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A New Type of Grief: Inheritance Posting · 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
Ragnetta, and we have a collectible show for you this
0:20
week. In this episode, our senior producer Hans Buto works
0:24
with contributing producer and friend of the show, Kurt White,
0:28
to look at a new form of bereavement posting to see what
0:33
it contributes to the process of mourning and how it might help
0:36
us through our grief. But first, you're gonna hear a few ads
0:41
unless you're on the member feed and then Hans and Kurt on
0:46
Inheritance Posting.
1:06
Hans Buetow: I am a big feelings kind of guy. Big feelings. I say
1:09
it all the time in therapy. Big feelings. Hello.
1:13
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
1:18
So it was no wonder then that I was having big feelings a year
1:22
to the day after my grandfather died. So my family had gathered,
1:27
and I was sitting on the floor of my grandmother's living room,
1:30
and I was surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins, nieces,
1:34
nephews, kids, like, the whole crowd that would be at every
1:37
Christmas, every family picnic. And those big feelings were very
1:41
present for me in that moment. It's the one year anniversary of
1:44
my grandfather's death. It's a gathering of my loved ones who
1:48
knew him.
1:51
And somewhere I got the idea that we were gathering that day
1:54
to honor him, So I was hoping to talk about grandpa. I was hoping
2:00
to hear memories from other people. I was hoping to share my
2:03
memories of him with the group, but that's not what was
2:08
happening. It was lovely, but grandpa wasn't there at all. We
2:14
weren't saying his name.
2:14
It was just a regular family hangout.
2:17
Kurt White: That's gross.
2:22
Hans Buetow: I remember feeling confused by this. Like, maybe
2:26
what I was expecting isn't what everyone else is expecting, or
2:29
maybe they don't want to talk about him, or maybe their big
2:32
feelings happen elsewhere. My big feelings, they were on the
2:37
floor with me. I was hoping to talk about grandpa. I just
2:42
didn't know how to do that.
2:44
So in a lull in the conversation, I thought, okay.
2:50
I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna try to bring him up. Well, grandma,
2:54
it's been a big year. Yeah.
2:58
Yeah. It has. And I remember this moment so clearly, and I
3:09
remember the feeling of starting the sentence and then losing
3:14
absolutely all confidence in it, and feeling like it was just too
3:19
big to say what was in my heart, but I had already started
3:25
talking. And so so I just kinda Well, grandma, it's been a big
3:31
year. Yeah.
3:33
I mean, what a nonspecific, absolutely sideways, deeply,
3:40
just awkward way to bring up my dead grandfather and expect to
3:44
have any heartfelt conversation about him. And this wasn't
3:47
anyone's fault. I didn't even say his name when I brought it
3:51
up. And surprise, surprise, the conversation just moved on. No
3:56
one took me up on my big feelings because I didn't share
4:00
my big feelings.
4:01
And I don't think I'm alone on this. I think a lot of folks can
4:05
probably relate to wanting to bring up something big with a
4:10
group of people, but not having a mechanism to do that. Since
4:21
that moment, I have produced literally hundreds of stories
4:26
about death and about grief. And one of the things that I've
4:30
definitively learned is that we, and this is the collective we,
4:37
we have become shit at grief and mourning. And I don't know that
4:42
we've ever been very good at mourning, but it feels to me
4:47
like, especially since the decline of participation in
4:50
social groups and the loneliness epidemic and just general
4:55
socializing confusion, it feels that we have lost something
4:59
really important.
5:01
We've lost mechanisms for contextualizing, for elevating,
5:06
and maybe most importantly for sharing our grief. Even on the
5:11
Internet, in our most sharing happy environment, we're mostly
5:17
not operating as a group.
5:21
Kurt White: In group therapy, it's an interesting thing.
5:23
Sometimes, you know, it's a paradox of group process, and
5:28
that's that you'd think that the best thing for someone would be
5:31
to have all the individual time and attention. Right? One on
5:34
one. Someone's paying attention just to you.
5:37
Hans Buetow: This is friend of the show and friend of mine and
5:41
psychotherapist Kurt White, and he's making our hard pivot
5:46
transition into group therapy because, well, because Kurt has
5:50
what he calls a weird optimism about the Internet.
5:53
Kurt White: I have a weird optimism about the Internet.
5:57
Hans Buetow: Look. I don't think having optimism about the
5:59
Internet is super weird. It is there to be found, but Kurt
6:03
definitely applies that optimism faster, and also more
6:07
comprehensively than I do. And he was telling me about group
6:11
therapy because of how well it works for grief.
6:15
Kurt White: And I think that's because when one person is
6:18
talking, the other person is listening and finding their way
6:21
into that experience and silently also working alongside.
6:26
They're having their own experience associations. They're
6:30
doing their own work while the other person is there and
6:33
connecting to them and seeing them as a whole unique person.
6:38
And and maybe they don't even say anything in that group. What
6:43
if there are places on the Internet where there can be some
6:46
mass society version of this, where you can you can watch a
6:50
thing and it's personal enough that you can have your
6:54
association to
6:55
Mike Rugnetta: it and work right alongside it. It's
6:59
Kurt White: Whether you ever write a comment or like or
7:01
subscribe or anything like that, maybe still you've had an
7:05
experience.
7:12
Hans Buetow: When he said this, Kurt had been seeing a
7:14
particular type of post. Videos where someone makes new meaning
7:18
out of things that they have inherited from dead loved ones.
7:22
Some of these are just one off posts. There's the Instagram
7:25
channel cooking with congress where he cooks and eats the diet
7:30
that he associates with his dead grandma on what would have been
7:33
her 90 birthday, which is Pringles, Franzia, the wine,
7:37
expired meat butter, and pancakes. There's also the
7:41
sewing channel Good Natured Studio who they were sent a box
7:45
of clothes by a fan who had inherited his dead mother's
7:50
things and was asking, is it possible to sew these old
7:56
clothes from my dead mom into something new that I could wear?
8:03
And these are sweet and they're touching, but there are whole
8:06
channels that make this content the center of what they do. One
8:11
of the most famous of these is dead Greg's recipes. So my
8:14
roommate's estranged alcohol loving uncle died, and this was
8:17
his cook bag of recipes. Written down every chapter on this
8:20
wheel. I'm gonna make one.
8:21
I'm David Zarco. This is Dead Greg's recipes. And there are
8:25
plenty of others. Photographers sharing photos that are of or by
8:29
dead loved ones. There's music left behind, toys in a
8:32
collection.
8:33
And I haven't found anyone who's naming this particular practice,
8:39
this using social channels to share their own exploration of
8:44
the things that were left behind. So Kurt and I talked,
8:47
and he's very excited that we are gonna coin it inheritance
8:51
posting.
8:52
Kurt White: When we get a new technology for all of the hand
8:56
wringing about it and that it's breaking our brains, and maybe
8:59
it is, fine. But we're also what are we trying to do with it?
9:03
We're trying to do the same things we're trying to do with
9:05
everything else. Solve unsolvable problems that we get
9:09
stuck in like a grief and loss and mourning. And it seemed to
9:13
me that an interesting thing was happening, that maybe there was
9:17
something generative and productive for the person
9:20
sharing it, and that there was also something generative and
9:23
productive for the person consuming it, in a way that felt
9:27
truly new, actually.
9:29
Like, it's not totally passive like reading a book or reading a
9:34
story or an article about something, and it's not totally
9:37
active like a group therapy about loss. And I began to
9:41
wonder, have we has the Internet invented a new form of
9:46
processing grief?
9:50
Hans Buetow: Yeah. My first response to Kurt was a big old
9:53
shrug. I mean, yeah. I don't know, is what I said, to be nice
9:58
to my thoughtful and very smart friend. Because that's a big
10:02
statement, and we have done a lot of stories in the past
10:06
couple of years about how badly platforms bungle grief and how
10:12
complicated it is to try to handle them online and how the
10:16
people who in charge of the platforms, they at first had no
10:20
plan for how to deal with death and grief and now have no good
10:24
plan for it.
10:25
We've done those stories. And I think I was wary of that
10:29
optimism of Kurtz in the face of how much my guard is up around
10:35
that and just around posting in social platforms generally. But
10:41
I'm an open guy, and Kurt is lovely. So Kurt started
10:48
outlining his ideas. And I started applying to the ideas
10:54
some of the reading that I've been doing in rituals and in
10:58
meaning making, and it all served to open up my heart a
11:02
little bit to the idea that maybe, possibly, what's
11:07
happening isn't planned by any terms of service update or
11:12
platform feature.
11:12
What Kurt thinks is happening is us using an imperfect tool to do
11:19
a particular kind of posting that does something accidentally
11:23
maybe really well, which is replicating things that we as
11:28
humans need to grieve. And it does this in a specific way,
11:34
which is focusing on objects over time. So today, I wanna
11:42
wander alongside Kurt, and I wanna break those elements down,
11:45
objects and time, in that order, and see if perhaps Kurt is
11:50
right, and inheritance posting is somehow making up for our
11:55
deficits in human rituals and social structures. One of the
12:25
things that helped sway me on this topic was an interview that
12:27
Kurt did on his podcast Unraveling. It was a story that
12:31
felt relevant to this conversation.
12:33
So I asked him if we could use some of his conversations that
12:36
he did with someone who runs an Inheritance Posting Instagram
12:39
account, which is called dad's vinyl stash. So it's one album,
12:44
one post at a time, hands turning on a desk lamp, pulling
12:47
out a record, showing off the cover, putting it on the player,
12:51
flipping it over, and then turning off the lamp. The name
12:54
of the person who runs dad's vinyl stash is Nikki, and her
12:58
dead person is her dad.
12:59
Speaker 4: His name was Bobby?
13:01
Hans Buetow: Bobby collected things, all sorts of things. Yo
13:04
yos, Star Wars stuff, a lot of stuff. But the interest Nikki
13:08
shared with him is in his collection of vinyl records.
13:11
Before he died, Nikki had started her own little
13:13
collection of records, and the two of them were bonding over
13:17
music.
13:18
Speaker 4: And these were his words exactly in a text message
13:20
to me. Like, it brings me so much peace to know that my
13:25
collection will be with somebody who can honor it and who can
13:28
love it and who can listen to it and, like, give it life.
13:33
Hans Buetow: Give it life. Extend it into the future, and
13:36
in some ways, extend him into the future. When Bobby died in
13:42
July 2025, Nikki inherited 35 boxes of his records.
13:47
Speaker 4: Getting something that belongs to someone that is
13:51
no longer here was one of the most emotional things to deal
13:57
with because I didn't want dad's stuff. I didn't I don't want his
14:01
things. I want him to be here and to share the story of those
14:05
things with me. But, you know, it's I guess if you have to move
14:11
forward without that person here with you, then having things
14:16
that really remind you of them and, like, really can just,
14:20
like, give you those core memories and just those feelings
14:23
of peace and comfort that I really feel when I listen to
14:27
dad's music. I guess that that's, like, the next best
14:30
thing to ask for.
14:36
Hans Buetow: Grief and objects go together like peanut butter
14:40
and more peanut butter. Objects concretize something that's too
14:44
big for us to consider.
14:46
Kurt White: A common thing that people will say, and I'll
14:49
experience myself, the loss of a person, the loss of a pet even,
14:52
is sort of like the day after they're not here. You say, where
14:56
did they go? Where did they go? There was this thing that meant
14:59
so much to me, and now it's not in the world anymore. And I
15:04
think a physical object can ground that problem, that
15:09
unsolvable problem in a tangible format.
15:12
Right? Well, I don't have the person, but I have the scarf
15:16
that smells like them. I have the bag that they carried
15:20
around. I have the watch that they wore. I have the thing that
15:24
they valued most.
15:26
I have it on my shelf. I'm gonna keep it. I can think of them.
15:30
And it's not them, but it's enough like them that it can
15:33
kind of stand for. Where did they go, and what am I supposed
15:38
to do now?
15:45
Hans Buetow: Why do we pour that emotion into objects? Of course,
15:50
there are a lot of reasons, but I like two of them. One, it
15:55
could be terror. One of the most animating stresses and therefore
16:00
driving motivators in my life is my fear of being forgotten after
16:05
I'm gone. The cultural anthropologist Ernst Becker, who
16:09
in his youth helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp, would
16:12
say that we are so shaken by the idea of death, by our all
16:18
encompassing fear of death, that it drives us to attempt to
16:22
transcend it by creating vessels for immortality.
16:26
Kurt White: This is actually so disorganizing for us that
16:30
everything is actually about that. Everything. Not just some
16:33
things. Everything that we ever do. All of our transferences,
16:37
the things we think of as loves, our friendships, the things that
16:42
we accumulate, the ideas that we have about ourselves, all of it
16:46
is about that void that comes at the end and the way that we
16:50
can't look into it.
16:53
Hans Buetow: It could also be growth. My therapy is helping me
16:59
generate emotional scaffolding that can make my fear of being
17:03
forgotten less paralyzing in my everyday. The English
17:07
pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott talks
17:10
about a similar thing when he talks about transitional
17:13
objects.
17:14
Kurt White: We are born out of a state of union with a with a
17:17
mother, and we have to learn how to be without that. And we do
17:23
that gradually and we do it literally, but we also have to
17:26
do it symbolically. We have to have a way of carrying the
17:31
things inside of us that were in the ways that we were carried by
17:36
others, I suppose. Right? And part of how we do that is that
17:40
we begin to take the comforting parent with us in symbolic ways
17:48
by imbuing objects with meaning that seems to have some
17:53
representation, right, of that of that real thing.
17:57
Hans Buetow: And maybe we hold on to this. This internalized
18:01
way of developing using these representational transitional
18:05
objects. They help us move from one state to another state, to
18:10
kind of re imbue ourselves with this person that we're holding
18:15
inside of us, to create this kind of liminal in between space
18:19
where we can be several people at once, we can have several
18:24
states at the same time, we can move between, we can grow. And I
18:31
tend to think that both of these are true at once. Life giving
18:34
and deeply threatening.
18:36
We're terrified of death, and we are growing into it. So we cling
18:41
to the things that we're gonna leave behind. Also, the things
18:45
that have already been left behind by others. My
18:51
Speaker 4: husband is kind of a very creative outlet. Like, he
18:55
does videography and photography, and he just kinda
19:00
saw that's really where the first video came from that we
19:05
posted to dad's Vinyl Stash. He had this whole he envisioned the
19:10
boxes coming out, the lifting up of the of the storage unit, you
19:15
know, pulling everything out, kinda seeing it in its entirety,
19:19
he was like, you know, this is something I feel like your dad
19:21
would have been like like I mean, yeah. Like, hell yeah,
19:27
Nikki. Like, do something with it.
19:28
Like, it's yours now. Like, move forward with it. You know? And
19:34
and so when he asked me when my husband asked me, I was like,
19:37
yeah. I mean, sure.
19:38
Let's just see kinda how it goes. So he put it on to
19:44
Instagram, and, I don't know. It something happened. I have I
19:50
have no idea I have no idea what really happened, but I knew from
19:56
the moment that he showed me, like, just editing the video and
20:00
putting it together, I was like, this is really cool. Like, this
20:02
could really like, this just looks like it's about to tell a
20:05
story of something, and it's drawing people in pretty
20:09
quickly.
20:11
Hans Buetow: Which is why Inheritance Posting needs
20:14
objects. Objects provide a focal point. You can see the object.
20:18
They can touch. They can display the object.
20:21
It takes up space in the room. It takes up space in the frame.
20:25
The object exists between the poster and the audience. It's a
20:29
stand in while we talk and while we think about someone who's not
20:34
actually there. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim might
20:38
call these types of objects totems, physical representations
20:42
of emotions.
20:44
Items that are simultaneously transformed with meaning and
20:48
given the power to lead us to experience the sacred. And for
20:53
channels that make these inheritance posts their focus,
20:57
the person isn't fully in any one object. The person is in the
21:01
collection.
21:02
Kurt White: The dilemma around loss is that the people that
21:07
we've lost are complicated. Right? They're complicated whole
21:10
human beings, and we have complicated feelings about them.
21:14
But if you have a collection of things, if you have a variety of
21:18
things, then it's sort of like at least you have kind of like
21:21
different windows of looking into an experience of the
21:25
person, different ways of starting a story, of of having a
21:30
prompt that you might say, well, what about this? What about
21:32
that?
21:33
Hans Buetow: For Nikki and Bobby, this is a discovery
21:35
process. She's surprised by this album, and she remembers that
21:40
one. And she has associations with some of them and is
21:43
delighted to learn that they shared an interest with another
21:46
one. She gets to pull them out and she gets to wonder, what did
21:50
he like about this one? Or why did he buy all of this artist's
21:55
whole oeuvre?
21:56
Or this seems out of character for him. What is he carrying
22:00
inside of him that makes this appealing? She's truly sharing
22:05
something with him, and he's sharing something back with her
22:08
even when he's gone. And we, as observers, we get to discover
22:15
alongside her.
22:16
Speaker 4: Because dad would always tell me, like, you don't
22:18
understand, Nikki. Like, you you don't understand. This is like a
22:22
top personal collection that I have surrounding me. Like, this
22:26
is a top personal record collection, and you will be
22:30
surprised by what you find. And I'm like, well, you know what?
22:33
I am very surprised by what I find, but there are also 56,000
22:37
other people who are very surprised by by what we have
22:43
found, and they and they are loving it, dad. So
22:46
Hans Buetow: So these posts are doing what Bobby hoped. They're
22:49
giving the collection life. But because we poured so much of him
22:55
into the collection when the collection has life. In a way,
23:01
Bobby has life. As Emile Durkheim says, quote, there are
23:04
living ties between things and men, and the things are endowed
23:09
with special powers from which human allies benefit.
23:14
These ties also mean that the objects by themselves are not
23:17
fully able to accomplish any of these benefits on their own. The
23:22
objects are dormant unless we use them, and their power as
23:28
totems is unlocked only when we use them in actually really
23:32
specific ways. When we come back, time is the other half of
23:38
the inheritance posting equation. This is a good time to
23:50
make a distinction between grief and mourning. So they are
23:54
connected, but they are not the same thing.
23:57
Kurt White: There's something about, grief and that is so
24:01
intensely personal. Right? It's the no one will ever understand
24:06
this like I understand it. No one can ever feel this feeling.
24:12
Hans Buetow: Grief is the internal individual feeling of
24:16
loss. Mourning is how the grief is expressed, the way that those
24:20
feelings come out. For grief, in its most potent form, it is
24:25
overwhelming. It's a destabilizing, unmooring,
24:29
blinding, crushing, maelstrom of emotions that completely derails
24:35
us. But even mild grief can totally stop us in our tracks.
24:39
The processing of those feelings of grief is the work of
24:43
mourning.
24:44
Kurt White: Sometimes grief has to be metabolized in fits and
24:47
starts, in small bites, you might say.
24:51
Hans Buetow: This is what humor does for us. But maybe also
24:56
scrolling. You laugh or you blink. It's just too much to
25:01
look into that void for any extended amount of time. Even
25:04
just discussing the void is difficult.
25:08
Like, I'm worried this segment is too much all at once. Kurt
25:12
once told me about Earl Hopper, who's a group analyst who's also
25:15
one of his mentors, saying that he had to break up his lectures
25:19
about death.
25:21
Kurt White: He really actually didn't think that we could
25:23
really pay attention to things that were overwhelming at that
25:26
level for more than maybe ten or fifteen minutes. It's after that
25:31
you begin to kind of distract yourself, dissociate. You begin
25:34
to use coping skills to move your attention elsewhere without
25:39
even noticing that you're doing it right. Go to an hour long
25:44
lecture about the distress you experience with grief and loss
25:48
and mourning. And after maybe fifteen minutes, you might be
25:51
thinking about what you're gonna have for lunch, and then you
25:53
tune back in, and then you tune back out, and tune back in, tune
25:56
back out.
25:56
I do think there's a rhythm to that that our our we have to
26:00
just kind of protect ourselves against some of the scariest
26:04
parts of this.
26:07
Hans Buetow: That is a similar rhythm to the social feed where
26:10
Inheritance Posting lives. None of the posts are long. None of
26:14
them are so intense that you would stop your normal scroll.
26:17
You watch. You feel, you move on, you return.
26:22
Kurt White: Maybe you can watch a couple videos. You can linger.
26:26
You could look at the comments or maybe you don't want any of
26:29
it today and you can skip. But maybe a minute is okay. Right?
26:36
Hans Buetow: These work because they're small. I think that we
26:44
sometimes conceive of our feet as geography, a space that we go
26:47
to. But in this sense it's temporal, not physical space.
26:52
The routine of it, especially folded into the endless tiny
26:56
dopamine hits of scrolling, the routine allows us to let grief
27:00
be what it inherently wants to be, a process that moves with us
27:06
over time. Inheritance posting showing up on your feed turns
27:10
this expression of grief into a process instead of a
27:14
destination.
27:15
The repetition matters. The ritual of it matters. Ritual is,
27:26
in many ways, the bridge from grief to mourning. If grief is
27:29
what you feel, mourning is how you act, and rituals give us the
27:35
rules and the patterns to synchronize our fury of emotions
27:39
and grief with others in mourning. You cover the mirrors.
27:45
You wear black. You sit in silence.
27:47
Kurt White: What is the poem? The W. H. Auden poem, funeral
27:51
blues. Do you know this one?
27:52
Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog
27:56
barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos. And with
28:01
muffled drum, bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
28:07
Hans Buetow: But rituals also give us etiquettes to take this
28:11
swirl of emotions and bring it into sync with the community.
28:15
Death means that a void has been allowed into the community, and
28:19
the rights that we perform are a restoration of the social order
28:24
that has been upended by that void. So they're not only about
28:27
honoring the dead, but they're just as much about reaffirming
28:31
the bonds of the people left behind, of the living, and puts
28:36
a sort of moral pressure on all of us. We cannot remain
28:41
indifferent when there's a void amongst us. And this means that
28:47
rights can come out in extreme ways that would not seem proper
28:51
under other circumstances.
28:53
Bloodletting, hair pulling, shrieking in public, ritual
28:57
scarification. In our case, making content out of the
29:01
objects of the dead might feel exploitative, it might feel a
29:07
little gross. But when we do it together, according to
29:11
etiquette, there's a sacredness that is allowed in. And because
29:17
we experience grief as individuals but we mourn
29:19
together, the roles that we have in that process, those roles are
29:24
different. Strangely, mourning does not require grief.
29:29
You do not have to have the same feelings to participate in the
29:33
rite of mourning. Or really, you don't have to have the same
29:37
feelings about the same thing to still be a mourner. The griever
29:42
can have feelings in any way that makes sense to them. Our
29:45
job as a community is to mourn alongside them. And your
29:50
individual pain is not necessarily what brings you to
29:55
the Gathering.
29:57
Rather, your obligation as a part of community is what brings
29:59
you in.
30:00
Kurt White: Something as painful as a loss really does require a
30:05
group. I'm often trying to make the argument, and I won't get
30:10
into it too deeply here, that like actually the base unit that
30:14
we should be evaluating when we think about people is not the
30:19
individual, but is perhaps a small group. That we live much
30:23
more in groups than we do as individuals. We can pretend to
30:27
live as individuals, but it's like a certain kind of clothing
30:30
we put on. We're always dependent on others.
30:34
We live off others in seen and unseen ways. And the time when
30:39
we it when we really need to know that is when something
30:43
happens that would, of course, overwhelm anyone's individual
30:47
capacities. This sort of staring into the void. Where did they
30:51
go? What has happened?
30:53
Who am I now? What am I supposed to do? What does any of this
30:56
mean? And so I think, you know, sociologists have invented ways
31:02
of talking and thinking about rites and rituals that have
31:06
given us some windows into this.
31:09
Hans Buetow: Most religious traditions use mourning rites to
31:12
organize groups and address the collective upending loss within
31:18
a community. Wailing, rending of clothes, weeping, sitting in
31:22
quiet solidarity with the bereaved. It's the Christian
31:25
mass, it's the Hindu Shradha ceremonies, it's Jewish Shiva.
31:30
By dictating things like how long everyone waits, who can
31:33
speak, where someone goes, and in what order things happen, all
31:36
of these rights give agency to the grieving and offer them
31:40
support through community roles.
31:42
Kurt White: People that can help us express things that we can't
31:46
so that we can take it in in a different way. And I think it
31:52
can look like a lot of different things. And that's why to me, it
31:55
maybe it doesn't seem so unusual that the Internet might have
32:00
some versions of this. I think it's probably versions, not
32:05
version, that there are, like, multiple different ways where we
32:09
can kind of find our way into certain roles. You know, the one
32:14
the one that shares, the one that is taking in what is
32:18
shared, the one that is commenting and reflecting back,
32:22
the one that is responding in the next posting.
32:25
Right? It has a certain kind of formality to it that does remind
32:31
me of much more overtly formal rites and rituals.
32:39
Hans Buetow: In social spaces, roles are designated by the
32:43
tech, and they're heavily controlled by the platform. So
32:45
posters, followers, commenters, they each have their own
32:49
designated role and responsibility in the hierarchy.
32:52
Right? We have talked on this show over and over about how
32:57
licensing agreements and terms of service and the governance of
33:00
platforms are poorly suited to grief and mourning. But the
33:05
technology itself, like almost accidentally or maybe by the
33:10
inherent will of humanity, the technology itself allows people
33:14
online to activate the reciprocity that is one of the
33:17
core elements of mourning.
33:20
For Nikki, she knows that when she posts, someone else is
33:24
hearing something that is important to her grief.
33:28
Speaker 4: I will say sometimes it gets really, it feels really
33:32
heavy, you know, because people are people are sharing about
33:36
their grief, and you're you're reading about it. And then it
33:39
makes me think about dad, and it makes me think about and it'll
33:43
make me cry just thinking about it right now. But, you know,
33:46
there are so many people who are on the page who are sharing
33:51
about their the collections that they have gotten because of
33:55
loved ones who have passed, and some of them have not even
33:59
looked through their collection yet. But then they see our they
34:03
see dad's Vinyl Stash page, and they're like, because you're
34:08
doing this, now I want to go into my own record collection,
34:12
and I wanna start pulling out stuff from my granddad or my dad
34:17
or my husband or my wife or, you know, whoever it is. And I'm
34:22
like, that's that's deep.
34:25
I mean, that's really that's really purposeful.
34:30
Hans Buetow: Nikki is trying to understand who she is now
34:32
without Bobby. She's undergoing a transition. Not like when she
34:36
was a kid, but also not unlike when she was a kid of going from
34:40
a mass of competing feelings to a coordinated full person.
34:45
Kurt White: But how do we get from one to the other? That's a
34:48
very interesting tasty question. And part of the answer is that
34:54
we have to be seen for being a unique human being by someone
35:01
else, and we have to see them seeing us do that. And ideally
35:07
admiring it a little bit. Saying like, you know, the gleam in the
35:10
parent's eyes, right?
35:12
I have a need. I see that you have a need. I have a need. I
35:16
don't share your need, but I see that you have it and I'm going
35:19
to attend to it. I see you seeing me.
35:23
I see you seeing me. And and there's something fascinating to
35:27
me about the way that social media platforms replicate some
35:32
of the sort of form of an early attachment environment. Right?
35:36
Here is a thing, and I say I it is important to me. See it.
35:41
I see you seeing it. You know? And then I see that you've seen
35:46
that I've seen it, and both people's individuality are
35:49
reflected in it. And the dead person has emerged out of that
35:54
in a new form for everybody in a kind of multiplicity.
36:01
Hans Buetow: I have actually recently started Inheritance
36:03
Posting about my grandfather, the one who I couldn't mourn all
36:08
those years ago. Weirdly, concurrently with making this, I
36:13
launched a whole podcast where I sit with my dad and we read the
36:19
letters that my great grandmother wrote to my
36:22
grandfather while he was in the army during World War Two. It's
36:26
a collection that I get to ask my dad about, and he gets to
36:29
communicate his memories of his dad, and we get to see my great
36:33
grandmother's memories of his dad, my grandfather. And I get
36:38
all of these changing morphing ideas of who he was, and who he
36:43
is to me. And in a way, this is the morning.
36:48
I I actually feel what it is that Kurt is talking about, and
36:51
what it is that Nikki is saying, that this work is a way to
36:58
engage. It's a way to have agency. It's a way to move into
37:04
processing grief with the support of a community in a
37:08
public space, and it feels so big. I have such big emotions
37:14
about doing this. There's a passage from Emile Durkheim's
37:23
book, the elementary forms of religious life, that I think
37:26
about all the time.
37:28
He's talking about the, quote, heated passions that spill over
37:31
in grief, Spilling over until he says, from every side there are
37:38
nothing but wild movements, shouts, downright howls, and
37:42
deafening noises of all kinds that further intensify the state
37:45
they are expressing. Probably because a collective emotion
37:50
cannot be expressed collectively without some order that permits
37:55
harmony and unison of movement. These gestures and cries tend to
38:01
fall into rhythm and regularity, and from there into songs and
38:07
dances. But in taking on a more regular form, they lose none of
38:13
their natural fury. The songs and dances are sacred.
38:21
They're ecstatic. They are what Durkheim calls a collective
38:26
effervescence, when humans find themselves transformed by a
38:30
force that transports us beyond the individual, tying our chaos
38:35
together by synchronizing our movements. Grass in the wind.
38:42
Dances in a group. We all look in the same direction at once.
38:47
We all communicate in the same channels with the same
38:51
expectations.
38:54
Kurt White: If my hypothesis is right and that we're just trying
38:58
to use new tools to do basically fundamentally human things, you
39:02
might approach it from the point of view of, do you think this is
39:05
what the Internet might be trying to do? And I think it
39:09
might be trying to do that if there is a kind of like a best
39:13
purpose underneath the sort of motivated action part of it.
39:17
Because I think you can't I think you can't quell collective
39:21
responses to things with anything. I think it's the most
39:25
powerful force in the universe, you know, that when people start
39:31
to move in the same direction, things start to happen. Right?
39:35
And and why shouldn't that be true sometimes in places on the
39:40
Internet? Right? If it's and why shouldn't it be true that you
39:46
could find you know, I I didn't plan to have feelings about my
39:50
dead mother's mother's music choices today. But now I'm
39:54
having them. And I know also that I'm not alone in having
39:59
them because I can see that this channel is popular and that
40:04
there's a discourse about it.
40:06
And it's popular enough that the person is gonna do it again
40:10
tomorrow. And in the meantime, I'm gonna think about Pink
40:14
Floyd's The Wall. And I'm gonna think about my mother, and I'm
40:18
gonna know that other people are out there thinking about their
40:22
own unique experiences of things. But together, we're also
40:28
doing it even at this low level of intensity.
40:33
Hans Buetow: And maybe that's what we need.
40:34
Kurt White: Maybe that's what we need. In a world that's already
40:38
overly intense, it's a kind of gentle offering, isn't it? Can
40:42
we see it as a gentle offering?
40:44
Hans Buetow: Yeah. You
40:45
Kurt White: know? We're entitled to still some good things.
40:57
Hans Buetow: Thank you to Kurt White. Thank you, Kurt. And
41:01
thank you to Nikki from Dad's Vinyl Stash. You can hear a long
41:05
conversation with her and Kurt about the channel, mental
41:08
health, and her experience of making Inheritance Posts on a
41:12
recent episode of the podcast Unraveling. We'll put a link in
41:15
the show notes.
41:17
And I would love to be in collective effervescence with
41:20
you. I would love to hear if you have an object. Do you have a
41:24
totem of a loved one that you would find meaning sharing with
41:28
others. Send us a recording, short recording, of you telling
41:33
us about your object and your person. And if we can get enough
41:36
of these together, I don't know, maybe we'll make an episode of
41:39
Inheritance Posts, and we'll elevate all of us into some form
41:44
of collective effervescence.
41:47
You can find all the ways to submit to us and ask us
41:50
questions or share your thoughts on grief and the Internet.
41:54
Everything is in the show notes or at neverpo.st.
42:30
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We
42:32
are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday,
42:37
July 9. When you Google for $4, can you? The following
42:43
autocomplete results are shown. In fallout four, can you
42:47
recharge fusion cores?
42:49
In fallout four, can you get married? In fallout four, can
42:52
you join multiple factions? In fallout four, can you have
42:56
multiple romances? In fallout four, can you become a ghoul? In
43:00
sims four, can you marry the grim reaper?
43:03
In fallout four, can you join the enclave? In sims four, can
43:07
you have twins? So let me answer this for you definitively for
43:11
$4. You can become a member at neverpo.st and help us continue
43:18
to make this weird wonderful independent internet and
43:21
technology theory and criticism podcast, which I'm not gonna
43:25
lie, does not preclude multiple romances. Never Post's producers
43:32
are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious
43:34
doctor first name last name.
43:36
Our contributing producer this week is Kurt White. Our senior
43:39
producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason
43:42
Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta. The
43:56
eye is the lamp of the body, so I tried to make a world where
43:59
all I ate was light. A butterfly completes a similar labor in the
44:03
summer garden, beating its wings slowly like a healthy person.
44:08
The kind who runs for fun. Could run from an attacker, eats
44:12
greens in the same quantity as the salty meats the storytelling
44:16
part of us appears to favor. I couldn't decide whether I wanted
44:20
to stay alive or go faster. They appeared to contradict each
44:25
other. I tried in all I did to eat light.
44:30
Excerpt of self help by Katie Peterson. Peterson. Never Post
44:33
is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by
44:38
Radiotopia.