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The Hardest Thing To Do Is Nothing · Never Post

• 0:11
  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 Sunday, March 23 at 11:32PM
• 0:21
  eastern, and we have a formidable show for you this
• 0:26
  week. First, Georgia goes on a no buy journey where she
• 0:30
  attempts to make it nearly three months without purchasing new
• 0:34
  clothing as per the seventy five day hard style challenge. She
• 0:38
  talks about her experiences with Kyle Checa and host of the
• 0:41
  podcast articles of interest Avery Truffelman. Then I talk
• 0:46
  with Mike Masnik, founder of the stalwart technology block Tech
• 0:49
  Dirt about legislation that could be introduced in The US as
• 0:53
  soon as this week that would sunset section two thirty of the
• 0:58
  Communications Indecency Act, 26 words which, quote, paved the
• 1:02
  way for the modern Internet.
• 1:04
  Now why would anybody wanna get rid of those? And also typing
• 1:11
  tests. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that
• 1:14
  have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have
• 1:16
  four stories for you this week. Boston Celtic ska mainstay, the
• 1:23
  dropkick Murphys, were not banned from x for comments
• 1:27
  frontman Ken Casey made on stage critical of the US
• 1:30
  administration.
• 1:32
  Over the weekend, a post went viral claiming that the
• 1:34
  Northeast punk band rebooted from the social site after Casey
• 1:37
  pointed out a concert goer wearing a red MAGA hat and joked
• 1:41
  that Elon Musk's black dark MAGA variant is the quote, Elon Musk
• 1:46
  true Nazi edition. On her newsletter, the handbasket,
• 1:50
  Marissa Cabas reports that the podcast Midas Touch shared a
• 1:54
  clip of the joke which was shared again by an account
• 1:57
  claiming that it had led to the band's suspension, but it had
• 2:01
  not. Cabas confirmed quote, the dropkick Murphy's account was
• 2:05
  banned as early as June 2024, but regardless at least seven
• 2:09
  news stories centering on this claim had been published by the
• 2:12
  morning after the first posts. Don't believe everything you
• 2:16
  read on the internet, I guess. X has, however, seemingly
• 2:21
  suspended accounts connected with Turkish opposition in the
• 2:24
  midst of large scale protests in Istanbul following the arrest of
• 2:29
  Ekrem Imamoglu, mayor of the city and presidential candidate
• 2:32
  running against Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
• 2:35
  PCMag reports that most suspended accounts quote,
• 2:38
  belonged to grassroots activists with followers in the low tens
• 2:42
  of thousands who shared protest locations for students.
• 2:46
  According to X's transparency report, they continue, it
• 2:49
  complied with 68% of Turkey's government requests to take down
• 2:54
  content in the second half of twenty twenty four. Speaking of
• 2:58
  ostensible governments, multiple news outlets report that the US
• 3:01
  government is close to finalizing a deal for the sale
• 3:04
  of TikTok. Oracle, whose servers house TikTok's US recommendation
• 3:09
  engine and user data was once thought to be the preferred
• 3:12
  purchaser. But late last week, Reuters reported that quote,
• 3:15
  White House led talks are coalescing around a plan for the
• 3:18
  biggest non Chinese investors in parent company ByteDance to up
• 3:23
  their stakes and acquire the short video apps US operations,
• 3:27
  end quote.
• 3:27
  Among the investors are Susquehanna International Group
• 3:30
  and General Atlantic. Reuters reports that private equity firm
• 3:34
  KKR is also involved. And finally, biotech and personal
• 3:40
  genomics company twenty three and Me has filed for chapter 11
• 3:44
  bankruptcy protection and its CEO, founder Anne Wojcicki, has
• 3:48
  said she will step down, although she will retain a seat
• 3:51
  on the board. This leads to a number of questions about what
• 3:54
  happens to the genetics information of the 15 some
• 3:58
  million people who have used the service in the event of the
• 4:02
  impending liquidation of all of its assets. California's
• 4:06
  attorney general Rob Bonta released a statement on March 21
• 4:09
  reading in part quote, due to the trove of sensitive consumer
• 4:13
  data twenty three and me has amassed, attorney general Bonta
• 4:17
  reminds Californians of their right to direct the deletion of
• 4:20
  their genetic data under the genetic information privacy act
• 4:24
  and California consumer privacy act, end quote.
• 4:28
  Though these laws were passed in California, most websites make
• 4:32
  these features available to all users regardless of their
• 4:35
  location. So thanks California, I guess. We'll put a link to AG
• 4:41
  Bonta's statement in the description which includes
• 4:44
  directions for deleting your 23 and me data if you need them. In
• 5:06
  show news this week, this is the first episode of Neverpost
• 5:10
  officially distributed by Radiotopia. So that is very
• 5:15
  exciting.
• 5:17
  If this is news to you, just click back one episode and
• 5:20
  listen to our explainer about what Radiotopia is and what this
• 5:24
  means for the show. And if this is your first never post joining
• 5:27
  us from some other part of the Radiotopia family of shows,
• 5:32
  welcome. We are very happy that you're here. As mentioned last
• 5:36
  episode, I was on Matt Silverman's influence podcast
• 5:39
  talking about my career in media and what it is like making
• 5:43
  content these days. So that is out now.
• 5:46
  We'll put a link to that in the show notes. And also, I had the
• 5:50
  immense pleasure of speaking with Kurt White, a clinical
• 5:53
  psychotherapist, a clinical social worker, and a teacher at
• 5:57
  the Smith College School for Social Work, as well as the vice
• 6:01
  president of community partnerships, communications,
• 6:04
  and development at the Brattleboro retreat where he
• 6:07
  hosts their podcast unraveling. It's actually kind of a cousin
• 6:12
  show to never post. Both shows are made by some of the same
• 6:16
  people. Kurt and I talked about how it is that, our interactions
• 6:20
  with the Internet can help us construct our sense of self, and
• 6:24
  how this becomes the source of all kinds of anxiety for all
• 6:28
  kinds of people for a lot of different reasons.
• 6:30
  You can listen to our chat over on unraveling. We'll put a link
• 6:33
  in the show notes. And we liked it so much that we're actually
• 6:37
  gonna publish a segment length version on the next episode of
• 6:41
  Neverpost. But if you wanna listen to it now, please go
• 6:43
  check out unraveling with Kurt and his co host Mary. They are
• 6:47
  amazing.
• 6:47
  It's a great show. We're all really huge Kurt and Mary fans
• 6:51
  over here on Neverpost. Okay. That's the news I have for you
• 6:55
  this week. Next, Georgia and the 75 hard style challenge, then me
• 6:59
  and Mike Masnik on section two thirty.
• 7:01
  But first, each member of the team went out and bought a
• 7:04
  mechanical keyboard and did not touch it until we sat down to
• 7:09
  record a typing tournament. In our interstitials this week, the
• 7:16
  team uses monkeytype.com to see who got those WPMs.
• 7:29
  Jason Oberholtzer: Hey, type freaks. Welcome to the big show.
• 7:36
  First round, Georgia Hampton, Hans Butoh in the blue corner.
• 7:42
  Georgia Hampton, will you tell the folks at home what you're
• 7:44
  typing with today?
• 7:45
  Georgia Hampton: I'm rocking a Red Dragon Ultimate Gaming Rig,
• 7:50
  model number s one three four in the color mint green.
• 7:54
  Jason Oberholtzer: A strong addition to the fields. Georgia
• 7:57
  will be typing out of the left side of your headphones.
• 8:00
  Georgia, please march your way over there.
• 8:03
  Georgia Hampton: Aye aye.
• 8:03
  Jason Oberholtzer: And in the red corner, Hans Buto Hans, what
• 8:06
  are you typing with today?
• 8:07
  Hans Buetow: You will never defeat my LUT detect j one
• 8:12
  twenty. Corporate black borrowed from my wife's work.
• 8:18
  Jason Oberholtzer: Hans will be typing out of the right
• 8:21
  earphone. Hans, march your way over there.
• 8:23
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Hans did a backflip. Woah. I
• 8:28
  Hans Buetow: am so ready for this. Position your microphones.
• 8:32
  Jason Oberholtzer: Okay, everyone. We will be typing 100
• 8:35
  words. The first person to clear their 100 words will go on to
• 8:40
  the final round at the end of this show. I will count you in.
• 8:44
  Are you all on monkey type?
• 8:46
  Georgia Hampton: Hell yeah.
• 8:47
  Jason Oberholtzer: Just staring at your words.
• 8:48
  Hans Buetow: Okay. Okay. I'm trying not to read them.
• 8:51
  Jason Oberholtzer: I wanna see your hands on camera. Your hands
• 8:55
  can leave frame and begin typing in three, two, one,
• 9:01
  Mike Rugnetta: type. Georgia is locked in. I'm just euphoric.
• 9:17
  Hans Buetow: This is so intense. I'm I'm
• 9:20
  Mike Rugnetta: so bad. Hans is really putting putting the knees
• 9:23
  into it. He's really got the stance of someone who is working
• 9:27
  very hard.
• 9:31
  Jason Oberholtzer: The longest I have not seen Georgia smile in
• 9:34
  my entire life.
• 9:36
  Mike Rugnetta: Oh, first blink. That's the first blink of the
• 9:38
  round.
• 9:58
  Jason Oberholtzer: This is kind of a sleep aid for me. This is
• 10:01
  good.
• 10:09
  Hans Buetow: On. I'm getting there.
• 10:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Collin's digging deep. Woah. Georgia's done.
• 10:14
  Hans Buetow: Oh, 90
• 10:15
  Mike Rugnetta: 92.
• 10:16
  90 two?
• 10:19
  Georgia Hampton came to win.
• 10:21
  Georgia, Field: That's how you do it, baby. Alright.
• 10:25
  Hans Buetow: I can see nothing. I can see nothing. Me.
• 10:28
  Jason Oberholtzer: Alright. Georgia Hampton will be back on
• 10:30
  the mint machine in the final round of the tournament.
• 10:34
  Hans Buetow: Georgia, what were you what what's your WPM? Oh my
• 10:37
  god. 84. Yeah. It was close to that.
• 10:41
  What's your accuracy? 92%. Why are
• 10:43
  Georgia Hampton: you coming for me like this?
• 10:44
  Hans Buetow: What what percent? You already
• 10:46
  Georgia Hampton: lost, man.
• 10:47
  Hans Buetow: What what what percent was your accuracy?
• 10:49
  Georgia Hampton: 92.
• 10:49
  Hans Buetow: God. Yeah. I was close to that too. Okay.
• 10:52
  Mike Masnick: Okay. I believe it. I also
• 10:54
  Mike Rugnetta: am I also am good typer.
• 10:57
  Georgia Hampton: I am now learning I hate this keyboard.
• 11:00
  That was it's so annoying. I hate
• 11:04
  Jason Oberholtzer: using it. Well, alright, sickos. We'll see
• 11:06
  you back here in twenty some odd minutes.
• 11:10
  Georgia, Field: Oh, god.
• 11:25
  Avery Trufelman: Okay. So what was the actual garment that
• 11:28
  broke you?
• 11:31
  Georgia Hampton: It
• 11:31
  was this faded blue bomber jacket. So that's me, obviously.
• 11:40
  I'm talking with Avery Truffelman, host of Articles of
• 11:43
  Interest, a podcast which explores fashion, clothing, and
• 11:48
  our relationship to both. We'll get to the bomber jacket and
• 11:51
  how, yes, it broke me. But first, here's me two months ago.
• 11:56
  Georgia, Field: Okay. It's day one of the seventy five day hard
• 12:02
  style challenge. It's 01/06/2025, which feels like, an
• 12:09
  ominous day to start this. But you know what?
• 12:13
  Georgia Hampton: Let's do it. First of all, it is 29 degrees
• 12:19
  in the city
• 12:20
  Georgia, Field: of Chicago, Illinois, but it feels like 13
• 12:22
  degrees. So I think we're looking at pants. Maybe. God.
• 12:32
  I'm already so stressed out.
• 12:36
  Why is it that the second I decide to do this, I'm like,
• 12:38
  what are clothes and have I ever worn them? What is this? Who
• 12:42
  bought this stuff? Not me.
• 12:46
  Oh, god. Okay.
• 12:49
  Georgia Hampton: The seventy five day hard style no buy
• 12:52
  challenge is a TikTok trend started by fashion influencer
• 12:56
  Mandy Lee last year. She's also known by her handle old loser in
• 13:00
  Brooklyn. Mandy presents the challenge as a way to save
• 13:04
  money, to learn about your own closet, and ideally, a bit more
• 13:08
  about your personal style.
• 13:10
  Georgia Hampton: The rule's fairly straightforward. Get
• 13:11
  dressed every single day for seventy five days straight and
• 13:14
  document all of your looks. Don't buy anything new. Don't
• 13:17
  introduce anything new to your wardrobe. This one's really,
• 13:19
  really important because the point is to really get creative
• 13:22
  and rely on your own brain and your own closet for inspiration.
• 13:25
  Georgia Hampton: During the no buy, one stops consuming in
• 13:28
  order to confront their closet. Put new outfits together with
• 13:33
  what's already there. After seventy five days, your clothes
• 13:37
  buying habits are hopefully more intentional.
• 13:41
  Georgia Hampton: While you're going through this journey and
• 13:42
  documenting your outfits, you're going to be collecting a dataset
• 13:46
  of what you actually wear. And this acts like a sort of catalog
• 13:49
  to track what you're really, really wearing so you can enjoy
• 13:52
  your clothes in a new way and discover any wardrobe gaps that
• 13:55
  might exist.
• 13:56
  Georgia Hampton: By documenting your outfits, Mandy means
• 13:59
  posting, and people do.
• 14:03
  Georgia, Field: Today is my first day joining in on Mandy
• 14:07
  Lee's seventy five day style challenge, and I'm really
• 14:11
  excited.
• 14:11
  I wanna, like, lift my spirits. So here's me documenting day
• 14:15
  one.
• 14:15
  And I'm wearing just like a black turtleneck, and I decided
• 14:18
  to wear just this vintage navy blue button down on top of it
• 14:23
  because I haven't worn it in a while.
• 14:24
  I wore a Saksha jacket from Mexico, secondhand Coach bag,
• 14:28
  vintage Ralph Sunnies from Venice. And I think I wanna pair
• 14:32
  it with this red bag because I love doing a pop of red with
• 14:35
  gingham. I love this outfit.
• 14:40
  Georgia Hampton: The No Buy is its own version of a show and
• 14:43
  tell. It's between a get ready with me and a haul video. It's
• 14:48
  also kind of a brag, a way to show off what you already have
• 14:52
  in your closet. Let me tell you about mine, my closet. I have a
• 14:59
  complicated relationship to my clothes, and my wardrobe is in a
• 15:03
  constant state of flux.
• 15:05
  I have a closet with a dozen or so coats in it and another one
• 15:08
  full of pants and dresses and skirts and shoes. I have 36
• 15:13
  pairs of shoes, including heels. And finally, I have a dresser of
• 15:18
  shirts, sweaters, sweatshirts, and, like, three more pairs of
• 15:22
  pants. I adore shopping, and I window shop online daily. I
• 15:27
  browse Depop.
• 15:29
  I always have a new pair of pants open in a tab on my
• 15:31
  computer. I go to vintage markets every couple of weeks
• 15:34
  and often end up leaving with something or several things. For
• 15:39
  my whole life, buying clothes has been a salve for a bad day
• 15:44
  or a painful breakup or a funk. But I tend to overbuy garments
• 15:48
  I'd consider staples, stuff I can wear all the time. That
• 15:52
  means I've wound up with 26 total pairs of pants, a lot of
• 15:57
  turtlenecks, and a lot of black.
• 16:00
  My closet is full of repeats. Three identical black
• 16:04
  turtlenecks, a section of my closet dedicated to eight black
• 16:08
  dresses that are almost all the same length. I tend to put
• 16:12
  together uniforms and stick with them. I wear the same pair of
• 16:16
  Docs every day despite having 35 other pairs of shoes to choose
• 16:20
  from. I wear the same earrings every day.
• 16:23
  And that sameness is what often drives me to go buy something
• 16:27
  special and new, even if it's a fourth identical black
• 16:31
  turtleneck. I've wanted to break out of this for a while. I just
• 16:36
  want variety. And I do have some colorful pieces in my wardrobe.
• 16:42
  I have skirts.
• 16:43
  I have cool vintage jackets. I have interesting rings and
• 16:46
  necklaces. Like, the tools are there. I know they are. I just
• 16:51
  have to make myself use them.
• 16:54
  And I was hoping that the no buy could hold my hand to the fire
• 16:57
  and force myself to even just add more uniforms to the roster.
• 17:02
  There's no world where I stop wearing mostly black. I like
• 17:06
  wearing black. And I also think changing that would terrify
• 17:09
  everyone who knows me. But I did want to spice things up, play
• 17:15
  around some more, have fun.
• 17:17
  I wasn't going to post my outfits every day on TikTok or
• 17:21
  whatever, but I did document them in another way by recording
• 17:25
  myself with the Voice Memo app daily.
• 17:28
  Georgia, Field: We got, little black turtleneck top that's like
• 17:32
  a tank top under a cotton, like, bright green sweater, little
• 17:42
  western belt with a silver buckle, these carpenter jeans
• 17:46
  that I wear all the time, and then yellow socks that are sort
• 17:50
  of a butter yellow, which I'm gonna wear with my little
• 17:54
  loafers.
• 17:56
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. I think we got it. Day one down, only 74
• 18:01
  to go. That first day, I did pretty well. And for a week, it
• 18:07
  felt fun to shop in my own closet instead of online.
• 18:11
  I was actually clawing my way out of my all black outfit
• 18:15
  everyday purgatory. But as the days ticked on, I started to
• 18:22
  feel different.
• 18:27
  Georgia, Field: I'm in
• 18:31
  that place
• 18:32
  where I don't like any of my clothes, and I feel like I've
• 18:36
  never put on clothes in my life.
• 18:38
  Georgia Hampton: At first, I blame the weather. And I mean,
• 18:42
  it is hard to put together multiple slayful outfits when
• 18:45
  what I really need to do is wear the thickest, warmest sweater I
• 18:49
  own multiple days in a row. But that wasn't really the problem.
• 18:54
  Georgia, Field: Something about, like like, documenting this,
• 18:59
  like, sucks.
• 19:02
  Like, ugh, god. I feel like
• 19:05
  Georgia Hampton: I like, I wanna just magically have a better
• 19:09
  relationship to my clothes or, like, know how to put a cool
• 19:12
  outfit together that's different than the way I normally dress.
• 19:15
  But, like, why would I wanna do that? This is just my normal my
• 19:20
  normal life. Like, I don't I'm not even posting photos of
• 19:24
  these. Like, all you're hearing is me losing it.
• 19:32
  The longer I documented my process, the more I felt this
• 19:37
  pressure, guilt, shame. I did not feel closer to my personal
• 19:42
  style. If anything, I felt like the opposite. Rooting around in
• 19:48
  my closet revealed the holes in my wardrobe, but in a painful
• 19:53
  way. Like, I have this amazing pair of striped pants that I was
• 20:01
  excited to style until I realized they just don't fit me
• 20:05
  anymore.
• 20:07
  I found this cropped chestnut brown sweatshirt that I had
• 20:10
  bought maybe, like, five years ago, tried it on, and genuinely
• 20:14
  couldn't understand why I had bought it in the first place. It
• 20:17
  fit so weird on me. The neckline was too structured. It tugged
• 20:22
  upwards in this really weird way when I lifted my arms. Like, why
• 20:26
  did I even own this?
• 20:29
  So I was stuck in all black again, recording myself
• 20:32
  describing the same uniform outfits that I've always worn
• 20:36
  since time in memorial. I wasn't on a journey of personal style
• 20:41
  discovery. I was trapped in the past and unable to leave.
• 20:48
  Avery Trufelman: Yeah. When you're confronted by your
• 20:49
  closet, you're confronted with all of your past selves. It's a
• 20:52
  way of, like, having to learn to live with your past, which is
• 20:58
  rough.
• 20:59
  Georgia Hampton: That's Avery again. And I wanted to talk to
• 21:02
  her about why the no buy challenge made me feel so bad.
• 21:07
  And she said that that's kind of the point.
• 21:11
  Avery Trufelman: This is something that I've been
• 21:13
  wrestling with for a very long time. And I think it's something
• 21:20
  that's so deep and fundamental, and it has to do with our
• 21:25
  relationship to our own desires, our own sense of fulfillment.
• 21:30
  And every time the promise of a new garment comes along, it's
• 21:33
  the promise of a new self. And that's part of, like, getting
• 21:38
  right with yourself, is, realizing, okay, understanding
• 21:41
  who you are, how much capacity you have for change, how much
• 21:45
  you have changed from the past. I mean, it's like existential
• 21:47
  stuff.
• 21:57
  Georgia Hampton: But it's tricky to know where and how I need to
• 22:00
  change when it comes to clothes. On the one hand, denying myself
• 22:04
  the desire that comes from shopping feels like ignoring key
• 22:08
  parts of myself, the parts of me that truly find joy in playing
• 22:12
  around with clothes. But on the other hand, I've been chasing
• 22:16
  that promise of a new self for years. I'd buy a black sweater
• 22:21
  and feel renewed for a minute, and then my eye would start
• 22:26
  wandering again.
• 22:27
  Avery Trufelman: It's part of why I don't do Instagram or
• 22:29
  TikTok because those things are like desire engines. I am going
• 22:34
  to look at these things. I'm going to see what other people
• 22:37
  have. I'm going to see how they comport themselves, and I am
• 22:40
  going to find some lack in myself. I'm going to I don't
• 22:44
  know.
• 22:44
  I was I was on Instagram for a little bit and immediately was
• 22:47
  like, oh, everything I do is wrong. Like, all my clothes are
• 22:50
  wrong. Everything I I need to change it all. So it's this,
• 22:54
  like, complicated wrestling with desire all the time. It really
• 23:00
  vexes me a lot.
• 23:04
  Georgia Hampton: I wasn't expecting to hear Avery, of all
• 23:07
  people, tell me that she goes through this push and pull of
• 23:10
  existential turmoil around clothes. But it's also exactly
• 23:15
  what I deal with too. Any video on TikTok, any Instagram story
• 23:20
  by a friend of a friend, I can't help myself but laser focus on
• 23:25
  their cool pair of shoes or that plaid sweater they have as a new
• 23:29
  potential purchase that I could make. And removing the
• 23:33
  possibility of continuing this practice forced me to contend
• 23:37
  with its spoils. Namely, confronting a closet full of a
• 23:42
  lot of the same stuff and lacking a lot of clothing I
• 23:45
  actually need.
• 23:47
  In a way, that's the no buy doing its job, by forcing me to
• 23:52
  look squarely at my closet without distraction. But my
• 23:56
  conversation with Avery made me realize that my discomfort
• 24:00
  didn't really feel like this big confrontation with desire. The
• 24:05
  thing that was so unbearably horrible about this process
• 24:10
  wasn't my wardrobe. It was documenting my outfits. But why?
• 24:16
  Why did that suck so much more than anything else? I was
• 24:22
  wrestling with this question when I talked to Kyle Chaeka,
• 24:25
  the columnist from The New Yorker, for my segment about
• 24:28
  having fun online. And in addition to his many other
• 24:31
  accolades, Kyle also wrote a book called The Longing for
• 24:35
  Less, which was about minimalism. So I figured I'd ask
• 24:39
  him this question. Why did documenting this process feel so
• 24:44
  terrible?
• 24:45
  Kyle Chayka: I mean, like you're you're dressing for the
• 24:49
  internet. You're performing this exercise in order to generate
• 24:53
  more content, which in a way is another form of stuff like,
• 24:58
  you're contributing to the general mess of the world by
• 25:00
  putting out another video even though it's about not buying
• 25:05
  stuff. So to me, improving your relationship with stuff should
• 25:10
  be about stripping away the layers and stripping away the
• 25:13
  like meta meta quality of the act on the internet and just
• 25:18
  confronting the thing itself.
• 25:20
  Georgia Hampton: So I mean, thinking of it that way, how do
• 25:22
  you succeed at a no buy challenge?
• 25:26
  Kyle Chayka: By not buying anything and then not posting
• 25:28
  about it.
• 25:44
  Georgia Hampton: By recording my daily outfits, I put myself
• 25:48
  under a microscope, scrutinizing something I do every day. And
• 25:53
  that started off okay. But over time, I got more judgmental,
• 25:58
  more self critical. And I was doing it because I felt like I
• 26:02
  was performing. By virtue of creating a document, I created
• 26:07
  an audience of myself and, I mean, you listening to this
• 26:13
  right now.
• 26:14
  It made everything a performance, and that
• 26:17
  performance did not come naturally to me. It felt
• 26:21
  horrible.
• 26:23
  Georgia, Field: Okay. So I'm just lying in bed right now
• 26:26
  thinking about outfits and how I can kinda play around more with
• 26:32
  my closet. And I felt myself feeling so stressed and so
• 26:37
  guilty. And I I I wanted to record myself kind
• 26:41
  Georgia Hampton: of going through this because, like, what
• 26:43
  the hell is this?
• 26:47
  Georgia, Field: Why why should I feel bad about this? And I think
• 26:51
  it's because I'm
• 26:52
  Georgia Hampton: doing this for every like, four people.
• 26:57
  Georgia, Field: I think I'm predicting judgment.
• 27:04
  Georgia Hampton: Every half baked criticism I had of my
• 27:06
  clothes gained a body and a brain and a voice. The second I
• 27:11
  realized I was documenting myself for an audience, I got
• 27:15
  lost in this mindset where, like Avery described, I worried that
• 27:19
  my clothes were wrong and that I needed to, quote, unquote, fix
• 27:22
  my closet. But rather than being dressed, I'd become fixated on
• 27:28
  getting dressed. And that's not the point of the no buy
• 27:31
  challenge. Videos show people who already have their outfit
• 27:36
  put together.
• 27:37
  And I'm sure they also stood in front of their closet and felt
• 27:40
  the way I felt, the all too common, ugh, I have nothing to
• 27:44
  wear feeling. But with a no buy, you're not supposed to show your
• 27:49
  work. You're supposed to show your cool vintage jacket. But I
• 27:54
  was sick of this show and tell from hell. It wasn't working.
• 27:59
  So after telling Avery about the challenge and the difference
• 28:03
  between getting dressed and being dressed, I did mention my
• 28:07
  personal experience. I don't think I told you this. I did try
• 28:12
  this.
• 28:13
  Avery Trufelman: I was gonna ask. Yeah. Okay. Let it go.
• 28:16
  Georgia Hampton: Well, I lasted about three and a half weeks.
• 28:23
  Avery Trufelman: Wow. Hey.
• 28:24
  Mike Rugnetta: That's pretty good.
• 28:26
  Georgia Hampton: But no, I'm serious. Too kind. You're too
• 28:28
  kind.
• 28:28
  Avery Trufelman: I'm really serious, though.
• 28:34
  Georgia Hampton: I had kind of assumed that Avery would chide
• 28:38
  me for giving up so quickly, but she didn't. And I'm grateful for
• 28:42
  that because I wanted to shut up the part of me that somehow
• 28:46
  still felt guilty. And it's a feeling I wrestled with a lot on
• 28:50
  the day when I stopped doing the no buy. So
• 28:57
  Georgia, Field: I did a bit of a whoopsie uh-oh yesterday.
• 29:02
  Went to a vintage market with a friend,
• 29:07
  and I did did buy a couple things.
• 29:15
  Georgia Hampton: I hear a chorus of booing. But listen. It feels
• 29:21
  a
• 29:22
  Georgia, Field: lot better doing this as in, like, buying
• 29:24
  something vintage than buying anything new. I'm very much
• 29:28
  gonna stick to that, but
• 29:32
  Georgia Hampton: I broke I broke no buy edge.
• 29:38
  Georgia, Field: I I betrayed you all, but
• 29:45
  Georgia Hampton: I don't know. You'll have to forgive me.
• 29:50
  Georgia, Field: Got a dress on today. That's all.
• 29:59
  Georgia Hampton: Let me tell you something. The difference in how
• 30:02
  I felt after going to that vintage market and, yes, buying
• 30:06
  that blue bomber jacket was astounding. And it wasn't just
• 30:12
  that I was buying stuff again and fueling that desire engine
• 30:15
  like before. I was intentionally deciding how this journey would
• 30:20
  look for me specifically. A no buy just wasn't going to work
• 30:25
  for me in the long term, and I had finally allowed myself to
• 30:28
  realize that.
• 30:29
  But I mean, the no buy also kind of worked because the stuff I
• 30:34
  bought at that vintage market was filling holes in my wardrobe
• 30:38
  I realized I had while doing my no buy. But now, I felt like I
• 30:44
  was actually able to do what I wanted to do in the first place.
• 30:48
  Get to know my closet is a way of getting to know my personal
• 30:51
  style, fill in some gaps, and have fun. I wanna play this one
• 31:03
  specific part of my conversation with Avery again.
• 31:06
  Avery Trufelman: That's part of, like, getting right with
• 31:08
  yourself. It's like realizing, okay, understanding who you are,
• 31:11
  how much capacity you have for change, how much you have
• 31:14
  changed from the past. I mean, it's like existential stuff.
• 31:21
  Georgia Hampton: I mean, that is exactly what I wound up doing.
• 31:25
  Just, you know, in a different way than I originally expected.
• 31:30
  I went into this whole experiment thinking that a no
• 31:33
  buy would inspire me to play, to be innovative, to challenge
• 31:37
  myself to get out of my fashion comfort zone. But what the no
• 31:41
  buy really showed me was that I had filled my closet with
• 31:45
  clothes that would never let me out of that comfort zone in the
• 31:48
  first place. And it certainly proved to me that performing,
• 31:52
  being dressed, even for an imagined audience, was not going
• 31:56
  to inspire me at all.
• 32:00
  The possibility of being observed as I struggled through
• 32:03
  this only made me scared that somehow I had already failed.
• 32:09
  Kyle was right about that. The only way, at least for me, to
• 32:14
  succeed at this process was to stop posting about it. Thank you
• 32:36
  to both Avery Truffleman and Kyle Chaeka for helping me
• 32:40
  through the maze of this no buy journey. In the end, I decided
• 32:45
  to switch from a no buy to a no new, as in only buying
• 32:49
  secondhand clothes.
• 32:50
  That felt really good. And it's honestly something I'm going to
• 32:53
  keep doing well past the seventy five day mark, which I reached
• 32:57
  on March 22. But I know this is only one of countless ways to
• 33:02
  reexamine your wardrobe. So I'd be very interested to hear about
• 33:06
  what has helped you connect with your style and with your
• 33:10
  relationship to clothes. I mean, I'm still looking for new
• 33:13
  tactics, so tell me what's been helpful.
• 33:15
  I wanna hear about it. All the ways to contact us are in the
• 33:19
  show notes.
• 33:54
  Hans Buetow: In the blue corner, weighing in at four pounds
• 33:58
  sixteen ounces is Jason's keyboard.
• 34:03
  Jason Oberholtzer: I can keep it. Jason, do
• 34:04
  Hans Buetow: you wanna tell us who we have?
• 34:06
  Jason Oberholtzer: How much my keyboard weighs? Is that what
• 34:08
  you want me to tell you? I think I have that. So today, I'll be
• 34:12
  typing on a high ground hunter x hunter performance 65% scale
• 34:16
  wired magnetic linear dynamic actuation switch gaming keyboard
• 34:20
  with rapid trigger Hisoka edition.
• 34:23
  Mike Rugnetta: I'm sweating. I'm sweating.
• 34:24
  Georgia Hampton: That thing's street legal?
• 34:26
  Hans Buetow: And in the red corner, the host of the show,
• 34:31
  the keyboard with the mostest, Mike Rugnetta. Mike, what you
• 34:34
  what are you packing over there?
• 34:35
  Mike Rugnetta: I am typing on a Royal Kluge r s 61 no. RK? Hold
• 34:40
  on. Let me check. Royal Kluge r k 61 mechanical keyboard.
• 34:45
  Hans Buetow: Mike, take your corner in the right. Jason, take
• 34:48
  your corner in the left.
• 34:49
  Jason Oberholtzer: Alright. I'll see you in hell.
• 34:50
  Hans Buetow: Gentlemen, position your microphones.
• 34:52
  Mike Rugnetta: Jason, I think we can still be friends after this.
• 34:54
  Jason Oberholtzer: We'll see about that.
• 34:56
  Georgia Hampton: This is the last episode of the show.
• 34:59
  Hans Buetow: Alright. Bring up monkeytype.com. Are the
• 35:04
  competitors ready? Hold your hands up. I wanna see hands up.
• 35:06
  Hands up in the screen. And I want you to start typing in
• 35:10
  three two one go.
• 35:27
  Georgia Hampton: Experience of
• 35:28
  Hans Buetow: this. Yeah.
• 35:29
  Mike Rugnetta: This is pretty brutal.
• 35:30
  Hans Buetow: Mike's eyes are locked.
• 35:31
  Jason Oberholtzer: Turns out these scale difference matters.
• 35:34
  Hans Buetow: Jason's eyes are going up and down. Up and down.
• 35:37
  Look at that from Jason. Oh. You should have got
• 35:41
  Georgia, Field: those little cover covers.
• 35:42
  Mike Rugnetta: Oh, My space bar doesn't work.
• 35:45
  Hans Buetow: Oh, this oh,
• 35:47
  Mike Rugnetta: no. Oh, this is flag on play.
• 35:49
  Hans Buetow: Oh. That's right. That's right. Keyboard down.
• 35:52
  Keyboard down.
• 35:53
  Georgia Hampton: Technical difficulties. Yes. Someone get a
• 35:56
  medic.
• 35:57
  Jason Oberholtzer: Ahsoka wouldn't stop for you, and I
• 35:59
  won't either.
• 36:03
  Mike Rugnetta: Oh my god. This is oh my god. This is tragic. I
• 36:07
  have to push so hard on the space bar. This is what I get
• 36:12
  for buying a used keyboard.
• 36:15
  This is
• 36:15
  Hans Buetow: not what it sounds like when we are in production
• 36:17
  meetings normally. Normally, everyone's Hans, why are you
• 36:20
  lying? Every
• 36:23
  Jason Oberholtzer: time I look down, the changing lights
• 36:24
  distract me. Oh my. I'm done.
• 36:28
  Mike Rugnetta: I'm not I am not even close. Not even close.
• 36:33
  Hans Buetow: Jason. Wow.
• 36:36
  Mike Rugnetta: I did not get to 50 words.
• 36:38
  Hans Buetow: What? Was it a space bar issue? Was this an
• 36:40
  equipment failure?
• 36:41
  Mike Rugnetta: Yes. It was a space bar issue.
• 36:43
  Georgia Hampton: Hate to see it, folks.
• 36:45
  Mike Rugnetta: Hate to see it. It is a poor competitor who
• 36:47
  blames their tools.
• 36:48
  Jason Oberholtzer: It's almost like somebody with the nen
• 36:50
  ability bungee gum made your space bar a little sticky.
• 36:55
  Georgia Hampton: We'll run that one by the stewards.
• 36:59
  Mike Rugnetta: Jason, well played. Just don't ask my
• 37:02
  accuracy score.
• 37:03
  Georgia Hampton: No. I gotta know. I gotta know since we're
• 37:06
  now competitors.
• 37:09
  Jason Oberholtzer: 67%. Not great.
• 37:13
  Georgia Hampton: Well, it will be a pleasure to to fight
• 37:15
  against you, Jason.
• 37:17
  Mike Rugnetta: Type. Type type again type against Georgia
• 37:19
  unless you have other plans.
• 37:20
  Georgia Hampton: Well, I'm on my way. Let's just say that.
• 37:25
  Hans Buetow: Stay tuned for more drama.
• 37:43
  Mike Rugnetta: The internet is infrastructure, obviously. Wires
• 37:47
  in buildings full of machines and people in those buildings
• 37:50
  making websites, but it's also an institution. In the sense of
• 37:56
  it being a practice, a set of relationships between things.
• 38:01
  Something that is done versus something that simply is. And as
• 38:06
  we're learning now in many different ways across the world,
• 38:10
  institutions can be surprisingly fragile and their continued
• 38:14
  existence can depend on not very much at all really.
• 38:19
  Some spit in paper clips, toothpicks and bubble gum. In a
• 38:24
  sense, the internet as you and I know it at least is humming
• 38:27
  along because no one has pressed too hard on any particular
• 38:32
  toothpick. One of which is called section two thirty.
• 38:37
  Senator Dick Durbin, democrat from Illinois, and senator
• 38:41
  Lindsey Graham, republican from South Carolina, are gearing up
• 38:44
  to put forward legislation possibly as soon as this week
• 38:48
  that would repeal section two thirty. We wanted to understand
• 38:52
  more fully what section two thirty does, why it's so
• 38:56
  important, and why politicians might wanna get rid of it and in
• 39:00
  so doing potentially completely reshape the internet.
• 39:05
  So we talked with Tech Dirt's founder, Mike Masnik. Joining us
• 39:24
  is Mike Masnik, the CEO and founder of the Copia Institute,
• 39:29
  a tech law and speech think tank which operates the blog Tech
• 39:32
  Dirt that reports on the legal and policy issues faced by the
• 39:36
  tech industry with particular focus on privacy, free speech,
• 39:39
  and copyright. Since August 2024, Mike has also been on the
• 39:43
  board of the microblogging social media platform Blue Sky.
• 39:47
  His white paper protocols not platforms, a technological
• 39:51
  approach to free speech in part inspired the creation of Blue
• 39:55
  Sky. He's also the host of Otherwise Objectionable, a
• 39:59
  podcast about the origins of the tech boom, debates over speech
• 40:02
  and liability online, and section two thirty, which is
• 40:07
  what we're gonna be talking about here today.
• 40:09
  Mike, I'm a big fan of you and your work. I've been following
• 40:11
  you for a long time, so I really appreciate you coming on the
• 40:14
  show to talk to us.
• 40:15
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm always interested
• 40:17
  in talking about this stuff with smart knowledgeable people, so
• 40:20
  Well,
• 40:20
  Mike Rugnetta: we'll see. Don't let's not
• 40:21
  Hans Buetow: get ahead of ourselves here.
• 40:22
  Mike Rugnetta: So you're here to talk to us about section two
• 40:26
  thirty. For listeners to the show who might not know what
• 40:29
  section two thirty is, it was included in the Communications
• 40:32
  and Decency Act of 1996, and it reads as follows. It's very
• 40:37
  short. No provider or user of an interactive computer service
• 40:42
  shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any
• 40:46
  information provided by another information content provider.
• 40:51
  And I've seen you and other people describe this as
• 40:55
  essentially 25 words which make the Internet as we know it
• 40:59
  possible.
• 41:01
  And before we talk about why someone would want to change or
• 41:05
  repeal this, I was wondering if you could just tell us what it
• 41:08
  was intended to do at the time. Like, what do these 25 words
• 41:11
  mean?
• 41:12
  Mike Masnick: So it's 26 words.
• 41:13
  Mike Rugnetta: 26. I didn't count right. Okay. Thank you for
• 41:17
  the thank you for the life hack check. Yes.
• 41:20
  Mike Masnick: And there were a few different concerns about the
• 41:25
  Internet going on in the nineteen nineties. The Internet
• 41:28
  is early. The World Wide Web has just started. There are other
• 41:31
  aspects of the Internet that has existed, and everyone's sort
• 41:33
  trying to figure out what to do about it. And what became
• 41:36
  section two thirty, which was not designed to be part of the
• 41:40
  Communications Decency Act, It was designed to be its own
• 41:42
  standalone act to say, if you are an interactive computer
• 41:46
  service that you are hosting other people's content, you
• 41:49
  can't be held liable for that content.
• 41:52
  There is a little bit more to that law. It's not just those 26
• 41:55
  words. Mhmm. But, you know, the idea was like, this is a better
• 41:57
  approach. What we're saying is that if you're running an
• 41:59
  Internet service, you can choose to take down any content that
• 42:03
  you want.
• 42:03
  You can choose to leave up any content that you want. You can
• 42:06
  choose to use all different kinds of tools and resources to
• 42:09
  to allow users to filter. You can sort of empower everyone.
• 42:13
  You can empower the companies to make their own decisions in
• 42:15
  terms of, like, what types of communities do they want. If
• 42:18
  they wanna create a gardening community.
• 42:19
  Right? Can they say, like, no posts that aren't gardening, or
• 42:22
  is that is that introducing liability? You know, part of
• 42:25
  02/30 was like, yeah. You can create a gardening community,
• 42:28
  and you can ban nonverbal speech. Yeah.
• 42:30
  You could
• 42:31
  Mike Rugnetta: do what you want if someone comes in and they
• 42:32
  start wanting to talk about, like, building car engines or
• 42:34
  whatever.
• 42:35
  Mike Masnick: Exactly. And so the house supported it, and so
• 42:39
  they passed it. Yeah. And so then you had two laws. You had
• 42:42
  the senate had passed this this crazy sensorial law that was
• 42:46
  like, take down everything.
• 42:48
  Anything bad is illegal. And then you had this house bill
• 42:52
  that was, you know, let there be Do whatever you want. Yeah. To
• 42:56
  to to create the communities that you want. And the congress
• 43:00
  and its ridiculous non wisdom, they took these two approaches
• 43:04
  that that directly conflict with each other and just put them
• 43:07
  together.
• 43:08
  And then the the Cox Wyden bill became part of the
• 43:11
  Communications Decency Act, even though it was designed to be the
• 43:14
  opposite and opposing the Communications Decency Act. So
• 43:17
  then you had this one bill altogether. Yeah. But then the
• 43:21
  ACLU challenged all of the senate side of it, which got
• 43:24
  tossed out nine nothing by the Supreme Court, and all that was
• 43:27
  left was section two thirty.
• 43:29
  Mike Rugnetta: Wow. And so my understanding, you know, to just
• 43:32
  talk about, like, who benefits from the protections provided by
• 43:34
  two thirty and what kinds of things that it does, It's not
• 43:37
  just being able to moderate content level, decisions, like
• 43:42
  posts that people make. This is also what allows, say, like
• 43:46
  Gmail to implement spam filters, because that is a way of
• 43:50
  determining what sorts of messages get and do not get to
• 43:54
  an end user. Is that right?
• 43:55
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. Who it benefits honestly is is everyone
• 43:58
  who uses the Internet. Yeah. It's it's it's hard to explain
• 44:02
  how much it benefits people. Early on, there were lawsuits
• 44:06
  from people whose emails were caught in spam filters, and they
• 44:09
  said, you know, we're we're suing this.
• 44:11
  You know, it's defamatory to call our email spam.
• 44:13
  Mike Rugnetta: Right.
• 44:14
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, those got thrown out on two
• 44:17
  thirty grounds. And if they didn't, like, that would be
• 44:19
  terrible. It it it goes even further than that because, you
• 44:22
  know, one of the elements of two thirty that is often missed, and
• 44:25
  these are two of the 26 words that are in the law, is it's not
• 44:30
  just about interactive communication services. It's
• 44:33
  also about users. So it's or users.
• 44:36
  And so if you retweet something, you are protected. You don't get
• 44:41
  sued. If you retweet something that's defamatory, you're
• 44:43
  protected. The person who made the speech can still be, you
• 44:46
  know, held viable for for defamation. But also if you
• 44:50
  forward an email, and there were Yeah.
• 44:51
  Some of the early cases about 02:30 was someone received an
• 44:55
  email making accusations about someone else and they forward it
• 44:58
  to a mailing list. And the question was, who is liable for
• 45:02
  the, you know, potentially defamatory accusations in the
• 45:05
  email? Is it the person who wrote the the email or is it the
• 45:08
  person who forwarded it?
• 45:09
  Mike Rugnetta: And so because it says no provider or user of
• 45:12
  interactive computer service Exactly. You're fine.
• 45:15
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. So what it is saying is that whoever
• 45:17
  created the content, they are liable, not the person who just
• 45:22
  sort of passed it along.
• 45:23
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. So, I mean, 02/30 has been it seems like
• 45:28
  since its inception now, a perennially challenged piece of
• 45:33
  law. Like, it's always on the senatorial chopping block in one
• 45:36
  way or the other. And it's funny. It's like, it was started
• 45:39
  as a bipartisan project and now has had bipartisan criticism.
• 45:44
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 45:45
  Mike Rugnetta: For its entire history. Like, what what is it
• 45:48
  about two thirty that makes it sort of, like, stick in the craw
• 45:52
  of so many lawmakers? Why why does it keep coming back up?
• 45:57
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. It's really, you know, around twenty fifteen,
• 46:00
  twenty sixteen that things began to change. And and, again, on
• 46:05
  both sides. Right? You have both the Democrats and the
• 46:07
  Republicans being mad about it.
• 46:09
  And the reality is that it appears to be that both of them
• 46:12
  want to control the Internet better for their own interests.
• 46:17
  You know, the First Amendment is there and it protects lies and
• 46:20
  disinformation with a few exceptions. Very narrow
• 46:22
  exceptions. There's obviously defamation. There's fraud.
• 46:25
  There are things like that. What the Democrats tend to be mad
• 46:29
  about is that social media companies were not more
• 46:33
  proactive in trying to take down the the disinformation, which
• 46:37
  again is not entirely true, which is where the Republicans
• 46:40
  got mad at all of it. Because especially, you know, post
• 46:45
  twenty sixteen election, there were lots of concerns about
• 46:48
  election misinformation, election disinformation. And
• 46:51
  because the public spoke out about it, because the media
• 46:54
  spoke out about it, and importantly, because advertisers
• 46:57
  began to pull their advertisements from Facebook and
• 47:01
  from Twitter and saying, like, we won't support a platform that
• 47:04
  is pushing election disinformation. Yeah.
• 47:07
  The companies themselves had a business reason to actually try
• 47:11
  and tackle that. The response then though was Republicans
• 47:14
  freaking out and saying this is censorship.
• 47:18
  Mike Rugnetta: Because they're because they are saying it's a
• 47:19
  it's a political position and not incorrect information being
• 47:23
  right, of course.
• 47:24
  Mike Masnick: The reality is that the scale of the process of
• 47:26
  what's called now trust and safety of handling this kind of
• 47:30
  information is beyond your imagination. It is an impossible
• 47:34
  problem, and mistakes are going to be made. And some of the
• 47:36
  mistakes are just because people disagree subjectively over does
• 47:39
  this cross the line or not. Some of it is just because the
• 47:42
  frontline people have, like, fifteen seconds to make a
• 47:45
  decision on some of these things.
• 47:47
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
• 47:47
  Mike Masnick: Right? And and you're never going to be able to
• 47:49
  get all those things right. But section two thirty, part of the
• 47:52
  importance of it is it says, like, if you make a mistake
• 47:56
  because you're going to make mistakes, you're going to make
• 47:58
  many mistakes every day, you don't get punished for it.
• 48:01
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
• 48:01
  Mike Masnick: If you were to take that away, that actually
• 48:04
  makes it more difficult to moderate content because any
• 48:08
  mistake could create the potential for legal liability.
• 48:12
  And so, you know, the the result then would be taking away
• 48:16
  section two thirty depending on how you look at it. There's a
• 48:18
  few different things of where it could go. But one aspect of it
• 48:21
  is that many sites would then decide not to look. Yeah.
• 48:25
  If they don't moderate at all, then they cannot be held liable
• 48:29
  under the First Amendment. And so the incentive then is to just
• 48:33
  look the other way and try not to find out any of the bad
• 48:35
  content. And then your website gets filled with spam. And
• 48:39
  again, like, you know, if this is supposed to be a gardening
• 48:42
  forum and you can't weed out spam or off topic subjects or
• 48:48
  anything like that, or you might introduce liability, it it would
• 48:52
  be impossible, and we would not have the kind of openness of the
• 48:55
  Internet that you want. So either you get to that point
• 48:58
  where you do no moderation at all
• 48:59
  Mike Rugnetta: And you have just a complete cesspool, like, murky
• 49:02
  swamp of everything.
• 49:04
  Mike Masnick: Garbage. Awful. Nobody even likes it. Even the
• 49:06
  people who are like, no. We don't want any censorship.
• 49:08
  Mike Rugnetta: They wouldn't like it.
• 49:09
  Mike Masnick: They wouldn't like the spam. Or you have sort of
• 49:12
  the Netflix style Internet, which is like, okay. This is
• 49:15
  just purely broadcast. We are just picking and choosing the
• 49:18
  few things that you are able to see, and it's not an interactive
• 49:22
  service. It's now a broadcast service.
• 49:24
  Mike Rugnetta: So I mean, that completely without 02:30, the
• 49:28
  way the Internet looks completely changes, basically,
• 49:30
  overnight.
• 49:31
  Mike Masnick: Exactly. Yeah. It is a very, very different
• 49:33
  Internet.
• 49:34
  Mike Rugnetta: The people who do wanna get rid of it, why do they
• 49:38
  want that? Or do they not actually want it?
• 49:41
  Mike Masnick: I don't think anyone really wants it, but I
• 49:44
  don't think they fully understand the implications of
• 49:46
  it.
• 49:46
  Jason Oberholtzer: Okay.
• 49:46
  Mike Masnick: And so, you know, I think a lot of it is just
• 49:49
  control. Right? That that these people want the Internet to be
• 49:53
  in the image of what they want. And often with critics of of
• 49:58
  section two thirty, they have very strong feelings of what the
• 50:00
  Internet should look like in their ideal world. And it
• 50:04
  doesn't because people are terrible sometimes and people
• 50:07
  are different.
• 50:08
  But a lot of people think, well, if only the Internet match my
• 50:11
  view of what it should be, then it would be great. And the best
• 50:14
  way to get there is to remove two thirty.
• 50:17
  Mike Rugnetta: But really what they're saying is like, if only
• 50:19
  there were no people who bothered me in the world.
• 50:21
  Hans Buetow: Yes. Yes. Okay. Got it. Great.
• 50:23
  Mike Masnick: It's an unrealistic view of the world,
• 50:26
  but I don't think they're fully understanding the implications
• 50:29
  of it or how the Internet works fully, how section two thirty
• 50:33
  works, and and how the the First Amendment underlies both of
• 50:35
  those.
• 50:36
  Mike Rugnetta: And who is it that is making this push now?
• 50:38
  Who's the group of people behind it?
• 50:40
  Mike Masnick: So there are a number of politicians, again, on
• 50:42
  both sides of the political aisle who have been gunning for
• 50:45
  section two thirty for a while. On the Republican side, you have
• 50:50
  Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn to some extent.
• 50:54
  Ted Cruz really was one of the first to to come out and really
• 50:58
  yell about section two thirty, completely misrepresenting it,
• 51:01
  by the way, as as part of the that process. On the Democratic
• 51:05
  side, you have Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut,
• 51:09
  Dick Durbin, Amy Klobuchar. But so you have this sort of
• 51:13
  bipartisan approach
• 51:15
  Hans Buetow: Yeah.
• 51:15
  Mike Masnick: To getting rid of section two thirty. And now the
• 51:17
  proposal that that we're expecting to come out soon, in
• 51:21
  theory, is one that will be headlined by Graham and Durbin,
• 51:25
  bipartisan, and the plan is to sunset section two thirty and
• 51:29
  basically say, by the end of twenty twenty seven, we would
• 51:32
  just wipe out section two thirty and it would be gone from the
• 51:36
  laws on the books.
• 51:37
  Mike Rugnetta: So listeners to the show will recognize
• 51:39
  Blumenthal and Blackburn is also having been involved in COSA
• 51:44
  Yes.
• 51:44
  Mike Masnick: Which is
• 51:44
  Mike Rugnetta: part of another sort of like moral panic of like
• 51:46
  the Kids Online Safety Act, we have to protect children. Again,
• 51:49
  from pornography and sex trafficking and various content
• 51:53
  level evils, which much like Fosta Sesta, a lot of its
• 51:57
  critics will say will cause more problems than it will solve,
• 52:00
  pushing things further into the fringes. In that group that you
• 52:04
  just mentioned, I think it was Durbin who had also said, you'll
• 52:08
  correct me maybe if I'm wrong, that it's like, we're gonna set
• 52:11
  a date, it will sunset by 2027, but we don't actually want that
• 52:18
  to happen. We don't we're not we don't actually want to get rid
• 52:22
  of two thirty. What we want is for the social media platforms
• 52:27
  to come and talk to us about regulation.
• 52:29
  Can you what is in
• 52:33
  Hans Buetow: in a word,
• 52:34
  Mike Rugnetta: what like, why write a law? Why write
• 52:37
  legislation if you don't actually want it to happen?
• 52:41
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. It it is very much the give us what we
• 52:43
  want or we'll shoot the Internet kind of of a Yeah.
• 52:47
  Mike Rugnetta: Really is like a it's like a hostage situation,
• 52:49
  really. And, like, it's not, you know, they're using the back end
• 52:53
  of a screwdriver as a hammer. Like Yes. What like, why? Do you
• 52:57
  like
• 52:58
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. Instead of recognizing that the problem is
• 53:01
  them and that they don't really understand what they're doing,
• 53:03
  they're blaming because it's easy to do this, they're blaming
• 53:06
  big tech and saying, like, oh, big tech lobbyists. Every time
• 53:10
  we try and change section two thirty, the big tech lobbyists
• 53:13
  descend and they're too powerful and it's like this big deal. And
• 53:18
  so, therefore, we have to, like, give them an ultimatum. And the
• 53:22
  only way to give big tech an ultimatum is to try and take
• 53:24
  away two thirds entirely.
• 53:26
  Mike Rugnetta: Which is just extremely not true.
• 53:29
  Mike Masnick: Right. Mark Zuckerberg has come out and
• 53:31
  said, and Facebook or Meta's, you know, official stance is
• 53:34
  that the law should be changed. And the ways that they are
• 53:38
  suggesting changing it would effectively dismantle section
• 53:42
  two thirty. And people say, well, why would they do that if
• 53:45
  that's going to lead to more liability for them? The reality
• 53:48
  is that what section two thirty does well, it protects smaller
• 53:53
  platforms much more than it protects bigger platforms.
• 53:56
  Mhmm. The bigger platforms may face more legal threats without
• 54:02
  section two thirty and more liability, but the First
• 54:04
  Amendment will still protect them. The difference is that in
• 54:08
  a section two thirty case where a platform can use section two
• 54:12
  thirty, you can get it dismissed at the earliest stage. It
• 54:15
  probably costs a company about a hundred thousand dollars to get
• 54:18
  a case dismissed on two thirty grounds. If you're getting a
• 54:22
  case dismissed on first amendment grounds, it's much
• 54:24
  more involved.
• 54:25
  It goes deeper into the process. You have to do a bunch of other
• 54:27
  things. It's probably more along the lines of $2,000,000.
• 54:30
  Mike Rugnetta: So all the small platforms can't afford that?
• 54:35
  Exactly. They're gonna go away. Yeah. Right.
• 54:37
  Which Facebook loves.
• 54:38
  Mike Masnick: Which Facebook absolutely loves because right
• 54:41
  now Facebook is losing users, and they're finding that there
• 54:44
  is more and more competition that is a problem for them. But
• 54:48
  Facebook also has a building full of lawyers. Right? If they
• 54:52
  start facing a whole bunch of lawsuits that are about
• 54:55
  2,000,000 a pop that they're going to win, and they know
• 54:57
  they're going to win because the First Amendment will still
• 54:59
  protect them, they can afford many of those lawsuits and
• 55:03
  they'll just go to court and they'll win. And it'll cost
• 55:05
  them, you know, whatever, $50,000,000.
• 55:07
  That's pocket change.
• 55:08
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Couch couch cushion money.
• 55:10
  Mike Masnick: Exactly. But for smaller companies, for others,
• 55:13
  you know, for little forums, for any new competitor that is
• 55:17
  coming up, that is existential. You get one or two of those
• 55:20
  lawsuits, many of those will go out of business.
• 55:24
  Mike Rugnetta: So I have two follow ups to this. One is just
• 55:26
  sort of like, I have a side question and then an actual
• 55:29
  follow-up. The side question is like, is this also a way it
• 55:33
  seems like they're already going this way, but is this also a way
• 55:36
  for Facebook to be like, listen, we didn't wanna moderate
• 55:38
  anything anyways. So we we're we could just get to stop and that
• 55:42
  rules.
• 55:43
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think they
• 55:45
  would love it.
• 55:46
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. My, my actual follow-up is from the
• 55:51
  perspective of someone who is a lawmaker and who is ostensibly
• 55:54
  invested in the health of the American economy, which, like,
• 55:58
  at this moment, that might be a strange thing to claim a
• 56:01
  lawmaker is interested in. But Yeah. Do they just not know that
• 56:05
  this is a a, like, death blow to the kind of economic development
• 56:10
  that has been, like, really, like, the signature
• 56:12
  accomplishment of the country for the last thirty years, or do
• 56:16
  they think that they're helping that in some way?
• 56:20
  Mike Masnick: It it's a little unclear to me, and I think there
• 56:22
  are different motivations for different different ones. I
• 56:25
  think there is the moral panic aspect of it. There are a number
• 56:28
  of groups who are really focused on things like child safety. I
• 56:31
  think they're incorrect in thinking that two thirty is the
• 56:35
  problem when actually two thirty is what allows companies to
• 56:38
  experiment and try and figure out ways to protect children and
• 56:41
  to do more to keep children safe online without facing legal
• 56:44
  liability. There's also the entertainment industry,
• 56:48
  Hollywood and the record labels spent many years fighting the
• 56:52
  Internet companies over copyright issues, and mostly
• 56:56
  lost.
• 56:57
  And some of the Hollywood Lobbyists effectively decided,
• 57:01
  well, now we lost the copyright fight, but we're going to
• 57:04
  destroy tech companies however we can, and section two thirty
• 57:08
  is is our next target. And so suddenly, you had these people
• 57:11
  who had been fighting on copyright stuff suddenly showing
• 57:14
  up in congress experts. And I was like, you have no knowledge
• 57:18
  or experience with section two thirty. Why are you testifying
• 57:21
  as a section two thirty expert? And so you have elements of both
• 57:25
  of those in this effort to to undermine two thirty.
• 57:27
  You have the people who see it as like, oh, we're gonna profit
• 57:30
  from this, and you have the people who are making the sort
• 57:32
  of moral arguments incorrectly, I think, where they don't really
• 57:35
  understand the the nuances and complexities here.
• 57:39
  Mike Rugnetta: What other tools do lawmakers have to get this
• 57:42
  work done instead of threatening two thirty? Like, are there
• 57:45
  other ways for them to get what they want?
• 57:47
  Mike Masnick: I actually do think there are a lot of tools,
• 57:49
  most of which are totally ignored. And I have been working
• 57:53
  on a paper of like all the tools that that politicians should
• 57:56
  look at before they get to two thirty. Oh, wow. But I've been
• 57:59
  working on it forever, and and I never get it done because so
• 58:01
  much other stuff is happening.
• 58:03
  Hans Buetow: We shouldn't have had you on this podcast. You're
• 58:06
  we've taken fifty five very important minutes from your
• 58:09
  life.
• 58:11
  Mike Masnick: But it's you know, there are a whole bunch of other
• 58:14
  tools. Obviously, like antitrust is a big one. Right? If you're
• 58:16
  worried that companies are getting too big, you have
• 58:18
  antitrust tools that you can use. Bigger ones though, I
• 58:21
  think, are even more important.
• 58:23
  There's there's a law called the CFAA. And I bring this up all
• 58:26
  the time and everyone stares at me blankly and they're like,
• 58:28
  what is that? The CFAA is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
• 58:31
  And it was written in theory to to stop computer hacking. It's
• 58:36
  very poorly written and it's very vague and it's been abused
• 58:39
  in all sorts of ways.
• 58:41
  Because it talks about authorized or unauthorized
• 58:43
  access. And what is authorized access? Well, somebody says,
• 58:46
  well, if you violate the terms of service, that's no longer
• 58:49
  authorized access, and we can sue you for computer hacking.
• 58:52
  But where that has become really a big problem, I think, and I'll
• 58:56
  go back to Meta as the example of this, which was in the sort
• 59:00
  of, you know, 02/2010 time frame. I forget exactly when
• 59:03
  this started.
• 59:04
  There was a company called Power Ventures that they had created a
• 59:06
  dashboard that let you look at multiple social media back when
• 59:09
  there was most multiple social media in one unified interface.
• 59:14
  You gave power your logins and it would go log in to Meta and
• 59:18
  or not Meta then, Facebook and and whatever else was out there
• 59:21
  and give you a single unified dashboard. Facebook sued them
• 59:25
  claiming that they violated the computer fraud and abuse act
• 59:28
  because they claimed it was unauthorized access. I don't
• 59:30
  think it was unauthorized access because the user themselves was
• 59:33
  providing their own logins. They were giving authorization for
• 59:36
  that.
• 59:37
  But they won. And that sort of stripped out the ability for
• 59:41
  there to be, you know, a way to get out of of the Facebook silo.
• 59:45
  Right? You know, I also think, like, patent law has often been
• 59:48
  used to shut down competition. The issue inherent in all of
• 59:52
  this is who is controlling your experience online, and people
• 59:56
  are upset about certain billionaires in the in most
• 59:59
  cases, you know, controlling your experience and
• 1:00:02
  manipulating.
• 1:00:04
  Yeah. Manipulating what you see or what you don't see. Right?
• 1:00:06
  That's the underlying concern that I think a lot of people
• 1:00:08
  have and it's legitimate. But the way you get around that is
• 1:00:11
  if there is real competition and if you can still communicate
• 1:00:14
  with people without having to be pulled into the manipulation
• 1:00:17
  engine part of it.
• 1:00:19
  And so patent law, CFAA, there are antitrust in some cases.
• 1:00:24
  There are ways to deal with that that isn't break the entire
• 1:00:29
  Internet.
• 1:00:30
  Mike Rugnetta: Sure. So the future at this point is, like, a
• 1:00:32
  little bit uncertain. We know that legislation may be incoming
• 1:00:36
  at some point or another. We don't know exactly when. Like,
• 1:00:40
  what should people look out for?
• 1:00:41
  Like, what is the next six months to a year look like?
• 1:00:46
  Mike Masnick: Yeah. Well, to some extent, I wish I knew.
• 1:00:48
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Of course.
• 1:00:49
  Mike Masnick: It would let me plan stuff a little bit better.
• 1:00:52
  It it does come a little bit haphazardly. You know, the issue
• 1:00:54
  really is what is congress gonna do? And so watching what is
• 1:00:59
  coming out of the senate in particular, and just seeing
• 1:01:02
  where these things go. And I would say being very careful
• 1:01:05
  about, you know, who you trust on these issues.
• 1:01:09
  We need people out there speaking about how important the
• 1:01:12
  Internet and the ability to speak is and the ability to use
• 1:01:15
  alternative services, whether it's small forums or alternative
• 1:01:18
  social media, how important that is, you know, people really need
• 1:01:21
  to speak up about it.
• 1:01:23
  Mike Rugnetta: So in addition to your show, otherwise
• 1:01:25
  objectionable, what are the other places that people can go
• 1:01:27
  online to learn more about this?
• 1:01:29
  Mike Masnick: So, obviously, Tech Tirt, I've been writing
• 1:01:31
  about it forever. Yeah. And so you can follow me there. I am on
• 1:01:35
  Blue Sky, and so I'm often commenting there on it. There
• 1:01:39
  are lots of other excellent people who are covering this
• 1:01:41
  stuff.
• 1:01:42
  Eric Goldman is a professor at Santa Clara law professor at
• 1:01:45
  Santa Clara University. He has a blog that covers almost every
• 1:01:49
  section two thirty case. It's like the best database of what's
• 1:01:51
  going on. Jeff Kosseff, is a law professor at the Naval Academy,
• 1:01:55
  wrote the book, The 26 Words That Created the Internet. He's
• 1:01:58
  been following this stuff closely.
• 1:02:00
  EFF, as an organization, has obviously been paying close
• 1:02:03
  attention to this. The ACLU, brought the original case that
• 1:02:06
  that got the Communications Decency Act cost out. All of
• 1:02:10
  them have been following this and working on these issues. All
• 1:02:14
  of them are worth following, and they do an excellent job of
• 1:02:17
  keeping people up to date on these things.
• 1:02:19
  Mike Rugnetta: Great. We'll put links to all those things in the
• 1:02:21
  show notes. And, yeah, we'll put Tech Dirt right at the top.
• 1:02:23
  Can't co cosign, I've been reading it for years, and it's
• 1:02:27
  an indispensable source for all of this stuff. So thank you for
• 1:02:29
  all of your hard work.
• 1:02:31
  Always appreciate that. That goes constantly to the
• 1:02:33
  grindstone.
• 1:02:56
  Hans Buetow: Let's get ready to cookie clack. It's a beautiful
• 1:03:03
  day here for the final round of the team takes sighting tests
• 1:03:08
  Mike Rugnetta: on Neverpost. In the blue corner, Georgia
• 1:03:13
  Hampton. Ow. Ow. Ow.
• 1:03:15
  With an accuracy of 92%. Oh.
• 1:03:18
  Georgia Hampton: I know
• 1:03:18
  Hans Buetow: that's right. That's a lot to come
• 1:03:20
  Georgia, Field: up against. Right.
• 1:03:21
  Hans Buetow: It's gonna be tough for our other competitor, Jason
• 1:03:24
  the whip fingers overholzer.
• 1:03:29
  Mike Rugnetta: Good try, Hans. Nice. Nice one. With an accuracy
• 1:03:32
  of redacted. That's none of your
• 1:03:35
  Jason Oberholtzer: Not accuracy. It's about vibes.
• 1:03:37
  Hans Buetow: But, Mike, how do you like the chances of each of
• 1:03:39
  these two competitors?
• 1:03:40
  Mike Rugnetta: You're asking me to choose a child and I refuse
• 1:03:43
  to, but Georgia is gonna smoke Jason.
• 1:03:48
  Jason Oberholtzer: I am going to try to get an accuracy at least
• 1:03:52
  above 80, which will slow me down. But I think it is a more
• 1:03:56
  fair way to do this competition.
• 1:03:58
  Mike Rugnetta: Jason is going for the political victory. You
• 1:04:00
  know why I lose?
• 1:04:03
  Jason Oberholtzer: Because I chose to.
• 1:04:05
  Georgia Hampton: It's actually ethically
• 1:04:07
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
• 1:04:07
  Mike Rugnetta: Better. Alright. Georgia, to your corner in the
• 1:04:10
  left. Jason, to your corner in the right.
• 1:04:13
  Jason Oberholtzer: Here I go.
• 1:04:14
  Mike Rugnetta: I wanna see hands up. You're gonna start typing on
• 1:04:18
  type. Ready? 321. Type.
• 1:04:26
  Hans Buetow: Oh. Oh, it's a strong showing.
• 1:04:30
  Mike Rugnetta: Jason looking down not as much as
• 1:04:32
  Hans Buetow: last much. Yeah. He's more comfortable. He looks
• 1:04:34
  way more comfortable on this on this smaller scale.
• 1:04:37
  Mike Rugnetta: I will say Georgia is statuesque.
• 1:04:40
  Hans Buetow: I now see what I was up against, and, I never
• 1:04:43
  stood a chance.
• 1:04:44
  Mike Rugnetta: Jason, looking like he's having a good time.
• 1:04:47
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Oh, some deep breaths. Some deep breaths.
• 1:04:49
  Mike Rugnetta: Got enough. Yeah.
• 1:04:50
  Jason Oberholtzer: I understand it now.
• 1:04:51
  Hans Buetow: Yeah. Yeah. He's got it. This, it looks like the
• 1:04:53
  strategy of improving his accuracy might be paying off for
• 1:04:57
  him.
• 1:04:58
  Jason Oberholtzer: I understand it now.
• 1:05:03
  Hans Buetow: This this is close to yeah. This is what you like
• 1:05:05
  to see, folks, in the final. This is it. To the wire. Both
• 1:05:08
  competitors strong, coming in hot,
• 1:05:10
  Mike Rugnetta: giving it their all. And
• 1:05:19
  Hans Buetow: it's coming down to the wire. We're getting close.
• 1:05:38
  Jason Oberholtzer: I was 92 words in.
• 1:05:40
  Hans Buetow: So close.
• 1:05:41
  Jason Oberholtzer: Well played, Georgia.
• 1:05:43
  Georgia Hampton: And that's a
• 1:05:44
  Jason Oberholtzer: Good job.
• 1:05:44
  Georgia Hampton: A 94% accuracy.
• 1:05:46
  Mike Rugnetta: Wow. Folks, she just keeps getting better.
• 1:05:50
  Jason Oberholtzer: 71% accuracy trending in the right direction.
• 1:05:54
  Okay.
• 1:05:56
  Mike Rugnetta: The next time we do this, we should do it on a
• 1:05:58
  mobile keyboard.
• 1:06:00
  Hans Buetow: Oh god.
• 1:06:00
  Mike Rugnetta: Georgia Hampton, congratulations.
• 1:06:03
  Hans Buetow: Congratulations, Georgia. Thank you.
• 1:06:04
  Mike Rugnetta: As your prize, just mail your keyboard to us,
• 1:06:07
  and we'll dip it in gold for
• 1:06:08
  Mike Masnick: you.
• 1:06:08
  Georgia Hampton: Perfect. I never wanna see this thing
• 1:06:11
  again.
• 1:06:34
  Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
• 1:06:36
  gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, April 9 for
• 1:06:39
  $4. You can get a single McDonald's Big Mac in the year
• 1:06:44
  02/2002. Though strangely not February or 02/2001 when they
• 1:06:48
  were more than $4. For $4, you can get a venti chai tea at
• 1:06:53
  Starbucks in 2014.
• 1:06:56
  For $4, you can get a Mexican pizza combo at Taco Bell in
• 1:07:02
  02/2001 or for $4, you could get a membership to never post right
• 1:07:08
  now and support your friendly local Internet media and tech
• 1:07:12
  criticism podcast. Sure. You'll get an ad free feed of the show.
• 1:07:16
  Sure. You'll get extended segments and interviews.
• 1:07:20
  Sure. You'll get sideshows like our watch along pod Neverwatch
• 1:07:24
  or our sleep aid pod slow post. Sure, Hans will call you and
• 1:07:29
  personally tell you that he loves We're we're not we're not
• 1:07:34
  doing that one anymore. Really? I still think it's okay.
• 1:07:39
  Fine. Fine. Fine. Okay. Sorry about that.
• 1:07:44
  Well, I love you. And I'll love you more if you become a member.
• 1:07:49
  NeverPoe.st, 4 dollars a month. Membership, it's good for the
• 1:07:54
  soul. Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton,
• 1:08:00
  and the mysterious doctor first name last name.
• 1:08:03
  Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is
• 1:08:06
  Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike
• 1:08:10
  Rignetta. By the sparklet of certain ciliates, cesium
• 1:08:28
  practices its cricket song. Am I supposed to be impressed? My
• 1:08:33
  smoothie comes with GPS.
• 1:08:37
  Excerpt of We Have the Technology by Michael Robbins.
• 1:08:43
  Neverpost is a production of Charts and Leisure. It is
• 1:08:47
  distributed by Radiotopia.