Never Post

Mike talks about how and why some authentic media looks like it was generated by AI; Hans talks about KOSA – the Kids Online Safety Act – and how it is shaped by not one, but two concurrent moral panics. Also: RARE TAPES! 📼
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Intro Links
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Generated-ish
Generated-ish Examples
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KOSA is a Moral Panic (or Two) 
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

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Creators & Guests

Host
Mike Rugnetta
Host of Never Post. Creator of Fun City, Reasonably Sound, Idea Channel and other internet things.
Producer
Hans Buetow
Independent Senior Audio Producer. Formerly with Terrible, Thanks for Asking and The New York Times
JO
Producer
Jason Oberholzer

What is Never Post?

A podcast about and for the internet, hosted by Mike Rugnetta

Mike Rugnetta:

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and this intro was written on Wednesday, November 6, 2024 at 12:02 PM Eastern. We have, well, it's a show. I can say that much. In our first segment, I talk about how and why some authentic media looks like it was generated by AI.

Mike Rugnetta:

And in our second segment, Hans talks about COSA, the kids online safety act. And how it's shaped by not 1, but 2 concurrent moral panics. Also, rare tapes. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have 5 news stories for you this week.

Mike Rugnetta:

Jeff Bezos is apparently the first Titan of the tech industry to congratulate Donald Trump on his apparent presidential win. This according to New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac, on x. Isaac follows up with screenshots of congrats from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, as well as amateur MMA fighter and recent gold chain guy, Mark Zuckerberg. Congrats to President Trump. I wish for his huge success in the job, Sam Altman's post reads with a reply that adds, it is critically important that the US maintains its lead in developing AI with democratic values.

Mike Rugnetta:

Zuck writes, quote, congratulations, President Trump, on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of this country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration. And these, you know, actually Jason, you can stop the music for a sec. These make me think of something.

Mike Rugnetta:

We have one sort of middling review on Apple Podcasts which gives us 3 stars as a show for claiming, to be a show about the Internet while actually being a show about politics. And I hope this news item, right here, puts an end to the idea that those are 2 separable things because they're not. A show about the Internet is a show about politics and also honestly vice versa. It used to be that one could exist without the other and that is not the case. Not now.

Mike Rugnetta:

Not for a while now and for better and probably, let's be honest, worse. That will continue to be the case for a long time. We are gonna do our very best, as we have to help you navigate what that means. But we are not, and I wanna be really clear and very forceful about this, we are not going to ignore it or apologize for it. Okay.

Mike Rugnetta:

Jason, you can restart the ticker now. I'm done being melodramatic. Facebook took over $1,000,000 from organizations running political ads containing disinformation, Forbes reports, quote, just 6 days before the 2024 presidential election, Facebook is running hundreds of ads from pages that falsely claim the election may be rigged or postponed. One of the ads features a stylized image of vice president Kamala Harris with devil horns and an American flag burning behind her. And later, some of the ads, the piece continues, question whether Harris will remain in the race and suggest America is headed for another civil war.

Mike Rugnetta:

Will we look at Facebook in 2024 the same way we did in 2016? I think it's unlikely. Arguably, their role in spreading election disinformation has severely diminished over the last 8 years, but it appears true that they remain a massive force in an otherwise still very polluted information environment. I don't I I didn't write this in the script. I'm gonna let Jason decide whether or not it stays in.

Mike Rugnetta:

I'm not I don't wanna get on like my high horse here but I think genuinely, if you are still a user of Facebook, just be honest with yourself about why and if you should continue to be. That's it. That's all I wanna say. The European Union bastions of regulatory action have launched an official investigation of online commerce hub, Taimu, for its allegedly lax enforcement of fraudulent and illegal item removal. Lisa O'Carroll at The Guardian reports, a senior commission official said concerns about the selling of counterfeit products, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and toys have been raised by various authorities across Europe, particularly in Germany, Denmark, and Ireland, where the company is headquartered in the EU.

Mike Rugnetta:

Taymoo has nearly 100,000,000 users across Europe and the commission stresses that the current investigation is the result of suspicion and not conclusions.

Pronunciation Clip:

We are looking at how to pronounce this name and more confusing pronunciations and vocabulary. Stay tuned to learn more. This is a name. It's also the name of an application, an app. Tmoo.

Pronunciation Clip:

Easy once you know. Tmoo. Stress on the first syllable. Tmoo.

Mike Rugnetta:

The Mozilla Foundation, the non profit arm of Mozilla, developer of Firefox, has laid off 30% of its staff and shuttered its advocacy division, according to TechCrunch. The foundation's overall focus is setting the browser makers policies and overseeing its corporate structure. Its website lists the advocacy divisions focus as making the health of the Internet a mainstream issue. It's also vital as centralization, surveillance, exclusion, and other online threats proliferate. We need a movement to keep the web a global public resource.

Mike Rugnetta:

Mozilla Foundation's executive director Nabiha Syed wrote to staff that quote, navigating this topsy-turvy distracting time requires laser focus. And sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far, because it won't get us to the next peak. Lofty goals demand hard choices. End quote. And finally, it seems as though an AI slot generating page nominally headquartered in Illinois, but with admins operating out of Pakistan, fooled a rather large group of Dubliners into assembling in public for a Halloween parade that was not ever actually going to happen.

Mike Rugnetta:

Please be advised, Ireland's National Police Force wrote, that contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin City Centre this evening or tonight. All those gathered at O'Connell Street in expectation of such a parade are asked to disperse safely. That's so unfortunate. That is the news I have for you this week. In our first segment, you'll hear from me again talking about AI generated photos organizing a new genre of media.

Mike Rugnetta:

In our second segment, Hans talks with historian of gay and trans culture, Avery Dame Griff about Xhosa and moral techno panics. But first, in our interstitials this week in celebration of the return of the Internet Archive, 3 selections from its audio unsorted collection.

Raquel Welch:

Welcome to the audio portion of body and mind. We'll be concentrating on abdominal breathing. And as you proceed with the following breathing session, one thing is certain, every day will be different. You'll find some days will be very easy flowing, and other days, you'll feel anxiety all around you. You'll learn to simply observe your thoughts floating in your consciousness, and practice allowing them to drift along without attaching any judgment to them.

Raquel Welch:

By choosing to be a witness to your own mind. So now, we are about to sit down and stop. Let go of all the worries and problems, and just be. Let's start this session by releasing some tension in the areas where you feel it the most. In your back, your shoulders, and the neck, and in the face.

Raquel Welch:

So these are simple stretches that you can do anytime, anywhere, and they're also wonderful before this meditation, because when you let go of your body, you'll notice that your thoughts also begin to quiet down. Let's begin by coming to the edge of the chair, and gently close your eyes now. Just place your hands on your thighs, and we're going to stretch and use the breath. So breathe in, and stretch from the bottom of your spine up to the top of your head.

Mike Rugnetta:

Generative AI is organizing a new genre of media. And into orbit around this genre's dense mass. It's pulling things made by humans. Some things which even predate the existence of generative AI. I see these comments on posts where someone will write, is this AI?

Mike Rugnetta:

Or this looks AI generated? Or is this mid journey? Or this could have been made by an AI. I see these comments on videos, images, text, comments written in response even sometimes to other comments. Over the last few months, I've happened upon this under a video of a woman dancing at the bottom of a pool.

Mike Rugnetta:

A picture of dogs in the snow. A tram crashed into an Apple store in Norway. Cosplay, lots of cosplay. Illustration, lots and lots of illustration, especially of things anime related. So I used never posts research software to run a search across a few social media platforms, a bunch of blogs, news sites, forums, etcetera.

Mike Rugnetta:

Looking for comments and captions and body text reading, this could be made by AI. This has to be AI. Is this AI generated? 10 or so phrases of disbelief to see how common an occurrence they are. In a day, it found over 300 results.

Mike Rugnetta:

The software reckons in a month, it would find up to 36,000. I thought this was AI nonsense, written in response to a Reddit post titled, the Swedish word for speed is fart, with real actual photographs of Swedish signs warning of speed bumps or fart hinders. This has to be AI generated. A comment reported in a news story about an authentic video of Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan being danced at by a fan. The video is, it's pretty awkward.

Mike Rugnetta:

A post from ex user pomela, sharing a picture of a loaf of pumpkin bread they made that reads, someone on Reddit replied that this looks like AI. Compliment. And finally I understand how cosplayers feel when people ask them where they bought their costume. And listeners, just to be clear, this bread does look unreal. Also compliment.

Mike Rugnetta:

I thought this was AI at first. Written about an allegedly historical black and white photo of a multi story Soviet snowman. Occasionally, commenters are correct, and the post they're commenting on was generated. Is this AI? They'll ask about some illustration, and the OP will reply, yes, even occasionally helpfully detailing the prompt.

Mike Rugnetta:

Is this edited with AI? Only the background, responds someone posting their latest cosplay. And, I'm paraphrasing here, you can find the original on my website so that you can verify it's real. Or, this looks like slop, written under a misshapen 3 d rendering of Mario, and then the response, that's because it is. I'm less interested in these cases, where the commenter is correct.

Mike Rugnetta:

Where they've seen enough slop around the Internet, and now they can reliably identify it. I'm more interested, increasingly interested, in cases where they're obviously wrong, or the comment seems to be more rhetorical than anything. Like, they know what they're looking at wasn't AI generated, but still, still there is some quality to it which gestures at all the other images, text, and videos that were AI generated. In a recent notable instance, this occurred when Donald Trump, on the campaign trail, served fries at McDonald's. The photos were shared far and wide online, and about them, many people opined, this looks like AI.

Mike Rugnetta:

Why? What's that connection between actual photos and the algorithmically generated? Between things which obviously aren't AI, but we can easily imagine they might be. How did that relationship develop? What sustains it?

Mike Rugnetta:

And why are people writing about it up to 36,000 times a month? That's what this segment is about. A real world made unreal by its proximity to the unreal. And for what it's worth, I'm genuinely unsure about the Soviet snowman. Looking at it, I think it could really go either way.

Mike Rugnetta:

You can often, if not always, judge the provenance of AI generated images. There are the obvious distortions and image artifacts, but as platforms evolve to figure out how many fingers people tend to have, we can tell increasingly from the vibes, which at the time of recording at least, are uniformly off. Depicted subject matter is often surreal, and has the appearance of a butter sculpture. Skin and hair and clothes are fondant like, the result of some nightmare bake off.

Evil Mary Berry:

I think they're such fun.

Mike Rugnetta:

Eyes are wild, colors vibrant, and backgrounds either uncannily sharp or half considered and dreamlike. Visual composition is often cliche and movie poster like. In writing, AI delves, uses cliche and overwrought to adjective phrasings. AI detection tool, GPT 0, claims that bots use the phrase crucial role in shaping 155 times the rate that it's used in authentic human writing. These are all the tells which after enough time, you begin to be able to I'm sorry to say it.

Mike Rugnetta:

Grok. These stylistic markers and others, in aggregate, are the lattice over which the subject matter of generated works is grown. The tells are some aspect of their form poking through in to content, A 7 digit hand reaching from one plane to the next. These idiosyncrasies are distinctive enough that they play a crucial role in shaping what generated works are about. Like magic tricks, some backstage aspect of these things, development is nearly impossible to put aside.

Mike Rugnetta:

They don't stand fully apart from how they are done. Of course, arguably no creative work does, but here, for now, the bond between process and output is significant, literally, in that it signifies. And that process is often evident when viewing AI generated works. Everything generated by artificial intelligence is at least partially about its eccentricities and so how it was made. This will fade over time as it has done for photography and cinema and much, if not most, and honestly, maybe all of digital art before AI.

Mike Rugnetta:

But for now, provenance and style are monolithic and isomorphic. Images generated by artificial intelligence have a look, and that look means artificial intelligence. This means, I think, that generated media forms a genre. The problem is that photos of real things, like Pamela's Bread, also form that genre. A genre can be thematic, rhetorical, or formal, says literary theorist and cultural studies professor, John Frau, in his aptly titled book.

Mike Rugnetta:

Genre. The riddle is a genre about many things, with a consistent rhetorical function and formal construction. The western film genre tends to depict cowboys and tell stories about lawlessness, ruggedness, and individualism. Though each individual film may look and be edited and be scored quite differently from the next. Sonnets, neo noir detective stories, narrative interviews, first person shooters, landscape paintings, eulogies, video essays, drum and bass.

Mike Rugnetta:

All genres where the works associated with them share thematic, rhetorical, or formal characteristics. Frau explains how genres are mutable and self reflexive. Contrary to how we may talk about them, individual works don't really belong to a genre in a hierarchical sense, but use or instantiate them. A novel, a song, a game. Each will reflect ideas about the genre they reference, but each will also change, challenge, expand, and extend those ideas.

Mike Rugnetta:

This is how and why classification can be so fraught. A genre and the work using that genre are mutually constitutive. They create each other. Individual pieces of media shape genre just as much as genre shapes those works and how we understand them, which is ultimately what genre is for, Giving artists and media makers a kind of head start in communicating with their audiences, and giving them a frame for understanding what they're about to experience. Genre, we might say, Frau writes, is a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning.

Mike Rugnetta:

Thematic, rhetorical, and formal decisions made in creative works, all indicate some intention, or significance. They give an audience clues, though crucially not answers, about what the creator of these works is getting at. And when multiple works employ similar strategies towards those ends, we group them together, and a genre develops. Crucially, genres aren't a natural precipitate of media in aggregate. Genre isn't a natural fact of the world, but a thing noticed, and named, and maintained, and changed by people.

Mike Rugnetta:

A thing done by people. Rhetoric Professor Carolyn R Miller describes genre as an action. A social action. A quote point of connection between intention and effect. Genre makes some amount of private intention available to a public audience who then does kinda whatever they want with it.

Mike Rugnetta:

Occasionally to the consternation of the artists who had the intention in the first place. Call any death metal band black metal for instance, you'll see exactly what I mean. This is how we get photos of huskies in the snow with comments wondering, is this a I generated? And the photographer responding emphatically, no. Explaining that they took these photos with a camera and edited them manually in Photoshop.

Mike Rugnetta:

No AI to be found. We see works, and we perceive something in their make up. Some thematic, rhetorical, or formal aspect that suggests they're an instance of some genre, which in turn suggests some intention concerning their use and meaning. We see a man in a Stetson on a horse in Arizona and we think western. Individual struggle?

Mike Rugnetta:

Probably there's going to be a gun fight. We see hyper vibrant colors, sharp lines, smooth textures, unbelievable subject matter and we think AI photo, a prompt, maybe a source image, and perhaps also the thought of a couple trees being liquefied. So of course, occasionally, the images creator will be aghast at the suggestion. What we learn here is that genre isn't, it seems most reliably instantiated through the concrete, sensible characteristics of a work. The relationship between a work's qualities and its quote, actual genre, is always bending and shifting.

Mike Rugnetta:

Works and their classification continually push back and forth on one another. They're situated in time, culture, milieu,

Mike Rugnetta:

all

Mike Rugnetta:

of which exert their own pressures. There's a fluid dynamism here that is only increasingly roiled in our contemporary media environment. The genre of a work is open to interpretation and capable of being misread. And yes, we do often recognize in media united by a genre similar concrete characteristics, but those characteristics are ciphers for what genre actually and more accurately allows. Similar affects, similar feelings, similar uses and understandings across many discrete works.

Mike Rugnetta:

This is how widely varied pieces of authentic media, a video of a woman dancing underwater, photos of huskies in the snow, comments about how a car works, a tram crash, cosplay, a man feeding a bunny, a particularly good breakdancer can all be pulled into the same genre with AI generated works. A genre of both the bona fide and the prompted which we might call generated ish. All of these pieces of media produce similar affects, similar understandings, similar feelings of alienation, amazement, suspicion, disbelief and discomfort for any number of reasons. The coagulation of thousands of pieces of content into 1 generated ish genre clump speaks principally, I think to growing distrust audiences have while using the Internet. They cannot, and they know they cannot believe their eyes.

Mike Rugnetta:

Disbelief has become a default mode. Whether or not comments on generated ish media state genuine beliefs, I thought this was AI at first remains a statement about how what we encounter on the Internet often requires a second look. After DALL E and Midjourney and Imogen and Firefly, we think now perhaps a 3rd and 4th looks. Now there's even more slop on which to scaffold this vague yet pervasive sense of trickery. Artificial intelligence generated images are like kudzu in the American South.

Mike Rugnetta:

Invasive, landscape redefining, and likely impossible to beat back. In fact, with the release of their Galaxy S24, a phone that comes with a suite of AI enhancement camera features, Samsung's head of customer experience, Patrick Chaumet, even proclaimed, there's no such thing as a real picture anymore. Rip Beaudrillard reads a post by Chris Exp The News on X, in response to a photo of Donald Trump scooping fries. You would have loved the fact that this picture was taken at the same time AI slop generation got good enough to make something just like this. In the photo, Trump stoops, His bright white dress shirt glowing center frame against the gray metal backdrop of a McDonald's kitchen.

Mike Rugnetta:

The yellow of the fries, the heat lamps, the straps on the apron he's borrowed and his face all resonate against the cool blue gray of the rest of the photo. The fries lined up in the station look identical. Like they've been cloned, or copy pasted. The image is detailed, but it lacks details. The surroundings are clean.

Mike Rugnetta:

The rest of the restaurant out of sight. The focus soft. The depth of field shallow. And maybe most importantly the subject matter improbable. For the generated ish to proliferate, for us to see it instantiated throughout our media environment, both of these things need to be true.

Mike Rugnetta:

There must be powerful technology capable of generating believable, yet virtual images, and authentic actual images capable of being disbelieved because of the existence of the first type of image. I would go even further than Chris eXp The News. It's not only convenient and appropriate that a generated ish press image of Trump lands alongside Gen AI's newfound ability to create photorealistic output, it's also convenient that the subject matter is a politician well known for denying basic, sensible facts of reality, depicted doing something unreal, given our understanding of his character and his priorities. Commenters on X below a particularly popular post sharing this image wager with one another. Do you think the photographer edited the photo or shot it in just such a way to conjure the look of AI generated images to make it in our coinage generated ish?

Mike Rugnetta:

Because these posters say, quote, such similar AI images are already persuasive and pleasing to a certain demographic. I'm reminded in this scenario of another photo, taken with an iPhone months ago at an early Kamala rally, judged and dismissed by some as fake, as propaganda, quote, warped and surrealist because its AI enhanced Sheen made it untrustworthy. If there's so much energy surrounding the Harris campaign, one commenter writes, why'd you use generative AI in Photoshop to fill out the background people? So which is generated ish? Persuasive and pleasing?

Mike Rugnetta:

Or warped and surrealist? The answer, as with all genre, is whichever reflects the most useful intention. Genre building, as discussed, is usually a mass cooperative effort. We search for shared understanding in sets of media objects so we can appreciate them as a group. So we can be on the same page.

Mike Rugnetta:

But this assumes an end game of shared comprehension and there is no reason the process can't be weaponized. To produce fractured comprehension. I think of the so called satanic music of my teens. Of gangsta rap and violent video games. All media with shared, thematic, rhetorical, formal characteristics, with genre foisted upon them for the express political purpose of denigrating and dismissing them.

Mike Rugnetta:

And which of course, in the eyes of others made them seem so much cooler. Sometimes cooler than they actually were. I see photos from the campaign trail. I see images from Spain, India, and North Carolina of climate destruction. I see the giant Soviet snowman, all generated ish.

Mike Rugnetta:

Each of them believable and unbelievable at the same time. And I do think of Baudrillard who wrote in 1983, illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible. Have you seen something generated ish online? Send it our way in an email to the never post atgmail.com or in a comment on the website, or tell us about it in a voice mail or voice memo. Links to all the ways you can get a hold of us in the show notes.

Mike Rugnetta:

We may share your generated ish content submission in a future Mailbag episode.

Hans Buetow:

Do you think you could identify a moral panic? Like, what does it look like? Screaming in the streets? Screaming on TV? Screaming in each other?

Hans Buetow:

Screaming into a pillow? This is a segment about moral panic. Actually, 2 moral panics. More specifically, 2 moral panics on top of each other which actually when I say that out loud kind of sounds like a sort of phrase that might incite a whole other moral panic. Moral panics on top of each other.

Hans Buetow:

What are they doing? Who will think of the children? I mean, the moral panic will, of course. Because this these moral panics are wrapped up in COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. Legislation that is currently moving through Congress that has roots in a long history of overlapping moral panics about protecting children.

Hans Buetow:

Protecting children from what? Well, it depends on who you ask. First of all, let's understand what a moral panic is.

Avery Dame-Griff:

There's this always this arc to them and they have these key five factors.

Hans Buetow:

This is Avery Dame Griff. Avery is an historian of gay and trans culture especially in the Internet and a lecturer in women, gender and sexuality studies at Gonzaga University. Avery was the genesis of this piece. He reached out to us and he told me about the 5 factors that come from the sociologist Stanley Cohen, who says a moral panic is something that occurs when you have something, a person, a group of people, an event, a way of life who are defined as quote, a threat to societal values and interests. So the first factor that makes up a moral panic is always a concern over a threat.

Avery Dame-Griff:

And often this concern is seen as verifiable in things like public polling.

Hans Buetow:

Which then there's hostility towards a recognizable group

Avery Dame-Griff:

and then they are already outcast or they become outcast because of this.

Hans Buetow:

3rd, there's a widespread social anxiety and public concern

Avery Dame-Griff:

that there is some problem, there is some threat, and we've got to do something about it.

Hans Buetow:

But the ensuing reaction is disproportionate.

Avery Dame-Griff:

The perceived danger is so much greater than the likely harm someone actually faces from this thing.

Hans Buetow:

And the whole thing is volatile.

Avery Dame-Griff:

Suddenly, everything is focused on it. But then those sort of subside and fade and vanish, but they leave behind essentially a kind of, like, wreckage in people's lives and this legislation that doesn't actually handle some of the real problems that are a part of the panic.

Hans Buetow:

Let's map this against a real example, COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act.

Avery Dame-Griff:

The bill aims to establish guidelines that protect minors from encountering harmful material on social media platforms. And it uses this duty of care system, which means that these platforms have to take reasonable steps to prevent harm. And it would also require platforms to disable possibly addicting design features as well.

Hans Buetow:

I mean, on its face, that actually sounds kinda reasonable. COSA was written for the senate by 2 people, Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee and also Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who says that with COSA, parents and young people will have control.

Richard Blumenthal:

They will be able to disconnect from the addictive features and opt out of those black box algorithms that drive at them relentlessly, the eating disorders, bullying, Fentanyl, sex exploitation, self harm, and all too often, suicide and bullying.

Hans Buetow:

The senate passed COSA in July by a vote of 91 to 3, and it is up for debate in the house now.

Richard Blumenthal:

So we are on the cusp of a new era. It is an era of accountability for big tech.

Hans Buetow:

Again, at a high level, reasonable. But if we apply Stanley Cohen's criteria for a moral panic onto the details of Xhosa, we can see right away that there's something more happening. There is a threat to kids, lots of kids. The kids are depressed. Their phones are making them sad.

Hans Buetow:

There's a hostility towards big social media companies. People are mad that these companies are not doing more to protect kids. There's a widespread social anxiety that we've got to do something. Legislation must be enacted to protect the children, restrict the technology. This is a crisis.

Hans Buetow:

But the solution that's proposed is disproportionate. As the restrictions on social media companies go way beyond their interactions with children to affect all corners of the Internet, whole big areas of how we all interact online are included in the scope. The Internet could change. And really, when you step back, the urgency being displayed feels rushed, like being pressured to make snap decisions on a complex problem. But this crisis didn't just come out of thin air, it has been brewing for a long time.

Hans Buetow:

But we're treating it like some sort of sudden side swipe to our, as Cohen says, societal values and interests. Five factors. I mean, if it walks like a moral panic and it quacks like a moral panic so what is the truth about Xhosa? Well, to answer that, we have to understand that there are different types of moral panics. Young people's media has always been perfect fuel for a good old moral panic.

Moral Panic:

We are quite sure it is not to the interest of the nation that the rising generation should be nourished on the literary fair enclosed within the covers of a penny dreadful. Publishers, circular, 18/95.

Moral Panic:

The radio seems to find parents more helpless than did the funnies, the automobile, the movies, and other earlier invaders of the home because it cannot be locked out or the children locked in. Seydany Matzner Gruenberg, 1931.

Moral Panic:

It's D and D, and it's become popular with children anywhere from grammar school on up. Not so with a lot of adults who think it's been connected to a number of suicides and murders.

Hans Buetow:

But in the last 40 years, moral panics have a new flavor with the advent of digital media. This addition leads to what Alice Marwick calls techno panics, moral panics forged in the crucible of digital technology. Marwick says that techno panics quote focus on new media forms which currently take the form of computer mediated technologies. She also says that they quote, generally pathologize young people's use of this media like hacking, file sharing or playing violent video games. So for example

Avery Dame-Griff:

So the cyber porn panic emerges in the early 19 nineties as more American homes are getting access to the internet, and particularly the World Wide Web is rising.

Moral Panic:

Why are kids interested in the internet? It's fun.

Avery Dame-Griff:

And more and more families are getting online. And at the time, this is a new technology. Parents don't know a lot about it.

Moral Panic:

What is the Internet?

Avery Dame-Griff:

And there's this concern about what will children encounter online. And part of that concern about what they'll encounter online is pornography.

Moral Panic:

We hope we've inspired you to get on the Internet and have some fun. But if your parents or teachers are doubtful, just tell them to keep watching.

Hans Buetow:

You will recognize the same moral panic formula in the 19 eighties with violence in music and video games. In the 2000, it was online predators and cyberbullying. In the late 20 tens, the heat was around kids being on their phones too much. And now, Cosa insists that those phones are giving kids anxiety and depression. Remember when I said that this was a story about 2 moral panics on top of each other?

Hans Buetow:

We've got a sense of one, but maybe a better visual is that Cosa is like that image of Elvis shaking hands with Nixon except they're doing like the predator hand shaking with each other. They've come from very different sides of the aisle. They have very different targets, but they are working together for one important reason.

Avery Dame-Griff:

Their goals align and that's what makes COSA complicated. There is a real mental health crisis but there's also these other motives that other actors have and they see COSA as the avenue to achieve those motives.

Raquel Welch:

Protecting minor children from the transgender and this culture.

Hans Buetow:

That was Marsha Blackburn, senator from Tennessee who is the other author of COSA. Her motivations and her moral panic are different from those of her co author.

Avery Dame-Griff:

They have said explicitly that it is about access to queer and trans content.

Hans Buetow:

This pairing, a techno panic and a queer panic working hand in glove to fight their

Avery Dame-Griff:

respective fights, this pairing

Hans Buetow:

is not new. As a respective fights. This pairing is not new at all. We have seen it play out again and again over the past 50 years. Like that panic over cyber porn in the 19 nineties.

Hans Buetow:

The concern that some adults had was not just that kids might be exposed to pornography.

Avery Dame-Griff:

A part of that concern was that these youth might be encountering gay people, might be encountering gay topics. So to give an example of a kind of classic cyber panic story that I've talked about in my research is there's this 1993 syndicated, Washington Post column that is a classic cyber porn panic story. It starts out with this young child, an 8 year old. She's on AOL. She's going around the chat rooms.

Avery Dame-Griff:

She goes into a chat room called TV chat.

Hans Buetow:

This article outlines an adult figure, a quote self appointed crossing guard on the information highway who says that she found a little girl in the chat room because

Avery Dame-Griff:

she believed in all honesty they were going to be talking about Barney.

Hans Buetow:

But no, no, this was not the case. No big purple dinosaurs here or at least not that big purple dinosaur.

Avery Dame-Griff:

TV chat was actually a well known trans support chat room, and they use TV just because it was an acronym. Everybody in the community, if you are in the know, you knew it. And so you get, like, this perceived threat to this innocent child who it wasn't really much of a threat at all. They were probably talking, frankly, knowing as they do this historical period, they were probably talking about, like, heels or, like, how to do their makeup or, like, what was the best mail order catalog to buy stuff from.

Hans Buetow:

This pattern plays out again and again and again with a fear of social contagion by queer and trans folks. Anita Bryant in the Save the Children campaign afraid that kids are gonna be exposed to homosexuals. Conservative organizations attacking AOL for exposing kids to homosexuals. Myspace being blamed for exposing kids to predatory homosexuals. Technopatic, queer panic, technopatic, queer panic, technopatic, queer And now we're seeing the pattern rise up again in the past few years as more youth are learning that they are queer and trans, and doing so at younger ages.

Hans Buetow:

You can hear the shouts. Are they being turned queer through exposure and peer pressure? The pure child is once again being threatened by awful dirty technology.

Avery Dame-Griff:

So the problem with this approach is that queer and trans youth have always existed throughout history regardless of whether or not they knew anything about these concepts. The difference as we enter into the 19 nineties in the era of the Internet is that the Internet just made it possible for trans and queer youth to come in contact with each other and to actually find each other. They can talk to each other. They can learn from each other, and they can come to understand themselves as trans to take those feelings, give them a name, give them a framework, give them a way to communicate these feelings to other people in a way that might make sense to them.

Hans Buetow:

This to me feels like one of the most cruel and frustrating parts of a moral panic. Someone is always at the outcast end of the equation, out on the edges of what is trying to be defined as acceptable. But either because they started there or because it's necessary for the psychology of those who pushed them there or both, they are often the least well understood. With moral panics, the people most in a panic have limited knowledge of the thing they're scared of and are often working off of incomplete or incorrect data that shows a biased or even very wrong picture of something to hate. In past panics, music, video games, comic books, surfing the web, etcetera, etcetera, we see arguments being made by non experts at the exclusion of the people impacted.

Hans Buetow:

We see the reduction of complex problems to oversimplified solutions. The Child Online Protection Act in 1998, the Children's Internet Protection Act in 2000, the Deleting Online Predators Act in 2006, FOSTACESTA in 20 18. Not all of these became the law of the land, but each of them still changed the Internet forever. Because when the companies being examined are this big and there's this much money at risk, some corporations find it easier to just make the proposed restrictions even if they don't become law.

Avery Dame-Griff:

The only reason COSA works is because stuff is so highly centralized, you will get anticipatory compliance.

Hans Buetow:

Corporatization and very few players making huge decisions for everyone makes for a lot of vulnerabilities in the system when laws come knocking.

Avery Dame-Griff:

And because these are often so broad and so all encompassing, Whatever happens, we will have to live in that world. So if we have to live in that world, what can we do?

Hans Buetow:

Right now, we do not know if Xhosa will become law or if it'll become watered down or be struck down by the courts once it is law. But we do know that we are gonna have to live with the effects of COSA in some form.

Avery Dame-Griff:

I think the world after the panic, it is a world we wish didn't exist, but it's also a world that can present particular opportunities because the panic is structured by whatever the infrastructures that were before. And so if these infrastructures can make this possible, maybe it's that we actually need to rethink the foundations of, in this case, of the Internet, of what the Internet looks like, of our expectations of how we should structure it. Is it that mega platforms that could be vulnerable to this kind of legislation are actually the real problem? So is it that we need to embrace new ways of organizing and structuring how we communicate that will not be so vulnerable to this kind of legislation and to these kinds of panics?

Hans Buetow:

Moral panics are cyclical, unfortunately. And so are techno panics and so are queer panics. There will be a next one. We will again be screaming in the streets, on TV, at each other, into pillows. The thing I think we can work towards is to know how to recognize a panic when it emerges.

Hans Buetow:

To be able to understand its approach, its limits and say, if you really are concerned about the mental health of kids, and we all should be, how do we not scream? How do we have a better conversation?

Avery Dame-Griff:

What this moral panic shows us is that ownership matters, And centralized corporate networks, individuals on them will always be vulnerable to the corporate feelings and machinations and pressure from outside, pressure from shareholders. A million things will always make them vulnerable to being controlled, corralled, or just pushed off in a decentralized network that where you're dealing with much more local control, control where you may know the folks who own it and run it. You may be involved in its governance system. Right? These systems are not perfect by any means, but they ensure that that community is invested in you, and you are invested in that community.

Avery Dame-Griff:

And you are

Hans Buetow:

Thank you to Avery Dame Griff for prompting and shepherding this story. You can find Avery's work ataverydame.net. We'd love to hear from you what other moral panics you see swirling about in the world right now and also how you might be affected by them. You can find all the info on how to contact us in the show notes.

Mike Rugnetta:

Lesson 34, Text. That is the show we have for you this week. It was a race to the finish, I'm gonna be honest. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, November 20th. Neverpost is an independent staff owned podcast with no funding, no runway, and no production partners.

Mike Rugnetta:

It's just us, the folks you hear on the show, working on it in the time that we have between other work that we do. We are entirely listener funded and that being the case, we need your support to keep making the show. So if you like it, if you think we're fun, funny, interesting, entertaining, useful, insightful, any of those things, please consider telling your pals about the show and then also becoming a member at neverpo.st. It is only with your help that we can keep doing what we're currently doing, and if we're very lucky, do even more of it down the road. That's neverpo.st to become a member.

Mike Rugnetta:

Never posts producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor First Name, Last Name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Cregnetta. I hope you will, permit me the indulgence of reading an entire poem. The Coal Jetty, by Sinead Morrissey.

Mike Rugnetta:

Twice a day, whether I'm lucky enough to catch it or not, the sea slides out, as far as it can go. And the shore coughs up its crockery. Rocks, muscle banks, beach glass, the horizontal chimney stacks of sewer pipes, crab shells, bike spokes. As though a floating house fell out of the clouds as it passed the city limits, Belfast bricks. The kind that also built the factories and the gasworks litter the beach.

Mike Rugnetta:

Most of the landing jetty for coal's been washed away by storms. What stands, a section of platform with sky on either side, is home now to Guillemots and Cormorants, who call up the ghosts of 19th century halyers with their blackened beaks and wings. At the lowest ebb, even the scum in the rim of the waves can't reach it. We've been down here before, after dinner, picking our way over mudflats and jellyfish to the 5 spiked hallways underneath. Spanned like a viaduct, there's the stink of rust and salt, of cooped up water just released to its wider element.

Mike Rugnetta:

What's left is dark and quiet. Barnacles, bladder wrack, brick, but bookended by light. As when Dorothy opens her dull cabin door, and what happens outside is Technicolor. Neverpost is a production of charts and leisure.