Never Post

Georgia and guest producer Luis wonder why there is so much audio online that seems to sound bad on purpose; Mike talks to Gabriele de Seta and Paolo Berti about how the “megadungeon” is a productive model for understanding the internet. Also: posts from the field!
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Intro
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Burnt Toast Audio
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Megadungeons
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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. 

Expand the sense of urgency with which you communicate. Installing this machine in your environment will ensure that your temper matches the tenor of the world as it crosses your threshold. Instantly you will match emergent problems in volume and strain -- no longer will you be trumped by sirens or fear. Use the multilayered time matrix to detect radiant torpor. 

Object #5923 - from Catalog of Nothingness by Kate Armstrong

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.

CC-BY Licensed Audio used in this episode
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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.
GH
Producer
Georgia Hampton
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 Neverpost, a podcast about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, March 26, 2024, at 8:58 AM. Let's talk about what's happened since the last time you heard from us. The American House did, in fact, pass a so called TikTok ban.

Mike Rugnetta:

The bill will now make its way to the Senate, where it has a slim chance of passing, though President Biden has said he would sign it if it does make its way all the way to his desk. The bill states that Beijing based TikTok owner, ByteDance, has 6 months from its signing into law to sell the short form video app to a US corporation or it will be banned, which means it will be removed from app stores and access will be blocked from within the United States. Supporters of the bill label TikTok a national security threat, as it is controlled by a state adversary that collects reams and reams of data on US citizens. Critics of the bill are asking, have you met Facebook and Google and mobile phone carriers and insurance companies and so on and so forth? NPR reports the list of national conglomerates large enough to even afford purchasing TikTok is small, and such purchases would likely be blocked anyway over antitrust concerns, placing TikTok between a political rock and a judicial hard place.

Mike Rugnetta:

Business Insider reports that Congress people have been given the business over the bill by their kids, who expressed fears that they would be bullied because of their parents' political posturing. Speaking of bullying, the DOJ officially brought suit against Apple last week, stating, quote, Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others. Bullies, bullying, bullies. You love to see it. The behavior at the heart of the case is something every iPhone and iPad user knows well.

Mike Rugnetta:

The deeper you get into the Apple ecosystem, the harder it is to get out. Even the sheer prospect of migrating away from Icloud gives me hives, and I don't even like Icloud. In fact, I hate it. Sarah Jeong, writing for The Verge, points out that the suit calls back to United States versus Microsoft, and the attendant browser wars of that age, and that is no coincidence, she says, as the DOJ's win then was seen as a significant propellant in the wave of new tech to follow soon after, a wave which significantly boosted Apple. If the DOJ is successful again, one wonders, for what new advancements are they presently clearing brush?

Mike Rugnetta:

Swedish newspaper Dagensnietr reports that one man, Johan Rohr, is behind 50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names on Spotify, totaling 2,700 songs and 15,000,000,000 streams, which netted Rohrer in the neighborhood of 6,700,000 US dollars between 2020 and 2022, making him, quote, Sweden's current most played artist on the streaming service. Continuing that, DJ and producer Avicii has slightly more streams overall, but Johan Rohr has more listeners per month. End quote. Rohr's success is largely linked to his prominence on Spotify's official playlists, which are curated by and under the sole editorial guidance of Spotify. Curious.

Mike Rugnetta:

I've barred my door and am recording in an undisclosed location, so I can say, safe from Hans intrusions, that Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, revealed this week that the reason for her public absence was a cancer diagnosis. She asked for privacy at this time for her and her family as she underdosed treatment. As it always does, online discourse generated fractal backlash from further depths of conspiratorialism to royal worshiping finger wagging to what, in my feeds, is the most prevalent, a kind of discursive about face summarized by Kate Lindsay at embedded thusly. What started in the relative privacy of forums swiftly made its way to videos, podcasts, and people's public Instagram stories. Now, we're witnessing a great unwriting of these narratives, as jokes about the princess's disappearance and long winded accusations of infidelity went from harmless to cruel in a matter of seconds.

Mike Rugnetta:

And finally, Facebook has resurfaced, poking in its UI, and says that there has been a 13 times increase in its use, with 50% of that use being between 18 29 year olds, which makes sense to me because as a man of 40, I feel like if I were to use the poking feature, the feds would be knocking on my door in moments. We got a wild show for you this week. 1st, Georgia and guest producer Luis Lopez, head sound designer at Studio Ocenta, wonder why so much audio online seems to sound so bad on purpose. And then I talk with sociologist Gabriela de Seta and art historian Paolo Berti about the mega dungeon as a model for understanding the complexity of the media landscape. But first, Georgia makes toast.

Georgia Hampton:

Hello, everyone. It's me, producer Georgia. I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, Luis Lopez, an audio producer at Studio Ocenta.

Luis Lopez:

Georgia and I have known each other for a long time. We went to graduate school together, and we worked together as editors for the same news magazine.

Georgia Hampton:

Over the years, well past grad school and living in the same city, we spent a lot of our friendship online. We're always tossing back and forth tweets and TikToks and Formula 1 memes and just anything else we find.

Luis Lopez:

We're both Internet people. We're both audio people. And for the last couple weeks, we've been thinking about crappy audio on the Internet. Crappy as in mediocre or amateur. Audio that's been poorly recorded or poorly reproduced.

Luis Lopez:

Being online, you get exposed to a lot of it.

Georgia Hampton:

People record themselves way too close to the bike, or in a noisy place, or outside when it's windy. Maybe they want to record something that's happening right now so they don't set up their levels. There's a thousand reasons for audio to be bad, and there are countless examples of bad audio online. Gonna be a lot of

Clips:

snow in Iowa. Charge your tablets. Get your papers out of the bedroom. Lasagna. Is papa junk a person or is he just, like, a character?

Clips:

Oh my gosh. Oh my god. Look at this so hard. Not my books. The devil is not in fire.

Clips:

You're not shovel. The clothes are down.

Luis Lopez:

You hear it so much that it's easy for crappy audio to just become background noise. But as an audio producer, I'm thinking about audio all the time. If I hear a mic that's clipping, if the voice starts to distort and create noise, I immediately notice it. It's like a blurry picture. In fact, there's a case to be made that it's better when it sounds bad.

Luis Lopez:

It's doing something. Something that it wouldn't do if the recording was clean. There is a desire for audio to clip, distort, degrade, totally against the rules. But this rule breaking communicates an essential aspect of Internet culture. Bad is good, or at least certain flavors of bad are good.

Clips:

Put your head on my shoulder

Georgia Hampton:

So listen along with me. You're sitting on the couch and scrolling TikTok, sort of half paying attention. The sound is just playing out of your iPhone speakers into the room, so the quality is already okay ish, And this video pops up by a woman named Tiara Skye.

Tiara Skye:

Hello. Hello. It's the beach with the massive camel toe.

Georgia Hampton:

Tiara's whole thing is running up to people on the street at night with a microphone and asking them unexpected questions to catch them off guard.

Tiara Skye:

Are you gonna be a lesbian here tonight? I might be.

Georgia Hampton:

You watch a few, and then you get to this one particular video.

Tiara Skye:

Do you name some of my black people? Oh, sorry.

Georgia Hampton:

Tiara is in a long red dress with a white fur coat. It's night, and she's just approached a woman on the street. The sound is already bad. Tiara is using this handheld corded microphone that seems to only pick up distorted rough sounding audio.

Clips:

You're going to be back Black people? Oh, sorry.

Georgia Hampton:

After being asked the question, the girl hesitates and laughs. She's definitely been put on the spot.

Clips:

Sorry. But

Georgia Hampton:

then Tiara decides to change the subject.

Tiara Skye:

How are you doing tonight?

Georgia Hampton:

And that's when something really fabulous happens.

Clips:

I'm feeling good because today is my birth.

Georgia Hampton:

Thursday. Tiara's voice just totally overpowers the technology. It's like the mic just can't capture her full body exaltation about the fact that it's this girl's birthday.

Luis Lopez:

The mic doesn't just fail. It gives up, and the video abandons its original premise completely and becomes a masterful failure in audio recording. Individual syllables struggle to burst through the saturation. And if you close your eyes and focus only on the video sound, it's like time stops. We get freeze frames of an outburst that never could have happened if the recording had gone well.

Tiara Skye:

Birthday. What? Happy birthday to you.

Georgia Hampton:

The clipping is what makes this video something. Just in case you need the numbers to prove it, this TikTok has been viewed 7,600,000 times and has been liked 1,800,000 times. And even the comments can't find the right way to express how that clipping makes them feel. So many of the comments on this video, and we're talking tens of thousands of comments, so many of them use emoji more than text. It's like the clipping has broken not only audio recording, but also written speech as if even that isn't sufficient to capture what's going on here.

Georgia Hampton:

This video is an especially good display of overloaded audio, but pretty much all of Tiara's videos sound distorted. I don't know what kind of microphone she's using, but it's very good at recording bad audio. Even if she's just talking, her voice is raggedy at the edges, like the microphone could give up at any second. But when other people speak, it sounds fine, and that tells us that she's not doing this by accident. It's not the microphone.

Georgia Hampton:

It's how she's using it. Tiara is holding the mic so close to herself that it has no other option but to blow out. She wants it to sound bad. You can assume that. So why?

Georgia Hampton:

Cross. Well, because it means something to do that. And she's not the only person who intentionally distorts what could be quote unquote normal sounding audio to make it worse. It's a sound that's familiar to a lot of us on the Internet.

Clips:

Bravo. And his name is John Cena. The fuck is on come out? Say that you're fine, and you're not really fine, but you just

Luis Lopez:

When we do get the decency of a warning before listening to anything like this, it'll usually go something like, RIP headphone users. Audio like this is shocking and discomforting at best and dangerous and potentially harmful to our hearing in the worst cases, if we listen to it too loudly, of course. And yet, people make it and share it, and people listen to it for fun.

Georgia Hampton:

And the joy comes, at least in part, because this is so far beyond the scope of what could be considered regular or acceptable audio. The entire point is to overwhelm you in the way that the audio equipment itself is being overwhelmed. It's too loud. It's too distorted. It's too much.

Luis Lopez:

It's intentional overcooking. We could compare it to deep fried memes, these washed out grainy and strangely colored images run through many filters and often accompanied by equally weird text, and they do have a lot in common. But we'd like to propose a different culinary term burnt toast audio. But why burnt toast? And why would anyone find that appealing?

Luis Lopez:

Well, when you burn your last piece of toast and you have no other choice, that's breakfast, I guess. It'll be wrong. And with every bite, you'll be tasting how wrong it is. And no amount of butter or jam can remove that lingering char from your mouth. Now imagine you're served burnt toast every day for breakfast.

Luis Lopez:

Eventually, you'd get used to it. You'd have to, but the burnt taste will never leave. It's there to stay, like the burn marks on the sound waves that redlined for too long, And after getting a taste of it again and again in your daily doom scroll, you realize that it's not so bad, and you're starting to like it.

Georgia Hampton:

Then you start to seek it out. Burnt toast audio has a layer of intention to it. It's either made to sound bad on purpose or it's shared with purpose because it sounds bad. The poor quality is what makes these clips funny, and it's what makes them meaningful. That

Luis Lopez:

relationship to intention is the key to all of this because there is an inherent contradiction between the Internet and those of us who use it. The Internet offers immediacy, quantity in addition to and often in place of quality. And people value authenticity, something that statistically few things on the Internet will have. Although, of course, what counts as authentic is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. In any case, here you are with the tools at hand to record a piece of content, and you're able to share it right away.

Luis Lopez:

And what's going to happen? Will you create content that follows professional standards or content that defies them?

Georgia Hampton:

For example, it's difficult to imagine something more immediate than live streaming, and gamers who stream on Twitch have their own relationship to this burnt toast type of audio. Sure, they have a headset mic or whatever, but when they totally freak out when they die in the game, there it is again.

Luis Lopez:

A pristine high quality recording of this scream might be funny, but it wouldn't have this burnt toast flavor to it. It wouldn't be of the Internet, And we know audio distortion is nothing new. Whole music genres exist because of how much we love distorting guitars. Voices on the phone have gone from a nostalgic Leave your message band pass filter. To an uncanny warble while the person on the other end finds better WiFi.

Luis Lopez:

But that's not burnt toast audio. Because burnt toast audio is audio that is bad not only because the person who creates it knows it's bad or doesn't care, but because they expect the listener to understand the badness as a choice.

Clips:

Pineapple upside down you. In the toilet, I make a brownie. At my wedding, I won't wear a gown you. I would rather wear Lady Gaga me just wanna do.

Georgia Hampton:

The point of a livestream is to grant access, to record yourself gaming for other people to watch you in real time. And as a viewer, it feels like that level of access should come with a lack of artifice. Even if someone streams professionally as their real job, it's still possible that they'll blow out their mic in a moment of game induced fury. And when that happens, it's a tell, like reminder that this is a real person, a real emotion. It's letting you as the viewer in.

Georgia Hampton:

As the audience, we want that bad audio because in a way, it feels more real than other kinds of media.

Clips:

Please end.

Clips:

I can't I

Clips:

I hate this. You would save the day. Save the day. Right? Why are you backing us?

Clips:

They're always new. No.

Georgia Hampton:

But what's desirable online would be seen as an absolute failure in other more traditional kinds of media. Like, if a microphone blew out during a news broadcast, that would be unprofessional. It would be a mistake. Still expecting about

Clips:

about 3 to 5 inches widespread summaries could pick up as much as

Luis Lopez:

And in this Internet code, we crave mistakes. We don't care that clipping may sound unprofessional, because what we're looking at is not professional, at least not in the same way. A gamer on Twitch could be a millionaire, but they're using the tools of the Internet to do their job. It's of the Internet in a way that a news broadcast is not, which means that in a certain way, this media prioritizes accessibility over this more standard sheen of professionalism. It's not hyperproduced, and moreover, it can't seem to be hyperproduced.

Luis Lopez:

Even if streamers have the best, most expensive equipment, they can still give that DIY feel to their content. They make it look and sound like any of their followers could do the same thing with whatever tools they have at hand. Not only does it contradict the rule book, it exists for that very contradiction.

Georgia Hampton:

And that rejection isn't just a bratty response to pre approved audio standards. It comes with a very interesting weight to it. In the essay, Rough Music Futurism and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands by Mary Russo and Daniel Warner, they talk about this idea of challenging the dominant code with something harsher. In that context, it was replacing sound, something people want to hear, with noise, something people don't want to hear. It might be a bit much to say that blowing out a microphone by screaming, Oh, my God, happy birthday, is some deliberate punk act of rejection of the status quo.

Georgia Hampton:

But it is intentionally refusing the option of better sounding audio. And there is joy to be found in basically saying, fuck your levels. There's a desire to hear what we don't want to hear. There's this paradox. But in the essay, Rousseau and Warner mentioned a really interesting idea of aesthetic sizing the tumultuous activities of modern life.

Georgia Hampton:

In other words, interpreting the chaotic nature of living in the world through a look, a vibe, or in this case, a sound. Bertoast audio is its own aestheticization of this very online, Internet forward feeling. A lot of the sounds we've used here serve as these emotional shortcuts. These short form bite sized memes that can be used in place of writing out, this is how I feel when I see this.

Tiara Skye:

Happy birthday.

Luis Lopez:

There's a sort of real ones no situation here. Not everyone will get it. It's a kind of lexicon, an Internet slang, so to speak. And beyond that, it takes the communication in our everyday online lives, the voice notes, the TikToks, the threads, and throws them into the fire, scorching them to a crisp. It's exaggeration to the point of destruction.

Luis Lopez:

It's beyond aesthetics. Like the comments on Tiara's video, it's something that's hard to put into words. It's almost anti aesthetics. It's fuck your aesthetics aesthetics.

Georgia Hampton:

Luis, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so glad we found an excuse to work together again.

Luis Lopez:

Well, thanks so much for having me. Yes, this was a topic that we could talk about for much, much longer and we definitely did while writing it. It was a lot of fun. But we're both interested to hear from the Never Post audience about burnt toast audio. When it works, and when maybe it doesn't.

Luis Lopez:

On the internet, why is bad audio desirable in some contexts and unwanted in others?

Georgia Hampton:

Let us know. Send us a voice note, leave us a voicemail, send us an email. The information about the myriad ways you can contact us are down in the show notes. Luis, if we get some good ones, will you maybe join us for a mailbag episode?

Luis Lopez:

I would absolutely love to.

Clips:

Yes.

Mike Rugnetta:

3 months ago, my longtime friend and legendary Internet cryptid, Chris Shee, mentioned me in a quote post on Blue Sky. She said, I think this might be made just for you. The post she quoted was from an Italian academic, linking to a journal issue he had edited. His post read, in the introduction we make a case for abstracting the main features of the mega dungeon. Infrastructural layering, ecological geography, procedural generation, ludic logic, and mapping them onto digital mediation to see if they can capture its complexity.

Mike Rugnetta:

You are probably familiar with something like the mind palace. A framework, a metaphor, a kind of mnemonic made famous, perhaps, by its most well known user, Sherlock Holmes. The Mind Palace is a way to understand, to navigate one's own intellectual storehouse. It's a memory aid. A psychogeographic landscape.

Mike Rugnetta:

A place graft onto the placelessness of the psyche. Gabriela de Seita, who wrote the post that Chris forwarded me, and his colleagues Paolo Berti and Stefania de Vincentis, put forward in this journal that Gabriela linked to, the mega dungeon, a place prevalent in tabletop role playing, as a kind of mind palace for the media technological environment, which is itself also fundamentally placeless. I had the journal issue printed, since its release is digital only at a local print shop and I read it all highlighter in hand. Conceptually, it is dense and rich and really just unlike anything I've ever read and it has changed the way I see the Internet, which is no mean feat. In this segment, me, Gabriele, Paolo, we barely scratch the surface of the work they've done.

Mike Rugnetta:

We traverse but a few rooms of the vast network of ideas that they have worked so hard to assist in generating, but as brief as the encounter is, there are more than a few treasures to behold. I hope you enjoy. Joining me are Gabriela de Seita and Paolo Berti. Gabriela de Seita is a sociologist and researcher at the University of Bergen. He holds a PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a post doctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica in Taipei.

Mike Rugnetta:

His research focuses on digital media practices, how the social and the technological entangle and vernacular creativity in the Chinese speaking world. Paolo Berti is a lecturer in the faculty of humanities at Cofoscari University of Venice. He holds a PhD from Sapienza University of Rome, did post graduate work in historical and artistic heritage at the Specialization School, and studied art history at the University of Siena. As a contemporary art historian, he focuses on new media, digital cultures, and mobile technologies, with forays into critical theory and game studies. Gabriela, Paolo, thank you so so much for joining us.

Gabriele de Seta:

Thank you for having us. Thank

Paolo Berti:

you, Mike. Thank you.

Mike Rugnetta:

So you both also, in addition to your long your long list of accomplishments, recently, with your collaborator, Stefania de Vincentis, co edited a special issue of the journal Magazen, the International Journal For Digital and Public Humanities. This was, volume 4, number 2, for people who go looking for it. It was out at the end of last year, December 2023. And this whole issue of magazine, their first ever, if I understand correctly, guest edited issue is organized around a single idea that is built upon, and expanded, and explored, and plumbed throughout a number of papers, 2 of which are your own, The single organizing idea is that of the mega dungeon. And I wonder if the 2 of you could explain briefly what a mega dungeon is.

Mike Rugnetta:

Not the metaphor, which we will sort of get to in a moment, but just the sort of like base concept that exists in the world that appears in tabletop role playing games, what is a mega dungeon? Gabriele, let's start with you.

Gabriele de Seta:

So a mega dungeon is quite simply a dungeon that is very big. One of the ways to distinguish a mega dungeon from a dungeon is that a dungeon is usually part of a larger world, role playing, setting. So you might, with your party of adventurers, you might start in a in a city inn and then kill some goblins and then hear about a dungeon and go explore it to clear it of monsters or loot it. And then you come out and you continue your adventures. A mega dungeon is so big that usually it represents the entirety of the gaming world.

Gabriele de Seta:

So you start in the dungeon in the mega dungeon or you enter the mega dungeon and you never leave. And this has some consequences for the design of the space because it's not just a, I don't know, a cave system or or an underground level of a castle. It is a huge dungeon that is a world in itself. It has an ecology, it maybe even has some sort of urbanism in it or or different zones or societies or ecosystems.

Mike Rugnetta:

One of the things that's in the journal that I think is really interesting is this idea that the classic dungeon has an edge to it. You are probably gonna reach that edge when you're playing. You're gonna get to a point where, the DM has decided, you know, there's a wall in this dungeon and you can't go through the wall. One of the defining features of the mega dungeon is that you might never and perhaps could never get to a point where you've finished. So in each paper, we sort of take the idea of the mega dungeon as a starting point.

Mike Rugnetta:

This possibly ever expanding active environment that contains the entirety of what you might need in a large scale campaign, and uses that idea as a framework for understanding a lot about the world. The contemporary media and technology landscape, is maybe the quickest way to summarize it. You know, saying that the Internet, media, the stack of technology that organizes and powers all of those things is itself a mega dungeon in many ways or there are things that you gain by looking at those things as perhaps being mega dungeon like. And I I don't wanna ask both of you to like summarize or to go through everything in a nearly 200 page journal issue, But I wonder if we could like let's start at the surface. Like, you know, the entrance to the dungeon.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yes. Like, how and why is it that contemporary media and technology is something like this setting that can be found in tabletop role playing games? Let's start with Paolo.

Paolo Berti:

Okay. The fact is that the digital realm today is depicted as increasingly intricate with layers of interconnected system system and so on. So it's not longer about just discussing of cyberspace or mid space or hybrid space. The world we imagine in the mid 20th century as a small, so implying closeness to other where globalization and telecommunication give us the impression that we could reach, friends or relatives on the other side of the world actually no longer exist. Dimensionality has changed.

Paolo Berti:

Digital, telecommunication now speak of big word and spaces that are no longer computable so proximity no longer exists. If I connect, for instance, from my kitchen to play Fortnite with my brother in a in another room, It's not just a communication between us as if it were simply a phone call, but rather an entire infinite infrastructure of data, of layers, of words that have the potential to emerge. The world is not getting smaller. It's getting bigger and we don't know where backrooms is an online trope, for instance, that speaks about that, where they are, those backrooms, where they expanded those rooms.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The

Mike Rugnetta:

backrooms like the sort of very anodyne gray pathways that connect, everything together in the lore of the Internet. Your Fortnite example is interesting. Is that sort of what you mean when you talk about self organizing, self propagating space? By taking these actions, by using this technology, you're sort of automatically and maybe even accidentally expanding the

Mike Rugnetta:

architecture of how you can understand the entirety of, you know, contemporary media and the Internet?

Paolo Berti:

The Internet is the most dungeon like media of of today. Just think of the of the iceberg image that represent the deep web. For instance, there is a real stratification and a real sense of exploration in the Internet, something done in in the exploration of of the Internet. There is also, representation that I find very interesting, very effective. As you may know, Wikipedia is full of hidden pages and one of these leads to a page that equates the role of Wikipedia contributors to characters of a dungeon crawling game.

Paolo Berti:

So by contributing, those people identify themselves as characters, the article as dungeon, they have character sheets, experience points. The dungeon is very similar to this idea of leveling of the Internet, stacking.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. What are what are some of the other characters that one encounters in the dungeon? Surely the troll is, you know, a very easy and ready example, but, like how far does this metaphor extend? Like, are we, you know, am I a player?

Gabriele de Seta:

I think the history of how to characterize yourself when you relate to media is very interesting. So in the beginning it was, you know, a user or a wizard, if you were very good at computing in the eighties, I guess. And it changes. So yes, you can be a player, you can be a user, a member, a profile, a streamer, a celebrity, an influencer. And there is a constant change in the definition of of, the individual first person user of these technologies.

Gabriele de Seta:

We used to see the materiality, and we used to think about the Internet as a dungeon and and ourselves as wizards or a frontier to explore or a Geocities neighborhood, you know, in very special terms.

Mike Rugnetta:

Very literal. Yeah.

Gabriele de Seta:

And and we kind of lost that, and I don't think it's because we stopped thinking about it, but it's because there's an increasing attempt from, especially corporate actors to, make people lose a sense of this materiality. Data centers and cables and increasingly, environmentally demanding computation, labor exploitation, and so on. And that is why I think one of the most common rhetoric for the digital has become that of flatness, of of platforms, right, of, a certain depthlessness. And in this sense the mega dungeon for me, and I think Paolo shares this point of view, is a way to inject or re inject this spatial and volumetric model into, discussions of, of the Internet and of any other, yeah, communication or computational technologies.

Mike Rugnetta:

It's interesting because I I wanna try to pull together a a few things that we've just said in the last couple minutes. Just like, for a lot of people, I think, the Internet is kinda not fun anymore.

Gabriele de Seta:

Yes.

Mike Rugnetta:

It's a bleak place. You log on. You look at bad news, and you log off. We all know what the experience is. It's hard to imagine it on mass as something that's pleasant.

Mike Rugnetta:

But a lot of how you describe the mega dungeon and talk about our place in it and how we appreciate our interaction with it is based in play. And in recognizing that play is not only a, sort of, fundamental aspect of the mega dungeon as a concept in tabletop role playing but is maybe part of our experience of the aggregate of technology that we can look at as a mega dungeon. And so I wonder, like, is the idea of play, like, radical in a sense in that way?

Paolo Berti:

I think there is a ludic paradigm that underlies the the dungeon and the mega dungeon. And in my say, I I talk about John Huizenga that is a Dutch historian that wrote a book, nearly, 100 years ago suggesting that the foundation of religion and war and so on were shaped in the realm of play. We wanted to show how this Huizenga paradigm has come in the end to to wrap around us, to create a sort of of prison around us through the concept of gamification. This day we approach life as a game, maybe to match the the interfaces of public administration, apps, pick the language of gaming and leveling up, for instance. We strive to improve ourselves, our curriculum vitae through skills like characters.

Paolo Berti:

Digital goods are our equipments, for instance. So maybe this role playing game mobile model, sorry, has became more pervasive than we might expect it maybe. So it's a sort of mixed match of gaming too much and not gaming too much.

Gabriele de Seta:

The dungeon as a metaphor, the mega dungeon as a model, asks us to think about the other side of play, which is design. So being a game master and a game designer and a designer of the dungeon and who makes the mega dungeon, who, decides what connects to what, and then what you can explore. And I think that that is a key point because what we were discussing before, that the Internet has become boring or not fun, is because much of it has become trapped by this gamification of use. So the platforms and and the apps and, the consumer oriented stuff. But the materiality is still there.

Gabriele de Seta:

The networks are still there, and actually, we have devices that are way more powerful than 10 or 20 years ago, so we could build. Otherwise, the mega dungeon is there to be explored and to be mastered and designed for ourselves. And I think what Paolo mentioned before, the backrooms, is a very good example of that because, yes, it is a sort of pseudo horror trope, but it also represents, a kind of fantasy or dream, this liminal space that is behind the Internet or be behind the surface world of of corporate media. It's it's this endless, sprawling maze of of empty rooms that look like, conference rooms in in in abandoned hotels or something like that. But but for me, to me, that that is a very clear example of how people still dream of that unknown maze of infrastructural spaces that can be inhabited by by masters but it can also be explored beyond the surface of what you're gamified into everyday use.

Mike Rugnetta:

It's interesting. It's horrific. But in a way, it's also kind of hopeful because it is able to be explored.

Gabriele de Seta:

Yes. And and and made into a story. Like, the the backrooms as a whole, it it's just an image. Right? Or or a few images.

Gabriele de Seta:

But the stories that develop around them are are infinite. People make an entire lore about the backrooms and how to noclip into them, inventing words and practices and and monsters that inhabit them and what they mean and where they come from. So it's it's this endless lore production that is very similar to role playing games, to what players and and and game masters do together, fabulating a medium. So, yes, it is hopeful because it proves that you can make that, exist.

Mike Rugnetta:

Paulo, Gabriela, thank you so so much for chatting with us and taking some time out of your schedule to have this conversation. This was fascinating. I know I said this to both of you privately when I reached out, but I wanna say it publicly too, like, my friend Chris alerted me to the existence of this journal issue. Having now read it, what I said to her was, I don't know that there has ever been anything that feels like it is more for me. Thank you very very much for making it.

Gabriele de Seta:

Well, thanks to you and thanks to Chris for sharing this issue with you and, it was a blast so yeah thanks.

Paolo Berti:

Yeah thank you Mike and thank you Hans for this.

Mike Rugnetta:

Where can people find your work online? Gabriele you can go first.

Gabriele de Seta:

People can find my work online on my website paranormal.asia. Paolo?

Paolo Berti:

Yes. I I have a profile on Academia Edu on Cofoscari webpage, on Orchard and social media like Facebook as poloberti or Instagram at Beth Vibel.

Mike Rugnetta:

Thanks again to Gabriela and Paolo and Chris for introducing me to their work. There are links to the Mega Dungeons issue of Magazen and videos of the Mega Dungeons mini conference in the show notes. Importantly, Gabriela and Paolo want you to know that the issue is open access, meaning you can get it for free. You can go download it and start reading it right now, and I think you should. And even before you've done that, I wonder based upon what we talked about in this segment, what for you the Mega Dungeon reframes within the contemporary landscape of media, the Internet, and all the technology which powers those things?

Mike Rugnetta:

I have been thinking constantly since we had this conversation of Paolo's ludic paradigm, that we are perhaps at once thinking too much about games and not enough. How we play within the rules of capital and the logics of the platform Internet, but we don't play nearly enough with or maybe more importantly against those things. Though, of course, it's hard to, isn't it? Let me know what you think and think with. Call us, send us a voice memo, an email, leave a comment on the website, and we may respond in a future Mailbag episode.

Mike Rugnetta:

Links to all those places in the show notes, and happy dungeon crawling. You have been listening to lightly scored excerpts of Posts From the Field, a Neverpost members only sideshow, which collects field recordings from the Neverpost team. You heard Georgia get ready in the morning, you heard Hans walk his dog in the snow, and you are currently listening to the mysterious doctor professor make lunch. All of these recordings are available currently in a longer form on the posts from the field member feed. Other field posts include the sound of a very good bridge and an hour of a rainstorm from inside an empty car.

Mike Rugnetta:

Find out more and how to get access at neverpo.st. That is the show we have for you this week. We'll be back in the main feed on Wednesday, April 10th, but fear not. Members, there will be an extended cut of our mega dungeons segment out next week. And as mentioned, there are, as of this moment, full versions of the 3 posts from the field featured as interstitials in this episode on that member feed.

Mike Rugnetta:

Plus more in the works, as always. Head on over to neverpo.st to join our mailing list, become a member, and get access to all these fun, rad goodies. But mostly to help us keep making this here little internet show. Never Post Producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.

Mike Rugnetta:

Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host, that's me, is Mike Crickknimmer. Expand the sense of urgency with which you communicate. Installing this machine in your environment will ensure that your temper matches the tenor of the world as it crosses your threshold. Instantly, you will match emergent problems in volume and strain.

Mike Rugnetta:

No longer will you be trumped by sirens or fear. Use the multilayered time matrix to detect radiant torpor. Object number 5923, from Catalog of Nothingness by Kate Armstrong. Never Post is a production of Charts and Literature.