Ten Thousand Posts

This week, we take a look at Quinn Shepherd's recently-released social media black comedy, Not Okay. The film tells the tale of a young journalist who finds social media success after she uses photoshop to claim to have been present at a terrorist attack, and the travails of being a young woman thrust into massive mainstream popularity, and her attempts at leveraging this position for personal gain while trying to hide that the whole thing is a fabrication. 

It stars a lot of social media influencers you will be familiar with if you're about a decade and a half younger than any of us, and appears to have the moral: Not everyone's cut out to be an influencer. Cool!

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This show is supported by Patreon. Sign up for as little as $5 a month to gain access to a new bonus episode every week, and our entire backlog of bonus episodes! Thats https://www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast

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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_onEarth).

This is a Preview of a bonus episode. Listen to the entire episode on Patreon at: www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast.----more----Ed (@bigblackjacobin) returns to the pod this week to discuss his recent article about a new TV show which aims to make light entertainment out of footage captured on Amazon Ring Cameras, and what developments like this suggest about Amazon's ambitions as the leader in surveillance tech, and how neighbourhoods have changed as a result of its invasive cameras being part and parcel of existing in society. Plus, we talk about "WeR8", a new social media platform that is using Rio Ferdinand to promote itself as an anti-hate social media network, that apparently believes the revolution will occur through watching ads. Sure, it might not make sense, but its got a bunch of money behind it, which, presumably, is being used to uh, fund its "iconic merchandise".You can read Ed's article here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k8x49/ring-nation-is-amazons-reality-show-for-our-surveillance-dystopia

This week, Phoebe is joined by Michael Hing (@hingers), a co-host of the excelled Free To A Good Home podcast. You can listen to their show, here: http://freetoagoodhomepodcast.com/

This is a preview of a bonus episode. Listen to the entire episode on: www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast.----more----

Phoebe and Hussein watch the new Channel 4 mini-series, "The Undeclared War",  which speculates on a near future in which the UK faces a severe cyber attack which "shuts down the Internet" and forces the country to face the reality of cyber warfare. The gang talks about what it gets right and what gets lost in clunky, strange dialogue. We also talk about the way the show frames mental health (bad!) it's understanding of how people engage with the internet (also bad!) and how it deals with the issue of Muslims working in the intelligence services (you've guessed it, not great!)

This week we're joined by author and journalist Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist, Transmission, and Gods Without Men, to discuss his latest novel, 'Red Pill'. 

The novel is an exploration of radicalisation, online culture, the alt-right, sanity, and history. A writer signs on for a three-month retreat in Berlin and finds himself extremely micro-managed, finding solace in watching a police show called Blue Lives. I'm underselling the novel here but I truly cannot recommend it enough.But first, we take a look at an essay written by Hari for the NYRB that explores the same themes.

And even earlier still, we watch a tiktok of a woman meeting some nice happy men with snakes.You can find Hari at https://twitter.com/harikunzrufind the essay we discuss at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamergate-lulz/and find his novels anywhere books are sold.

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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_onEarth).

This is a preview of a bonus episode. Listen to the entire episode at: www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast, where you can also listen to a bunch of other great episodes for as little as $5 a month.--------

This week, we take a look at the final two candidates for Leader of the Conservative Party, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. In many ways this can be seen as a showdown between two extremely distinct posting schools, and we can learn a great deal by observing how these two relate to Online.From Liz's suggestion to create a second internet for kids, to Rishi's increasingly desperate and poorly-thought-out pledges to close Mandarin language schools, this is one for the ages.

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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_onEarth).

This week we are joined by Kyle Chaka, contributor to the New York Times and co-founder of Dirt, a newsletter about digital culture, to discuss how the algorithm on social media sites invisibly shapes the language, content, and even posting styles most prevalent. We use the example of Instagram's current insane attempt to become Tiktok 2 by pushing hard for a more video-based content economy, and how this is affecting the average user.We also discuss Kyle's excellent article about 'Algorithmic Anxiety', the constant looming terror that one day the algorithm could just simply change, destroying an up-and-coming influencer's career unless they make drastic changes to their content to optimise it to an ever-shifting and never-explained standard. It's a great chat that actually ends on a hopeful note!Kyle can be found at https://twitter.com/chaykak

Dirt can be found at https://twitter.com/dirtxyz

and the article discussed in this episode can be found at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-age-of-algorithmic-anxiety

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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_onEarth).

This is a preview of a bonus episode. Listen to the whole episode at: www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast

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Katie (@k80way) returns to the pod this week to discuss how the Thin Blue Line guys are handling the fall out of the recent Uvalde school shooting, and how some of them seem to be struggling to steal army valour as even their most ardent supporters begin to critique them. We talk about how this is changing the way cops engage with online, and whether police will be encouraged to post less and ignore the backlash. We also talk about Katie's recent article, in which she spends some time on BeReal, a new social media app that aims to be the 'anti-instagram', while also being funded by the same VC funds that prop up Facebook.--------Read Katie's article, here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/aked58/bereal-is-the-only-good-social-media-app

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Subscribe to Katie's newsletter, here: https://acap.substack.com/

This week, we take a retrospective look at the movie Enemy of the State, a Will Smith / Gene Hackman vehicle about the dangers of government surveillance, as the entire force of the NSA is brought to bear against a single man for being tangentially involved in an embarrassing incident for a politician. 

This episode does not feature a plot summary, this is a long conversation about a movie that has an extremely large amount to say.

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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_onEarth).

This is a preview of a bonus episode. Listen to the entire episode at: www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast, where you can also listen to a bunch of other great episodes for as little as $5 a month.--------

We're joined this week by returning champion Magda Taylor, a writer whose work you'll probably be familiar with through MEL magazine.Magda talks to us about the "Female Dating Strategy" subreddit,  which, while having been called 'RedPill for Women' by some outlets, represents an understandable cynicism of dating apps and algorithmic romance, and in turn, has spurned dozens of TikTok trends and phenomena, repackaging its 'central pillars' into shareable content that, uh, tends to really only apply to good looking people. Magda talks to us about one of these sub-phenomena, 'Sirenmaxxing', whether its actually a thing, and what it suggests about the way we think about online dating today.

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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_OnEarth).