Mike talks with unsung internet pillar DylanPDX, steward of vxTwitter and others, who single-handedly does what Big Social doesn’t want - keeping your embeds working. Senior producer Hans gets the ambrosia from Tallulah Trezevant, an antiquities scholar who ran an experiment to see how fast she would get flushed down the alt-right pipeline when expressing an interest in ancient history online. Also! Some of your favorite hidden corners of the internet.

Show Notes:

Become a Never Post member at https://www.neverpo.st/

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
• See what interstitials we need submissions for

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Intro Links

• Canada demands 5% of revenue from Netflix, Spotify, and other streamers -- Ars Technica
• The Spotify conspiracy theories about “Espresso,” explained -- Vox
• MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline -- Variety
• Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site, 25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gone -- LateNighter
• Why Major Labels Are Suing AI Music Startups Udio and Suno For Mass Copyright Infringement -- Forbes
• Succor borne every minute -- FTC

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vxTwitter with Dylan

Find Dylan:

• GitHub
• Twitter
• Ko-fi

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Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline, with Tallulah Trezevant

Find Tallulah:

• The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline -- workingclassicists.com

Other Sources of hope in Antiquity:

• Dan-el Padilla Peralta
• Sarah Debrew
• Ky Merkley

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Favorite Corners of the Internet

• Rad Pro Calculator
• Serebii
• Sporcle Geography Quizzes
• crouton.net
• The Academic Family Tree

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Excerpt of “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

An episode-long staff round-table about music library management with special guest Meghal Janardan.

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

We respond to you!

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LINKS!

• Angelmamii7 in Limerance
• Burnt toast about burnt toast HEADPHONE USERS BEWARE

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Moss’ Email

​​Hi Never Post!

My name is Moss (she/her) and I am trans.

Your recent segment on before and after pics got me thinking about the particular variety of before and afters that are shared online in the trans community. I think that this became a lot more visible to me after being witness to the early chaos of unconstrained trans horniness and wild openness in the early formation of Bluesky last year, which is a whole fascinating bit of platform ecosystem history, especially seeing how much Bluesky has leveled out into something much more "presentable" and twitter-like now that it's operating at scale—but I digress.

On sites like Twitter and Bluesky (and surely elsewhere...) there is an established trend of trans beings (queer beings) sharing before and after pictures of themselves. These are occasioned by trans holidays, like Transgender Day of Visibility, by personal events like transition anniversaries, and by quote chains of such pics (not to mention special occasions of steps taken towards transition). I think it's important to mention these not only as a queer phenomenon, but as something that illuminates how before and afters work for everyone in a variety of situations (as is the case with many things related to transness—it's not [only] about being trans: it's about living more freely). The trans case highlights a few aspects that I want to explore here:

1) The pics, by virtue of being in a trans discourse, would seem to point to something deeper about how life is structured—an identity, a gender—rather than merely an aspect of life—weight, appearance, dwelling, &c.—not of course that identity and gender are not merely aspects of life nor that what seem to be mere aspects are not structuring, but thinking about the weight these are given culturally. What does it mean to see one photo and then another and think, and be encouraged to think by the poster, to see the second as more in line with their gender, as "more woman," "more animal," "more thing," "more man," "more..."? But perhaps above all "MORE THEMSELF." I think we can reasonably be quite ambivalent about this: as your segment points out, the after of the before and after is actually a changing state, and that perhaps it's harmful to over-fix (and that it might fix norms that should be taken as fluid and contextual), but, on the other hand, the fixing function of the before and after photo may be precisely the point for the trans poster—a trans performance to reinforce self. We might further ask, what is visible and what is invisible about transition—does the before and after pic over-reinforce the visible (and how does it then interact with the endless discourse of "passing")? There is also of course a great potential for rupture with norms with queer people—the after often completely rejects standard norms (but then is it rejection or creation...? and so on and so on and so on).

2) The before pic is possibly quite contentious for trans beings, when it is understood to be a pre-transition pic (and not say, both before and after being after the start of transition). This is because there are a ton of frameworks for understanding what one was before transition, and—rightfully—everyone has a different approach: Shall I define myself in opposition to my past? Shall I cut the past off and build myself in the now? Should my transition be understood as an attempt to work with my past, to heal my past, and to continue what is good from it? Is transition not at all a dividing line between me and my past—is it simply an event in a continuous life? Is transition not an event but a continuous process that has been operating since the very moment of my birth? (How many of these are at play at once!?) This makes understanding what is conveyed by the after very difficult. There's a sense in which the before and after flattens all these possibilities into the idea of CONTRAST, of cutting off, of opposition, without precisely exploring what kind of contrast is meant, or whether it is meant at all. There's also a tendency that I've noticed in the commentary (from both the original poster and commenters) on these posts to read them in terms of well-known transition narratives, where before the being was miserable, and after the being is happy and thriving. There's kind of an assertion that this is somehow visible in the picture—that a moment of photography can capture years of pain, years of pleasure—when, of course, life is so complicated, so variegated, even when transition does mark a huge change for the better (and it really does).

3) There is a pretty complicated interaction between the before and after pic and the values of the audience, when the audience is trans (I could also talk about the beings trying to figure out whether they should transition, but I don't want to make this too long). If I come across a before and after pic displaying a change in weight, I might (will) have a complicated emotional reaction, but I myself may not have committed to changing that aspect of myself, and there's a sense that a weight before and after is aimed at a pretty broad swath of the poster's community. But if I come across a before and after transition pic, not only does the pic feel in some sense aimed at me as a member of the trans community, but I in fact have as a trans being already accepted the underlying goals and values of this by committing myself to transitioning—it is something that I myself am trying to accomplish (but of course, not necessarily by the same methods as the being in the pics, and not the same goals). This is not to say that this kind of in-community targeting of before and after pics is unique to the trans community—think for example of before and afters shared in a weight-loss subreddit vs. ones that show up from a friend on your general feed. However, there's a kind of weird way in which being connected to trans people on social media, just as your friends and peers, puts one into a community rather than general discourse.

In any case, I think I have rambled enough—it's a big can of worm spaghetti. Hopefully there's enough wiggle room and questioning here that all beings might find a place to be nurtured from it. Thank you all for your wonderful work on this enjoyable podcast, and thank you for encouraging community input. Keep it up!

Moss

Georgia chats with Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Hilke Schellmann about the job market, and the increasing prevalence of Artificial Intelligence in hiring. Mike talks with comedian, writer and podcast host Jamie Loftus about her show Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), and the curse of becoming an Internet Main Character. Also! Every YouTube video the team watched in the last two weeks.

Show Notes:

Become a Never Post member at https://www.neverpo.st/

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
• See what interstitials we need submissions for

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Intro Links

• Google Cut Back AI Overviews in Search Even Before Its ‘Pizza Glue’ Fiasco –  WIRED
• Ikea is hiring UK workers for its new store in Roblox – Eurogamer
• How 7 Brands Are Engaging Gen Zers with Roblox Experiences – Obsessar
• Nebula Strikes Deal With Spotify to Stream Video Content (EXCLUSIVE) – Variety
• Spotify demonetises all tracks under 1,000 streams – Musictech
• Spotify Announces New Price Increases for Premium Plans – Yahoo Tech
• Spotify raising prices by up to $3 as frustrated subs beg it to “just do music” – Ars Technica
• A New Lawsuit Accuses Spotify of Cheating Songwriters Out of Royalties – Time
• We'll Miss You: Pioneering instant messaging program ICQ is finally shutting down after nearly 30 years – PC Gamer
• Internet Sleuths Finally Find Origin of 'The Backrooms' Creepypasta Image – 404 Media
• Backrooms Research Doc

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Why Is It (Hiring) Like This? with Hilke Schellmann

Find Hilke:

• hilkeschellmann.com
• The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future

Other Sources:

• OpenAI GPT Sorts Resume Names With Racial Bias, Test Shows – Bloomberg
• AI Bias In Recruitment: Ethical Implications And Transparency – Forbes
• AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think – Pew
• AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants – BBC

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Main Characters, with Jamie Loftus

Find Jamie:

• Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
• jamieloftus.xyz
• Instagram
• Twitter

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Others were more economical than I, but I

had my red marble. I had action

figures weighing down the drapes

on tiny threads. That twisted, and got smaller.

One door led

to a more economical room

Perhaps a more economical view. The girl

across the hall was the same girl

Except, “Persuasion” by Joyelle McSweeney

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

Georgia digs deep into the enshittification of dating apps, and pays dearly as a result. Mike talks to Aftermath co-founder Luke Plunkett about recent, massive changes to Google’s Page Rank algorithm, and the risk of reconfiguring entire industries to pander to search traffic. And also: An AI Voice Clone of Mike is set to *maximum chaos*. 

Show Notes:

Become a Never Post member at https://www.neverpo.st/

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
• See what interstitials we need submissions for

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Intro Links

• Belle Delphine earned over $90K selling jars of her bathwater in 2019. PayPal only released her money this week – Katie Notopulous, Business Insider
• Slack has been using data from your chats to train its machine learning models – Will Shanklin, Engadget
• It’s the End of Google Search As We Know It – Lauren Goode, WIRED
• Uber and Lyft agree to deal with state lawmakers on minimum pay rates for drivers – Max Nesterak, Minnesota Reformer
• IGN Entertainment acquires Eurogamer, GI, VG247, Rock Paper Shotgun and more –  Christopher Dring, gameindustry.biz
• IGN buys Eurogamer, VG247, and Rock Paper Shotgun – layoffs have already started – Game Central, Metro.co.uk
• Never Post at XOXO 2024 
• 12 Best Podcasts of 2024 (So Far) – Lauren Passell, Lifehacker 
• Mike on Blocked Party

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Dating Apps (derogatory)

• Dating Apps: The Uncertainty of Marketised Love
• https://www.tiktok.com/@officialbrept/video/7028325781537393925?_t=8lrDLmaKbTa&_r=1
• https://www.tiktok.com/@hannahgraser/video/7117094997484309806?_r=1&_t=8ly4uYqQrPD
• https://www.tiktok.com/@harmonythread/video/7262952885158235435?_t=8lwOVY3O0LP&_r=1
• https://www.tiktok.com/@hannahgraser/video/7125991346489314603?_t=8lwOSDK1l3H&_r=1
• https://www.tiktok.com/@jordanzhang13/video/7036251495951535366?_t=8m88ojNTm3y&_r=1

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Google Scruples

• Find Luke at Aftermath.site
• Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change
• Workers At The Gamurs Group Of Video Game Websites Describe It As ‘Hell’
• The Perfect Webpage: How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms 

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Foot, how you press

 me to keep that

 old contact alive

the repeated daily sentiment

 of pace so

 grim, always that

untrusting silence

untitled, by JH Prynne, from The White Stones

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

The second and final installment of our two part collab with Slate’s ICYMI! Mike talks with mis- and disinformation researcher Joan Donovan about the line between gossip and conspiracy; then ICYMI’s Candice and Rachelle join us to talk about what it feels like swimming in the wide open sea of monocultural event discourse. Also: C-SPAN’s earliest internet memories!

Special thanks to Candice, Rachelle, Se’era, Daisy and the whole ICYMI team! Please listen to them on slate.com and wherever you get your podcasts.

Become a Never Post member at https://www.neverpo.st/

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
• See what interstitials we need submissions for

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Everyone is a Journalish

• Find Joan at her website
• and at publicinterestinter.net

–

Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

vertigo of too many nuances

don’t drown in their rapidity

choose the nuances you love

and settle down with them

Excerpt of #45 - butter colored slacks and rubber rum balls by Wayne Koestenbaum

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

This week, we got TWO episodes coming at you - one today and one on Saturday. Both are a collaboration with the incredible team at the Slate Podcast ICYMI.

In today's episode, the first of our collaboration, Mike guests on ICYMI, where they break down one of 2024’s biggest internet stories and ask: what's the recipe for a rare monocultural event?

It's been more than a month since Kate Middleton announced she'd started preventative chemotherapy treatments following a cancer diagnosis. Which means it's also been just over a month since conspiracy theories about the princess ran rampant across the internet. As an increasingly algorithmic internet silos us further into our own little content niches, all-consuming events like Kate Middleton's disappearance are fewer and far between. So what does it take, in 2024, to capture the internet's attention and create these rare monocultural moments?

ICYMI is produced by Se'era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton.

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To get ahold of the Never Post team:

- Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
- Drop us a voice memo via airtable
- Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
- See what interstitials we need submissions for

Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

Senior producer Hans Buetow investigates the transit vacuum that’ll be left when Uber and Lyft leave the Twin Cities; Mike looks at how the car has become a default setting for vertical, short form video. Also: PLANES, TRAINS… BIKES

Become a member at https://www.neverpo.st/

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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Intro Links

• The House just voted on a potential TikTok ban (again). Now what? – CNN
• Biden signs a bill that could ban TikTok — after the 2024 election – NBC News
• Steve Mnuchin seeks AI partner to rebuild TikTok’s algorithm in takeover bid: sources – NY Post
• Google blocks California news in response to bill that would force tech giant to pay – NPR
• When Facebook bans the news – Matt Pearce
• Nvidia drops 10% as investors see risk in Big Tech shares – FT
• Super Micro And Nvidia Stock Woes Could Mean Trouble For Generative AI – Forbes
• AuthorJMac Tweet
• Mike on The Eurowhat Podcast
• If You Love Podcasts, Dump Spotify – Alex Sujong Laughlin, Defector

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Twin Cities Transit Vacuum

• Minnesota Reformer Uber Archives
• Max Nesterak is on Twitter 

–

The American Car 

• Garlic Naan And Butter Chicken Fountain?! – Tiktok
• David After Dentist – YouTube
• Taco Reacts – Tiktok
• The American Room – Paul Ford, Medium
• It is NOT My day – Tiktok
• forget a rage room, ima just rent out my car so y’all can scream in it – Evelyn, Tiktok
• Shanin Blake – Tiktok
• Dear single parents ~ when I was 18 I got pregnant with my daughter and her dad went to prison right after she was born, so I was on my own. – Shanin Blake, Instagram
• This is our home her name is Nancy 🚐 – Shanin Blake, Instagram
• Good morning! I love living in a mom van!!! – Shanin Blake, Instagram

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

To understand what was going on it is perhaps necessary to have participated in the freeway experience, which is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident.

Except from The Bureaucrats, by Joan Didion

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

😷

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☎️ Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
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Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta. 

It’s easier to read the mind of a fox than to guess   

what a man’s about to say when he returns   

from the woods         head full of roots         veins   

more like branches         shoes in one hand         feet   

blistered         and none of this necessarily   

an indication of how the feet feel         what miles   

uphill and back have done to the soles   

and to the small bones that propel a man

Excerpt of Rest Before You Sleep

By Dionisio D. Martínez

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.

We respond to your comments!
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🌐 Leave a comment at neverpo.st

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Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.

Contributing Producer Marie Kilaru discusses the emotional impacts of making and seeing Before and After posts; Charlie Harding of Switched on Pop joins Jason to talk about what pop-musical acts have sounded like the internet. Also: Georgia reads Franny Choi’s “Unrequited Lovesong for the Panopticon”

-
Become a member at https://www.neverpo.st/

Join us on Twitch, Friday, April 12th @ 2pm ET to chat about audio production!

–

• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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Intro Links

• Why a near-miss cyberattack put US officials and the tech industry on edge – Reuters
• When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet’s future – Kansas Reflector
• We can slay giants – Handbasket
• FCC to vote to restore net neutrality rules, reversing Trump – Reuters
• LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform – Techcrunch
• Mike’s Twitch
• Mike on the Alarmist!

–

Before and After Photos

• Find Marie at her website and on X.
• Mark Gaetano is on IG and YT

Special thanks to Hannah Meacock-Ross for editorial support

–

What (Pop Music) Does the Internet Sound Like?

• You should listen to Switched on Pop generally, but also here’s the interview they did with 100 gecs.

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Unrequited Love Song for the Panopticon was used with permission 

–

Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our contributing producer this episode is Marie Kilaru. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

After the accident we had

the phrase after the accident.

Also this: before the accident.

We had a drawer marked

before and after, and after

and before happenings

we'd add atrocities and

incidents and the wild

asters someone before

and after keeps leaving.

After By Andrea Cohen

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.