Mike Rugnetta:
00:12
Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This introduction was written at 11:43 AM Eastern on Tuesday, February 27, 2024. Let's talk about what's happened since the last time you heard from us. In independent media news, journalists Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter launched Rascal, an independent reader supported worker owned news site focusing on tabletop role playing games and the industry surrounding them, or, quote, the newest tabletop role playing game outlet from 3 writers who don't know how to do anything else.
Mike Rugnetta:
00:48
I respect it. As discussed in Neverpost episode 0, there has been a palpable shift over the last few years towards worker owned cooperatives, and it's really incredible to see that trend extending to the relative niches of things like t t r p g's, actual play, and so on. You can read more about Rascal at rascal dot news and rascal underscore news on x. We, of course, wish him the best of luck. You should go check him out.
Mike Rugnetta:
01:15
This last Monday, the American Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case concerning laws in Texas and Florida, which seek to restrict social media platforms ability to moderate content. Legally, the question being asked is if Facebook, say, is more like a newspaper, and that they're allowed to exercise some editorial control by choosing what to publish and how, or if it's more like a phone line, a utility that should carry whatever content it is asked to with little consideration as to its broader meaning or impact in the moment. Some folks have suggested the answer is neither, that platforms are more like a mall, privately owned spaces, which act as public spaces, but whose owners can and should impose usage restrictions in certain cases. The problem is that all of the pre existing case law doesn't really apply tidally to the Internet, and so that's why the Supreme Court will rule on these specific cases. The stakes here are pretty big, but according to NBC News, at least, quote, after almost 4 hours of oral arguments, a majority of the justices appeared skeptical that states can prohibit platforms from barring or limiting the reach of some problematic users without violating the free speech rights of the companies.
Mike Rugnetta:
02:33
In other words, justices seem to think that platforms are allowed to moderate. Alito, of course, wondered if content moderation is, quote, anything more than a euphemism for censorship, proving once again he is the court's resident 13 year old redditor with a sword collection. Yahoo announced it would be laying off 10 staff members at Engadget, including editor in chief, Dana Wollman, and managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The remaining staff will be focused on, get ready for the most compelling pitch for a website you have heard in a while, Google traffic, SEO, commerce, and affiliate revenue. It really feels increasingly like the Internet is only for the LLMs and the ad bots, and no one else.
Mike Rugnetta:
03:17
Days later, Vice announced it would no longer exist, thanks to the management of its owner, a private equity consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, who is also tied, Megan Greenwell noted on X, to the gutting of national newspaper publisher, Gannett.
PBS Newshour:
03:35
Hundreds of journalists employed by Gannett, the country's largest newspaper chain, went on strike today. Staffers from 2 dozen newsrooms from California to New York walked off the job, demanding livable wages and accusing Gannett leadership of decimating its newsrooms.
Mike Rugnetta:
03:52
You can hear some detailed chat on VICE's bankruptcy filing from last year on Ripcorp, a podcast Jason and I produce with Ingrid Burrington. I'll put a link to that and sources for all this stuff in the show notes. VICE announced that operation of the website would cease, effective almost immediately. The entire archive was axed, leaving writers and journalists scrambling to save their clips after access to the internal CMS was unilaterally terminated. Jules Suletsev on X noted also that it appears a 1,000 or more Now This News videos have been axed in the recent past, leading to conversation about how content makers can save their work to prove that they've done it.
Mike Rugnetta:
04:32
A few people on the Neverpost team know this firsthand, as we previously worked on an amazing podcast stricken pretty much completely from the internet by Matt Mullenweg, who has had a real week, but that's about all any of us have the stomach to say. Jules, for his part, has apparently extended an offer to Now This to purchase the deleted videos on behalf of quote, a small coalition of former employees. In show news, meaning, us, we've been around for a month. Holy heck. And we have also been featured on Apple Podcasts new and noteworthy section for the past week and change, which is, honestly, it's sort of flabbergasting and amazing.
Mike Rugnetta:
05:19
So, hello, and welcome to anyone who has come to the show via that route. But really, thank you so much to everyone for listening. And especially thanks to all of the folks who are sending us emails, and voice memos and voice mail about the show and about segments and just telling us your thoughts and, telling us things we should cover. On that subject, we are going to be releasing our 1st mailbag episode next week, and that will go out on the main feed and the member only episode feeds. So let us know, if you like that as a format once it's out, and, you know, if we all have a good time, we'll try to get to doing one of those every, I don't know, let's say 3 or 4 episodes.
Mike Rugnetta:
06:00
As for this episode, we got a great one for you. Georgia is gonna talk with writer and researcher Tamara Nies about how platforms do, and mostly do not, acknowledge death and support the grieving process, and then you'll hear from me on the subject of trick shotters, people throwing things into other things impressively. But first, some chill, lofi, public domain beats to soothe your nerves.
Barry White:
06:26
That album was under the influence of love,
Barry White:
06:29
John Lippert. That that was
Barry White:
06:31
That album was under the influence of love,
Barry White:
06:34
John Lippert. That that was
Barry White:
06:40
Under the influence of love. That that was
Georgia Hampton:
09:23
In some ways, our relationship to death looks the same online and off. People grieve, they share photos, they commiserate. And posting about death online lets you share in a way that's so much more far reaching than it would be in real life. But there's there's this other part of the online experience of grieving that is I mean, it's fucked up. This segment contains discussion of death, dying, mass shootings, and a brief mention of suicide.
Georgia Hampton:
10:14
To give you an example of what I mean, I have to describe a TikTok to you. It's by this woman, Adrianna, who is driving to go pick up her husband's ashes, and you're really in it with her. She's positioned her phone so you're basically sitting in the passenger seat, and you're there with her when she parks and sits there for a second and then bursts into tears. Then she leaves the car and comes back with a box. She opens it and pulls out the little blue disc shaped urn.
Georgia Hampton:
10:48
And you're right there in the passenger seat when she holds it up against her chest and starts crying again. At the bottom of the screen, she has put a caption talking about how hard it is to lose someone so special. But while I was reading it, I noticed this other thing. Under the caption, there's this little alert that the app put in there, and it says Participating in this activity could result in you or others getting hurt. And listen, I know it's there because she's in a car.
Georgia Hampton:
11:27
It's standard boilerplate language that TikTok places alongside most videos shot in cars, but I just felt myself getting so fucking mad because it felt so disrespectful to the content of the video. Like, here's this woman sharing an unbelievably intimate part of her life and the software just, like, muscles in there like, hey, guys. Hey. Hello. Like, it just felt so inappropriate, so utterly tone deaf, and this speaks to the way that platforms deal with death generally, not with respect, sometimes not at all.
Georgia Hampton:
12:11
And I just I felt like social media platforms should know better than this. Because seriously, haven't we been online long enough to figure out how to handle the concept of death?
Tamara Kneese:
12:26
A lot of platforms are sort of in the middle of developing a memorialization policy, but don't quite have one yet.
Georgia Hampton:
12:35
This is Tamara Neece.
Tamara Kneese:
12:37
I'm Tamara Neece, and I'm currently the project director of Data and Society Research Institute's new Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab or AIM Lab.
Georgia Hampton:
12:49
Tamara is exactly who I wanted to talk to about this because she wrote the book about this topic. It's called Death Glitch, and she describes it as
Tamara Kneese:
13:00
A long term look at the changing user experience of death online. And so really trying to understand the ways in which people have been using social media platforms and other other kinds of digital media and smart devices in order to maintain relationships with the dead, to memorialize them and also to mourn or to imagine their own afterlives.
Georgia Hampton:
13:29
Death Glitch covers a huge range of issues around death and grieving online, but I was especially interested in this tension between the users who are posting about death and loss online and the platforms themselves which don't seem to know how to handle these concepts properly. To put it plainly, online social networks have always been bad at handling the grieving process. That weird mess up with TikTok is actually pretty tame. Back in the 2000, in the beginning of social media, it used to be so much worse. And a big reason for that, as Tamara says, is because of the original purpose of these websites and, specifically, Facebook.
Georgia Hampton:
14:18
Facebook was built by college kids for college kids.
Tamara Kneese:
14:24
And by and large, you know, people at elite colleges don't really think about their own death a lot.
Georgia Hampton:
14:31
But everybody dies. And Facebook users did die. In the beginning, Facebook handled that in a very simple way. They just delete that person's profile. Photos, bio, all of it just gone in a second.
Georgia Hampton:
14:48
And there was no widespread belief that it might be useful or important to keep that stuff accessible online. And then, everything changed very suddenly. On the morning of April 16th, 2007, an undergraduate student opened fire in 2 different university buildings at Virginia Tech and killed 33 people. It remains the deadliest school shooting in US history. And within hours of the attack, Virginia Tech students started using Facebook as a way to tell their friends that they were safe and to check-in with each other.
Georgia Hampton:
15:28
They also started visiting the profiles of students who had died to just look at them, to leave comments, and to say stuff that they didn't have a chance to say before.
Tamara Kneese:
15:39
And there also was a growing kind of mass memorialization movement. A lot of students ended up putting a black ribbon as their Facebook profile to kind of show solidarity with victims of the gun violence. And so it was almost like a feedback loop, right? Where, you know, you had a lot of students who were using Facebook to talk about what had happened and communicate with each other. And then because there was already a lot of content on Facebook about Virginia Tech that got taken up by the news as being part of the story.
Georgia Hampton:
16:14
Suddenly, Facebook was becoming an essential tool of the grieving process for Virginia Tech students, their families, and their friends. A big part of that was because, by 2,007, Facebook was the social media platform. It was bigger than Myspace. It was bigger than Friendster. This was where that age bracket hung out online.
Georgia Hampton:
16:39
Everybody was there. So when the Virginia Tech massacre happened and students started posting about it all over Facebook, it really just showed how integral this website was in the daily lives of college aged people. Pretty much all the victims of the shooting had a Facebook profile. You could revisit their photos or read their bio, and this allowed you to even kind of continue communicating with them. You could still wish them a happy birthday on their Facebook wall.
Georgia Hampton:
17:20
Their profile could feel alive even though you knew this person was dead. These profiles were suddenly extremely important in a new way, not just as something left behind, but also something to maintain. But initially, Facebook didn't really catch on to that.
Tamara Kneese:
17:44
Facebook announced that they were going to deactivate the profiles of the victims, And this really upset a lot of the friends and family members of the people who had died. And there were actually grassroots campaigns led by Virginia Tech students in order to get Facebook to change their memorialization policy, and allow them to preserve, the profiles of the dead indefinitely.
Georgia Hampton:
18:11
The campaigning worked. Facebook decided to stop deleting these profiles. But Facebook didn't really do much else. The accounts of dead users weren't memorials or anything like that. They were still just regular profiles like anyone else.
Georgia Hampton:
18:33
And that became a huge problem. Because while all of this was happening, Facebook was also working on this thing called reconnect. It's just what it sounds like. This little feature that tries to coax inactive users back onto the platform by inviting active users to reach out. And, well, I think you see where this is going.
Tamara Kneese:
18:58
You know, you would get a prompt like, hey, reach out to your friend because they haven't been on Facebook in a while. You should poke them or, you know, whatever. And, of course, some of the users who were no longer active were no longer active because they were dead.
Georgia Hampton:
19:15
Once again, people started complaining. And this mounting pressure pushed Facebook to adopt an official policy in 2009, which did make memorial pages a specific different thing. If you showed Facebook someone's proof of death, you could transform your loved one's profile into a memorial page that was basically frozen in time and, crucially, wouldn't come up on the reconnect feature. But weird software problems involving dead users kept cropping up in other ways. For example, inactive accounts are much more likely to be hacked.
Georgia Hampton:
19:56
So all of a sudden, someone's dead grandma starts posting about cryptocurrency or starts sending out messages with links to a website that's trying to steal your credit card information. What we're left with is this situation where the living and the dead cohabitate in a digital space that is really only consciously built for living users. And while I wish I could tell you this was just happening on Facebook, it wasn't. These horrible, uncanny experiences happened across all digital platforms, and they keep happening. Tamara knows about this firsthand.
Tamara Kneese:
20:37
I had a friend who died by suicide, a couple of years ago, and LinkedIn actually sent a reminder of her work anniversary. It felt very disturbing because it was, this sort of this weird sheen of, like, professionalism and, you know, careerism, but for somebody who had died in a very tragic way.
Georgia Hampton:
21:05
That's the weird, horrible tension here. While social media networks are being used as essential spaces for grieving and commiseration, there are also these emotional minefields for anyone who's grieving.
Tamara Kneese:
21:21
And so the feeling of kind of intentionally visiting the profile of somebody who had died, that does feel very much akin to visiting a gravesite or having some other ritual that you are setting aside to communicate or commune with the dead. And then then these moments of sort of being intruded on and that and actually a lot of the people that I interviewed about sort of caring for the the digital remains of their loved ones, that was when they would get upset is if they felt like the algorithm was being intrusive in some way or if the technology was haunting them in a way, that felt more like a violation.
Georgia Hampton:
21:57
That's the thing. You can't choose 1 or the other. It's always both. You can visit the profile of a dead relative or make a TikTok about picking up your husband's ashes, but the software makes its own moves in parallel, and you don't get to control that. Grief is a complex emotion around which we have very little social training.
Georgia Hampton:
22:26
There's no standard way to express grief or to receive it. Sometimes it feels taboo. Often it feels weird. It's complicated, but software is strict. It's good at following simple rules and adapting to patterns, but it's not nuanced.
Georgia Hampton:
22:46
It can't take a hint. It can't read the room. In an essential way, it can't and won't serve these complicated emotional needs. So there's this degree to which any social media platform just will never be a reliable steward of the digital remains of a dead person. Websites are always changing and updating and redesigning, which doesn't always play well with the memorial page that's been frozen in time since 2007.
Georgia Hampton:
23:18
And I mean, I don't think it's unrealistic for me to say that Facebook is not going to exist forever.
Tamara Kneese:
23:33
I think the problem with what is happening now is that people have very little control over how those memories will be maintained over the long term and so much can change very quickly. So the interface is going to change. The memorial that you have is not a static thing. It is not a headstone. It is not a photograph that may fade but generally looks the same.
Tamara Kneese:
23:58
We're talking about interfaces that are, you know, very malleable, that may disappear. And so it is a very different kind of relationship because it is not it is not very permanent, in any way and I think people have to kind of accept that because the thing that you have become very attached to may in fact not be something that you can maintain for decades into the future.
Georgia Hampton:
24:31
Thank you so much to Tamara and Niece for talking to us. This whole conversation really helped me be able to name and examine these weird feelings I had about how platforms just don't really seem to understand death and grief. And I wanna know if you have similar frustrations around social media platforms and how they handle or mishandle death. I'm also interested in your own weird experiences where software is just totally incapable of navigating the tricky terrain of grief and dying. Send us an email, leave us a voicemail, Tell us what you think.
Georgia Hampton:
25:09
The information about the many ways you can reach us are down in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta:
28:01
I love a challenge. I love all kinds of challenges. I love long books, tight deadlines, boring movies, ambitious projects, music that is, as far as most people are concerned, unlistenable. I like finding meaning where the search for it feels futile. I like being bad at stuff, and I love getting better.
Mike Rugnetta:
28:24
Another version of me definitely runs marathons, for sure, but this version does 24 hour plays and tries to make a living as a podcaster. So, maybe it makes sense that I love trick shot videos. I haven't always. I've known for a long time of like, you know, dude perfect. The YouTube wizards of sinking seemingly impossible sick basketball shots.
Dude Perfect:
28:51
Only thing between us in history, 800 feet. Let's go boys. Come on. We can do it.
Mike Rugnetta:
28:56
Recently, the more general trick shot genre has found me on TikTok in the way things find you on TikTok. And then you find those things reflecting something deep about your trickshot genre is simple. A man, almost always a man, though not exclusively, throws, almost always throws, though not exclusively, some object into or onto some other object impressively. Impossibly. A card from across the room into a closed clothes pin attached to a spinning turntable.
Mike Rugnetta:
29:40
A disc bounced off several surfaces and into the slot of a Nintendo Wii. And oh, so many ping pong balls bounced off every conceivable surface and into any and every vessel imaginable. But most often, it seems a solo cup. Quietly suggesting that the trickshot genre's er trickshot is, and has probably always been, beer pong. Trickshot videos themselves don't really make for instructive nor compelling audio.
Mike Rugnetta:
30:12
Mostly, one hears a flicked finger, silence, maybe a bounce or 2, a ding or a clink, and then a cheer. Oh. Always a cheer. Because as trick shot success compilation videos make evident in big bold text, these successes take 7 hours, 3 hours, 10 hours, 17 hours, and, yes, occasionally, 4 tries in 2 minutes. But often the better part of a waking day.
Mike Rugnetta:
30:45
Sitting there, tossing, flicking, flipping, waiting, and finally, you make it. Of course, you'd cheer.
Magic of Matt:
30:54
Yo, yes.
Mike Rugnetta:
30:55
I wanted to talk to someone about this. A trick shotter, I mean. About the frame of mind they enter when doing their work. What it's like to set up for themselves a challenge they know could take a dozen or more hours to meet. I wanna know what their goals are, what the ideal outcomes for their work as a whole are, and more than anything, to find out what it feels like, what it means to them, how it differs, or maybe doesn't, from darts, long books, golf, boring movies, basketball, other challenges, and other things that one can put skillfully into other things.
Mike Rugnetta:
31:39
So, I reached out to a number of trick shotters, and none of them returned my emails. Actually, that's not true. 1 did after about 2 weeks, and they very politely declined. At this time, they wrote, I am not interested in participating in your podcast. Which, honestly, I get it.
Mike Rugnetta:
31:58
No hard feelings. How thematic. Anyway, I had tossed all my cards. Got no snags. So I went to Target, and bought the cheapest set of pans I could find.
Mike Rugnetta:
32:10
I want to know what it feels like doing trick shots? Maybe I can find out for myself. I told our senior producer Hans, and my wife Molly about my plan. And they both said the same thing to me. Please be careful.
Mike Rugnetta:
32:23
What if this awakens something in you? You're about to turn 40. This can't become your midlife crisis. I told you. I love a challenge.
Mike Rugnetta:
32:40
I brought my pots and pans into my tiny basement studio. I'm currently surrounded by them recording this and set them up in the style of Sam Carlson, AKA Trix Shot with an x in the middle. A well known TikTok and Twitch trick shot live streamer who among other things, bounces ping pong balls off of cookware in his stairwell. His social media bios read, you've seen me on my steps. I get the ping pong balls from my sound design kit.
Mike Rugnetta:
33:06
They're good for all kinds of things, so I have a bunch. And I get to work. Here we go, I guess. It took me about an hour on a Sunday night to design a remedial trick shot course. And upon my first attempt, my first toss, I was reminded immediately of Sisyphus.
Mike Rugnetta:
33:32
Have I cheated death and, for my crimes, been sentenced to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity? No. But the superficial resemblances are not remote. Here I stand repeatedly tossing balls, watching them plink off a succession of overturned Farberware nonstick skillets, hoping they will plonk into a plastic cup. Retrieving them over and over and over again when I'm empty handed.
Mike Rugnetta:
34:00
I understand now why Sam and other trick shotters have so many ping pong balls. One pan in my studio hangs from the ceiling. That's the one I throw the balls at. They then fly over my head to a pan angled atop my MIDI keyboard. In a usually tall, shallow bounce, the ball then hopefully dings the next pan on my step stool.
Mike Rugnetta:
34:25
Then, if they even make it this far, off a baking tin atop my tiny trash can and towards a McDonald's cup, angled sideways inside a wooden IKEA salad bowl. It's a Rube Goldberg esque assemblage of kitchen gear stretching from my desk to the door of my studio about 20 feet. And with each successive ding and dong and plink and plonk, the progression through my little circuit feels increasingly remote. Improbable. Borderline.
Mike Rugnetta:
34:58
I practice what I can. Meaning, the few things I can practice. Where I stand, how I aim my ping pong ball at the center of the first skillet, and how hard I toss it. After that, the rest is sort of up to chance. Or I guess, not chance really, but chaos.
Mike Rugnetta:
35:15
The whole thing is a classically chaotic system, accounting for all of the variables I could, in theory, know how each toss will go. The spin on the ball, the slight wind from my studio HVAC, the density and smoothness of the pan surface where the ball hits. It's all knowable technically and contributes to my long string of failures. The pots make, I notice a nice little melody once I can successfully hit 3 of them in a row, which is not often. I begin to realize the layers of practice.
Mike Rugnetta:
35:57
Not just where I stand, how hard, and at what angle I throw the ping pong ball, but also how I've set up my circuit. I've created, I think, too many variables. I adjust my setup slightly, secure some pieces with gaff tape, and adjust also my attitude. I'm starting to get frustrated. I'm not making it.
Mike Rugnetta:
36:17
And it has been 20 minutes. I'm not even getting started yet. As I toss the ping pong balls, I think about Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who wrote under a pseudonym that, quote, life is repetition. If it's possible, he wrote, wondering if we can really ever actually do the same exact thing multiple times in a row. If it's possible, repetition makes a person happy.
Mike Rugnetta:
36:49
It gives them, he wrote, the blissful security of the moment. I think about this when practicing archery too, which I've done for a little while. Shooting arrows is sorta like this here, with the ping pong balls. A thing practiced over and over and over again, and not ever the same really in each instance. Able to be explored as deeply as a vast subterranean chasm.
Mike Rugnetta:
37:19
But when you release an error, an instant passes before a result with little perceptible interference from the outside world, except for, you know, wind and gravity. Letting go of the ping pong ball, I trace it consciously. Almost in slow motion from one obstacle to the next. And I see with very clear sight where it goes wrong, where it goes right. And I wonder in each case, can I control for that?
Mike Rugnetta:
37:48
Is there some minuscule change I can make so that doesn't happen? Or does? And get me that much closer to a sure goal. What if I throw with my thumb and forefinger, instead of all fingers in a line opposite my thumb? Is there a spin that I can impart when I throw that will have an impact?
Mike Rugnetta:
38:08
What if I tilt this pan ever so slightly? Maybe I should tape up my HVAC vent. I hear Hans and Molly at a great distance. Please, be careful. As the darkness of the chasm envelops me.
Mike Rugnetta:
38:30
Philosopher Antonia Ponte writes of practicing, with an s if it matters, as something which constitutes neither virtuosity nor suffering. Practicing is neither perfect nor punishment. It is, she says, sustainable and pleasant. The activity being practiced, the practice, must be benign. It must not wear us down, or else it becomes something else.
Mike Rugnetta:
38:55
To practice, she explains, is to accept, and even search for, the interweaving of differences among intentional repetition. Throwing these ping pong balls, I wonder, am I practicing? Is this a practice? There are certainly elements of it that I am practicing in the conversational sense, if not the philosophical one. I am interweaving differences, I think.
Mike Rugnetta:
39:28
I am engaging in intentional repetition, that's for sure. I walk further into the chasm, wondering about wondering about what I'm doing, and how I'm doing it, and why. Trying to perceive the difference between each shot as the daylight shrinks and dims behind me when it happens.
Mike Rugnetta:
39:58
Yes.
Mike Rugnetta:
40:01
Fuck it. Okay. So that's what that feels like. It took just over 46 minutes, but I got it. Finally, a success.
Mike Rugnetta:
40:22
Four pan bounces and the ball is in the cup. So simple. So monumentous. I want to celebrate. And I do.
Mike Rugnetta:
40:32
But what am I celebrating? I wonder to myself. I've done the same thing over and over and over again. And been successful once. Can I celebrate my skill?
Mike Rugnetta:
40:45
I don't think my skill has had much bearing on the outcome. Am I celebrating this ping pong ball on its successful journey? I'm reminded that Sam trick shot Carlson marks and tracks successful balls presenting them as relics on his website As though they're imbued with some power. Having reached their solo cup destination. Am I celebrating it?
Mike Rugnetta:
41:08
The circumstances? The moment? The whole system of household objects and time which has been invested? Which has passed the effort expended to get to this instant, which dissipates as quickly as it formed. In trickshot livestreams, which I've watched, a bunch of hours of, there's often a collective jubilation at successful shots, especially, of course, if it's been a while since the last one and or the shot is particularly challenging.
Mike Rugnetta:
41:40
The emoji fly, the LFGs overrun the chat. The audience really shares in the success. It's as if the trick shotter is a team that they root for. A team competing against Well, I'm not sure, actually. The pots and pans and clothespins?
Mike Rugnetta:
41:57
The ping pong balls? Themselves? Time? Practitioners, Antonia Ponte writes, meaning those who practice, might playfully be seen as time workers. A practitioner makes time for their practice, which is, quote, objectively fun, nice, simple, pleasurable, and with some intricacies that might invite a little effort.
Mike Rugnetta:
42:24
And which one, unfathomably, often doesn't quite want to do, or which one resists doing with startling tenacity. I think of trickshotter's live streaming, which is tough to think of, outside of the logics of fame, and capital, and platforms, and algorithms, and labor. Work. Not time work, but work work, which isn't generally fun, nice, simple, pleasurable. Live streaming, in particular, is the most complicated thing otherwise normal people do, and it's shocking to me how many people do it.
Mike Rugnetta:
43:02
There's definitely an inertia that I feel in adhering to my own self imposed live streaming schedule, which I certainly resist with a startling But there is then also always the simple pleasure of having done it. I recognize that. I feel it. But I don't have to stream. It's not my job.
Mike Rugnetta:
43:23
I don't have to throw the ping pong balls. It's not my job. Well, not usually. It is right now sort of. But Hans, Molly, I wanna assure you I do not feel myself getting sucked in.
Mike Rugnetta:
43:34
But anyway, I don't know for how many trickshotters this is work. A job. I suspect the answer is some. I wonder, does this practice of trick shots, specifically, change? Does it become something different?
Mike Rugnetta:
43:57
More? Less? Worse? Better? When repeated over and over again.
Mike Rugnetta:
44:03
A repeating repetition. In public. Framed by all of the things brought by social media. The numbers, the buttons, the audience. There themselves, perhaps, again and again and again.
Mike Rugnetta:
44:18
There's a several times nested repetition here that I'm fascinated by, but which is ultimately out of my reach unless this does become my midlife crisis. And I feel distantly like there's something courageous about the multi hour dedication to some seemingly impossible and ultimately useless success. Useless in the way all art is fundamentally useless. Its lack of use being the point, really, and the source of any power that it has. And also the source of a well known anxiety in the people who have tasked themselves with making it.
Mike Rugnetta:
44:59
Which is funny. We say when we sink a shop that we've made it. We celebrate, maybe then, an act of creation. 1 in uniquely challenging circumstances. A question, or a thought, I guess, for the trick shotters I couldn't snag.
Mike Rugnetta:
45:22
I go and get the successful ball from the cup, my relic, and I stand back in front of the starter skillet. I toss it again, and I wonder, how do I know when to stop? And, also, am I still having fun? He who chooses repetition, Kierkegaard wrote, he lives. Or as another writer on the absurd may have put it, one must imagine Sisyphus and the trick shotter happy.
Mike Rugnetta:
46:19
You can find sources for this segment in the show notes, including links to a bunch of trick shotters if you wanna watch them. For an earlier version of this segment, our senior producer Hans spoke with artist Tara Asgar about her durational performance work, and to get her take on trick shot live streams. A sincere thanks to Tara for her time, and we'll put links to her work in the show notes as well. And an edit of her thoughts will be up for members next week. Highly, highly recommend checking out her work.
Mike Rugnetta:
46:47
It's great. If you do trick shots, I would love to hear any thoughts you want to share about your work. How does it feel making a shot after 7, 10, 14 hours? And if you do trick shots live, how does your audience react in those moments? I would love to know what this work means to you and how you've arrived at the decision to do it.
Mike Rugnetta:
47:11
And if you're not a trick shotter, tell me about your practices. What are the things you do that are objectively fun, nice, simple, pleasurable, and with some intricacies that might invite a little effort, but which you unfathomably also don't quite want to do, or which you resist doing with a startling tenacity. Tell me why. Why such tenacity? Send us an email, a voice memo, leave us a voice mail, and we may respond in a future episode of Never Post.
Mike Rugnetta:
47:41
Instructions on how to get a hold of us are in the show notes.
Hans Buetow:
48:11
Hans Buto, senior producer, Never Post.
Hans Buetow:
48:14
The beats that you have
Hans Buetow:
48:15
been hearing throughout this episode are government funded. That's right. Tax dollars at work. The project that these come from is called Citizen DJ, and it is incredible. Citizen DJ was created in 2020 by a man named Brian Foo.
Hans Buetow:
48:34
Really smart, really cool. Brian was a part of the innovator in Residence Program at the Library of Congress. Brian chose to create a public portal that allows anyone to make music using free to use samples from the library. You go in, you get to choose from hundreds of recordings. There's opera, folk music samples, but there's also like World War 2 training films, dialect interviews, conversations with celebrities, a ton of stuff.
Hans Buetow:
49:03
And you pick your beats, you grab a sample and then you can live mix your own songs. You can even record it right there in the portal. We have, all of us, been playing with this on the team and you should too. In the show notes, you'll find links to Citizen DJ and instructions on instructions on how to contact us to share what you do with it. Send us what you make and we might just use it in an upcoming episode.
Mike Rugnetta:
49:34
That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back next week with our 1st mailbag episode. That's very exciting. Please get your comments in by next Monday, if you want us to respond to them in that mailbag episode. And then we're gonna be here the week following on March 13th with a normal episode, 2 segments as you know it, as you love it.
Mike Rugnetta:
49:55
We've also got a few surprises in the works for the member only programming feed, so keep your eyes upon for those sweet, sweet drops. Okay. Love you. Never post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.
Mike Rugnetta:
50:15
Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer, and I'm your host, Mike Richey. We have undertaken something, the consequences of which we know not. We imagine we will be forced to choose. Something in us dramatizes the choice. We have created a universe of opposites, which cannot be reconciled.
Mike Rugnetta:
50:45
We have created a dichotomy, the parts of which we cannot interpret. Excerpt of Headlines from Atalanta, Acts of God, by Robert Ashley. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.
00:12
Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This introduction was written at 11:43 AM Eastern on Tuesday, February 27, 2024. Let's talk about what's happened since the last time you heard from us. In independent media news, journalists Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter launched Rascal, an independent reader supported worker owned news site focusing on tabletop role playing games and the industry surrounding them, or, quote, the newest tabletop role playing game outlet from 3 writers who don't know how to do anything else.
Mike Rugnetta:
00:48
I respect it. As discussed in Neverpost episode 0, there has been a palpable shift over the last few years towards worker owned cooperatives, and it's really incredible to see that trend extending to the relative niches of things like t t r p g's, actual play, and so on. You can read more about Rascal at rascal dot news and rascal underscore news on x. We, of course, wish him the best of luck. You should go check him out.
Mike Rugnetta:
01:15
This last Monday, the American Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case concerning laws in Texas and Florida, which seek to restrict social media platforms ability to moderate content. Legally, the question being asked is if Facebook, say, is more like a newspaper, and that they're allowed to exercise some editorial control by choosing what to publish and how, or if it's more like a phone line, a utility that should carry whatever content it is asked to with little consideration as to its broader meaning or impact in the moment. Some folks have suggested the answer is neither, that platforms are more like a mall, privately owned spaces, which act as public spaces, but whose owners can and should impose usage restrictions in certain cases. The problem is that all of the pre existing case law doesn't really apply tidally to the Internet, and so that's why the Supreme Court will rule on these specific cases. The stakes here are pretty big, but according to NBC News, at least, quote, after almost 4 hours of oral arguments, a majority of the justices appeared skeptical that states can prohibit platforms from barring or limiting the reach of some problematic users without violating the free speech rights of the companies.
Mike Rugnetta:
02:33
In other words, justices seem to think that platforms are allowed to moderate. Alito, of course, wondered if content moderation is, quote, anything more than a euphemism for censorship, proving once again he is the court's resident 13 year old redditor with a sword collection. Yahoo announced it would be laying off 10 staff members at Engadget, including editor in chief, Dana Wollman, and managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The remaining staff will be focused on, get ready for the most compelling pitch for a website you have heard in a while, Google traffic, SEO, commerce, and affiliate revenue. It really feels increasingly like the Internet is only for the LLMs and the ad bots, and no one else.
Mike Rugnetta:
03:17
Days later, Vice announced it would no longer exist, thanks to the management of its owner, a private equity consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, who is also tied, Megan Greenwell noted on X, to the gutting of national newspaper publisher, Gannett.
PBS Newshour:
03:35
Hundreds of journalists employed by Gannett, the country's largest newspaper chain, went on strike today. Staffers from 2 dozen newsrooms from California to New York walked off the job, demanding livable wages and accusing Gannett leadership of decimating its newsrooms.
Mike Rugnetta:
03:52
You can hear some detailed chat on VICE's bankruptcy filing from last year on Ripcorp, a podcast Jason and I produce with Ingrid Burrington. I'll put a link to that and sources for all this stuff in the show notes. VICE announced that operation of the website would cease, effective almost immediately. The entire archive was axed, leaving writers and journalists scrambling to save their clips after access to the internal CMS was unilaterally terminated. Jules Suletsev on X noted also that it appears a 1,000 or more Now This News videos have been axed in the recent past, leading to conversation about how content makers can save their work to prove that they've done it.
Mike Rugnetta:
04:32
A few people on the Neverpost team know this firsthand, as we previously worked on an amazing podcast stricken pretty much completely from the internet by Matt Mullenweg, who has had a real week, but that's about all any of us have the stomach to say. Jules, for his part, has apparently extended an offer to Now This to purchase the deleted videos on behalf of quote, a small coalition of former employees. In show news, meaning, us, we've been around for a month. Holy heck. And we have also been featured on Apple Podcasts new and noteworthy section for the past week and change, which is, honestly, it's sort of flabbergasting and amazing.
Mike Rugnetta:
05:19
So, hello, and welcome to anyone who has come to the show via that route. But really, thank you so much to everyone for listening. And especially thanks to all of the folks who are sending us emails, and voice memos and voice mail about the show and about segments and just telling us your thoughts and, telling us things we should cover. On that subject, we are going to be releasing our 1st mailbag episode next week, and that will go out on the main feed and the member only episode feeds. So let us know, if you like that as a format once it's out, and, you know, if we all have a good time, we'll try to get to doing one of those every, I don't know, let's say 3 or 4 episodes.
Mike Rugnetta:
06:00
As for this episode, we got a great one for you. Georgia is gonna talk with writer and researcher Tamara Nies about how platforms do, and mostly do not, acknowledge death and support the grieving process, and then you'll hear from me on the subject of trick shotters, people throwing things into other things impressively. But first, some chill, lofi, public domain beats to soothe your nerves.
Barry White:
06:26
That album was under the influence of love,
Barry White:
06:29
John Lippert. That that was
Barry White:
06:31
That album was under the influence of love,
Barry White:
06:34
John Lippert. That that was
Barry White:
06:40
Under the influence of love. That that was
Georgia Hampton:
09:23
In some ways, our relationship to death looks the same online and off. People grieve, they share photos, they commiserate. And posting about death online lets you share in a way that's so much more far reaching than it would be in real life. But there's there's this other part of the online experience of grieving that is I mean, it's fucked up. This segment contains discussion of death, dying, mass shootings, and a brief mention of suicide.
Georgia Hampton:
10:14
To give you an example of what I mean, I have to describe a TikTok to you. It's by this woman, Adrianna, who is driving to go pick up her husband's ashes, and you're really in it with her. She's positioned her phone so you're basically sitting in the passenger seat, and you're there with her when she parks and sits there for a second and then bursts into tears. Then she leaves the car and comes back with a box. She opens it and pulls out the little blue disc shaped urn.
Georgia Hampton:
10:48
And you're right there in the passenger seat when she holds it up against her chest and starts crying again. At the bottom of the screen, she has put a caption talking about how hard it is to lose someone so special. But while I was reading it, I noticed this other thing. Under the caption, there's this little alert that the app put in there, and it says Participating in this activity could result in you or others getting hurt. And listen, I know it's there because she's in a car.
Georgia Hampton:
11:27
It's standard boilerplate language that TikTok places alongside most videos shot in cars, but I just felt myself getting so fucking mad because it felt so disrespectful to the content of the video. Like, here's this woman sharing an unbelievably intimate part of her life and the software just, like, muscles in there like, hey, guys. Hey. Hello. Like, it just felt so inappropriate, so utterly tone deaf, and this speaks to the way that platforms deal with death generally, not with respect, sometimes not at all.
Georgia Hampton:
12:11
And I just I felt like social media platforms should know better than this. Because seriously, haven't we been online long enough to figure out how to handle the concept of death?
Tamara Kneese:
12:26
A lot of platforms are sort of in the middle of developing a memorialization policy, but don't quite have one yet.
Georgia Hampton:
12:35
This is Tamara Neece.
Tamara Kneese:
12:37
I'm Tamara Neece, and I'm currently the project director of Data and Society Research Institute's new Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab or AIM Lab.
Georgia Hampton:
12:49
Tamara is exactly who I wanted to talk to about this because she wrote the book about this topic. It's called Death Glitch, and she describes it as
Tamara Kneese:
13:00
A long term look at the changing user experience of death online. And so really trying to understand the ways in which people have been using social media platforms and other other kinds of digital media and smart devices in order to maintain relationships with the dead, to memorialize them and also to mourn or to imagine their own afterlives.
Georgia Hampton:
13:29
Death Glitch covers a huge range of issues around death and grieving online, but I was especially interested in this tension between the users who are posting about death and loss online and the platforms themselves which don't seem to know how to handle these concepts properly. To put it plainly, online social networks have always been bad at handling the grieving process. That weird mess up with TikTok is actually pretty tame. Back in the 2000, in the beginning of social media, it used to be so much worse. And a big reason for that, as Tamara says, is because of the original purpose of these websites and, specifically, Facebook.
Georgia Hampton:
14:18
Facebook was built by college kids for college kids.
Tamara Kneese:
14:24
And by and large, you know, people at elite colleges don't really think about their own death a lot.
Georgia Hampton:
14:31
But everybody dies. And Facebook users did die. In the beginning, Facebook handled that in a very simple way. They just delete that person's profile. Photos, bio, all of it just gone in a second.
Georgia Hampton:
14:48
And there was no widespread belief that it might be useful or important to keep that stuff accessible online. And then, everything changed very suddenly. On the morning of April 16th, 2007, an undergraduate student opened fire in 2 different university buildings at Virginia Tech and killed 33 people. It remains the deadliest school shooting in US history. And within hours of the attack, Virginia Tech students started using Facebook as a way to tell their friends that they were safe and to check-in with each other.
Georgia Hampton:
15:28
They also started visiting the profiles of students who had died to just look at them, to leave comments, and to say stuff that they didn't have a chance to say before.
Tamara Kneese:
15:39
And there also was a growing kind of mass memorialization movement. A lot of students ended up putting a black ribbon as their Facebook profile to kind of show solidarity with victims of the gun violence. And so it was almost like a feedback loop, right? Where, you know, you had a lot of students who were using Facebook to talk about what had happened and communicate with each other. And then because there was already a lot of content on Facebook about Virginia Tech that got taken up by the news as being part of the story.
Georgia Hampton:
16:14
Suddenly, Facebook was becoming an essential tool of the grieving process for Virginia Tech students, their families, and their friends. A big part of that was because, by 2,007, Facebook was the social media platform. It was bigger than Myspace. It was bigger than Friendster. This was where that age bracket hung out online.
Georgia Hampton:
16:39
Everybody was there. So when the Virginia Tech massacre happened and students started posting about it all over Facebook, it really just showed how integral this website was in the daily lives of college aged people. Pretty much all the victims of the shooting had a Facebook profile. You could revisit their photos or read their bio, and this allowed you to even kind of continue communicating with them. You could still wish them a happy birthday on their Facebook wall.
Georgia Hampton:
17:20
Their profile could feel alive even though you knew this person was dead. These profiles were suddenly extremely important in a new way, not just as something left behind, but also something to maintain. But initially, Facebook didn't really catch on to that.
Tamara Kneese:
17:44
Facebook announced that they were going to deactivate the profiles of the victims, And this really upset a lot of the friends and family members of the people who had died. And there were actually grassroots campaigns led by Virginia Tech students in order to get Facebook to change their memorialization policy, and allow them to preserve, the profiles of the dead indefinitely.
Georgia Hampton:
18:11
The campaigning worked. Facebook decided to stop deleting these profiles. But Facebook didn't really do much else. The accounts of dead users weren't memorials or anything like that. They were still just regular profiles like anyone else.
Georgia Hampton:
18:33
And that became a huge problem. Because while all of this was happening, Facebook was also working on this thing called reconnect. It's just what it sounds like. This little feature that tries to coax inactive users back onto the platform by inviting active users to reach out. And, well, I think you see where this is going.
Tamara Kneese:
18:58
You know, you would get a prompt like, hey, reach out to your friend because they haven't been on Facebook in a while. You should poke them or, you know, whatever. And, of course, some of the users who were no longer active were no longer active because they were dead.
Georgia Hampton:
19:15
Once again, people started complaining. And this mounting pressure pushed Facebook to adopt an official policy in 2009, which did make memorial pages a specific different thing. If you showed Facebook someone's proof of death, you could transform your loved one's profile into a memorial page that was basically frozen in time and, crucially, wouldn't come up on the reconnect feature. But weird software problems involving dead users kept cropping up in other ways. For example, inactive accounts are much more likely to be hacked.
Georgia Hampton:
19:56
So all of a sudden, someone's dead grandma starts posting about cryptocurrency or starts sending out messages with links to a website that's trying to steal your credit card information. What we're left with is this situation where the living and the dead cohabitate in a digital space that is really only consciously built for living users. And while I wish I could tell you this was just happening on Facebook, it wasn't. These horrible, uncanny experiences happened across all digital platforms, and they keep happening. Tamara knows about this firsthand.
Tamara Kneese:
20:37
I had a friend who died by suicide, a couple of years ago, and LinkedIn actually sent a reminder of her work anniversary. It felt very disturbing because it was, this sort of this weird sheen of, like, professionalism and, you know, careerism, but for somebody who had died in a very tragic way.
Georgia Hampton:
21:05
That's the weird, horrible tension here. While social media networks are being used as essential spaces for grieving and commiseration, there are also these emotional minefields for anyone who's grieving.
Tamara Kneese:
21:21
And so the feeling of kind of intentionally visiting the profile of somebody who had died, that does feel very much akin to visiting a gravesite or having some other ritual that you are setting aside to communicate or commune with the dead. And then then these moments of sort of being intruded on and that and actually a lot of the people that I interviewed about sort of caring for the the digital remains of their loved ones, that was when they would get upset is if they felt like the algorithm was being intrusive in some way or if the technology was haunting them in a way, that felt more like a violation.
Georgia Hampton:
21:57
That's the thing. You can't choose 1 or the other. It's always both. You can visit the profile of a dead relative or make a TikTok about picking up your husband's ashes, but the software makes its own moves in parallel, and you don't get to control that. Grief is a complex emotion around which we have very little social training.
Georgia Hampton:
22:26
There's no standard way to express grief or to receive it. Sometimes it feels taboo. Often it feels weird. It's complicated, but software is strict. It's good at following simple rules and adapting to patterns, but it's not nuanced.
Georgia Hampton:
22:46
It can't take a hint. It can't read the room. In an essential way, it can't and won't serve these complicated emotional needs. So there's this degree to which any social media platform just will never be a reliable steward of the digital remains of a dead person. Websites are always changing and updating and redesigning, which doesn't always play well with the memorial page that's been frozen in time since 2007.
Georgia Hampton:
23:18
And I mean, I don't think it's unrealistic for me to say that Facebook is not going to exist forever.
Tamara Kneese:
23:33
I think the problem with what is happening now is that people have very little control over how those memories will be maintained over the long term and so much can change very quickly. So the interface is going to change. The memorial that you have is not a static thing. It is not a headstone. It is not a photograph that may fade but generally looks the same.
Tamara Kneese:
23:58
We're talking about interfaces that are, you know, very malleable, that may disappear. And so it is a very different kind of relationship because it is not it is not very permanent, in any way and I think people have to kind of accept that because the thing that you have become very attached to may in fact not be something that you can maintain for decades into the future.
Georgia Hampton:
24:31
Thank you so much to Tamara and Niece for talking to us. This whole conversation really helped me be able to name and examine these weird feelings I had about how platforms just don't really seem to understand death and grief. And I wanna know if you have similar frustrations around social media platforms and how they handle or mishandle death. I'm also interested in your own weird experiences where software is just totally incapable of navigating the tricky terrain of grief and dying. Send us an email, leave us a voicemail, Tell us what you think.
Georgia Hampton:
25:09
The information about the many ways you can reach us are down in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta:
28:01
I love a challenge. I love all kinds of challenges. I love long books, tight deadlines, boring movies, ambitious projects, music that is, as far as most people are concerned, unlistenable. I like finding meaning where the search for it feels futile. I like being bad at stuff, and I love getting better.
Mike Rugnetta:
28:24
Another version of me definitely runs marathons, for sure, but this version does 24 hour plays and tries to make a living as a podcaster. So, maybe it makes sense that I love trick shot videos. I haven't always. I've known for a long time of like, you know, dude perfect. The YouTube wizards of sinking seemingly impossible sick basketball shots.
Dude Perfect:
28:51
Only thing between us in history, 800 feet. Let's go boys. Come on. We can do it.
Mike Rugnetta:
28:56
Recently, the more general trick shot genre has found me on TikTok in the way things find you on TikTok. And then you find those things reflecting something deep about your trickshot genre is simple. A man, almost always a man, though not exclusively, throws, almost always throws, though not exclusively, some object into or onto some other object impressively. Impossibly. A card from across the room into a closed clothes pin attached to a spinning turntable.
Mike Rugnetta:
29:40
A disc bounced off several surfaces and into the slot of a Nintendo Wii. And oh, so many ping pong balls bounced off every conceivable surface and into any and every vessel imaginable. But most often, it seems a solo cup. Quietly suggesting that the trickshot genre's er trickshot is, and has probably always been, beer pong. Trickshot videos themselves don't really make for instructive nor compelling audio.
Mike Rugnetta:
30:12
Mostly, one hears a flicked finger, silence, maybe a bounce or 2, a ding or a clink, and then a cheer. Oh. Always a cheer. Because as trick shot success compilation videos make evident in big bold text, these successes take 7 hours, 3 hours, 10 hours, 17 hours, and, yes, occasionally, 4 tries in 2 minutes. But often the better part of a waking day.
Mike Rugnetta:
30:45
Sitting there, tossing, flicking, flipping, waiting, and finally, you make it. Of course, you'd cheer.
Magic of Matt:
30:54
Yo, yes.
Mike Rugnetta:
30:55
I wanted to talk to someone about this. A trick shotter, I mean. About the frame of mind they enter when doing their work. What it's like to set up for themselves a challenge they know could take a dozen or more hours to meet. I wanna know what their goals are, what the ideal outcomes for their work as a whole are, and more than anything, to find out what it feels like, what it means to them, how it differs, or maybe doesn't, from darts, long books, golf, boring movies, basketball, other challenges, and other things that one can put skillfully into other things.
Mike Rugnetta:
31:39
So, I reached out to a number of trick shotters, and none of them returned my emails. Actually, that's not true. 1 did after about 2 weeks, and they very politely declined. At this time, they wrote, I am not interested in participating in your podcast. Which, honestly, I get it.
Mike Rugnetta:
31:58
No hard feelings. How thematic. Anyway, I had tossed all my cards. Got no snags. So I went to Target, and bought the cheapest set of pans I could find.
Mike Rugnetta:
32:10
I want to know what it feels like doing trick shots? Maybe I can find out for myself. I told our senior producer Hans, and my wife Molly about my plan. And they both said the same thing to me. Please be careful.
Mike Rugnetta:
32:23
What if this awakens something in you? You're about to turn 40. This can't become your midlife crisis. I told you. I love a challenge.
Mike Rugnetta:
32:40
I brought my pots and pans into my tiny basement studio. I'm currently surrounded by them recording this and set them up in the style of Sam Carlson, AKA Trix Shot with an x in the middle. A well known TikTok and Twitch trick shot live streamer who among other things, bounces ping pong balls off of cookware in his stairwell. His social media bios read, you've seen me on my steps. I get the ping pong balls from my sound design kit.
Mike Rugnetta:
33:06
They're good for all kinds of things, so I have a bunch. And I get to work. Here we go, I guess. It took me about an hour on a Sunday night to design a remedial trick shot course. And upon my first attempt, my first toss, I was reminded immediately of Sisyphus.
Mike Rugnetta:
33:32
Have I cheated death and, for my crimes, been sentenced to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity? No. But the superficial resemblances are not remote. Here I stand repeatedly tossing balls, watching them plink off a succession of overturned Farberware nonstick skillets, hoping they will plonk into a plastic cup. Retrieving them over and over and over again when I'm empty handed.
Mike Rugnetta:
34:00
I understand now why Sam and other trick shotters have so many ping pong balls. One pan in my studio hangs from the ceiling. That's the one I throw the balls at. They then fly over my head to a pan angled atop my MIDI keyboard. In a usually tall, shallow bounce, the ball then hopefully dings the next pan on my step stool.
Mike Rugnetta:
34:25
Then, if they even make it this far, off a baking tin atop my tiny trash can and towards a McDonald's cup, angled sideways inside a wooden IKEA salad bowl. It's a Rube Goldberg esque assemblage of kitchen gear stretching from my desk to the door of my studio about 20 feet. And with each successive ding and dong and plink and plonk, the progression through my little circuit feels increasingly remote. Improbable. Borderline.
Mike Rugnetta:
34:58
I practice what I can. Meaning, the few things I can practice. Where I stand, how I aim my ping pong ball at the center of the first skillet, and how hard I toss it. After that, the rest is sort of up to chance. Or I guess, not chance really, but chaos.
Mike Rugnetta:
35:15
The whole thing is a classically chaotic system, accounting for all of the variables I could, in theory, know how each toss will go. The spin on the ball, the slight wind from my studio HVAC, the density and smoothness of the pan surface where the ball hits. It's all knowable technically and contributes to my long string of failures. The pots make, I notice a nice little melody once I can successfully hit 3 of them in a row, which is not often. I begin to realize the layers of practice.
Mike Rugnetta:
35:57
Not just where I stand, how hard, and at what angle I throw the ping pong ball, but also how I've set up my circuit. I've created, I think, too many variables. I adjust my setup slightly, secure some pieces with gaff tape, and adjust also my attitude. I'm starting to get frustrated. I'm not making it.
Mike Rugnetta:
36:17
And it has been 20 minutes. I'm not even getting started yet. As I toss the ping pong balls, I think about Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who wrote under a pseudonym that, quote, life is repetition. If it's possible, he wrote, wondering if we can really ever actually do the same exact thing multiple times in a row. If it's possible, repetition makes a person happy.
Mike Rugnetta:
36:49
It gives them, he wrote, the blissful security of the moment. I think about this when practicing archery too, which I've done for a little while. Shooting arrows is sorta like this here, with the ping pong balls. A thing practiced over and over and over again, and not ever the same really in each instance. Able to be explored as deeply as a vast subterranean chasm.
Mike Rugnetta:
37:19
But when you release an error, an instant passes before a result with little perceptible interference from the outside world, except for, you know, wind and gravity. Letting go of the ping pong ball, I trace it consciously. Almost in slow motion from one obstacle to the next. And I see with very clear sight where it goes wrong, where it goes right. And I wonder in each case, can I control for that?
Mike Rugnetta:
37:48
Is there some minuscule change I can make so that doesn't happen? Or does? And get me that much closer to a sure goal. What if I throw with my thumb and forefinger, instead of all fingers in a line opposite my thumb? Is there a spin that I can impart when I throw that will have an impact?
Mike Rugnetta:
38:08
What if I tilt this pan ever so slightly? Maybe I should tape up my HVAC vent. I hear Hans and Molly at a great distance. Please, be careful. As the darkness of the chasm envelops me.
Mike Rugnetta:
38:30
Philosopher Antonia Ponte writes of practicing, with an s if it matters, as something which constitutes neither virtuosity nor suffering. Practicing is neither perfect nor punishment. It is, she says, sustainable and pleasant. The activity being practiced, the practice, must be benign. It must not wear us down, or else it becomes something else.
Mike Rugnetta:
38:55
To practice, she explains, is to accept, and even search for, the interweaving of differences among intentional repetition. Throwing these ping pong balls, I wonder, am I practicing? Is this a practice? There are certainly elements of it that I am practicing in the conversational sense, if not the philosophical one. I am interweaving differences, I think.
Mike Rugnetta:
39:28
I am engaging in intentional repetition, that's for sure. I walk further into the chasm, wondering about wondering about what I'm doing, and how I'm doing it, and why. Trying to perceive the difference between each shot as the daylight shrinks and dims behind me when it happens.
Mike Rugnetta:
39:58
Yes.
Mike Rugnetta:
40:01
Fuck it. Okay. So that's what that feels like. It took just over 46 minutes, but I got it. Finally, a success.
Mike Rugnetta:
40:22
Four pan bounces and the ball is in the cup. So simple. So monumentous. I want to celebrate. And I do.
Mike Rugnetta:
40:32
But what am I celebrating? I wonder to myself. I've done the same thing over and over and over again. And been successful once. Can I celebrate my skill?
Mike Rugnetta:
40:45
I don't think my skill has had much bearing on the outcome. Am I celebrating this ping pong ball on its successful journey? I'm reminded that Sam trick shot Carlson marks and tracks successful balls presenting them as relics on his website As though they're imbued with some power. Having reached their solo cup destination. Am I celebrating it?
Mike Rugnetta:
41:08
The circumstances? The moment? The whole system of household objects and time which has been invested? Which has passed the effort expended to get to this instant, which dissipates as quickly as it formed. In trickshot livestreams, which I've watched, a bunch of hours of, there's often a collective jubilation at successful shots, especially, of course, if it's been a while since the last one and or the shot is particularly challenging.
Mike Rugnetta:
41:40
The emoji fly, the LFGs overrun the chat. The audience really shares in the success. It's as if the trick shotter is a team that they root for. A team competing against Well, I'm not sure, actually. The pots and pans and clothespins?
Mike Rugnetta:
41:57
The ping pong balls? Themselves? Time? Practitioners, Antonia Ponte writes, meaning those who practice, might playfully be seen as time workers. A practitioner makes time for their practice, which is, quote, objectively fun, nice, simple, pleasurable, and with some intricacies that might invite a little effort.
Mike Rugnetta:
42:24
And which one, unfathomably, often doesn't quite want to do, or which one resists doing with startling tenacity. I think of trickshotter's live streaming, which is tough to think of, outside of the logics of fame, and capital, and platforms, and algorithms, and labor. Work. Not time work, but work work, which isn't generally fun, nice, simple, pleasurable. Live streaming, in particular, is the most complicated thing otherwise normal people do, and it's shocking to me how many people do it.
Mike Rugnetta:
43:02
There's definitely an inertia that I feel in adhering to my own self imposed live streaming schedule, which I certainly resist with a startling But there is then also always the simple pleasure of having done it. I recognize that. I feel it. But I don't have to stream. It's not my job.
Mike Rugnetta:
43:23
I don't have to throw the ping pong balls. It's not my job. Well, not usually. It is right now sort of. But Hans, Molly, I wanna assure you I do not feel myself getting sucked in.
Mike Rugnetta:
43:34
But anyway, I don't know for how many trickshotters this is work. A job. I suspect the answer is some. I wonder, does this practice of trick shots, specifically, change? Does it become something different?
Mike Rugnetta:
43:57
More? Less? Worse? Better? When repeated over and over again.
Mike Rugnetta:
44:03
A repeating repetition. In public. Framed by all of the things brought by social media. The numbers, the buttons, the audience. There themselves, perhaps, again and again and again.
Mike Rugnetta:
44:18
There's a several times nested repetition here that I'm fascinated by, but which is ultimately out of my reach unless this does become my midlife crisis. And I feel distantly like there's something courageous about the multi hour dedication to some seemingly impossible and ultimately useless success. Useless in the way all art is fundamentally useless. Its lack of use being the point, really, and the source of any power that it has. And also the source of a well known anxiety in the people who have tasked themselves with making it.
Mike Rugnetta:
44:59
Which is funny. We say when we sink a shop that we've made it. We celebrate, maybe then, an act of creation. 1 in uniquely challenging circumstances. A question, or a thought, I guess, for the trick shotters I couldn't snag.
Mike Rugnetta:
45:22
I go and get the successful ball from the cup, my relic, and I stand back in front of the starter skillet. I toss it again, and I wonder, how do I know when to stop? And, also, am I still having fun? He who chooses repetition, Kierkegaard wrote, he lives. Or as another writer on the absurd may have put it, one must imagine Sisyphus and the trick shotter happy.
Mike Rugnetta:
46:19
You can find sources for this segment in the show notes, including links to a bunch of trick shotters if you wanna watch them. For an earlier version of this segment, our senior producer Hans spoke with artist Tara Asgar about her durational performance work, and to get her take on trick shot live streams. A sincere thanks to Tara for her time, and we'll put links to her work in the show notes as well. And an edit of her thoughts will be up for members next week. Highly, highly recommend checking out her work.
Mike Rugnetta:
46:47
It's great. If you do trick shots, I would love to hear any thoughts you want to share about your work. How does it feel making a shot after 7, 10, 14 hours? And if you do trick shots live, how does your audience react in those moments? I would love to know what this work means to you and how you've arrived at the decision to do it.
Mike Rugnetta:
47:11
And if you're not a trick shotter, tell me about your practices. What are the things you do that are objectively fun, nice, simple, pleasurable, and with some intricacies that might invite a little effort, but which you unfathomably also don't quite want to do, or which you resist doing with a startling tenacity. Tell me why. Why such tenacity? Send us an email, a voice memo, leave us a voice mail, and we may respond in a future episode of Never Post.
Mike Rugnetta:
47:41
Instructions on how to get a hold of us are in the show notes.
Hans Buetow:
48:11
Hans Buto, senior producer, Never Post.
Hans Buetow:
48:14
The beats that you have
Hans Buetow:
48:15
been hearing throughout this episode are government funded. That's right. Tax dollars at work. The project that these come from is called Citizen DJ, and it is incredible. Citizen DJ was created in 2020 by a man named Brian Foo.
Hans Buetow:
48:34
Really smart, really cool. Brian was a part of the innovator in Residence Program at the Library of Congress. Brian chose to create a public portal that allows anyone to make music using free to use samples from the library. You go in, you get to choose from hundreds of recordings. There's opera, folk music samples, but there's also like World War 2 training films, dialect interviews, conversations with celebrities, a ton of stuff.
Hans Buetow:
49:03
And you pick your beats, you grab a sample and then you can live mix your own songs. You can even record it right there in the portal. We have, all of us, been playing with this on the team and you should too. In the show notes, you'll find links to Citizen DJ and instructions on instructions on how to contact us to share what you do with it. Send us what you make and we might just use it in an upcoming episode.
Mike Rugnetta:
49:34
That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back next week with our 1st mailbag episode. That's very exciting. Please get your comments in by next Monday, if you want us to respond to them in that mailbag episode. And then we're gonna be here the week following on March 13th with a normal episode, 2 segments as you know it, as you love it.
Mike Rugnetta:
49:55
We've also got a few surprises in the works for the member only programming feed, so keep your eyes upon for those sweet, sweet drops. Okay. Love you. Never post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.
Mike Rugnetta:
50:15
Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer, and I'm your host, Mike Richey. We have undertaken something, the consequences of which we know not. We imagine we will be forced to choose. Something in us dramatizes the choice. We have created a universe of opposites, which cannot be reconciled.
Mike Rugnetta:
50:45
We have created a dichotomy, the parts of which we cannot interpret. Excerpt of Headlines from Atalanta, Acts of God, by Robert Ashley. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.
