XOXO Fest Live
This week, we have arguably our most special episode to date, a recording of our first ever live show at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, held August 22nd to 24th. We got to share the stage with some Alzheimer's, Smallboo Animation, The Pudding, Tony and Taylor from Every Frame a Painting, and Annie from the depths of Wikipedia. We were introduced by video essayist and science communicator about internet town, Tom Lumb. It was an incredible evening, part of an amazing weekend. For our part, we tried to do a show, an episode, on stage at Revolution Hall.
Mike Rugnetta:Picture it with me now. It's a former high school auditorium, a few 100 seats, a mezzanine, and a proscenium stage. On it, 2 desks. 1 center stage, shared by me and Georgia. 1 up stage left where Hans and Jason performed live.
Mike Rugnetta:Sonic accompaniment. The mad men that they are. Also, a projection screen and the object. More about that in a minute. So yes, there are visuals that accompany this performance.
Mike Rugnetta:You're gonna get 95% of what happens without them. But in case you wanna see what showed on that screen, you can head to the link in the show notes to download a somewhat sizable PDF of the visuals. There were also some theatrics around Georgia's segment, where Never Post researcher and producer, Audrey Evans and I would parade around the very objects Georgia directly discusses including something called the object. A sculptural item with no clear purpose. Custom fabricated for the show by my good friend Guy Snover of Cirque Design in Montreal, Canada.
Mike Rugnetta:A purveyor of otherwise extremely fine and purposeful home goods. Cyrcdesign.com. You should go check them out. Anyways, for its role in the show, the object itself is pretty tough to describe. It's very unique, sort of defeats language.
Mike Rugnetta:So you may just wanna go check the show notes for links to some photos. Alright. The next voice you hear will be Tom Lums.
Tom Lum:Hello, everyone today. Next, we have a podcast that was recently crowned one of the top 5 podcasts for the terminally online by the New York Times. Actually, not only do they dig through the Internet for the news so you don't have to, they put together stories that take a look at what it means to be a person online and as a result, what it means to be a person at all. Please welcome to the stage for their live podcast debut, Never Post.
Mike Rugnetta: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 Thursday, August 22, 2024 at 8:56 AM Pacific time, and we have an amazing show for you this week. As you can tell from the sound of my voice, I am not in my studio.
Mike Rugnetta:In fact, I am here on stage at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, Alongside the rest of the Never Post team to perform and record this episode live for the wonderful folks of XOXO. XOXO crowd, please say hello to everybody listening at home. Hello. Listeners at home, say hello to the XOXO crowd. I love that you guys are pals.
Mike Rugnetta:First up, in our episode this week, Georgia is gonna talk to marketing consultant, Bryce Whitwam, and take She's gonna take us in and out, and further in, and maybe further in than any of us have ever wanted to go to the TikTok shop. Then I talk with media studies professor Shannon Mattern about drafts, writing while it is still in progress, and how it feels to post them. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Unless this is the first time that you've heard from us, are there any new listeners in the crowd? That can I swear on this stage?
Mike Rugnetta:I can swear on this stage. Right? We can swear we swear in the show. That fucking rules. Welcome.
Mike Rugnetta:It's really nice to have you. I have three stories for you this evening. World renowned author of tweets primarily at this point, Joanne Robert Galbraith k Rowling, had not tweeted for 16 days after it was announced that gold medal winning boxer Imani Kelleth named Rowling as well as Twitter ex owner Elon Musk in a cyberbullying criminal complaint filed in France after, quote, acts of aggravated cyber harassment. The complaint calls for an investigation into counts of cyber harassment due to gender, public insult because of gender, public incitement to discrimination, and public insult because of origin. Rowling, unfortunately, broke her post silence this morning around 5 AM Pacific time by posting a link to some gender essentialist nonsense that we'll just show you the top reply to.
Mike Rugnetta:Delif has said, I was born a girl, grew up a girl, I studied as a girl, and I fought like a girl. Those who attacked me, of course, they were enemies of glory. But without them, my victory would not have been so satisfying. What's his face? The reality TV show host guy, you know who I mean, recently showed AI generated images of Taylor Swift fans claiming to support his bid for re presidency.
Mike Rugnetta:The original post included an Uncle Sam style rendering of the pop queen demanding votes for the notably thin skinned wannabe demagogue who included the caption, I accept. While there are some photos out there of Taylor Swift fans showing support for What's His Name, Wired said they've, quote, found that many of the images shared by Trump show substantial evidence of manipulation. While there doesn't appear to be an active Swifties for Trump campaign initiative, there is an active Swifties for Kamala group. Parade.com reports that many Swifties are taking the singer's statement about the Vienna show's recently canceled over, quote, security concerns as a subtle indication of her position on the AI photos as well.
Clip:Because baby now we got bad blood.
Mike Rugnetta:Good news, everyone who lives in and around New York City. Independent designer program and artist, Kellen Carolyn Zhang. Zhang, who I think is at xox0. Possible in here in the room? Maybe not.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. Coordinated across time, space, and borders to bring the chocolate muffins made famous by Olympic swimmer, Henrik Christiansen, across his many hit TikToks to the states. Kellen posted a series of TikToks about finding the Olympic muffin supplier and attempted to and attempting to get them to commit to shipping the muffins over with the right amount of urgency such that they cleared customs before melting. They are now available at Ishiki Macha on second Avenue in Manhattan after the shop's owner, a friend of a friend, was tagged into Kellen's videos. No word yet on restocks, but Ishikimacha has posted that after an incredible turnout, everyone should stay tuned for updates.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. That is the news that I have for you this week. Thank you so much for joining us here in Revolution Hall and at home. We have an incredible show for you. In our next segment, step right up, folks.
Mike Rugnetta:Get your bubble machine gun with 69 holes. Great toddler toy, must have rocket foaming bubble gun. But first, you know it. You love it. It's why you come to a live podcast recording audience participation.
Mike Rugnetta:We have 2 interstitials for you this week. And in them, I'm going to ask you for help creating sounds that we will record, for the folks at home to listen to. And, of course, you in this room now are allowed to listen to them as well. The first one is pretty easy. Could everyone, here in Revolution Hall, please find a partner nearby, that could be someone next to you, someone behind you, someone in front of you, another person.
Mike Rugnetta:I'm gonna count to 3. And after 3, I want you to tell each other your first Internet username. The one that you picked when you first logged on, sitting at your keyboard in front of AOL or whatever when you were in middle school, high school, maybe college. Tell each other your first username, then tell each other about your first username. We're gonna talk for 75 seconds.
Mike Rugnetta:Ready? 123. Friends, in this segment, Georgia, Audrey, and myself will be giving away real actual items purchased from the TikTok shop. This is good. This, this response is encouraging.
Mike Rugnetta:We were afraid this would not fly. This is our phone number. When the time is right, please text this number your name. Type this phone number into your phone now. Save it to your contacts.
Mike Rugnetta:Do not text me, because that will cost me 791000ths of a cent. But when the time is right, and you will know when it is right, there will be no question. Text us your first name and last initial, and we will announce the lucky winners at the end of the show. You could be going home with dragon egg lunar new year 2024 today. Sound good?
Mike Rugnetta:Makes sense? Great. Georgia, take it away.
Georgia Hampton:Let me set the scene. It's 1994. The city, Philadelphia. You're a guy named Phil. And what does Phil want?
Georgia Hampton:What do you want? Well, you want entertainment. You want music. You want the gentle rhythmic stylings that only Gordon Sumner can offer you. You want those fields of gold.
Georgia Hampton:You want a copy of Sting's 1993 album 10 summoner's tales on CD. To do this, surely, you could go to any number of brick and mortar establishments. But no. No, Phil. You are ready to do something no one has ever done before.
Georgia Hampton:You are going to buy a CD on the Internet. You are going to do something called ecommerce.
Clip:Ecommerce. Ecommerce. Ecommerce.
Georgia Hampton:The rest is, as they say, browser history. Since that first ecommerce transaction, which was, and I can't stress this enough, the purchase of a Sting CD by a man named Phil, Phil from Philadelphia, as breathlessly reported by the New York Times. But since, the Internet has been swallowed by shopping to the point where we are all buying Sting CDs on the Internet, where we buy anything on the Internet, where we are all Phil.
Clip:Phil. Phil.
Georgia Hampton:And now you don't have to go anywhere or do anything to be presented with the incredible treasures the internet has to offer you such as the nachiola 3 Giggle Puffs stick toys. Nachiola 3 Giggle Puffs stick toys is a pack of plushie cigarettes for a dog to play with, but they could also be for you, your friend, your lover, your priest. And oh, how they will giggle when they feast their eyes on all 3 of the Giggle Puff stick toys. Remember how I told you about texting us? Here's your chance.
Georgia Hampton:Who wants it? Who needs it? These are, again, fake cigarettes for dogs, but we can't call them that because that is not important and nor would that be an inappropriate or maybe even legal thing to sell I mean, offered to you. All 3 of these stick toys are so giggle and so puff and you could have them right now. At first, online retailers were worried about gaining the trust of would be shoppers, so shopping needed to feel safe, and websites used data encryption, which ensured that your credit card information and your address were kept safe from cybernetic bad guys.
Georgia Hampton:But as ecommerce seeped into all the little corners of the Internet, trust became replaced with something else, speed. The more speed you have, the less trust really matters. After all, the Internet promised salvation from the slower, more drawn out process of shopping IRL. You could buy something from the comfort of your own home. You could buy everything from home, and you could get it fast.
Georgia Hampton:And if it's cheap, all the better. I can go to Amazon dotcom right now and order shampoo, kitty litter, and coffee filters and have it show up at my house today. How tantalizing is that? How easy is that? Speed became and is the model.
Georgia Hampton:Tell customers that they can get whatever they want at the drop of a hat, and you're golden. This model works. It works very well. By 2017, The Washington Post writes that Americans were, quote, shopping online as often as they were taking out the trash. But like boiling a frog, this shift happened.
Georgia Hampton:In the beginning, you had to go to a website to shop, but then they started coming to you. But not like a visit from a friend. Like a coming storm. Like both a promise and a threat.
Clip:Threat. Threat.
Georgia Hampton:Right? And what could be more promising and threatening than bubble machine gun with 69 holes? I personally counted all the holes and can confirm that, yes, absolutely, there are 69 of these bad boys, and they are all ready to blow bubbles out of them. It's such a display of delight and whimsy that you will be changed forever, emotional to the point of tears and falling to your knees at the sight of the bubble machine gun with 69 holes. A Astound everyone in the Trader Joe's parking lot with 69 holes of pure bubble magic that can only come forth out of the 69 discrete and incredible holes.
Georgia Hampton:2016, Facebook debuts its marketplace feature. 2018, Snapchat launches Snap Store. Pinterest, 2020. Instagram shop, 2020. By now, online shopping counts for 1,000,000,000 of dollars in transactions in the US, and online social commerce is also raking in 1,000,000,000 of dollars globally.
Georgia Hampton:On social media brands realize they have a captive audience so they start offering the option to buy their products on social platforms and they start paying influencers to promote that stuff too. Here's the trust again. This is a real person. A real person like you and I are real people, and they like this eye shadow palette. And after all, why shouldn't I why shouldn't I treat myself?
Georgia Hampton:Why shouldn't I have this palette for $25 with a promo code that gives me free shipping? It's just so easy. You don't even have to leave the auditorium I mean, app you're already in. The store comes to you. The store builds itself around you, but nowhere is that more perfectly tuned than TikTok shop.
Georgia Hampton:TikTok shop is different than the other girls. I talked to Bryce Whitwam, a marketing consultant, PhD candidate, and author of the paper, the TikTok effect, the impact of platform engagement and trust in American livestream ecommerce. Bryce explained that TikTok is unique because it plays on your emotions. Using its algorithm, TikTok can figure out what kind of entertainment you like and what kind of stuff you might wanna buy. Not need to buy, want.
Bryce Whitwam:It is not a place where you're going to go and buy, let's say, toilet paper or a bottle of shampoo. But you're gonna buy things that are kind of emotionally connected to you during your experience of watching short videos on the platform. The commerce space, either through advertisements, through endorsements of influencers or through actual live stream engagement disrupts your experiences within TikTok.
Georgia Hampton:There's no designation between entertainment and ads. They're treated to the exact same visual weight. You don't realize you're shopping and then suddenly you are.
Clip:Shopping. Shopping.
Georgia Hampton:Dragon egg, Lunar New Year 2024. Dragon egg lunar new year 2024 is here, and it's available. And it could be yours with just a few little tippy taps on your phone. What else is there but dragon egg lunar new year 2024? And why is it specifically for this Lunar New Year?
Georgia Hampton:I don't know and neither do you. What a joy it is to give yourself over to the ecstasy of ignorance. Free your mind and your heart today for dragon egg, lunar new year 2024. The stuff being sold on TikTok isn't serious, and it's not meant to be.
Bryce Whitwam:TikTok shop is designed for quick and dirty, impulsive fun stuff that comes along while you're watching your Olympic highlight videos and all those kind of programs.
Georgia Hampton:TikTok is diverting. It's distracting. It's fun. The stuff being sold on TikTok shop reflects that and so too do the people selling those products. TikTok influencers are very different from influencers on other platforms.
Georgia Hampton:The app operates in short form videos, a much more informal kind of entertainment than, say, YouTube. People are recording themselves at home, in their bathroom, in their bedroom. It feels normal, real.
Bryce Whitwam:That's just some friend of yours who's your age that's sitting in their bedroom or sitting in some in their living room making this video, talking about this amazing foundation product or this amazing eyeliner that you've just got to try and here are the reasons why.
Georgia Hampton:This is another unique thing about TikTok. The stuff being sold, it's unbelievably cheap. Like, $4 for a dress cheap. And this stuff is cheap because of drop shipping.
Bryce Whitwam:Drop shipping essentially is a way for online stores to sell things and they don't keep them in shop stock. So when a customer places an order, the store just forwards the order and payment to the supplier, and then they ship the product directly to the customer. You don't actually buy things from a warehouse. You actually buy them directly from a manufacturer.
Georgia Hampton:And since you don't have to pay for storage, you can offer pretty much anything at outrageously low prices that are impossible to find through more standard shopping means. Like, you won't be able to buy a dress for $4 at the mall. So TikTok creates this endlessly delicious experience of passive shopping like the evil twin of QVC. Similar to QVC, you're being sold a product through storytelling, through people sharing their experience, by making it feel accessible, but there's no TikTok shop channel. There's no separation at all.
Georgia Hampton:You're fed ads that look virtually the same as everything else on the app by people who seem like regular people and with prices that are so unimaginably low that it almost feels like a crime not to buy something. And that thing you're buying is fun and dumb and it's right there. It's so easy. It's so easy that you forget what it actually was that you just bought. It encourages a flow state that negates the desire to wonder at any of the scaffolding of this.
Georgia Hampton:Why should I trust this influencer? Why should I trust that this product is well made? It probably isn't. Right? Why am I putting any trust in the enormous monolith of TikTok at all?
Georgia Hampton:But this is the thing, trust doesn't matter. We are way past that. You can tap through someone's TikTok shop, buy something with Apple Pay, and be back to scrolling in a matter of seconds. It reduces shopping to a brain impulse and you have no time to second guess yourself. It gets to a point where the actual object you're purchasing doesn't matter anymore.
Georgia Hampton:You're just buying more entertainment, a reward for watching a woman show off the different slime she's selling. It's not unlike gambling. You think you're paying to win, but you're actually paying to lose for as long as possible.
Bryce Whitwam:Possible. Possible.
Georgia Hampton:And you guys, I used to think I would never win, that my life, my one precious life wouldn't be fixed through external commercial means, but that was before I saw object. And guys, my life has never been the same. Without object, I would be lost. I would wander this planet like it was a barren wasteland, but object, it saved my life. And now you can have object too and and see what I see.
Georgia Hampton:Without object, life is dull and gray, but not when object is here as your companion, your guiding light, your north star. Let object join you on your life's journey forever and stay with you until your dying breath, until the heat death of the universe, and the end of linear time. But even then, object will remain a mockery against all of us, but only yours for a limited time to call your own, your very own object. Don't wait. Text now.
Mike Rugnetta:Thanks to Bryce for chatting with us. Also to Andy Bayo for babysitting a mountain of goods purchased from the TikTok shop over the last month. Really, genuinely, thank you. As always, we wanna hear from you. Have you purchased anything from the TikTok shop?
Mike Rugnetta:Did you actually need it? Tell us about your strange flow state inspired experiences doing ecommerce. Call us at 6 5161550007. Don't text us anymore. Email us at the never post atgmail.com, or send us a voice memo via Airtable.
Mike Rugnetta:We got links in the show notes.
Clip:Folks, hello. You're warmed up perfect.
Georgia Hampton:In our 2nd audience participation, interstitial tonight, we
Mike Rugnetta:need your assistance. We need you to simply repeat after me. Please read loudly and clearly
Clip:each word that you see on screen. Ready?
Mike Rugnetta:Derrida, in his essay Plato's Pharmacy, says writing is death. Derrida actually says Socrates says writing is death. And I guess if you wanna get really specific, Derrida says Socrates says, which means Plato says Socrates says, with Socrates occasionally saying, Phaedrus says that Ammon, the king of the gods, or maybe it was Thomas, a mythical pharaoh, it depends upon who you ask, and they were maybe the same person, but we're gonna stick with Ammon, because we have pictures of him. Ammon said, writing is death. Let me tell you, if writing doesn't kill you, reading Derrida surely will.
Mike Rugnetta:Anyway, when the Egyptian demigod Thoth brings writing as a gift to Ammon to bestow it upon humanity, Thoth describes it as something which will make humanity wise and improve their memory. He calls it a pharmacon, a remedy. Emmet is suspicious. He responds.
Amun:You, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters, which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented a Pharmacon, not of memory, but of reminding, and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things. When they are, for the most part, ignorant and hard to get along with since they are not wise but only appear wise.
Mike Rugnetta:Discourse, conversation, Emond thinks, is instructive, interactive, productive, alive. Writing is authoritative, unresponsive, fixed, dead. Not a
Amun:Pharmakon.
Mike Rugnetta:For aiding life and living, but a Pharmacology. Which harms and has the capacity to halt thought. Is this is this the right way to begin a segment? Is this too I mean, the first word I say is darida. Surely, that's not the most welcoming thing for an audience.
Mike Rugnetta:And at our first live show, what is a what am I thinking? Okay. Let's try something different. I'm a murderer. Okay.
Mike Rugnetta:Maybe a bit of an overcorrection. How about this? I write a lot. Not in like a look at me. I'm a wordsmith sort of way.
Mike Rugnetta:I kinda do it almost compulsively in notebooks and pages around the house in the backs of envelopes on my phone too, of course, in the notes app, in Twitter, Notion, in text to myself, in my to do's, even in Google Calendar sometimes. Often whatever I have open when some idea strikes, I just kinda try to capture the thought. I don't even know that I really wanna call this writing. It's more like scribbling, drafting, not laboring on some long document to finish it, but pulling ideas through some hole they've poked in the ether, drafting like dragging heavy cargo, like following closely behind a thing that's traveling much faster than me, drafts like wisps of air that dissipate as quickly as they intrude. This segment is about drafts, writing before it's written, writing when it's thinking and not yet thoughts, as well as how the weird permeable boundary between thinking and writing, in progress and finished, has caused a kind of widespread confusion around what happens on the Internet and maybe even a widespread confusion about what the Internet and writing is for.
Mike Rugnetta:A draft occupies special territory in the universe of communicative experience. It is both the fucking around and the finding out, all rolled into 1. What are we finding out though when we write a draft? Usually, just what we think.
Shannon Mattern:The drafting process, the iterative I wouldn't even say perfection, but development of your ideas through multiple drafts that allows you to work out what you think about something. The thinking comes through the drafting.
Mike Rugnetta:I talked to Shannon Mattern, professor of media studies at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania and director of creative research and practice at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. I asked her about drafts and their purpose. She mentioned the contradictions that arise only once one sets out to do the work of writing in earnest by writing. You often realize how little sense your thoughts actually make.
Shannon Mattern:There will inevitably be discontinuities, non sequiturs, contradictions in a first draft, and you have to figure out what which of those need to be resolved and which of them need to be kind of celebrated and elevated.
Mike Rugnetta:It's not that before a draft, one has not thought. It's that the thoughts have not yet been assembled into some rhetorical edifice. Provisional writing, drafting makes those thoughts material, gives the ideas shape, which can then be fit together. Drafting transforms vaporist concepts to hardened substance. Editing then chisels that material into something, into something He, again, allegedly described that process as, and this is an alleged direct quote, constipated.
Mike Rugnetta:When I'm writing, and especially when I'm editing, I think about that a lot. Anyway, Derrida, whose work I have tried to make sense of on more than one occasion, says or writes, maybe we'll soon learn there's no real difference. Derrida says Plato and Phaedrus and Amon, they get it all wrong. Speech isn't this exemplar of knowledge with its immediacy and pathos. It is, after all, itself secondary to thought, guilty of exactly the thing writing is charged with.
Mike Rugnetta:Speech is also full of ambiguities. It's a second order reference for meaning otherwise caught inside the mind of an interlocutor. There is always a translation that must occur. Derrida doesn't resolve the conflict of Plato's pharmacy, coming either to writing's defense and insisting on its primacy, or admitting that speech has some edge in the production of ideas. Rather, it seems that he says that arguing one or the other speech or writing sits rightfully on the throne of knowing is to miss the point that language as a whole and all the communicative acts that depend on it, it's all always opaque.
Mike Rugnetta:There's always a translation that must occur. Speaking, writing, the 2 so opposed at the time of the ancients and opposed even now are more similar, much more similar than they may at first seem. Still, writing has unequivocally become our de facto repository of knowledge. Contrary to the ancients' insistence that the nimbleness of speech makes it the most suitable for transmitting an understanding of the world, writing, with its relative permanence, inflexibility, and portability, has become the foundation of expertise, insight, and education. This is a bit of a trap.
Mike Rugnetta:This is a consistency illusion. There's a consistency illusion to the written word, that what is written is and has been and should continue to be committed to. This isn't necessarily the case. Here's Shannon again.
Shannon Mattern:I think there's an assumption that in academia and publishing and so many realms of practice and professional practice that things have to reach a state of completion, that you have finalized, fully tied together your thoughts. You have reached a complete and terminal conclusion, and then you're ready to share it with the world. Whereas, I think the way thought really works in a healthier way to think about the evolution of thought, again, regardless of what realm it's in, whether it's policy or scientific understanding or kind of humanity's kind of analysis, I think it's much more healthy to realize that our thoughts, if we are continually taking in new knowledge, having conversations with people, our thoughts should be changing.
Mike Rugnetta:The draft then can be 2 things, a textual artifact of allegedly unfinished work, but also a kind of mode, a framework, or a perspective for appreciating otherwise seemingly fixed things in the world and considering that much more obvious much more than obviously appear so may be provisional. There are drafts, and then there is viewing things as drafts.
Shannon Mattern:So just because we have cut off our thinking about something at a particular time, cemented it in print, and sent that book out into the world, that is still, in a way, a draft because there's lots of stuff I published in my first book that I would not say today
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah.
Shannon Mattern:15 years later. So that book feels final, but it is still a draft to the way, in regards to the way I think about that subject matter.
Mike Rugnetta:This is uncomfortable. The consistency illusion surrounding writing, what is written remains committed to, derives in part from a consistency bias that we hold. Ours is a culture that values inflexibility. The confidence of rigidity. We don't like to imagine that our knowledge about the world is provisional.
Mike Rugnetta:We don't like to imagine our perspective, captured as it is, may soon change. We don't like change. We like to imagine that what is fixed in type is fixed in fact because that's safe and clear and convenient, and, oh, we love convenience. This is at the heart of the ancients' charge against writing. Saying is preferable, knowing it will address and then evaporate in the moment.
Mike Rugnetta:Writing will persist adamant. Herein lies a fundamental tension 2 of posting, which has all the aesthetic markers of a fixed text, but which functions rhetorically, formally even as the feed ushers everything by, like speech. Posts are provisional, ephemeral, living. There is a lot of talk of death around writing, for sure because writers are a dramatic bunch, but also because death is our central metaphor for leaving and being left behind in a way that denotes permanent loss. Cruella Kutch wrote of Killing Your Darlings, Helene Csikszoo, said I'm also realizing now that most of these people are French, so that probably has something to do with all the dramatics.
Mike Rugnetta:Anyway, either way, writing requires so much self restraint, focus, antipathy towards indulgence, empathy for a not yet existent audience, clarity of purpose that the author may feel as though they are constantly leaving versions of themselves and their work behind permanently. Break after break after break, creating new futures without what's present. The written word, especially when it must be finished to be released, has what Shannon calls a definitiveness, and that definitiveness is absent in so much of the rest of our lives. And then we log on. A draft is not death, though it may precede it.
Mike Rugnetta:If anything, it may be the rush of truly living, the representation of discovery, and even of excess if one so chooses. In drafts, we can often do and occasionally must let it all out, usually principally because drafts are private.
Shannon Mattern:I don't think everyone shares their drafts. Some people keep them in draft files, or back in the days of Twitter, there were draft tweets. I drafted many of those as a cathartic experience, you know, wanting to tell off somebody or share some controversial take that I was a little bit too scared to actually hit send. Blue Sky does not have that feature, which I know a lot of people have asked for.
Mike Rugnetta:And so we return in these last few moments together to posting. The most common approach is to treat the feed as speech, to tell off, to exclaim, to enjoin, to protest, and to have those thoughts taken with a level of seriousness comparable to if they had been said in the dispersive medium of air, not a fixed patch of parchment or pixels. But the feed is a functionally stable record for many of us, a minute by minute document of passing feelings and reactions and interjections and sudden observations fixed in state, sometimes even for years. My Twitter account is old enough to drive, and so we hesitate as Shannon did, as I have done 100 of times, probably more, probably 1,000. These facts, our rhetorical reflex, and our impulse towards textual commitment are in conflict, and so then too is our understanding.
Mike Rugnetta:We do not, and I we and I mean this we as broadly as possible. We do not know really what the feed is for. Are these disposable musings, or are they serious commitments? It's Schrodinger's rhetoric. Both and neither until circumstances require them to be 1 or the other, and the circumstances online are, shall we say, rarely in one's favor.
Mike Rugnetta:The fact that Twitter x has drafts suggests that these are thoughts to labor on, to which you must return to get just right. The drafts are a place where you can audition the idea of an audience, estimate the cost of textual commitment. Instagram too and Tumblr say, here is a place where you can think about what you're about to do. Here, you can draft. Blue Sky takes perhaps an ethically draftless stance, announcing itself as a place of fleeting conjecture.
Mike Rugnetta:Do not labor. Do not reconsider. Dash and go. Draft and go. An insistence that all of this, while it is writing, may in fact be more like speech and should be considered provisional and in progress.
Mike Rugnetta:You are not posting. We never post. We are only ever drafting. In the feed, we are speaking through writing, the 2 so opposed much more similar than they may at first seem, posting both a Pharmaconna. For aiding life and living as well as a Pharmaconna.
Mike Rugnetta:Which harms and has the capacity to halt thought. So there there's it's opening yourself up to a collaboration with sometimes an anonymous,
Shannon Mattern:unruly public who will have thoughts about what you share, depending upon how widely you share your draft. But putting something out there in a more public forum does require a lot of openness and acceptance of vulnerability.
Mike Rugnetta:Thanks to Shannon Mattern whose work you can and definitely should find at wordsinspace.net, and thanks also to everyone who shared their drafts with me for this segment. I hope you all experienced the rush of truly living. That is the show we have for you this week. Thank you so so so so much to XOXO, to Rev Hall, to the Andes, to Neil, to Al, to Clara, the lighting tech, and to the rest of the tech team and everyone here in the audience. This is our first ever live show.
Mike Rugnetta:This has been very fun, very weird, and very exciting. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.
Mike Rugnetta:Thank you.
Tom Lum:Can you believe that was their first podcast live? That was truly amazing. Give it up once more for them. Holy can I swear? Holy fuck.
Tom Lum:Wow.
Mike Rugnetta:That is the show we have for you this week. We'll be back in the main feed on Wednesday, September 11th. Members, we have some extended cuts of both Leah Haberman and Whitney Phillips. If you're interested in helping us continue to make the show and listening to any of our side shows like posts from the field, slow post and never watch, alongside extended segments, bonus segments, and an ad free version of this show, you can head on over to neverpo.st to become a member. It's slow writing on readmission to the abyss.
Mike Rugnetta:So if this body is sleepy tired, please walk around. Suddenly, there's nothing in the laws of the alphabet that breaks open revealing what buoyancy I am. Excerpt of Puberty of Puck by Mark Hyatt. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.
Mike Rugnetta:Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. Never Post is a production of charts and leisure.
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