Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 06/17/2025 at 09:06AM eastern, and we have a bop for you this week. Georgia talks with Tim Lawrence, professor of cultural studies at the University of East London and author of multiple books about the history of dancing, DJs, and nightlife about why no one dances in the club anymore. I bet you can guess.
Then the glorious return of what is going on here? Where the Neverpost team brings in posts to the group and asks, yes, that is right. What is going on here? And also sign offs. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire as long
as it's five stories this week. WhatsApp is getting ads and crowdfunding. While the chats tab of WhatsApp will remain unchanged, two new features are coming to the updates tab used to follow brands, local businesses, celebrities, and the US state department. Channel owners will now be able to offer subscriptions in exchange for exclusive content and the updates tab will now feature ads similar to how they appear in stream on Facebook and
Instagram. I cannot wait to see what sorts of exclusive content and ad placements the State Department of the United States of America offers up for a few bucks a month. Disney, assuming mid journey, the mouse and Universal are filing suit against the generative AI startup claiming it trained
models on archives of work owned by both studios. Reuters reports that quote, Horatio Gutierrez, Disney's executive vice president and chief legal officer said in a statement, we are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy. And the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.
Your Apple Watch is calling the cops while you're moshing. Last weekend, calls to local emergency services doubled during Leicestershire's annual download festival hosting bands like Sleep Token and Korn largely because the activities of attendees triggered their smart watches crash detection feature normally used to alert first responders to car
collisions and serious falls. According to the Guardian, quote, police are asking fans to stay online if their device makes an accidental 999 call or to answer callbacks made by emergency teams to let us know you're safe. TikTok can
influence your opinion of politicians. A new paper published in Social Media and Society titled Thirst Traps and Quick Cuts, the effects of TikTok edits on evaluations of politicians finds that quote, thirst trap edits cause an increase in perception of politician attractiveness and that badass edits improve overall evaluation of Donald Trump, but not Joe Biden. The study was conducted in June of last year ahead of Biden's
exit from the presidential race. We argue, the author's right, that the proliferation of the technologies that make edits possible represents a significant shift in the practice of democratic politics. To date, a primary concern around digital media is the proliferation of misinformation. Although facticity is an important element of digital media and to democratic politics, we argue that it is more central to textual communication than to images or
particularly video. We study a novel form of digital media that is manifestly not about facticity, end quote. And finally, Nexus Mods was purchased by Chosen, an organization that Eurogamer describes as a quote, growth focused gaming company. I don't know what that means, but their website says, we partner with founders to help scale what they've built, amplifying their impact, supporting their team and culture, and ensuring the business thrives for the long
term. Nexus Mods, a hub for game modding resources, has been run by Robin Dark One Scott for more than two decades. In a statement on the site's mod blog, Scott writes, the strain of being responsible for the behemoth I created has taken its toll. The stress of the job has been a regular source of anxiety and stress related health issues. I realized that I have been burning out and this started to
have an impact on my staff and nexus mods as a whole. So I firmly believe that the best thing for the future of Nexus Mods is for me to step aside and bring in new leadership to steer the business forward with renewed energy to make Nexus Mods the modding community we all truly deserve, end quote. Nexus members immediately began digging into the past of the new management only to find endorsements of both cryptocurrency and NFTs which the new owners have since said
will not be forced upon the modding community. Fingers crossed. That is the news I have for you in this week's episode, Georgia on phones at the club, and then what is going on here? But first, did you know that there was a time in history when content stopped? When it turned off and it wasn't available anymore? In our interstitials this week, sign off messages from three television networks aired in the late seventies and eighties.
This concludes our schedule of events for today. If you've missed a program or would like to see one a second time, feature presentations are repeated throughout the month on Home Box Office. Consult your program guide for exact dates and times.
For the last few months, I've been following this online conversation around a strange phenomenon happening at the club.
We went to a bar the other night, and the DJ was playing bops. Okay. Kesha was played, Bad Bunny, Gasolina. And me and my friends were the only ones dancing. You get to the club and you just stand up. Or the bar or wherever you go. Wherever you go to hang out, you're not dancing. Why doesn't anyone dance anymore? Hello? Hello? Why aren't you dancing?
Across my feeds, I keep seeing videos and tweets and posts in which people claim that out at the club, nobody dances anymore. And there was often visual proof of this, clips where someone pans across a packed dance floor only to show people just standing around. As this concern started to swell online, the response to it came in just as quickly. Basically, and you'll be shocked to hear this, but it's that damn phone. There are too many phones out at the function and that's why nobody's dancing.
You're worried about being on camera so people don't dance. No one wants to wake up the next day and see their face on like the club Instagram page. Why does no one wanna dance anymore? Like, nobody dances so boring blah blah blah. It's because when people do dance, you guys film them and put it on TikTok. Cut that shit out.
Beyond individual people commenting on this, Vox also published a piece a few months ago about this exact same phenomenon. And they came to the same conclusion, that the fear of being documented and having your likeness shared online was a huge reason why people choose to just forgo the act of dancing entirely. And I mean, I get
that. Like, the irony is not lost on me that a lot of the videos I saw about the lack of dancing at the club were videos where people were filming the other patrons at the club not dancing. Phones are tools of distraction in virtually every part of our lives, but I just wonder what it is about the act of dancing and publicly dancing with other people that is so antithetical to the presence of a smartphone.
If the people around you are not dancing, but they're just talking, or they're on their phones or who knows what, It's not much it's kinda hard to have a good time. It's much easier to have a good time when everyone around you dancing.
That's Tim Lawrence.
I'm the author of three books on the history of, dance, music, DJ culture, and art culture in New York City in the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. I've been running, two community parties that place a high emphasis on, good stereo sounds, and I've been doing this for twenty two years now. One is called Lucky Cloud Sound System. Another is called All Our Friends, and I'm also the cohost of a podcast about music, the dance floor, and counterculture called Love is the Message.
Tim has spent his career writing about and immersing himself in club culture. He speaks about it with this deep reverence. And as he explained to me, the act of dancing in a public setting offers a kind of experience that just can't really be replicated anywhere else.
If we want to, we can just dance in our rooms, by ourselves. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to people to do. But if you do it with other people, you can have much more of a sense of elation. And the reason the reason this happens is you will generally be by being with other people, you interact with other people, then you can have more of a pre appreciation of of our existence and also the way that we basically cohabit, we with other human beings and, of course,
with everything that is on the planet. What can happen in these situations is you can come close to having a sense of the essence of what it might be to be human.
Tim went on to mention that a defining feeling of communal dance is collective joy, a term popularized by the sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2006 book, Dancing in the Streets. In the book, she examines dance as an act that generates both a sense of togetherness with others, and also individual ecstatic pleasure. And that enjoyment comes in large part due to the freedom that can come from being
a member of a collective sharing the same experience. Near the end of the book, Ehrenreich explains that, quote, the capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression. She writes that later, quote, there is no point to it. No religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made.
Just the chance, which we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration. To Ehren Reich, collective joy through public dance is just that. An excuse to celebrate, to express oneself freely among others who are doing the same.
When people want to get into the go onto a dance floor and just kind of forget about their everyday challenges, problems, the the things that might just kind of you can't stop, you know, you get stuck in your mind that you just find kind of, are undermining your sense of of of, tranquility, let's say, or goodwill or happiness. You get on the dance floor to let all of that go.
On the dance floor, you're not beholden to whatever role you hold in, quote, unquote, polite society. Nobody even knows your name, let alone what job you have or whether you have student loans or stress out about school. You get to be anonymous, to express yourself in a way that might be more, I mean, free by virtue of not needing to hold on to various components of your regular life. What's better, everyone around you is experiencing this feeling
together, and that feels good, validating, comforting. It's a reminder that whatever baggage you left at the door of the club doesn't define every moment of your life, that this can also be part of your expression too. An expression in this space is collective and individual with both feeding on each other. The energy exuberance of the crowd is added to by your own form of self expression, by your own body dancing amidst all the other bodies. It's this perfect
little circuit that is until the phones come in. So I said to Tim, can you fully express yourself on the dance floor if you know there's cameras?
Well, I certainly wouldn't be able to. The phone on some level is always going to disrupt. It's gonna take you away from being in that moment. But the the other thing about the phone is that it then takes you it affects everyone around you. So if someone is by you and they're on the phone, they're kind of you know, not only are they not there, but they're not contributing to the, you know, this dynamism of the party. It's all these bodies kind of, you know, in this kinetic motion
that can beautifully kind of connect together. It's a circuit, and they interrupt the circuit.
To better understand this, we need to dig deeper into this notion of the crowd. Specifically, the difference between a crowd and an audience. Barbara Ehrenreich has an entire chapter of her book dedicated to what she calls the revolt of the audience. She writes that, quote, the great innovation of the modern era has been the replacement of older, more participatory forms of festivity with spectacles in
which the crowd serves merely as an audience, unquote. An audience is expected to observe, to enjoy perhaps, but not to participate. As a member of the audience, you can clap, you can sing along, hell, you can even dance, but you are not the event. An audience demands the presence of a spectacle, of a single point of focus that everyone is there to observe. But the dance floor isn't meant to be like that.
The dance floor is is most expressive, most dynamic, most engaging when people are dancing with each other rather than looking at the DJ. If the crowd starts to look at the DJ, then you're just entering into a, let's say, a rock concert scenario, hero worship, etcetera, which is like chur. Everyone's facing the priest. Whereas actually, what we want is conversation, democracy, interaction, antiphony, call and response, whatever words we wanna give it.
To me, the the dance is the audience, if you like. This doesn't have to be a leader figure here. It's about interacting with those immediately around you and and feeling this sense of kind of collective energy come through that, and it's and that surpasses your yourself as a individual.
When an errant phone camera appears on the dance floor, that structure falls apart. Using your phone is an inherently individual act, and as such, it severs you from the communal joy of group dancing. And sure, posting about it may bring you joy, but it's a kind of extractive joy. Through the phone, the sense of enjoyment you receive from sharing a video and getting likes or comments on it serves more as a commodity than a lived, embodied experience. It's a copy of the real thing.
And don't get me wrong, that can still feel nice. But the simple act of pulling out your phone to record the DJ or yourself or, God forbid, a stranger on the dance floor, instantly destroys your role as a member of the crowd, of the collective, and turns you into the maker of a spectacle. Your audience, in this case, isn't anyone in the room with you. It's your followers. It's strangers online.
Something that says, we're gonna capture this moment and we're gonna, like, take it we're gonna take it outside of this environment because it's gonna preserve it. And then that can go online. It can be shown to other people. So on some level, it's a it's a possible breach of privacy, let's say. It's a possible breach of kind of intimacy. It threatens or it physically does kinda say, okay. This is this this moment doesn't have its own integrity.
In a lot of clubs, the reaction to the problem of phones on the dance floor is to flat out ban them entirely. In the time I've been doing research for this segment, several clubs have opened that make a point to say that cell phones are not welcome inside. The parties that Tim throws have no phone policies too.
People think it's a human right to be able to use your phone, one's phone. It's incredible. It's almost like sometimes the most offensive thing you can possibly say to someone is, do you mind not using your phone? Even though we've asked this numerous times over. It's like, oh, I just want to tell my friend where I am or oh, there's this reason or oh, there's that reason or oh, there's that reason. And it's always about like, well, it's it's okay for me, but
but just not anyone else. But my my it's this is this is this is why I'm special, basically. And look. I I don't it's not serious. This is again, I don't want to take any of this too seriously. But what we what I do know and what the people I work with know is that it's much nicer. It's incomparable to have a a dance floor without phones than than, you know, a dance floor where everyone's on the phone.
Establishing a no phones policy interrupts that entitlement that Tim is talking about. An entitlement really is what it feels like here. Not just feeling entitled to checking your phone wherever you are, but to use it to document whatever's going on around you with little consideration of the impact that act has on the space you are physically embodying.
It's the entitlement of creating a spectacle. So if you remove the sheer possibility of taking a video or posting a photo at the club, you deny the ability to create a spectacle and court an audience. You're also forced to focus your energy on the physical space that you're in. You have to remain in the real world environment of the dance floor without the possibility of
recontextualizing it somewhere else. It makes me think of what Tim said earlier, how people come to dance in order to leave the stresses of their lives aside, Of what Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about how the ecstasy of communal dance comes with a shedding of the mask one has to put on in polite society. The no phone policy at the club suggests to me that part of that
real world baggage is your phone. And there is a way that the phone does adhere itself to a kind of role that we are all expected to play for ourselves and for each other. Maybe it's being a poster, or a passive scroller, or a live streamer. But whatever it is, your relationship with the social Internet is a kind of performance that you do, so long as you have your phone in your hand. I do think that there is a degree of communal enjoyment that can come from posting
online. It's a very accessible way of being seen, of sharing an experience, even if it's just through a screen. But it is just through a screen. It's a kind of togetherness that is inherently limited. It's flat. And as Tim said to me, it often doesn't really endure.
It's perfectly possible that some people, so enjoy being visible to others, being seen. Let's say being seen gives them the sense a sense of existing in the first place If they're not being kind of on some sort of screen, if they're not being watched and maybe admired, then they don't really exist, then maybe this group of people can can only express themselves fully when they're being watched. My belief is that this kind of this thrill the thrill that might come with the
idea that you have an audience is inherently, ephemeral. It's meaningless. There's something addictive about it, you know, and it's the reason it's addictive is that it doesn't it doesn't doesn't it's not a lasting feeling. So you kind of have to kind of keep on being seen. Keep on being
interesting to me that Tim mentions the idea of ephemerality here. Because in a way, what's more transient, more temporary than a night out at the club? You'll never dance the exact same way twice. You'll never get to identically repeat the experience from one night to the next. Dancing is intrinsically temporal, an endless series of motions that disappear and are replaced with new ones. And to that point, a video or a photo of that night has more
staying power. If you post a video of your friend death dropping on the dance floor, your Instagram followers can see it. You can rewatch it, and it exists for much longer than the experience of seeing it in real life. But I think the true staying power when it comes to collective joy is in the act of embodied participation. Of truly being a member of a crowd, all dancing and sweating together for no other reason than for the enjoyment of the experience.
The phone can attract your attention. It can demand your participation. A phone is a great tool for documentation, for visual evidence of a wild night out, but it will never be embodied.
There is no video in the history of the planet that has been able to remotely capture what is going on on that dance floor, not remotely. We might give ourselves the impression that it does, but if we think about it, it's that it can't even come close.
An immense thank you to Tim Lawrence for sharing his thoughts and experiences on dance, club culture, and collective joy. To find more of his work, you can find him at timlawrence.com. And if you'd like to learn more about the parties he runs or even attend them yourself, you can find information at luckycloudsystems.com and allourfriends.com. I'll include links for all of that in the show notes. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts about phones at the club.
Do you take videos on the dance floor? Does the threat of being documented affect how or if you dance publicly? How do you feel about the no phone policy? I mean, should it be implemented elsewhere, like at the gym, at the grocery store, everywhere? All the information on how to reach us is also in the show notes.
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videotape. This concludes our broadcast for today. The staff of channel six wishes you a pleasant good night.
Friends, hello, theydies and gentle thems. Welcome to what is going on here? A segment wherein members of the Neverpost staff bring a posts to the group about which they would like to ask. What is going on here? What? Could we have done some googling? Could we have gone further down thread? Could we have cracked a book or gone to YouTube? Probably. But where is the fun in that?
In the following segment, we share things that we found online that made us want to know more and about which we thought the process of finding out more would be fun to do together. Joining us this round in order of how likely I think it is that they are descended from an Arcturian starseed are Never post executive producer Jason Oberholtzer. Are we ascending or descending? This is ascending. So Jason, I think you're probably just a human.
What gives it away? The depth behind my eyes.
Never post producer Georgia Hampton.
Oh, thank God. I'm just glad I'm not the top one.
Never post senior producer Hans Buteau already has the haircut.
Your emotions might be telling you that you
Hans, no.
Know things about technology.
Go towards you are the light.
I am the light. It's reflecting off of my head.
Alright. Let's find out what is going on here.
Welcome to today's game.
Okay. I'm gonna send you three posts from Instagram, and I want you to look at them in order. Hans, I'm gonna have you I'm gonna have you start with, the aptly titled post number one.
Post number one.
And tell me what you see.
I'm opening up Instagram. The dress is gold. Mhmm. It's from Ibiza. Ibiza. I
hate that.
A woman twirling in a satin ish Yes. Skirt and top combo on the sand in front of an Ibiza sunset.
Still hate that.
Do you do you have to say it like you're on Love Island?
I was gonna say On
paper, this is my ideal. You mugging me off?
Okay, Hans. Go to post number two, please.
Post number two is opening. Post number two. It might be the same woman. It's hard to tell because now she's facing the camera. It is. Posing video. White this time instead of gold. She's wearing shorts and what looks like an a very woolly angora sweater, that is collared. Sunglasses, doing a selfie of herself in an elevator holding a coach bag.
Okay. And now post number three, please, and I want you to read the caption.
Post number three, the caption says, we're thrilled to announce our new AI enhanced team member, Reem. Oh, no. Yes. I was getting the vibes.
Yeah. Yeah. The vibes were strong.
Who has joined the team as a fashion who has joined the team joined the team as a fashion and lifestyle editor. Swipe right for her dump of For her dump
of the Guys.
Oh, you nailed it, Lord.
Who copy edited this? You're probably the AI editor. Oh,
dump of the day. Good god.
Swipe right for her dump of day one in SL office. I don't so this is from Sheerluxe?
Yes. Sheerluxe is a UK fashion publication, a la, you know, Vogue, Cosmo, stuff like that.
Okay. So you were right to say Ibiza.
Yes. Actually, I really were.
I could sense it.
So yeah. Reem, all the posts that I had you look at are, like, her doing influencer things, like telling you what outfit she was wearing, being in Ibiza, but she's not real.
And also that which means the clothes that she's wearing are not real.
I don't know who likes this. Yeah. Like, who is this for?
Who is this for? This is for an executive who feels like they will be accused of falling behind if they don't integrate AI into what they're doing.
I think that's exactly right. That's a great answer. God. That's I think I think, Georgia, your response is exactly right. Yeah. So like, I'm looking at I'm looking at one of the images on ReemBot's grid, and it's her on a street holding a matcha latte and a bag that is roughly the same color as the matcha latte and wearing sunglasses and big gold earrings and a gold bracelet. And then you go to the next image in the carousel and
she's gone. It's a bench somewhere else with a then a picture of the purse and the matcha latte with like a more of a gradient look to it. And then the third is the shoes, the bracelet, and the earrings, all of which also look AI generated.
Interesting.
So that I mean, like, yeah. I guess my question is like, what okay. What are we advertising here?
Well, this is exactly it. Right? I'm like, I think Jason, you're completely right that this is basically like for shareholders, for for people in the c suite who feel like they have to adopt AI, but it is still kind of doing nothing.
Don't know. Which I think is is exposed more because the objects that don't need to be generated are. Like you could pitch the idea for having an AI spokesperson as like novel and fun and potentially engaging in a way that would get attention from niche independent podcasters. And like have that character talk about items or pop into the universe and exist with items and then show a real item that a human could buy, rather than in frames absent this character have AI generated objects.
And then, like, further down the grid, there are image carousels where it's like, almost like a a a photo collage of images from fashion catalogs of like I'm looking at one of purses. Yeah. And it is a it is literally a photo collage of purses from catalogs, enumerated like one by one with who made them and what the product is called. But then there's just an inset oval photo of the AI generated model.
Yep. Yeah.
And she's like, I collected these so that you could see them all in one place. You're like, okay.
Guess like, but we know you didn't do that. It's part of her dump of the day, Mike. Yeah.
And that is what's going on here. Yep.
I have discovered a subreddit. And I would like to know what is going on here. Mike, would you be so kind as to describe what what happens to you as you join this subreddit?
Yeah. What? Okay.
It's hard to figure out where to put the eyes first.
That's true. Yeah. Hold on. I gotta lie down. Okay. So we're
at we're at our fifth world picks. This was created 10/07/2011. It's got 91,000 members, and it is in the top 2% of subs by size. The rules of the sub are submissions must be fifth worldly. Submissions must have clear and concise imagery. Post quality content be nice. We can see what I can only kind of maybe describe as like, if you did a blender adaptation of an MC Escher painting Yes.
Mhmm.
But like elaborated on it 10 times and then used the color scheme of the old school Windows screensaver that was the pipes. Yes.
My lord. Wow.
That's such
a good description.
Nailed it exactly. Holy moly.
What you're picturing to your audience? Yep. It's exactly that.
It's that.
And then the one below it is like, it's sort of like you're looking down into a square well that has a similar color scheme to it, maybe a little bit more orange. But the vibe is no longer M. C. Escher. It's more like traditional South American art.
Yes.
The one after that is like a strange Janice faced sculpture of some kind.
This is when the genre sort
of Right?
Yeah. Yeah. The genre really takes a turn here. Floating mug in the sky.
I was gonna point that one out because the caption is just addiction.
Addiction. Right? Mike, I'd like you to do me a favor. Yeah. I'd like you go to top. Yeah. And then I'd like you to go all time. And then I'd like you to talk.
My god.
Babe, you better
talk fast
because it is challenging.
What is happening?
It's much longer than I thought it was gonna be. Okay. So nine nine years ago, someone posted what is obviously the best post on this.
We should have just ended here like as a as a society. Yeah.
This is a video. It's a GIF actually. So there's no sound. There's what looks like a Rottweiler maybe riding a three d man shape in like nineteen nineties, early two thousand style three d rendering.
Sure.
So a Rottweiler riding a man shape down what looks at first like a mountain, but turns out to be the chest of a statue bent over backwards.
Yes.
So the they ride the chest down to the throat off the chin and as they ride off the chin, the eyes open and the tongue extends and then they get swallowed? No. They sort of No. Jump off like a sick skateboard jump.
There's sort of a metal creature man.
It's like a huge I'm gonna
go ahead and I'm just gonna stop there and I'm not gonna describe the rest of it. There's a snowy owl, there's a I was gonna say gotta mention the snowy owl. This defeats language. I also I mean, maybe it's because this attitude has been cemented more since then. This feels less fifth world y to me than Mhmm. The group of images that we saw sorted by most recent.
Is fifth world y something that you understand, Mike? No. Know what that is.
And not
outside of this. I would say that this is like, this is one of those places on the internet where like the whole purpose is to just sort of like divine and solidify this vibe. Yeah. And there's sort of no other purpose than to be like, to vibe navigate, you know, like Mhmm. To just try to find or make things that seem to cohere in a way that is really hard to describe. But when you see it, you're like, oh, yeah, that is fifth worldly.
In the rules, it defines submissions must be fifth worldly if you expand it out. Oh. It has a definition. Oh.
Must depict or seem to originate from another dimension, must either be surreal or bizarre, or attempt to convey a novel emotion or experience. Which I think that that aligns with everything that we've said so Yeah.
Asked and answered.
Who hasn't had that novel experience?
Alright. I wanna ask the room real quick before you if I say wacky Tic Tac, do you know what that means? Wacky Tic Tac?
Wacky Tic Tac? No. I don't want to.
No. She said nervously.
Okay. Well, we're going back to Reddit. Uh-huh. Georgia, can you please read the description of it before you open it?
Oh my god. Okay. Okay.
We're off to such a good start.
We really are.
I have seen the face of god and it was weeping. Banana.
Okay. Now you know where we are? Yeah.
Let's open that up. Oh.
Say it the way the wacky Tic Tacs would have you say it.
Banana. Yes.
Yeah. We're in minion land.
Yeah. We're I'm I'm in the minion system. I'm in the walls.
Yeah.
Okay. So just going through here, it's it's all sorts of content involving minions. The kind that as you may imagine, oh, wait. Never mind.
Right? Your expectation got subverted.
It's So
you start and you're like, this is this is a grandma on Facebook.
Okay. It's just literally about to say, your aunt on Facebook was like, happy Tuesday everyone. God bless America.
Yeah. These are no But like if minions were the thing that lives behind the diner in Mulholland Drive.
Oh my god. And what's funny is that not all of them have been so we should say what is what's going on here is that they're yes. It's this format of, you know, minion photos photos.
Like in TikTok. It's documentary.
Documentary of the real creature minions that live among us. Images of minions, you know, with wigs or making a funny face or pointing at themselves and has the sort of structure of of what we were just describing of, like, you know, sometimes a girl just needs to let loose or whatever. But but every, one that I'm seeing now, actually, I was wrong. They're all like this.
They're all like
this. So, like, you know, a couple down, is two minions smiling at at you and sort of pointing at themselves and it says, exercise? I thought you said, and then someone clearly superimposed over whatever it originally said, Bush did nine eleven.
The, the title of the post would seem to suggest that what is, covered over is extra fries.
Yes. Because the the caption is no extra fries today.
Now, that's funny. I like that. This George Bush two nine eleven thing, I'm not sure about that quite as much.
You have like under the title God has abandoned us, you have a very grainy hungover minion that says exercise? I sell a 130 grams of crack cocaine behind my local middle school, run over 21 innocent children with a hijacked bus, evade $82,000 in taxes, and commit severe war crimes in Iraq every day. That counts. Right?
Yeah. There's a lot of, like, a newly restored World War one photo that is what looks like an already AI generated black and white image of soldiers on the battlefield, and then a minion storming alongside them. My god.
And so it keeps going, and there's a it's a wide variety. It's not all political. There's like a cuck life one. Mhmm. There's all of these. It's but it's like it's like your auntie is the filthiest person who like the filthiest tin hattiness wearing person and is still into the same aesthetic. And the whole thing is wacky Tic Tacs, which I looked up, there is such a thing as a Minion Tic Tac. They're banana flavored, which
Of course.
There are 97,000 people in this, and the title is God is Dead.
This does have a sort of sheen of a a 4chan or 4chan adjacent.
It's just it just is just leaning so hard into the irony of,
you know,
the minions are from Despicable Me, they're funny little guys, they're, you know, innocent, strange little characters. And now, you know, here's a book they're next to Bush did nine eleven and on a image that says, have one finger for a reason, woodworking accident. Like, it's just That's one of
the more like, you know, palatable ones.
Yeah. One of the most palatable. Yeah. Yeah. And I agree. Like, it it's it's very much that kind of like that 4chan style of ironic distance or ironic detachment.
So this is really just an a repeated joke over and over, if I'm understanding correctly, of isn't it funny to put these cute little memed up things in actually despicable situations?
Yes. It's people making fun of Facebook aunties by, you know, imagining what if they were edge lords.
Edge lord is exactly the word. Because this is sort of a classic, like, internet Right.
Vibe. This is like terminal posting, you know? Like, this is
Yeah. Yes.
This is endgame posting.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Well, thanks. That's that's helpful. It's sort of what I thought, but it's a lot more.
And it's really validating to know that a wacky TikTok is not commonly known.
That's what's going on here?
We've learned what's going on here, but at what cost?
We've got one more what's going on here, but we are going to lose one Georgia Hampton because she's got somewhere more important to be right now.
I gotta go kill all the minions. Oh, no. I'm stopping this once and for all.
Georgia, thank you for joining us. Bye.
Godspeed.
Okay. I have something that I first encountered about a month ago. And I have been going out of my way. I wanna know what it is so bad. And I have not gone and searched to learn because I wanted to bring it to what's going on here. From what I can figure out, this is not new.
Okay.
By this, I mean, a a person. This person. I get served their videos all the time and like everywhere. And I think it's probably because I watch them because I'm like, what? I mean, it's the name of the segment for a reason. What is going on here?
And the algorithm is like, this guy loves
this. This guy
loves this. So, Jason. Yeah. I have four videos. Okay. And this is the first one.
Okay. The name, Sufi Blower. What we have here is a man with a microphone. When I press play, we'll figure out what he does with that power. It's in a public space, a crowded public space. A lot of folks have their hands on their foreheads. Is that him making this noise? Okay. He's like sort of beatboxing a little bit.
It feels like he's like slamming his diaphragm, like his abdomen to make his diaphragm work.
Yeah. He's engaging his diaphragm with his hands. He's sort of like I need a pan down here, but looks like he's kind of chilling his belly and
Yeah.
Okay. I'm gonna send you a second video.
I just watched this man on Facebook, now to TikTok. Okay. Because he was doing his hands. Okay. He's sort of pulling at a necklace, a rope, round beaded. Perhaps beaded is hard to see, I need better fidelity on these buddy. And he's doing that same deep breath thing into a microphone in a public setting and this one has like a delay slapped to it and a big reverb. There
are people screaming in the background, like scream, like someone's being attacked.
Yes. Okay. And the same we pan to the crowd, they have their hands on their heads again, they're screaming.
And the crowd is huge. Huge. How is this how would you describe this man's manner of dress?
He's got he's got a black head wrap, but like a multi colored sort of set of robes.
And someone else is holding the microphone in front of him. Right.
I mean, I would call it like a ceremonial robe even, like there are religious overtones to this certainly, but I don't have the cultural conversants to know.
To say exactly Yeah. The article of clothing.
Exactly.
Mhmm.
So here are two of his own videos. Okay.
Oh, he's not hitting his diaphragm.
No. He's not at all. He's just like fiddling with yanking this necklace, this beaded white beaded necklace. He's What about
a rosary?
Yeah. Yeah. It's a good That's a good way to describe it. It is basically essentially a rosary. I don't see a cross. And the comments on this one comments on this one include, I'm Christian but even I can tell this is not Islam and someone else saying this is not Islam. Someone else saying, I've been seeing this dude a lot in my feed lately, but why are
women screaming while he spits into the mic? Really trying to underline that this is not Islam, which makes me think there are comments that have maybe been buried here where people are being unkind about Islam or making assumptions there. And those more than no are making sure that we know that no, that is not what is going on here.
So based on just what I've seen from the comments of getting served these videos, is that this guy is a controversial spiritual leader of some kind.
That's what I'm picking up.
Yeah. Right? Related to Islam somehow. Perhaps tenuously in the eyes of a big group of people. I guess my question is like, why and what's the deal with the breath? Mhmm. But like, you know, going into a delay line while pulling on this necklace with people losing their minds.
I mean, it certainly has, you know, overtones of some of our more ecstatic American traditions.
Like speaking in tongues and
tongues, or yelling, or the fun little slap the forehead and watch them crumble move.
You know, his name is, I'm gonna say it probably very wrong, Haqqa'teb Hussein.
Okay. So he's got a he's got a website.
Serving humanity in the name of Allah SWT. Right? Every week, thousands of people make their way to Dab'ar e Aliyah Balawara Sharif and Astana Aliyahkar, Saddan.
It seems to be Northeastern Pakistan.
To receive Allah SWT's blessing through the doom and dua insufflation and supplication of Kaladar I Duran Haqqateb Hussein Ali Badshah Sakhar m e. So this is my sense and this was what I was hoping we could maybe figure out is like, is this guy like a Joel Osteen who is, you know, nominally associated with some religion, but really is just enriching himself. Yeah. But that still doesn't answer the
question of like, why these elements? Like, I I wanna understand the beads and the breathing and the hands on the forehead Yeah. And the like kneeling with the hands behind the head. I'm sure all of this is, like, deeply rooted in, like, religious symbolism that we just are not familiar with.
Yeah. Mhmm. I'm just I'm poking around more at the website, at this man's website, and there's a thing called Wazifa Taspeh, which is curative. And it says, to cure ill cure from illnesses, solution to problems or worries, righteous offspring income slash job, peace and blessings in the home, righteous marriages of children, etcetera, in the essence for all good, righteous purposes. When?
To be recited after Namaz ESR. How? After Namaz ESR, recite Durud e 11 times, Surah Kothar 100 times, followed by 11 times. So you have this pattern of recitation that you need to do. And then following the completion of Wazifa, you can make dua for yourself or anyone else for any good purpose. It is it is also allowed to blow upon to insufflate water after completing this wazifah and to drink it or to give the insufflated water to some patient to drink, any illness
will subside. Mhmm. So you're making an elixir with your breath, and I wonder if that's the idea is he's breathing he's making his breath after he's done this cleansing ritual is being breathed upon all of the crowds. Right.
Naturally, in the way that air does get amplified and moved Yeah. Through the microphone. Yeah. There's a healing tab on his page where some of these miracles are listed that I have found now. Things that he claims to have done, or this website claims that he has done include, a little boy had hole in his heart cured.
After four and the dom the dom is the is the breath water.
Okay. Cured after four dom. Man suffering from incurable jaundice of the liver is cured. Girl who lost her sight for seven months recovers her eyesight. Epilepsy, liver cancer, village had wells of hard water. Someone couldn't speak for fifteen years. These are among the victories that he is tallying up.
So you can participate live and have these healing properties expelled at you.
Little girl got dumb from Facebook live.
Yeah.
She had been unable to walk and doctors declare she would never be able to walk again. She was able to walk from second to woah.
I don't know, man. Yeah. May yeah. Maybe I am cynical. Like, maybe they are purporting that this happens over the Internet as well. And Yeah. This is an earnest effort to provide healing and that they believe they are providing through all of man's available resources including the social web.
There's a long tradition of this in both religious and secular spaces. I mean, placebos are a thing Yeah. And not just, you know, I don't know, maybe this is working for people, but people have been doing this, laying hands on people, doing all I mean, that's the big tent thing, you know.
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, think, you know, we are probably waiting into a contended area for which we have none of the signifiers lined up to figure out any sort of Yeah. Way finding. I think that's probably very right.
Yeah. Audience, if you have things to tell us about this, I wanna know all about them.
Wanna know more.
Okay. I think we did it Hans, Jason. Thank you for puzzling through what goes on on the Internet. Thank you to Georgia in absentia. Audience, are there things that you see on the Internet about which you think what is going on here? Or if you your self know what is going on here and you have been shouting at your phone, at your car stereo, at your speaker in your kitchen At your loved ones. Turn those shouts into words in
an email and send them to us and tell us. Tell us, please. What is going on here?
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Good night, everyone.
It's a star studded hour with Ed McMahon. Careers are being launched on the million and a half dollar Star Search eighty six. Tuesday at 07:30 on thirty two. And now Channel thirty two brings you this thought for today. Speaking is Father Garrett Barton of St. Michael Church.
Our whole being craves for the use of our own life to make it the life of someone else and someone else happy. And by helping them out, we're doing something for them, for our self, and for our supreme being. So you can't lose that way. And therefore, you got to put aside all the little things that are said and the little things that are done. As long as you are doing what you know is right, what else cares?
What else matters? You're going to get rewarded, and I wish the good almighty would come down and really show us the rewards that you already have from all the good that you've done. The good Lord praises you, and if he didn't praise you, well, he'd let you know. So we can do lots and lots of good things. We can be so happy in helping other people. We can lift up this world and our little small world that we
roam around. It can be so much wonderful if we make it so. And it doesn't take anyone but yourself to make up your mind. I'm going to do something about it so that tomorrow, the whole world, my world, will be different.
You've been listening to the thought for today with Father Garrett Martin of Saint Michael Church.
That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, July 2. A Neverpost membership is $4 and I think you should go get one right now at neverpo dot s t. Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer. And the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Through night lava like eyelids softly opening, the first cry of
creation's volcano flickers. In the branches of your limbs, the premonitions build their twittering nests. Excerpt of Dancer by Nelly Sacks. Never Post is a production of charts and leisure. It's distributed by Radiotopia.