Anon and I

Episode five takes a new format: rather than interview an “anon”, I interview a man who usually writes under his own name, anonymously.

In this conversation, an anonymous Hong Konger talks about about their city, their nation, and their search for identity. Listen to find out what makes Hong Kong distinctive; how nationalism awakens in the human heart; the difference between mainlanders and Hongkongers; about linguistic beautification; and how to insult a mainlander in Cantonese

Almost everyone I asked for feedback told me that there should be intro/outro music: so enjoy some public domain Tchaikovsky.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglology.substack.com

In the fourth episode of “Anon and I”, I speak to Iraqi Zoomer “Zoso”. We discuss youth culture in Iraq; the national economy; whether Iraqis are nostalgic for Saddam Hussein, and how they see themselves; gender politics, conspiracy theories and the bloody death of a psychiatrist; Kurdistan in the Western imagination and reality; the Iraqi space programme; America’s last advantage in geopolitics; whether anyone does anything other than watch TikTok; what it is like to be a schoolboy in Baghdad; Zoso’s dramatic involvement in anti-government protests; and how it feels to shoot and be shot at.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglology.substack.com

In episode three, I am joined by Arctotherium, who gives a dissident history of immigration to the United States.

Listen to learn who Americans thought of as “American”; why Americans tolerate Trump’s cryptoscams; the potential and problems of Farage’s Reform Party.

You can read more of Arctotherium’s work here

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglology.substack.com

In the second episode of “Anon and I”, I am joined by Concrete Horizon to recap the entire history of the World Wide Web in under one hour.

Listen to find out why forums died—what a WebRing is—how not to get doxxed—who is behind the worst website on the internet.

To correct my guest on one small point, an archive of the BBS system does exist and can be found at www.textfiles.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglology.substack.com

This is episode one of a podcast series I hope to run under the provisional title “Anon and I”. I will be interviewing different anonymous posters, mostly from Twitter.

Please excuse any production issues in these early episodes while I work out how to actually record and edit a podcast.

Mr S.T.A.R. is an anonymous China scholar who can be found on Substack here, and on Twitter here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglology.substack.com