Who Hires the Hiring Bots?
Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, June 4, 2024 at 4:30 PM EST, and we have an amazing show for you this week. Georgia chats with Emmy Award winning investigative reporter and NYU assistant professor of journalism, Hilke Shelman, about the increasingly prevalent role of artificial intelligence in hiring, and the ways it does and does not contribute to the utter hell that is the job search at the moment. And then I chat with comedian, writer, and podcast host, Jamie Loftus, about her new show, 16th Minute.
Mike Rugnetta:And the curse with an occasional sign of blessing that is the momentary viral fame of Internet main characters. But first, I have 6. 6 pick up sticks news items for you. Let's talk about a few things that happened since the last time you heard from us. Instagram is testing the addition of YouTube like unskippable ads to the platform, rolling the feature out to a selection of users according to Tech Crunch.
Mike Rugnetta:This may lead you to wonder when Instagram will begin testing the addition of good posts I wanna see and enjoy looking at. I'm just Joshin'. Instagram is great for seeing the TikToks that I missed last week split into 3 segments across a college friend's stories. Definitely something that I'm gonna sit through an unskippable ad to behold. Google rolled out and then quickly rolled back AI overview results in search.
Mike Rugnetta:SEO firm BrightEdge says immediately following Google's Developer Conference IO where the feature was officially unveiled, overviews appeared on 27% of searches. But then, overviews began telling people to add glue to pizza, eat one small rock a day. They overestimated the number of days one can attend the gym in a week at 8, advocated running with scissors as exercise, and claimed Andrew Jackson, the 7th president of the United States, is still alive. BrightEdge says overviews sank to appearing on around 10% of all searches around the time Google acknowledged the product's shortcomings last week. Read more about this at Wired.
Mike Rugnetta:Link in the show notes. IKEA has announced that it will hire 10 people from the UK and Ireland to work at its store in Roblox. This, according to Eurogamer, who says the responsibilities of the digital customer service associates will be to quote, serve meatballs in the store's bistro and help patrons choose furniture in the showroom. All this for nearly €15 an hour. That all of these are completely serious, Ralph Lauren, Crocs, Tommy Hilfiger, and Givenchy.
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Mike Rugnetta:Variety reports that creator owned streaming platform Nebula has struck a distribution deal with audio streaming giant Spotify, under which a selection of Nebula creators will be available in the Spotify for Podcasters section beginning this week. Speaking to Variety, Spotify's head of content partnerships, Jordan Newman, said, quote, creators are at the core of everything we do at Spotify, so we are eager to partner with Nebula, a creator built and creator operated platform to bring this content to our users across the globe. Recent changes to Spotify's eligibility requirements demonetized an estimated 86% of creators on the platform. This week, Spotify also announced an increase in subscription prices without any hint of increased rates for artists. Spotify is also embroiled in legal battles with both the Mechanical Licensing Collective and the National Music Publishers Association, who say they're cheating musicians out of 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in royalties.
Mike Rugnetta:Links to these stories in the show notes. After 27 years in operation, the venerable chat program ICQ will be going offline this month. PC gamer reports that at its height, the platform had over a 100,000,000 registered users, me amongst them. But after a number of handoffs between owners, the user base has dwindled significantly. ICQ remained somewhat popular in Russia where its current owner, v k, is located.
Mike Rugnetta:A message at icq.com says that once it's shut down on June 26th, users, quote, can chat with friends in VK Messenger and with colleagues in VK Workspace. And, finally, we did it folks. We found the back rooms. 2 years ago, YouTuber Virtual Carbon made a YouTube video about locating the real life space depicted in what has become a canonical image of the Backrooms, an Internet folkloric space thought to connect reality behind its scenes. The search continued for 2 years in VirtualCarbon's Discord, where members were successful at the end of last month, determining that the Backrooms, or at least one depiction of them, are located in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Mike Rugnetta:Honestly, I buy it. Wisconsin, it's giving Backrooms. Read more about this at 404 Media and Virtual Carbon's research documents. Links in the show notes. Okay, folks.
Mike Rugnetta:Let's get this show on the ding dang road. You're gonna hear from Georgia and Hylka on hiring and me and Jamie on main characters. But first, in this week's interstitials, the sounds of every YouTube video each member of the Neverpost team watched over the last 2 weeks.
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Georgia Hampton:Hello, everyone. It's producer Georgia. So before I got this job, being a producer on Neverpost, I was pretty much constantly applying for different positions. And it's already frustrating to apply for jobs, but applying for a job now is uniquely horrible in this one specific way. When I applied for jobs, I kind of knew that I wasn't just doing that.
Georgia Hampton:I was basically playing a game. I knew, for example, that any big name company was using an AI software to comb through interviews and find the best candidates, whatever that means. And any position I applied for likely had a couple hundred other candidates vying for the role. I would regularly see job postings on LinkedIn where the website would cheerily offer me the option of seeing how I measure up to, say, the 284 other people who applied for this job. All I could do to have a shot at any job was to basically court the AI software.
Georgia Hampton:I'd look up buzzwords to include in my resume or my cover letter. I had friends who would do weird jailbreaky tricks to cheat the system, like write out buzzwords all over their resume in white text so the recruiter wouldn't see it, but the AI module would register it. And all of this makes for a hiring environment that's basically at the mercy of AI software. And I wanted to talk to someone who could help me understand whether using AI so heavily in the application and hiring process is working for anyone. And lucky for me, I found the perfect person.
Georgia Hampton:-With me right now is Hilka Schellman, who is an Emmy Award winning investigative reporter and a journalism professor at NYU. Hilka, I am so excited to talk to you.
Hilke Schellmann:Well, thank you for having me. I I am excited to, to talk to you and, like, talk to folks out there and, like, sort of help them understand, you know, what is it like to, find a job in the HFAI?
Georgia Hampton:So, okay, not to put too fine a point on it, but just to get things started, why is it so bad right now?
Hilke Schellmann:Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I've seen more and more people job seekers trying to find jobs. So and since we have job platforms, really the dawn of, job platforms platforms like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Indeed,
Hilke Schellmann:all of those, it's super easy
Hilke Schellmann:to apply. And you often see that, right, when you look at LinkedIn, and it says, like, oh, you were one of 2,000 applicants, and these people have more qualifications than you have. Right? A lot and get through all of them. And we see this kind of now on steroids because now we have AI tools that help job seekers apply to, like, 400 positions in an hour.
Hilke Schellmann:Wow. So Google says they get about 3,000,000 applications a year. IBM says they get about 5,000,000 applications a year. Goldman Sachs alone for, their summer internships a couple years ago, they got over 200,000 applications. So it's, like, vast numbers, and they need more and more technology to weed through the all of them.
Hilke Schellmann:So it's sort of this, like, AI versus AI race. You know, as a human, it feels like you're sending your applications into a black hole, and it often takes 100 and 100 of applications, not 10 or 20 to get interviews and to get hired. So it is, like, sort of at the end of the game and numbers game, but it is so frustrating as a human. And so many job seekers talk about how depressed they are and how sad they are, and they feel like they have no skills. It's not true.
Hilke Schellmann:It's not the job seeker. It's not you if you're applying for a job right now. It's probably the technology. It's probably the AI. It's really, really frustrating.
Georgia Hampton:It really is quite literally throwing your resume into a black hole.
Hilke Schellmann:Yeah. And you never hear back. You get ghosted.
Georgia Hampton:Yes.
Hilke Schellmann:Or, you know, if you even hear back. It's just a mathematical equation that the efficiency is really important. I think also, like, you know, companies do to some extent also believe the high, Right? That these tools will help them and that these tools work better than humans. They do want to automate talent acquisition.
Georgia Hampton:What you just said is specifically something I really wanted to pick your brain about. Okay. Because in the research I've done around this subject, there is so much of this presumption that AI, that the tech is better than human judgment, is inherently less biased. Is it?
Hilke Schellmann:I mean, to be honest, like, I don't know that. No one knows that that because we don't have any longitudinal studies where we actually check. We have no long term data. Nothing. So I can't actually tell you who is better or not, but I can tell you that the promise that this technology is bias free, doesn't replicate the pious bias from the past, and picks the most qualified people, we don't actually have evidence of that.
Hilke Schellmann:In fact, I found the counter evidence that there is gender bias and there is racism in the tools and that a lot of these tools experts question if they're valid, if they actually do what they're supposed to do. Like, in one resume parser, the tool used first names like Thomas as an indicator of success. So people who were named Thomas got more points. Obviously, the name Thomas doesn't qualify for anything. Right.
Hilke Schellmann:You know, we really need to look for, like, skills and capabilities, and it's just a a statistical fluke.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. There was there was that famous Amazon case, I believe.
Hilke Schellmann:Yes. Amazon's tool, had learned over time that people who had the word women and woman on their resume were not as successful at Amazon and were downgraded.
Georgia Hampton:I see.
Hilke Schellmann:We're also uncover it, like, hobbies. So one of them was, like, football, baseball were indicators of success. And one example was actually if you had the word baseball on your resume, got more points. If you had the word softball on your resume, you got fewer points. Yes.
Hilke Schellmann:So that is in the United States, probably gender discrimination because women traditionally play softball. I would say so. Yeah. The way this probably has come to be is that companies use resumes of people who are, quote, unquote, successful right now or have been, maybe got to the last round of an interview. Those are all indicators of success, and I think that can be questioned as well.
Hilke Schellmann:Like, is that actually an indicator of success? But they take those resumes, give them to a tool, and, sort of task the tool with figuring out what do all these people have in common. And that's what job seekers are compared to.
Georgia Hampton:Right.
Hilke Schellmann:If you use performance reviews as criteria, for example, of success, and and this data to train the algorithms, We know that, like, even if they're the same performers, white people are especially white men get much, much higher performance ratings than people who do the same work, who may be women or people of color. Right? So you already have biased data that you then put in the system. And I don't understand why we think that magically just by a pattern recognition machine that this bias will be removed. In fact, it will be probably be amplified because AI tools are trained to, you know, rank people and use the smallest of differences to make that ranking.
Hilke Schellmann:And it's not always clear that the smallest of differences is actually predictive of that you will be more successful in the job. It could just be random. And I think that's where some of these problematic correlations, not causal inferences, come from, right? There's like a statistical fluke. There's like a bunch of Thomas' in the pile.
Hilke Schellmann:The tool does what it does. It does make a statistical analysis, and probably it's statistically significant. There's a bunch of Thomas' in there, and suddenly that becomes, a criteria. The same with, like, you know, another tool was Africa and African American. So, possibly some people have that on their resume.
Hilke Schellmann:Is that a criteria we should use? No, of course not. Obviously, we don't wanna do any hiring based on our demographics or any of that, but it keeps slipping into the hiring decisions even with tools that are, you know, marketed as bias free.
Georgia Hampton:Well, that to me is also an interesting component of this, that so much of AI learning and the way that it interacts with people using this technology is just by finding patterns and predicting the next word.
Hilke Schellmann:Mhmm. And is that fair to the individual? Right? Because, like, I have looked in the industry and, like, tested all of these tools and talked to, I don't know, 200 people or so, stakeholders in the industry, expert, employment lawyers, everyone and their mother who wanted to talk to me, job seekers, and found out that, like, we actually don't have any evidence that these tools pick the most qualified candidates and that they're biased free. Even though, you know, that's where it gets interesting, we know from surveys that companies' executives do know themselves that the tools reject qualified candidates.
Hilke Schellmann:They do know.
Georgia Hampton:Really?
Hilke Schellmann:Yes. There was a one survey that Joe Fuller and his team at Harvard Business School did, and they asked over 2,000, c suite leaders, HR managers, and about 90% of the folks who use AI tools said that they know their tools reject qualified candidates.
Georgia Hampton:So okay. If the people at the top know that there are flaws within these AI models
Hilke Schellmann:Yeah.
Georgia Hampton:But they're still buying them from vendors and using them for efficiency.
Hilke Schellmann:Yes.
Georgia Hampton:How much can they trust the results that the software is giving them? It seems like you wouldn't be able to. Right?
Hilke Schellmann:Well, I mean, I think it's sort of like a question. It is efficient. But every time companies use a deep neural network, it doesn't really matter what that means. It means we have the training data, you know, maybe all the resumes. We can look at the results, but we don't necessarily know what the tool infers upon.
Hilke Schellmann:Like, what are the criteria the computer uses? And I think that strikes me it's problematic when the software developers, the vendor, don't even know what the tool does. The companies that use the tools don't know what the tool does. Yeah. And the job seekers, of course, have they have no idea.
Hilke Schellmann:They often don't even know that AI is being used on them, to be honest. So they have no idea what is happening. And I think that strikes me as very problematic. I mean, if you upload people's resume, think about it. Like, you give their personal information often that's on these resumes to OpenAI as training data.
Hilke Schellmann:And I don't think any of the job seekers have obviously consented to that, that my personal address, my phone number, my email, everything that I put on a resume now is in OpenAI's hands to use for the next iteration of the tool potentially. Right? So, like, I think it's also a question of of privacy and consent that I don't think, people have really thought about. We are all none the wiser.
Georgia Hampton:What are
Georgia Hampton:companies doing, if anything, to, I guess, tweak these problems to fix? Like, is there a way to
Hilke Schellmann:Yeah.
Georgia Hampton:Alter this software and use it?
Hilke Schellmann:We don't see a lot of actual writing the industry itself. Right? Because the way the industry is set up, it's just not, suitable to, like, feedback and putting pressure on vendors and companies to do the right thing because it takes time. It's, like, work. Right?
Hilke Schellmann:Like, vendors, you know, they wanna have beautiful solution for the company. The company wants to save money, and they don't wanna hire new people now to supervise these systems, right, or be experts in AI to supervise these systems. Because employers are afraid if they publicly say, hey, we had a tool that exhibited gender bias and downgraded folks who had the word softball on their resume. You know, some companies get, as I said, millions of applications a year. They might have suddenly 100 of thousands of women who might have a class action lawsuit claim.
Hilke Schellmann:And, you know, they might actually be liable in court. But also, employer have an interest, to not make that public. I've now talked to so many folks who said, like, oh, yeah. You know, we we used this tool for a couple of years. We had the same questions that you had.
Hilke Schellmann:We found out it wasn't working, so we quietly abandoned it. I mean
Georgia Hampton:Okay.
Hilke Schellmann:I'm glad they abandoned it. That's great. They're not using it anymore. But to me, as a journalist, I feel like, well, it would be great if the public would know so that not the next company then says, well, this other company uses it, so it must be good. We keep reusing the same tools and not putting pressure on the vendors to actually change their tools and do the right thing.
Georgia Hampton:So if AI is gonna kinda stick around
Hilke Schellmann:Mhmm.
Georgia Hampton:How do you see the future of its role in this space of hiring and job seeking?
Hilke Schellmann:Yeah. So there's different scenarios. There's a dark scenario that sort of has AI tools looking at all of our data and almost predicting before we even apply for a job what kind of job we're qualified for, regardless if the technology works or not. That's sort of like the dark idea. And then my hope is that we learn from all of this research and stuff that I and others have uncovered that, like, we understand the and we bring the bias back.
Hilke Schellmann:So let's build tools in the public interest. And we bring the bias back. So let's build tools in the public interest, put them on GitHub, document how we built it, build better tools that may be used like virtual reality that puts people in the job to do a little bit of the job so they can learn what the job is, and employers can make a much better assessment of candidates. That is my hope.
Georgia Hampton:Well, Hilke, this was oddly very cathartic, talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to to talk to me about this and give me a little bit of hope.
Hilke Schellmann:Yes. I think I think there's hope. I think, like, there are lawmakers out there that are interested to hear about this. There's folks out there who do want to move the needle. So I think we we are at a moment where there is, like, real interest in this kind of evidence, and so we can make changes.
Georgia Hampton:I'm very happy to hear that. Yes. So where can people find more of your work and learn more about you?
Hilke Schellmann:Yeah. There's only one Hilke Shelman or that I know of. So if you put my name onto LinkedIn, you are bound to find me, and you can also find my email on my NYU faculty page. I also have a book about this. I took a deep dive into this industry and wrote sort of like an investigative detective book.
Hilke Schellmann:It's called The Algorithm, How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired, and why we need to fight back
Hilke Schellmann:now.
Georgia Hampton:Researching this topic and talking about it with Hilke made me very curious to hear about other people's experiences with job seeking in the age of AI. If you've been applying to jobs recently, how has the very obvious presence of AI affected your relationship to the hiring process? Write us an email. Send us a voicemail. The various ways you can contact us are in the show notes.
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Mike Rugnetta:Ages ago, I worked for the website Know Your Meme. And while there, one of my colleagues, Jamie Wilkinson, coined this term, famo, f a m o, As in, almost famous. Internet famous.
Mike Rugnetta:A qualified kind of famous. And in a lot of ways, a qualified kind of infamy. In my life, and career since then, I've met and known and befriended a lot of people who are famous, who are internet famous, not quite famous. I even married one of those people. So I think a lot about the types of fame that exist in the world, and the very particular, often extremely narrow types of fame enabled and supported by the Internet specifically.
Mike Rugnetta:Gradations and degrees of fame that we could likely spend a whole segment taxonomizing. One of the narrowest, and I think most interesting sorts of fame that the internet supports is the main character, Someone who, for a very short span, a day, a week at most, captures the public's attention. Sometimes in a good way, but usually usually in a bad way. They become a magnet for attention. They become a spark for discourse.
Mike Rugnetta:So naturally, I was very, very excited to have the opportunity to talk to someone who thinks a lot, not just about fame online generally, but about main characters specifically. Joining me is Jamie Loftus. Jamie is a writer, comedian, and podcaster with a long list of incredible work to her name. She has written for Teenage Euthanasia and Star Trek Lower Decks, amongst others. Her limited podcast series include My Year in Mensa and Lolita podcast about how the Nabokov book has been adapted, misinterpreted, and twisted over the years.
Mike Rugnetta:Over the course of a year she filmed herself eating infinite jest. She wrote a book about hot dogs, and is currently the host of the Bechdel Cast, a podcast about the portrayal of women in film, and is the writer and host and producer of 16th Minute, a weekly cool zone media show about the Internet's main characters. Jamie, I am so happy that you are here with us today.
Jamie Loftus:Likewise. Thank you for having me.
Mike Rugnetta:Oh, of course. Our pleasure. I I really wanna talk to you about, like, fame and infamy and the Internet and, the process and experience of being thrust into the spotlight generally. Mhmm. But first, I wonder if you could just, like, tell us a little bit about 16th minute.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. 16th minute is a show that I've been, like, noodling on for a little over a year now, that I kept waiting, to listen to, and then I I I was like, alright. I guess I'm gonna have to make this show that I was listening.
Mike Rugnetta:That's the that's the rule.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. That is like the monkey paw rule of podcasting. I'm like, I'm gonna give it a year. And if the show does not happen of its own volition, I'll I'll take a crack at it. But, it's a deeper profile into Internet characters of the day as people, but also in each episode, I'll I sort of attempt to explore through talking to experts either what this character's, selection, whether it be by the people, by an algorithm, whatever it is, what it seems to relate to with what was going on at the time, and also, depending on what era they they fall into, how algorithms or why algorithms may have served us, this particular person, and, how does that ruin your brain?
Mike Rugnetta:So, like, what are what are some examples of some of the main characters that you think of when you think about this type of person?
Jamie Loftus:I I talked to Antoine Dodson of the hide your kids, hide your wife. Infamy, I covered the dress, and we just did an episode on Boston slide cop. And then there are, you know, people that I'm like, I guess I'll have to do that episode eventually. I'm terrified to do a Bean Dad episode. I don't want to.
Jamie Loftus:I don't wanna do cinnamon toast shrimp, but I'll have to. But, yeah, stories like that.
Mike Rugnetta:Every person you list, I just have a reflexive kind of, like, whole body tense. Yeah. Yeah.
Jamie Loftus:I've noticed that so much, and this is overly simplistic, but, like, there's a lot of, like, men who did something diabolical and then women who just did something.
Mike Rugnetta:Had the had the audacity to exist.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. Do you have, like, the strong associations with the the woman who drank coffee in the garden with her husband and then everyone was like, kill yourself?
Mike Rugnetta:My strongest memory of it was being sent a Reddit post about it and being told to go and read the comments because it was a great example of Internet ambivalence where it was like a really 5050 of people being like, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. And then people being like, all of you just need to chill out. Everyone needs to calm down. This person is just living their own life.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. I and I feel like sometimes it's I will default to having, like, what I'm like. Well, this is the right opinion. The right opinion is to be like, well, that was absurd. That was ridiculous.
Jamie Loftus:Why would you do that? She was just trying to exist, which is true. But then I also, like, have to think back to, like, well, this was, like, mid 2022. I remember seeing that story and being like, yeah. Fuck you.
Jamie Loftus:I don't I don't have anyone to drink coffee with. Fuck you. Get out of my feed. And, like, that's not fair, but it is that sort of, like, moments of great projection that, happen against just, like, a person where you're just like, coffee wife cannot solve your problems. She can't solve your life.
Jamie Loftus:Sorry.
Mike Rugnetta:And be and being mad at coffee wife is just I mean, that's not gonna solve any problems either.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. I mean and and there was sort of this reflexive thing that I know I've done before in the past as well. You're saying something pretty unkind to someone who has no power, and then sort of making an argument that you're doing that for a political reason of, like, I'm not just in a bad mood, and the algorithm is showing me something. Like, it's that I'm trying to raise awareness about class, and you're like, no. You're not.
Jamie Loftus:Like
Mike Rugnetta:Do you think that there is some kind of responsibility that posters that Internet users, should shoulder when confronted with the existence of like a new main character? Do you think it's like people's responsibility to just ignore and move on? Or do you think it's, you know, is this just like almost part of the entertainment landscape now?
Jamie Loftus:It definitely is. I mean, I I feel like, you know, 10 years ago, there's maybe more of an argument for individual accountability. Even if you are finding it out, you're finding it out generally from other users, the Internet still moves extremely fast. People don't always know what they're talking about, and they're talking shit really rapidly because we're, you know, conditioned to not see each other as people. So okay.
Jamie Loftus:But now it's like, you know, today, I can go on to any social media platform and see something basically against my will, and the things that I'll see and the things that everyone will see are the things that are engineered to get a response out of me. You know? And this I feel like, you know, an aunt saying that. But, like, before you post, if you just think about why am I seeing this? And if the answer is I don't know, maybe just keep scrolling or or don't, you know, or or go do something else.
Jamie Loftus:Whatever. The app is always gonna show you the thing that's gonna make you the happiest or the saddest, and it's up to you to, like, maintain a level of composure, which is usually not possible.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. It's gonna show you the thing most likely to get you to angrily or excitedly tap a bunch of buttons, which then, you know, is better for them. Yeah. Do you think then that there is some sort of responsibility that platforms have?
Jamie Loftus:Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Like, should they be trying to not create main characters? Yes. Yes. I love the clarity of that.
Jamie Loftus:Yes. Yes. That's sort of why I liked main characters as an endpoint because it can often be a funny way to, like, start that conversation because, ultimately, you can get from chili wife to algorithms pushing misogyny in relatively few steps, but the offset of that is occasionally, when you're being manipulated for profit, it's fun. You make friends, you meet your spouse, and, you get to see the Jesus painting. And so, like, it's weird.
Jamie Loftus:I think about it the same way I think about hot dogs, where, like, conversations about the Internet and hot dogs, they're both either, like, glowingly positive or horrifically negative, and they're like the the little gray space of, like, well, I I like this thing. This thing has, like, you know, demonstrably shaped and improved my life, but it also has demonstrably ruining my life.
Mike Rugnetta:My friend Taylor has a great saying or position
Mike Rugnetta:Mhmm. Where he's
Mike Rugnetta:like, it would irreparably harm the careers of me and everyone I know.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:But if there were a button that I could press that would delete the Internet forever, I would press it. Yeah. I'm curious what it's like for you to reach out to the folks that you talk to. Like, when you reach out to Kevin Antoine Dodson, when you reach out to Coffee Wife, like, are these folks willing to talk about these periods, these moments in their lives?
Jamie Loftus:It depends. Part of what's interesting about this is that most people are just normal people who understandably, a lot of main characters have trepidation about talking to anyone Yeah. Because of how often, you know, like, they're willfully misunderstood or, like, reduced to a single moment.
Mike Rugnetta:Is that ultimately what draws you to these stories that you get to expand the background and the sort of context of these people beyond their really flat individual moment that they're what most well known for?
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. That's, like, my favorite thing. I love just, like, letting people talk, especially when it's people that are not often asked about themselves. People are so interesting, and I feel like if you let anyone talk for 3 minutes, you're gonna hear something that will, like, turn your head 360 degrees, and I love that.
Mike Rugnetta:I mean and it's a great gift to this particular group of people who have been given no space. But it's kind of the premise of their fame. They've been completely expanded or exploded or misrepresented and not given, the room that a lot of people who are traditionally famous have in the process of of gathering their fame. Being able to then say like to to clear out this space for them to just be themselves and to talk probably I mean, I would imagine feels probably is slightly terrifying, but probably can also feel pretty freeing.
Jamie Loftus:I hope so. I mean, I for the most part, I've found that people are very much like, oh, I I haven't been asked that question in the context of an interview before, which is I love that. And then there are occasionally people who go viral for a moment, kind of build a career off of that moment, and don't really wanna talk as much outside of the moment. And that is also fascinating to me, because you absolutely can build a career off of something like this. And I think that there's a lot of, like, caveats to that.
Jamie Loftus:I think it's much easier for white main characters of the day to spin it off into whatever the next thing is than nonwhite characters of the day. But eve even so, like, there there it's it's interesting watching someone who is like, this happened to me. It was really bizarre. It was a strange week. It kinda messed my brain up for a while, and I just wanted to, like, go to bed.
Jamie Loftus:You know? Like, I just wanted it to be over. And then people who are like, oh, well, it wasn't what I expected, but, like, now I have this company that's, you know, or or whatever it is. And then there's, like, experiences that sort
Mike Rugnetta:of fall in between. It's it's interesting. Listening to the show and listening first to the episode with Kevin Dodson and not with, but about in a way, his sister Kelly, you know, they were both thrust into the limelight Mhmm. First by news coverage and then by the Gregory brothers. And they both had, like, differing reactions to that fame.
Mike Rugnetta:Antoine or Kevin, sort of embraced it. Mhmm. Kelly, like, kind of refused it, but also was never offered nearly as much attention as her brother.
Jamie Loftus:Right.
Mike Rugnetta:And you also talk about, in the most recent episode as of recording, the Boston slide cop, who is, you know, the subject of this immensely viral video where he just hurdles down this, like, really twisty slide in Boston.
Jamie Loftus:It's so funny. It's so funny.
Mike Rugnetta:It's so it's one of the best Internet videos, I think. In that episode, which is just it's really incredible the lengths that you go to to try to figure out who this man is. For anybody who's listening to this, please go listen to this episode. It's incredible. But like, you you just you cannot figure out who he is.
Mike Rugnetta:I think at the end, you you figure out that you can narrow it down to like, maybe a 150 people.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. It was one of the most frustrating experiences ever. Because on a larger scale, and I didn't even really get into this in the episode because I feel like my head is still kind of wrapping around it, but it's like the only way you can prevent yourself from becoming a main character is with, like, inconceivable institutional power.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Exactly the question that I wanna ask. Like, hearing those two stories together, like, next to one another, like, who in the world gets to choose to be the subject of the kind of fame that the Internet foists upon them? Who has access to the societal infrastructure to say, like, no thanks. I would like to not be found.
Mike Rugnetta:Because it's very clear in those 2, you know, stories, you know, the cop has a lot of resources to do that and Kelly and Antoine have a different amount.
Jamie Loftus:The slide cop option of literally filing, you know, various lawsuits to, like, prevent their identity being released. Like, no one has that.
Mike Rugnetta:Having documents redacted.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. I'll never let it go. But but No.
Mike Rugnetta:I don't think you should.
Jamie Loftus:My fondest wish is to just one day surprise drop slide cut part 2 and be like, we got him. Ladies, we
Mike Rugnetta:have him. Gentlemen.
Jamie Loftus:But, yeah, I mean, it's the vast majority of characters you just see ordinary people, most of whom do not have resources. And in Antoine and Kelly Dotson's case, I mean, because that story was in 2010, there you see how the traditional media presents them, and then you see how the Internet presents them, and they're not really given an option to just opt out. I think the the most you can do is say nothing, but then the Internet just interprets you for yourself. And and I think Kevin Dotson is it made a lot of sense that he was like, no. I'm gonna like, if people are gonna be profiting off of my image and all of these false assumptions they have about me, I need, like, I need to be given some of that.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. What is the right way to deal with that? There's I don't know.
Mike Rugnetta:Do you think that that's a skill that people will increasingly know that they have to develop if they have any kind of public existence online?
Jamie Loftus:I think so. I mean, I I feel like I I almost revert more to thinking about how, like, there are sort of these procedures or routines in place for, like so you've been called out for something on the Internet, and you're, like, a small time influencer. There is, like, a process that you go through. You have an apology. You do this.
Jamie Loftus:You do that. You go silent for a while. You come back. Like, there are these known patterns, but even that is tricky because once there's systems in place like that, you can't trust that any of it is authentic. And then you have to go back to, like, I just have coffee wife on the brain right now.
Jamie Loftus:There was like a pressure for her to respond, but she hadn't done anything. And so it's like, well, why? You know? Like, what does this person owe me? Like, why?
Jamie Loftus:Why am I expecting this?
Mike Rugnetta:My only remaining question is like, you know, is there a checklist that you have for someone who might suddenly be careening towards main character status of, like, what do you do? Like, first 24 hours, what do you do?
Jamie Loftus:If someone near and dear to me suddenly became the character of the day, I think the first thing is is check-in with yourself. Are you okay with what's happening? Because it is a game, and people aren't gonna stop treating it like a game. And I don't begrudge anyone who tries to get out of it. It's impossible to talk about because who knows?
Jamie Loftus:If you go viral for doing something horrible, that's a totally different discussion. If you go viral for doing something innocuous, you know, have some fun with it if you want because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's gonna make a shitload of money off of it whether you do something or not.
Mike Rugnetta:The framework of it being a game is extremely useful and that you get to say, good luck. Have fun out there. It really reframes what a dunk is in a and I think a a useful and, much more fun light.
Jamie Loftus:Yeah. Yeah. And it can and also, you know, I can give you that advice and also it it can just ruin your life. And that is the world that we are, logging into every day.
Mike Rugnetta:Jamie, thank you so much, for chatting with me today.
Jamie Loftus:Oh, it was great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Mike Rugnetta:Where on the Internet can people find you and be normal and nice to you?
Jamie Loftus:That rules out Twitter. Right? But I am there Yes. At, at Jamie Loftus help, and I'm on Instagram at Jamie Christ Superstar. My TikTok is a lurker.
Jamie Loftus:You'll never find me, and I don't want you to. Those are the places. And listen to the show.
Mike Rugnetta:Hell, yeah. We'll put all the links in the show notes. Thanks again to Jamie for coming on the show to chat with us. You can find her show 16th minute wherever you listen to podcasts. And please please also go explore her other podcasts, her book, really everything she's done.
Mike Rugnetta:All of her work is so amazing and we here at Never Post, we are all really big fans. Also, I would love to hear from you, our audience, on the question of whether you think more and more people will either intentionally learn or latently absorb a certain level of PR skill as the chances of becoming a flash in the pan public figure increase. Call us at 615 651-50007. Email us at theneverpost@gmail.com. Leave us a voice memo on our air table or a comment on the website and we may respond to you in a future Mailbag episode.
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Clip:He finds a time that he needs. Perez in the drop. Friday, July 1st in the year 2022.
Mike Rugnetta:That is the show we have for you this week, thank you so so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.
Mike Rugnetta:If you wanna help us continue to make the show and get access to amazing bonus content like extended cuts of these segments and sideshows like posts from the field where we just post nice recordings that we make out in the world. It's actually, it's very relaxing. It's really nice. Please head on over to neverpo.st and become a member. We will be back in the main feed on June 19th with a summer vacation special.
Mike Rugnetta:That's right folks, on this show, we take vacations. And as always, members, keep an eye on your inbox for that sweet, sweet member only programming. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious Doctor First Name, Last Name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer.
Mike Rugnetta:And the show's host, that's me, 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.
Mike Rugnetta:Excerpt of Persuasion by Joao McSweeney. Never post is a production of Charts and Leisure.
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