Mailbag #4
Friends, hello, and welcome to the 4th Never Post Mailbag, where we respond to your comments, voice mails, voice memos, email, psychic messages, sky writings, telegraphs, telegrams, spectrograms, spectrographs, singing telegrams, smoke signal, semaphore, and Morse code.
Hans Buetow:It's not
Hans Buetow:like an MGMT song.
Mike Rugnetta:Weep. Weep. Weep. I've
Mike Rugnetta:just been working on my MGMT impression in the off time. I'm Mike Rugnetta, the show's host, joining me today in order of how recently I assume they have had a haircut. Most recent first are Hans, Never Post senior producer Buto.
Hans Buetow:I bet I bet you're correct. I bet it's me.
Mike Rugnetta:Jason Never Post executive producer, Oberholzer. It's been 1 week. Georgia Never Post producer Hampton.
Georgia Hampton:Honestly, very solid guest.
Mike Rugnetta:And special guest, Meg Old friend of Never Post, Jannardin.
Meghal Janardan:Hello. It's literally been a year since I got a haircut. Woah.
Georgia Hampton:I'm getting
Meghal Janardan:one tomorrow.
Georgia Hampton:Oh my god. Hey.
Jason Oberholtzer:Under the wire.
Meghal Janardan:That was rude, but very accurate.
Mike Rugnetta:Did I nail it? Did I did I do it? Yes.
Hans Buetow:Where are you in this, Mike?
Mike Rugnetta:I, hold on. Let me touch my head and find out. It's probably been about 3 weeks.
Jason Oberholtzer:So listeners, when did you last cut your hair? This is what we wanna hear.
Hans Buetow:We wanna hear from you.
Mike Rugnetta:So, yeah. Let's get started. We're gonna do things a little bit out of show chronology, since we only have Megal for a moment. And a bunch of you, wrote in, called in, sent us, voice memos about our sound files of summer episode, which, Miggle was the inspiration for. So we wanna get through those.
Mike Rugnetta:As a reminder, for this discussion, we talked broadly and at length about, music file library management, playlists, what playlists are for, the best way to make them, music streaming services, and also like how one even goes about finding and maintaining a music library in the age of the streamers. The age of Spotify, Apple Music, etcetera, etcetera. And on that note, to get us started, Ben Silver sent us a voice mail and wonders about the shame that you maybe do or do not feel in using a music streaming service.
Ben Silver:Have any of you ever felt Spotify as a source of peer pressure, guilt or shame? Because I reluctantly use Apple Music. I literally don't use Spotify at all, and I am constantly reminded of that by society, and I feel like shamed for it intentionally or not. Every time that an artist I like is going to release new music, they offer a pre save option. The Apple Music link is always missing, or it's broken, or at the very least, it appears way later, and I don't remember.
Ben Silver:That's the point of a pre save is that I don't have to remember to come back to it. And dating apps like Tinder integrate your most listened to data pretty much from Spotify only. I can't think of 1, and I've been on many of them that don't use Spotify. They only show songs in Spotify's library. I'm pretty sure that's also the same with Instagram.
Ben Silver:If you wanted to share a story, it is all based on Spotify. And, you know, music is a is a massive part of my life, and it feels like that's a pretty important thing to know on a dating profile, but you would have no idea based on looking at my profile. I have no top artist in Spotify. And then every few months, there's, like, some cool data fad, like a visualization of your top artists for the year every New Year's, or a pictorial graph of the genres that you listen to, or these like huge viral trends that I am unable to participate in. And we live in a world where everyone knows that Spotify is evil, and I still feel this massive combination of shame and missing out because of it.
Mike Rugnetta:I'm gonna free Ben. Ben, Spotify sucks and RAPT is stupid. You're free. Don't feel bad. I do not use Spotify.
Mike Rugnetta:Am I the only one here that doesn't use Spotify?
Meghal Janardan:I also barely I mean, I have it.
Mike Rugnetta:You haven't.
Meghal Janardan:But I definitely don't really use it, like, at all.
Mike Rugnetta:I do most of my listening through Bandcamp, but I do have an Apple Music subscription. And I do not feel I don't feel left out and I don't feel any shame. I think I maybe even feel just a small amount of moral superiority not using
Georgia Hampton:Spotify. There it is.
Hans Buetow:I think shame is a really interesting word to use for this. Ben, good job on nailing, like, shame coupled with FOMO. There's a there's a good Venn diagram for those two feelings. And I think Spotify really embodies that. I think the third part of that Venn diagram is loathing.
Hans Buetow:Not self loathing, but loathing. And then using, like, Spotify rests in the middle of those 3. And so that's the other feeling that I would add in. But the shame and the FOMO is very externally driven. None of that in there.
Hans Buetow:I hear you being like, it's a great product that adds value to my life. In fact, I hear the opposite, and I hear you saying it's in all these other places and I feel like everyone else is using it, which I feel like is very true that, I remember a work day in December, like, 3 years ago, Spotify wrapped, dropped, and work stopped. That's what of a meeting. Everyone was like, nope. I'm done.
Hans Buetow:I can't.
Mike Rugnetta:And GMT was my top artist this year. We gotta talk about it.
Hans Buetow:And I was like, oh. Oh. Oh. So I kinda get it.
Georgia Hampton:I think it's really interesting that they mention dating apps because this kind of relationship of FOMO and shame and obligation to participate is like the exact conversation that happens around using dating apps. And Tinder, yeah, is just like, do you wanna connect your Spotify? Assuming that's just, you know, of course, you have Spotify, this presumption of
Hans Buetow:it.
Meghal Janardan:As someone who doesn't really use Spotify but also doesn't really listen to music, I would say that I feel some sort of shame for not using Spotify. But I think the if I were to like dissect my shame, more of the shame is around not really listening to music anymore. And it's just I get reminded of that because of Spotify.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. You feel like you should be a better music consumer regardless of the technology that you use to do that or
Jason Oberholtzer:not do it.
Meghal Janardan:Yeah. I'm like I'm like, oh, rap is coming out again. Oh, wow. I can't name a single new artist that I listen to because I, like, don't consume it.
Hans Buetow:Well, I'm in a channel my grandmother in response to Ben, an echo Mike. My grandmother who used to say all the time, don't should on yourself and don't let anyone else should on you either. Nice.
Jason Oberholtzer:Hell, yeah. I love that. Grandma.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. So next, we got, 3 voice memos and voice mail, and one email that I think are all kind of about the same thing. They're all about the, like, fundamental materiality of sound files, and how that contributes to our, like, enjoyment or maybe like love of them. And then an additional voice mail that I think kind of exists in response to those. So this is 5 people that have all, I think, independently ended up on the same wavelength.
Mike Rugnetta:So we're just gonna go through them 1 by 1. The first one is from Anthony.
Anthony:I remember downloading from the Limes Wires and the Napsters of the world and getting m p threes that were perfectly fine, but I would say somewhere along the line where the optical drive burned them, there was a skip or some kind of I just felt really endeared to them. My friend had a copy of balaclava by the Arctic Monkeys that skipped in a really interesting and unique way. It kind of almost, like, stuttered like a like a DJ was mixing it. And I had a copy of of Point of Extinction by Motion City Soundtrack that just completely cut out, like, half a second, but it was in a very musical way. I listened to those songs now on Spotify, and I long for the messed up versions.
Anthony:I I the the imperfected, unique ones, I really would would rather be listening to. So I'm wondering if this is more of a wider phenomenon, or maybe it's just me that likes weird messed up stuff.
Mike Rugnetta:As if in answer, Callum Fewster writes in an email, I got to thinking about a trip I took to Vietnam as a young teenager. I was obsessed with music and lost my mind when we came across a shop selling what I presumed to be 100 of thousands of copied albums. I purchased about a 100 albums. Some of these files had some minor corruptions. A couple of rhythmic clicks between some, but crucially not all songs.
Mike Rugnetta:Maybe a jump forward by a second halfway through on some songs. Things like that. I accept that my copy of Akira, meaning the comic book is a little folded up in the corner after I sat on it without looking or that my vinyl copy of that one Sufjan Stevens record has a locked groove that I need to get up and lift the tone arm over whenever I get to that part. We expect our physical media objects to have quirks of ownership. There was a very short amount of time where our digital media had these same quirks.
Mike Rugnetta:Maybe that copy of Indiana Jones that's sitting on your computer just has the Hindi subtitles burned in and you learned to live with it. Kind of grow to love it. It's yours. Although, depending upon how you've got it, it could also be someone else's. It's just not everyone else's.
Mike Rugnetta:Digital files are funny like that. The age of streaming has somewhat singularized the files of digital media and I find that to be a little sad. I fucking love this. Yeah. I love this.
Hans Buetow:2nd.
Mike Rugnetta:As stated, there are 3 more people we wanna get to, but I just wanna emphasize that like, laying bare the kind of fundamental material nature of files considered copyable to infinity is just so beautiful. I love this so much. Have any of you experienced this?
Meghal Janardan:I had like I remember I would, you know, get all my back, like, listen to music. I would import, you know, all my CDs on my laptop and import them into my Apple Music library. Forgot what song it was, but there was one track that would like 1 minute in, it would skip or stop. But in my, you know, craziness of listening to things in order, it was also like a rhythm in my head that when I got to that track, it would pause or something. And it would just take me back to it was like muscle memory to me when I got to that track.
Meghal Janardan:And that just doesn't happen anymore. And it just felt like my thing. And when I would listen to that song elsewhere, it wouldn't happen. And I was like, oh, yeah. I forgot that that's like an technically an error Yeah.
Meghal Janardan:And not how it's supposed to be. But it's nice. It felt like, okay. This is my CDs. Yours.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:I had a very, I think, thematically appropriate. I had a Boards of Canada EP that imported incorrectly, into my music library and had all these weird warbles in it. Just funny, because like, if you know Boards of Canada, they're already very warbly. Yeah. And, I don't think I ever listened to the MP 3, to the actual CD.
Mike Rugnetta:I think I bought like, I bought it and then imported it and only listened to the MP threes. And so it took me hearing it years later somewhere else to be like, wait. Hold on. This sounds wrong.
Jason Oberholtzer:Reminds me at the, this is a physical media story. But at the end of one very long evening, it was falling asleep on the couch to it. And the side of the record finished, and the needle skipped up onto the paper and just continued to play dragging across the paper for
Mike Rugnetta:30 minutes. Record sounds like. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer:For literally 30 minutes while I lay there being, like, holy shit. What a sick fucking choice. I can't believe he's just sticking with this.
Hans Buetow:So
Mike Rugnetta:Love it. Yeah. Okay. Onto the next. This is Joshua on losing his music and movie library.
Joshua:I was, like you guys, very diligent in the past, curating and all the metadata for my library and making sure everything was good. I even started a project with the star rating, to rank every single song in my library, but then I gave up on that. And and because I had started it, but it couldn't be completed, I decided I had to erase it. It would it wasn't it was either everything or nothing. So I wasn't I wasn't as diligent.
Joshua:But anyway, the point I was wanting to share is that in 2016, I had, something that happens to everybody at some point. It's just a matter of when. Catastrophic hard drive failure. And I lost everything. My whole Itunes library and gigabytes and gigabytes of films that I'd curated and and, yeah, all gone.
Joshua:All. And, basically, it killed my my passion for for music and film. And I haven't really been able to I haven't listened to music in the same way ever since.
Meghal Janardan:I put
Joshua:the radio on sometimes if I'm driving or somebody else chooses a song if whatever, but I haven't actively listened to music pretty much since then. And now I've just had an audio diet of podcasts.
Jason Oberholtzer:Oh my gosh. Oh my god. Wow. It got worse somehow.
Joshua:Yeah. 8 years. Is
Meghal Janardan:this about me? Is this play about me?
Hans Buetow:It's kind of
Joshua:kind of depressing. And I tried to use Apple Music. I have this subscription, but it's just it's just work. It's work to to refind everything that I lost and and rebuild my library even in the subscription form. It's just so overwhelming, and and I feel like without the nucleus of what what I had to start my collection, It's just too much.
Joshua:I I can't face it. Anyway, it was somewhat reassuring to hear that other people also struggle with something similar, and maybe I can dedicate some time now to rebuilding this.
Georgia Hampton:I'm crying?
Hans Buetow:I'm good. Wow. Wow.
Meghal Janardan:So it's I was thinking about how this person, it was a hard drive crash. Right?
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. And I
Meghal Janardan:was like, you know what? Maybe what also contributed to me, like basically stopping listening to music, is that when I went to college, I got a new laptop. And that's also around the time that Spotify came out. So initially, I had my like music library with me, but throughout college, it just became so overwhelming to transfer and share along with just trying to like, my world just grew so much, and there's so much more data. It was so overwhelming, but I think about how, like, I technically still have access to my library.
Meghal Janardan:Like, I can find it, but even that, even though I have it, it's still so overwhelming to kind of start again. And I still feel like I have to fill the gap of those, like, what, 12 to 14 years of music listening that I've missed. But I think for me, I try and when I do say I find something that I do enjoy and that I like, and then I wanna save it, I'm like, okay, it's just a small start. I need to let go of having this curated library and just focus on, Hey, I like this thing. And I think that allows me to get excited about things again versus trying to curate my musical image to the world, and I can just focus on what I like.
Meghal Janardan:But there's a lot of pressure now to have this, and it doesn't feel it feels like it's beyond just something you have for your self now. And there's like other bigger pressures to have like your own music library. So it's almost like kind of making it small again and making it your own again.
Hans Buetow:I would like to name I'm not a psychotherapist or any sort of qualified individual,
Mike Rugnetta:but you're the closest that we have on staff.
Georgia Hampton:True.
Hans Buetow:I really feel like this is a great example of people underestimating an emotion because
Hans Buetow:it feels like
Hans Buetow:the source of it shouldn't be that dramatic. This is grief in a lot of ways. And I think sometimes it can be really hard to assimilate that sense, and it can be really hard to understand how it functions inside of you when you feel like, oh, but it's just a music library.
Mike Rugnetta:Can we now listen to Kat and her voicemail on playlist order?
Kat:Thinking about platforms and playlists and curation. I've been I spent several years using Google Play Music, because I had a YouTube subscription, and that came for free. And my favorite feature was the liked music auto playlist. And anytime you liked a song, it just stuck it on that playlist, and it always added the most recent song to the top. So playing it through would travel you back in time, and I would always be able to think back to where I was because the songs played in the same order every time.
Kat:And it almost became the way that sometimes when you're listening to Girl Talk, you listen to Girl Talk too much, and you listen to the original song, and you're surprised when the drop doesn't hit. I just became really used to the order of the music, and I loved it. And I loved being able to experience time through this playlist. So in 2020, Google decides they're gonna send Play Music to the Google Google graveyard, but they offer a way to transfer your data. And so I do it, and it's a one time thing.
Kat:Once you've transferred it, you can't go back to play music. And it worked. Everything transferred. But I went to play the liked playlist, and it was in a different order. They had retained the songs on the playlist, but not the order in which they had been added.
Kat:And I am still sad about that
Joshua:to
Jason Oberholtzer:this day.
Mike Rugnetta:I found yes.
Hans Buetow:Yes. And part of it, I think, is, like, we perform grief in a very particular way. Like, we we're, like, oh, but my grief over my the order of songs in my playlist, like, it's hard to use the same word for that as, like, my dog died, Also, like, my mom died is also, like, I may would one day die. Like, those three things feel like they shouldn't use the same word, but they are in a lot of ways accessing the same emotional space. And I think that it's, I think we should normalize being able to say that and not judge each other for saying that.
Hans Buetow:It's not an Olympics of who has the most tragic story and, like, it's okay to feel it's okay to feel really bummed about these things. And, I really appreciate people sharing this because, like, I deeply I had a lot of feelings listening to both of those. I really feel it.
Jason Oberholtzer:It's also it also, like, reminds you that, for many people, music is one of the most important things in their life, and we, like, trivialize it because we have commodified it so much. Yeah. Let me forget it. Like, it just is. For real.
Meghal Janardan:When Hans, you brought up how it's kind of like grief. And I'm like, yeah. You know, that makes sense. Because even when I look back on, like, the time that I listened to music, it's like almost grieving that version of myself where I felt really connected to something that I no longer have that connection to. And, yes, I can form a new connection, but it's not the same.
Meghal Janardan:But at the same time, it's like, yes, time will be the one of the constants that keeps going and things will constantly change. But it very much is grief and that's why it's maybe then painful for me to tap back into.
Hans Buetow:Yeah. And please don't at me because I'm not saying that the grief of losing your playlist order is worse or better than any other type of grief.
Mike Rugnetta:Just don't just don't exist. Just leave him alone.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. He
Mike Rugnetta:doesn't he doesn't need it. He doesn't deserve it.
Meghal Janardan:He's busy getting a haircut.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Always.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. So I wanna I wanna sort of try to pull these these, 4 ideas together and then have, Craig, sort of respond to my response. I think that one of the things that we're hearing across these is that it's like one of the things that we like about sound files and our and our libraries. Like when we do enjoy those things, we enjoy that they have marks of a human hand or that they exist in some way that exemplifies labor. That's like we've worked on them.
Mike Rugnetta:Someone has worked on them. Work has been done on them, that they have in some way been like almost worried like a stone. You know, like they've sort of been like rubbed smooth a little bit through just constant interaction and that there are situations in which those marks are like we have access to them. We have, we are closer to being able to interact with or reproduce or feel the kind of aura that they impart and there are certain situations where we are actually much much further away than it feels like we are. This is something that Craig talks about.
Craig:First of all, hashtag I'm with Georgia. If she's a Chipotle, I'm a Chipotle.
Mike Rugnetta:Like, though
Craig:you might get right about Spotify's role in play with becoming a dominant organizational structure, there must have been some wave of it earlier because I remember on my first Ipod, scroll wheel and everything, constantly building playlists out of my library, not only as an alternative to the dozens of burn CDs and mixtapes I made previously, but also one particular use case not addressed in the episode, that being a sort of audio storyboarding, using the contents of several songs to assemble the scaffolding and vibe of a fiction that I intended to write. Several writers I know say that they still do this to this day, and so while it is organizational and it tend to be played in order, it's more for the organization of thoughts than of music. Secondly, I was extremely compelled by Mike's observation that music on streaming feels further away. I think this is due mainly to 2 factors. 1st, despite streaming services doing everything to try and make you not notice this, it's plain to most that it's never really your library.
Craig:The app is a window, not a vault. Artists and publishers can and do remove songs without a moment's notice. Contrast this with the fact that local files are on my person in a way that Spotify is not. There's a required connection, an account, a payment, and all these layers get in the way when compared to the immediacy of a local file. Secondly, there's just this total lack of weight to a streaming track.
Craig:If I want to remove an MP 3 from my library, it is a commitment. I am destroying this file, and I will have to do some minimal labor should I wish to reacquire it in the future. On Spotify, it's completely commitmentless to add or remove songs from my library.
Mike Rugnetta:The app is a window, not a vault. And I think that there are ways in which we interact with these things thinking that we are interacting with a vault of our sound files, but we are in fact interacting with we're wearing rubber gloves through the porthole in the window touching things that are passing by on a conveyor belt that are never really ours.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. Good. Mine.
Hans Buetow:I touched it.
Georgia Hampton:I just first of all, Craig.
Mike Rugnetta:From one Chipotle to another.
Georgia Hampton:From one Chipotle to another. I swear my fealty to you. But I I do wanna to really take a second to think about this idea of storyboarding. I think that's such a beautiful way of of considering what I had been talking about because it's true. I have playlists, collaborative playlist with friends that are storyboarding tone setting playlists.
Georgia Hampton:Like, not even just, you know, vibes necessarily, but, like, I had a friend, she and I were gonna write a graphic novel together, and we made a playlist for it Mhmm. Because it was helpful.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. I know a fair number of people who actually make playlists to distinguish projects when they're writing, especially if they're working on multiple projects at the same time. We got an email from Alex about TTRPG playlist, which is something that I have done when I have run online. So I guess not tabletop, strictly speaking, but online role playing games where I have different playlists for different sections of the city as it were. And Alex also mentions authors using it in that way.
Jason Oberholtzer:So I guess I do find that helpful, but I don't think of that as music. I I don't know. I think of that as Oh. Like, a different thing. I think of that as scoring.
Jason Oberholtzer:The same way that and this is maybe the subject for something else. I don't think of podcast music necessarily as music Yeah. Until you, like, accidentally shift the focus on it for long enough where it becomes music again, which, you know, spoiler is something we occasionally try to do.
Meghal Janardan:I think the idea that Spotify is more of a window and not a vault is exactly why it's just a different type of consumption. It it doesn't like, I don't feel like I'm purchasing a new shirt to wear, like a new song to listen to. It feels like a rental. Maybe that's why it feels so different, and I don't really get to kind of hold and feel and change what I'm listening to and, like, move it around the same way and organize it. I do think it's, like, nice that something is made more available to other people.
Meghal Janardan:And there's like that question about access, but it's hard to make it feel personal. Like even just how we talked about that there's a lot of shame there can be shame in if you've post a Spotify wrapped or not. Or if you lose your files, you can, like, grieve what you've lost.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. I think one of the main things I'm gonna take away from this conversation is this understanding that we are now attaching grief and shame to the consumption of music, and I think it is I feel very comfortable squarely blaming the technology for having done this to us.
Mike Rugnetta:On that note, we are gonna pause for a break and we are going to say aurovoir to Meggel. Magel, thank you for joining us. Thank you for inspiring the original subtitles of summer segment, and then coming back.
Georgia Hampton:A rivetoci. To Magel.
Meghal Janardan:Thank you. I really wanna end on bum bum bum and just have MGMT be my walkout music.
Georgia Hampton:Okay. Great. Well, let's
Mike Rugnetta:go ahead and get the rights for that.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. It's you.
Mike Rugnetta:Maybe it could be us singing him, Jim.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Come on, guys. 123.
Mike Rugnetta:And we are back sadly, Sansmiegel, but we'll soldier on, to discuss some of the things that you all had to say about other episodes and segments. In those episodes, we return the question that Cooper Mulderry sent in. Hi, everyone. I've been enjoying the podcast very much and I have a question during your extended talk about email device importance. Mike used the term Stady 180.
Mike Rugnetta:What is that? After this when this came out, someone in the Discord, so I make like a tabletop role playing podcast called Fun City. And in the Discord for that, someone posted, the text, like a quote of what I had said. And they were like, tell me you're from Massachusetts without telling me you're from Massachusetts. And I was like, no way is this a regional term.
Mike Rugnetta:And I went and Googled it. And there are no Google search results for stadium 180. This is this would appear appear to be something that nobody says except for pre Internet mass holes. A stadium 180 is, I believe in normal parlance called a j turn or a hand brake turn. It is a way for you to, turn a car, for you to reverse a car's direction at speed using the hand brake.
Mike Rugnetta:So it's basically a driving maneuver. Mhmm.
Georgia Hampton:Wow. I think this is a regional. I I had never heard that before.
Mike Rugnetta:There were a couple other names for it. Let me hear. Let me just get it up really quick.
Jason Oberholtzer:No. Yeah. Break down the statie in this for me.
Georgia Hampton:I'm guessing state trooper.
Mike Rugnetta:Yes. So where I come from, I imagine this is the case in other states, that you refer to state police officers as staties.
Jason Oberholtzer:I refer to them as sir. Sir.
Mike Rugnetta:I learned, one of the things, you know, they have the cops come in, and like tell you how to be a good citizen when you're in middle school or whatever. And one of the students, when a state trooper came in, they asked the trooper a question and they were like, officer, I have and he went, I'm gonna stop you right there. I'm not an officer. I'm a trooper. Okay.
Mike Rugnetta:And there's a difference. And that's what I that's when I decided that I hated police.
Georgia Hampton:That was the moment. Listen.
Jason Oberholtzer:No, Mike. You hate
Mike Rugnetta:troopers. Okay. J turn is also called a moonshiners turn. Oh. A reverse 180, a reverse flick, filthy, a Rockford turn, a Rockford spin, or simply a Rockford popularized by the 19 seventies TV show, The Rockford Files.
Hans Buetow:The Rockford Files.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. And so yeah. The reason I from what I understand, I would guess, that was called the Stadia 180 is that they were just always on the highway, like, pulling insane nonsense. They still, I feel like, state troopers drive like crazy people. Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta:So, yeah. There's a maneuver associated with them. Next up, we got an email from Fernando Gonzalez who writes in with a question for Georgia about the conversation she had with, Hilke Shelman about the role of AI in hiring practices and how complicated that whole deal is. Fernando writes, I want to ponder a question about AI job recruiters and scanners. I loved the episode, but I have faced bigger issues.
Mike Rugnetta:I'm from Mexico and applied to many outsourced clerical jobs from Global North Companies. Recently, I've noticed that the AI is not only in the application submission process, but also in the first rounds of interviews. It's been dehumanizing to talk to a blank screen and record myself so that an AI can parse through my response and then make an assessment. Sometimes these AI sites are about my English proficiency and a machine decides if I'm a good enough English speaker or not. At times different companies use the same AI, therefore the AI asks me the same questions.
Mike Rugnetta:I can't even reapply with my old results. I'm ready to have robot overlords, but
Hans Buetow:at
Mike Rugnetta:least be paid by them. This in between is weird and dehumanizing.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. This is a part of the conversation that really made me wanna, like, take a shower afterwards because it just yucks me out so bad. Hilke talked to me quite a bit actually about this specific phenomenon of AI being used in early interviewing processes. And this is often an issue with certain kinds of work. If you are applying for certain tech jobs, if you're applying for jobs that have a lot of turnover, like something like a large scale retail job or working at like a fast food chain, lots of different industries use these models.
Georgia Hampton:And what Fernando is saying here about how dehumanizing it is, that was basically the overarching feeling that it kinda doesn't matter that, I guess, this is efficient or it's a way of handling many applicants. It's just a horrible experience, and it's very obvious that this is an AI bot. That's just not a perfect that's not a not even perfect. Like, it's not even it sucks. Yes.
Georgia Hampton:It sucks. It's horrible. And you're being judged by this sort of simulacrum of professionalism that
Mike Rugnetta:is completely It's probably also turnkey. Right? Like, it's probably just plugged into the process and not really, like, tuned or No. Or like what there's no yeah. Like you said, very no consideration.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah.
Georgia Hampton:No. There's no human consideration here. There's no real recognition of the fact that this person is a person. And that, I don't know, maybe these tools aren't going to be especially good at that. And basically, what Hylka said is that often they're not.
Georgia Hampton:They're not especially good at this.
Mike Rugnetta:I don't know whether or not this discourse is still happening, but I know, like, over the last couple of years has been all this discourse about like, nobody wants to work anymore and it's so hard to hire people and blah blah blah blah blah. Meanwhile, like every company pulls bullshit like this. Like Yeah. I'll fuck off. Do it.
Mike Rugnetta:Just like, don't be horrible and then maybe people will wanna work.
Georgia Hampton:Yes.
Mike Rugnetta:I'm gonna throw something on the ground. I'm so mad.
Hans Buetow:Our next question comes from David Lee, and this is in response to a segment that I did, a couple episodes back on the alt right pipeline. This was an interview with Tallulah Trezavant who's an antiquities scholar who was looking into how fast she could get her Twitter feed, a brand new Twitter feed, to move from wholesome historical based antiquity content into hard right political content, and spoiler real fast.
Meghal Janardan:Mhmm.
Hans Buetow:Uh-huh. David Lee in response wrote to us and said, hello all the way from Singapore.
Mike Rugnetta:Hello, David. Hello, David. Wonderful.
Hans Buetow:So David says, what I realized during my listen is that between 2021 and 2022, there was an explosion of fan edits of MGMT song, little dark age, which tend to glorify the past with classical imagery of old cities, that it would promote martial imagery shorn of their context, so weapons of war, soldiers marching, etcetera, and generally have a reject modernity, embrace tradition type vibe. What is more surprising is that these videos can run the gamut of topics from western animation to the British empire to Singaporean politics. I have an odd feeling about these videos as though alt right slash fascist elements have co opted synthwave. Do you have any insights on why it might have been so popular during this period of the pandemic, post pandemic world, and why this specific song was used. David, what a good question.
Hans Buetow:And, no, I have no answers for you. This is
Mike Rugnetta:I love it. It's great. Yeah. I have I have theories. The thing about the MGMT song is new to me.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Same. I can't speak to that, but we did do a little bit of digging just before we started talking about this. And there is a from 7 years ago, there's this piece on the Guardian about fash wave, Synth music co opted by the far right. Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta:And I'm just gonna do a quick apple f here for the phrase vaporwave. And it doesn't show up in, that piece. But I feel like vaporwave is a vector to some degree or another because of its association with antiquity. That there is antiquarian iconography that shows up in a lot of the most popular art associated with vaporwave. Even though vaporwave is ostensibly a like almost post cyberpunk pair of video game genre of music.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. And I wonder whether or not that somehow factors in here. That, like, the antiquarian iconography of vaporwave has in some way courted a group of people who were interested in, fascism. Let's just call those people what they are, fascists. Yes.
Mike Rugnetta:And that has led to the existence of something like Fash Synthwave. I don't know. That's a big there's a lot of question marks and a lot of contingencies in there. But that's the first thing that came to mind, while you were reading this, Hans.
Jason Oberholtzer:Maybe this just falls under the category of something my favorite podcast host, Mike Rugnetta, said once. It's, unfortunately, fascists also participate in culture.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Yeah. And maybe,
Jason Oberholtzer:they just like this stuff.
Hans Buetow:I think this fits actually really cleanly into what we were circling in that segment, which is that the the fascism of it doesn't have anything to do with the history of it. Those 2 things are not related. There's iconography, there's gestures, but you actually have to strip away most of the context in order to be able to utilize them in that way. And what you're really doing is you're not signaling to the past, you're signaling to the present that we're all of like mind. And so I think they like, those columns and those Yeah.
Hans Buetow:The statues might as well be any other thing. It could have been, you know, little bunnies or petunias.
Mike Rugnetta:But it's gotta be something that in some way says we should go back to the way it was before, which Synthwave definitely does.
Hans Buetow:That's right.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. You know?
Hans Buetow:That's fair.
Georgia Hampton:It has a very nostalgic sound specifically to itself.
Mike Rugnetta:It's the the easiest position in the world is to say things things should not be different. They should be the same as they always have been. Look at all these things from the past that you liked. It's so funny
Jason Oberholtzer:to me to attach nostalgia to antiquity though. Like Yeah. That that is not an emotion that is in the ballpark of things that register to me when I take in what antiquity means.
Mike Rugnetta:Back with the back with the Praetorian guard was still Right?
Jason Oberholtzer:I mean, I I can I can conjure a sense of wonder, a sense of interest, a sense of scope, sort of, like an existential gawking at the cavernous nature of how much time has proceeded since then, and the distance between me also a human and that also human? Like, all of these things I can connect with it, but none of them read particularly, like, sepia toned.
Mike Rugnetta:I think, Jason, that might be because you are not a fascist.
Jason Oberholtzer:Well, then I can't participate in culture.
Mike Rugnetta:Next, we have two comments that were sent in for the everything old embeds again episode. In that episode there was a segment where I talked with Dylan PDX who maintains the VX suite of software, which allows embeds of tweets amongst other things on places like Discord among other places. And, Eric Trebe or maybe Trebe? Eric, I'm sorry if I'm I'm definitely butchering your last name. Writes in to say that he enjoys, Dylan PDX work so much that he wrote a tool that will automatically fix any URL that is posted, to be, a VX Twitter URL so that the embeds are automatic.
Mike Rugnetta:Taking the work out of the hands of the person doing the posting, and putting it in the hands of the server. And you can check out, Eric's work. We'll put, links in the show notes. I will say just for full disclosure, I have not installed or looked at these things. I assume they are safe.
Mike Rugnetta:Eric, I assume you're a good guy. Bro.
Georgia Hampton:Eric.
Mike Rugnetta:But don't make me a liar, Eric.
Georgia Hampton:Bro. Bro. He's so fucking for real right now.
Jason Oberholtzer:This is what turns me fascist.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. And second, Ben Franco writes in to respond to a point that I made about how, embeds were roughly the age of social media posts. And I should have been more specific, but here we have Ben to be more specific for me. Ben writes, pardon while I push up my glasses and get technically correct, the best kind. Netscape Navigator 2 was when the embed feature snuck in.
Mike Rugnetta:It was wild, wooly, and off spec, showing up along with JavaScript before it had that name. We are talking 1995 to 96
Joshua:here. Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta:Nearly a decade before socials ate the world. And digging around to make sure I wasn't hallucinating this story, I stumbled on a now pay gated article at Wired from 2,008 about the history of embeds, which feels like the most perfect coda to your story that I could imagine.
Jason Oberholtzer:And this is what turns Mike fashion. You corrected me, a man
Mike Rugnetta:on my show.
Georgia Hampton:Hans, it's just you and me now.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. What I had imagined in my brain was, you know, posts. The embeds of posts, and not things like, you know, Flash. Like Flash was an embed. That's technically an embed.
Mike Rugnetta:Right? Yeah.
Hans Buetow:Yep. Yep.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. That's a an applet or whatever that runs within the frame of a website. I'm sure someone else will now write a correction to what I just said. We'll just continue this forever.
Jason Oberholtzer:Oh, no. Are we replicating patterns of the past that we should avoid? The very Internet we sought to move away from.
Mike Rugnetta:And last, but certainly not least, for this Mailbag the 4th, we have Molly's Corner, where my wife sends in a question completely unrelated to the show. Let's find out what Molly has to ask this time.
Molly:Hey. It's Molly. I was just wondering what's the funniest graffiti you've ever seen? Because I just walked by the word doink.
Hans Buetow:I was unprepared for that.
Mike Rugnetta:Doink is good.
Hans Buetow:Two points for delivery too, Molly.
Jason Oberholtzer:Wow. That's good. That's good.
Georgia Hampton:Chicago listeners may be familiar with this. But on 290, which is a freeway, someone has written in gigantic letters, Diva Cup.
Mike Rugnetta:That's pretty good.
Jason Oberholtzer:That's pretty Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Are you sure it's not advertising?
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Honestly, if it is, it's working.
Mike Rugnetta:It's still very funny graffiti. Yeah. It would be hilarious if someone's tag was Diesel. That's what
Hans Buetow:I was just thinking.
Georgia Hampton:Listen. I'll neither confirm nor deny my involvement in this.
Jason Oberholtzer:I once wrote the band's name Korn with the backwards k in a piece of, drying sidewalk in my neighborhood.
Georgia Hampton:Oh, yes.
Jason Oberholtzer:I was 25.
Hans Buetow:And that's how I turned fascist. Oh, no.
Jason Oberholtzer:Sorry. It's a backwards r. Apologies.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Oh, yes. All the corn heads were about to come for you.
Mike Rugnetta:Don't get it twisted.
Jason Oberholtzer:Some of whom are probably named Doink. There's a guy named Doink playing in 13 string bass. It's really a problem with me.
Mike Rugnetta:There's a few around Brooklyn that, like, I don't know if any of them are as good as Doink. And I'm I'm like really sticking to, like, graffiti graffiti.
Hans Buetow:Right.
Mike Rugnetta:Yes. King Baby.
Georgia Hampton:Hell, yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Is one that I see a lot. And King Baby is pretty funny. Blob Dylan.
Georgia Hampton:Okay.
Mike Rugnetta:But like both of these like, both King Baby and Blob Dylan are, like, very simple text. It's like they get a big thick marker and just write the words King Baby, Blob Dylan with like recognizable handwriting, but like not a lot of work. There is one guy that's got ups like everywhere. You could like less so now. I think he's not working as much as he used to be, but it's like these massive multicolored pieces that obviously took a long time.
Mike Rugnetta:Very, very skilled artist, and his tag is doctor Sex.
Georgia Hampton:Hell, yes.
Mike Rugnetta:And I always thought doctor Sex was really funny. That's a good choice.
Georgia Hampton:Professor fuck.
Jason Oberholtzer:I was really like, conversational bathroom graffiti.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Mhmm.
Jason Oberholtzer:That is some of my favorites. Franklin Park down in Franklin Ave in Brooklyn had great conversational bathroom graffiti for a number of years. And they would, I think monthly wipe it all down and start anew. And so you get a fresh conversation just going on in the stall.
Hans Buetow:If you are screaming your answer to this question right now, desperately at us, why don't you scream it in real life? We would love your one word voice mails to tell us your favorite answer to Molly's question in Molly's corner. If you'd rather send us an email, one word, folks. If you wanna put a comment, one word. If you wanna send us a tweet
Mike Rugnetta:or one word. Right? Because king baby is 2 words.
Hans Buetow:Sure.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. Hansel Hansel, allow it.
Hans Buetow:I'll allow it. I'll allow that. But, man, you give me a comma. You give me a period. Even a hello.
Georgia Hampton:No. X.
Hans Buetow:I don't want it.
Georgia Hampton:Do not address us.
Jason Oberholtzer:The last fascist has fallen. No.
Mike Rugnetta:And on that note, this has been never post mailbag number 4. Thank you everybody for joining us. We will be back in the main feed on Wednesday, August 14th with a full episode. And hey, if you happen to be in Portland for xox0, we also are gonna be there.
Jason Oberholtzer:That's us.
Mike Rugnetta:We are doing our first ever live show on Friday, August 23rd as part of the sideshow's segment section portion of xox0. Tickets are already done. So if you're not going, you're not going. But if you are going,
Hans Buetow:say hi.
Mike Rugnetta:Say hi. Okay. Bye. Bye.
Hans Buetow:Bye. Goodbye. One word.
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