Never Post

Mike chats with EX Research about their new report which goes deep on Roblox, the massively multiplayer online game played by HALF of all American teenagers. Georgia takes a look at Love Island UK – as many people have over the last few weeks – and asks why so much of that looking is preoccupied with plastic surgery. Also: the sound of touching grass.

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Intro Links

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Once Day, We’ll All Be In There

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Love Island Face

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:

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Intro Links

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vxTwitter with Dylan

Find Dylan:

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Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline, with Tallulah Trezevant

Find Tallulah:

Other Sources of hope in Antiquity:

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Favorite Corners of the Internet

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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 poe

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!

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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

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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Intro Links

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

Find Hilke:

Other Sources:

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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Intro Links

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Dating Apps (derogatory)

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.

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Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail

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Everyone is a Journalish

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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. 

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 result 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

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Intro Links

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Twin Cities Transit Vacuum

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The American Car 

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❤️‍🔥 Become a member at https://neverpo.st
☎️ Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
🗣️ Drop us a voice note via airtable
📧 Email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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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.