugnetta: Thank you so much to Justin for chatting with us.
• 56:00
  You can find Justin on Blue Sky at Justin Jackson dot c a. And
• 56:04
  if you are so inclined, can host your podcast at transistor.fm.
• 56:09
  They did not pay us to say that we got Justin on this segment
• 56:12
  because he is an expert, but we also just happen to be big fans
• 56:16
  of transistor. I hope this terms and conditions was instructive.
• 56:22
  Are there things about the Internet that you want us to
• 56:25
  explain to you because you're not going to go do the research
• 56:28
  yourself? Listen. I get it. Send us an email. Send us a voice
• 56:32
  memo or a voice mail.
• 56:34
  Let us know what you wanna know about and who knows, maybe it
• 56:37
  will be the next terms and conditions segment. That is the
• 58:33
  show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here on the
• 58:34
  main feed on Wednesday, August 27, but we will be on Twitch all
• 58:40
  next week. Join us at twitch.tv/the never post. Check
• 58:45
  the newsletter and the website for a schedule.
• 58:48
  I got some notes recently that I should not joke about not
• 58:51
  knowing what it is we do on the show and that in addition to
• 58:54
  being not true, it's also just kind of an irritating millennial
• 58:57
  move to be like, oh, we're just a small bean. I don't know what
• 59:01
  we're doing show. So Here's the facts. Never post is a media and
• 59:05
  technology criticism in theory podcast which takes the position
• 59:08
  that for better and worse, one of the best ways to understand
• 59:12
  contemporary western society is through an understanding of the
• 59:16
  internet and how our interactions with it shape our
• 59:19
  outlooks, our relationships, our sense of what's happening, and
• 59:23
  what's possible. My friend George said the show is NPR for
• 59:27
  the terminally online.
• 59:29
  Does that make Hans or Terry Gross? Does Georgia Arnetta Ulla
• 59:33
  be? Oh, no. Am I the Ira Glass become a member? At neverpo.st.
• 59:48
  Never posts producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the
• 59:51
  mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer
• 59:54
  is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer.
• 59:58
  The show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Not verb, but
• 1:00:04
  vertigo.
• 1:00:05
  Does not indicate action. Does not mean go to meet, but rather
• 1:00:09
  to lie there because someone doesn't arrive. To Search by
• 1:00:15
  Alejandra Pizarnik. Never Post is a production of charts and
• 1:00:19
  leisure. It is distributed by Radiotopia.