Rescuing Public Datasets the U.S. Gov't Deletes

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Mike Rugnetta (00:10):
Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about theInternet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta, and this intro waswritten on Tuesday, 07/29/2025
at 09:34AM eastern. We have afresh episode for you today. I
talk with media andcommunications researcher Emily

(00:30):
Owens and Ryan Broderick ofGarbage Day and Panic World
about brain rot. Then Hans talkswith four librarians about their
work rescuing and preservingdatasets that are under threat
by the United States government.
And also on ask an expert, wetalk with on the media's own,

(00:51):
Micah Loeinger. But right now,we're gonna take a quick break.
You'll listen to some ads unlessyou're on the member feed. And
when we return, we're gonna talkabout a few of the things that
have happened since the lasttime you heard from us. Man,
it's a hot one, like fivestories this week from the
midday sun.
The Internet Archive is now afederal depository library. What

(01:17):
does this mean? It means it's alibrary that will house federal
documents. Writing for KQED,Morgan Sung, who you'll remember
from our hantai segment, writesthat the Internet Archive,
quote, will join a network ofmore than a thousand libraries
around the country tasked witharchiving government documents
for public view. The status isparticularly notable, some

(01:40):
continues, as the Trumpadministration has
systematically removedinformation from federal
websites under new anti wokeexecutive orders.
Archive visitors will now haveaccess to primary government
sources in addition to materialsuploaded by users or saved
through accessible websites, endquote. You're gonna hear Hans

(02:00):
talk more about this sort ofthing this episode. You stopped
clicking things when you Google.Pew Research finds that only 8%
of people are likely to click onsearch results if they are shown
an AI summary of those resultscompared to 15% who are not

(02:20):
shown an AI summary.Furthermore, folks shown AI
summaries are more likely tosimply close the browser window
after their search versus thosewho are not.
Pew says about one in fivesearches in their study produced
an AI summary.

Clip (02:36):
Oh, man.

Hackers leaked data they stole from Tee, the
women only dating safety app,twice at the time of writing.
Four zero four media reports itwas able to access millions of
messages containing sensitivedata drawn from what is
nominally an anonymous platform.Highly personal details
including names, addresses,phone numbers, social media

(02:59):
handles, and as one mightexpect, hellishly hot gossip are
all included. It's unclear whoelse may have discovered the
security issue and downloadedany data from the more recent
database, four zero four mediarights, continuing members of
4chan found the first exposeddatabase last week and made tens
of thousands of images of tusers available for download. T

(03:23):
told four zero four media it hascontacted law enforcement, end
quote.
Okay. Deep breath before thisnext one. Itch, the indie games
publisher, last week searchbanned its sizable offering of
not safe for work and otherwiseexplicit games. Also removing

(03:46):
them from browse functionalityand restricting the sale of many
with almost no warning to gamemakers and publishers. This
because of pressure from paymentprocessors like PayPal and
Stripe following pressure theyreceived from a very small group
of Australian based activistscalling themselves collective

(04:08):
shout, which self describes as agrassroots campaigns movement
against the objectification ofwomen and the sexualization of
girls.
IGN reports that users estimatenearly 20,000 adult games may be
affected by this de indexing. OnJuly 24, Itch released a
statement reading in part, ourability to process payments is

(04:32):
critical for every creator onour platform. To ensure that we
can continue to operate andprovide a marketplace for all
developers, we must prioritizeour relationship with our
payment partners and takeimmediate step towards
compliance. An update posted onthe twenty eighth further
elaborates saying that to retainthe ability to pay anyone, Itch

(04:53):
will be working on stronger agegating, more specific terms of
service, and will begin a searchfor more lenient payment
processors. There's a grassrootscounter campaign underway
seeking to exert equal force inthe opposite direction on
payment processors.
We're gonna put a link to moreinformation about that in the
show notes if you're curious.And finally, polling by YouGov

(05:22):
shows a majority of respondentsand 60% of those aged 18 to 24
in Europe would prefer locallybased social media platforms
over current US based options. Iwonder why. Recently, a number
of developers have launchedEuroSky, a European alternative

(05:42):
to BlueSky. Its website reads,built in Europe, run on our
cloud, ruled by our laws.
Users choose the content,businesses control their brand
environment, people control thealgorithms. Social media is
crucial infrastructure and avital piece of the European tech
sovereignty agenda. We need toregain structural control over

(06:03):
our information ecosystems, endquote. Developers include Sherif
El Sayed Ali, the executivedirector of the Future of
Technology Institute, a selfdescribed think and do tank, as
well as Sebastian Voglesong,developer of the AT Proto
compatible photo sharing appFlashes. In show news this week,

(06:25):
we released a fundingannouncement one upload ago.
If you missed it, please go backand give it a listen. But the
long and short is we're about todo some fundraising to assure
that we will be able to continuemaking this show past the 2025.
What does that mean? It meansthat you should keep an eye out
for T shirts and a live streamedmembership drive, which is

(06:47):
happening the week of August 18,so please put that in your
calendars. We're gonna release amore detailed schedule in the
coming weeks, that's what I cantell you so far.
Week of August 18, we're gonnabe doing a bunch of stuff. I
think that Thursday is gonna beparticularly busy. Hey. Also,
just as an aside here, theresponse to the funding
announcement has been sort ofunbelievable, honestly. Welcome

(07:11):
to a bunch of new memberslistening to the show in the ad
free feed.
We are extremely happy andexcited to have you. And to
everyone who sent us along atip, it is so so, so appreciated
and extremely helpful. I can'teven be begin to say how much. I
think we're you know, it's atough time to be an indie show

(07:35):
doing the weird sorts of thingsthat we do, and so far, your
response to us asking for helpis just it's incredibly
encouraging. So thank you,really.
Thank you. Thank you. Alright.That's the news I have for
you this week. In this week'sepisode, Hans, Jenny, Kate,
Molly,
and Linda on tactical archiving.Then me, Emily, and Ryan on

(07:59):
Brain Rot. But first, in ourinterstitials this week, we're
gonna talk with Micah Loeingerof On the Media and get his
expert opinion on what happensnow that the US government has
drastically cut funding to theCorporation for Public
Broadcasting. Michael Lowinger,thank you so much for joining us

(08:30):
on Ask An Expert. You are trulyan expert.
You are the cohost of WNYC's Onthe Media, a nationally
syndicated public radio showthat can be heard on over 400
stations across the country. Youworked as a producer and then as
On the Media's first staffreporter, and your investigative
and human interest stories havefocused on political extremism,

(08:50):
Internet culture, and theevolution of the news industry.
You have won the John m HigginsAward for best in-depth slash
enterprise reporting. You were afinalist for Third Coast's best
news feature, a finalist for aLivingston award, and a finalist
for a Mirror award for bestcommentary. In 2019, the New

(09:11):
York Times wrote about yourexperiment on the use of
restorative justice inmoderating the Internet's
largest Christian forum.
Your radio and written work hasappeared in The Washington Post,
The Guardian, NPR, Death, Sex,and Money, and Gothamist. You
have worked in public media,reported on public media, and

(09:31):
are now the host of a publicmedia show about media. On July
18, Congress passed houseresolution four, which took back
1,100,000,000 that had alreadybeen allocated via legislation
to fund the Corporation forPublic Broadcasting. This money
was slated to go from the CPB tolocal public media radio and TV

(09:53):
stations in all 50 states. Anddespite two thirds of Americans
supporting the use of that moneyin that way, Congress has now
eliminated federal funding forpublic media.
Is this defunding going tochange the American media
landscape?

Micah Loewinger (10:09):
Yes.

Hans Buetow (10:27):
Alright. Here we go. Wilson Lever, U of M. As the
clock tolls noon. Isn't thatexciting?
Okay. Here go. Here we go. Herewe go. A recent, gorgeous July

(10:47):
afternoon, I was very on time,no big deal, for an appointment
to meet a trio of librarians.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi.

Jenny McBurney (10:57):
Jenny. Jenny. Yeah. Welcome.

Thank you.

Go find our room.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love a
library. I love a library.
There's just this feeling whenyou walk in like, I'm smarter
with all of this collected infoaround me. Like, these resources
and ideas are available to me.Could just grab them, take them
in, and synthesize them all forfree.

So this is what we were thinking. Yeah. It
sounds weird in here. It's soquiet.

Good. Perfect. Change anything.

I can

Love it.

Want tables or chairs or

whatever they want. This is great. We got plenty of
chairs. I'm gonna have us allsit awkwardly close to each
other That's fine. Becausethat's just

I'll sit way back.

How we do. Yeah. And even though it's the middle
of summer and this universitylibrary is basically empty, it
feels very cool. I mean, maybeeven more cool to be hanging out
with three librarians.

I'm Jenny McBurney. I am the government
publications librarian here atthe University of Minnesota Twin
Cities. Mainly, my job is tosteward our collection and make
sure that the public has accessto government information.

Kate Sheridan (12:08):
I'm Kate Sheridan. I'm the publishing
librarian at the University ofMinnesota Twin Cities, and I run
the library's scholarlypublishing program.

Molly Blake (12:15):
I'm Molly Blake. I'm a social sciences librarian
at the University of Minnesota.And along with Jenny and some
other fabulous people, I helpedlaunch the Tracking Gov Info
Project.

The Tracking Government Information Project?
That's why I'm here. Jenny,Kate, and Molly, they'll help
run it along with Sangah Sung ofUniversity of Illinois Urbana
Champaign and Ben Amada fromCalifornia State University in
Sacramento. So these fivelibrarians and their project,
which tracks what changes arebeing made to the public
information online, is avolunteer effort that is just

(12:48):
one of a group of volunteerefforts that are currently on
the front lines of data andinformation rescue and
preservation. There have beendata rescue efforts in play for
literally thousands of years,from the burning of the library
of Zimri Lim in ancientMesopotamia, the destruction of
the Maya codices by Diego deLanda in 1532.

(13:11):
You've got the deliberate arsonof US Library of Congress in
1812. You got lots of librariesdestroyed in World War two.
Information has always and isalways at risk of being lost,
and part of the work oflibrarians is to make sure that
it isn't.

So there's always been librarians and
members of the public who wantto help to preserve government
information, and there's superlong standing efforts to make
that happen.

But this year feels different. This year, The US has
entered what for it is a new eraof information threat. Alright.
So I'm gonna start. I'm gonnaread you all a headline, and
then I'm gonna ask you what thisheadline makes you think of, how
it makes you feel.
This is from 03/20/2025,04:48PM, from Politico. Trump

(14:08):
signs executive order todismantle education department.
You all work in informationsciences in the library. And so
when you read that, you open upyour paper. What people don't do
that anymore.
You open up your browser. Andyou read that. What like, what

(14:28):
do you think from yourperspective as librarians, as
data information folks?

I mean, my first thought is, is that legal? My
second thought then is, uh-oh.Where is all of the stuff that
those people are working ongonna go? Is it gonna disappear?
Are we not gonna have access tothat those reports, that data,
any of that stuff anymore?

And the Department of Education produces just an
amazing amount of data that isused by grant writers, that's
used by researchers. I thinkright away of the Institute for
Educational Sciences, which isin charge of ERIC, which is
probably the most populareducational database of
scholarly articles and grayliterature, conference papers,

(15:13):
things that are extremely usefulfor educational researchers.

ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center,
ERIC, is a searchable onlinedatabase of about 2,000,000
pieces of education research.Molly and her social sciences
colleagues rely on ERIC.

I work with a lot of researchers that do
systematic reviews and evidencesynthesis. So they have a topic
and their goal is maybe theirtopic is reading in third grade,
for example. And they then wantto figure out what is everything
that has been published over theyears on this topic. Because of
the cuts of the Department ofEducation, ERIC is likely not

(15:52):
going to be indexing the samenumber of journals. It's gonna
be cut by almost half in yearsto come.

Which means the researchers that are relying on
it can't go back and replicatetheir searches, and you lose not
just the materials, but themetadata, the indexing of
information, where theinformation is stored, how it's
discovered. There's just gonnabe less to find. But it also
means that there's gonna bedownstream effects. Here's Kate
Sheridan.

Eric feeds into so many other things. Right?
Eric records get pulled intocommercial databases. Eric
records get pulled into GoogleScholar. If Eric is affected,
many other things are affectedas well.
If the researchers who come toMali are gonna have their
systematic reviews impacted bythis, that's literally going to

(16:40):
reshape the knowledge we're ableto have moving forward. That's
going to reshape our ability tomake new discoveries, to make
progress, to innovate. Like, youhave to look at what's been
previously done, design a newexperiment, test it, report back
on it, and other people willread it and design new
experiments. We're gonna bemissing part of that.

Once we lose that information, we lose the ability
to understand things aboutissues such as school
segregation, issues such asequity. It's taking away data
that people can use to makeeducation better for everyone.

So what was happening in the early days of
the Trump administration is thatlibrarians started getting
questions from researcherssaying, my article's gone. Why
is it gone? Help. Other peoplewere saying, wait, this dataset
that I was using is gone. Whatdo I do?
How do I find it? How do Icomplete my research project?
And there was a superinteresting article, which I

(17:41):
brought along today just incase, from The Lancet that was
talking about how an importantpart of this data is
transparency. In normalpractices, if you make a change
to something, you document it.You say, this was changed to
this.
But that's not what's happeninghere. Changes are just happening
without anyone knowing, withoutany documentation, without any

(18:04):
recording. How do we even knowwhat's an accurate dataset
anymore?

So Jenny, Kate, Molly, and their colleagues
started the tracking governmentinformation project, which is a
crowdsourced spreadsheet thathelps everyone be able to track
what's being changed on anyfederal websites and where you
can go to find what it used tosay before the changes.

Say, okay. I'm looking for everything relating
to COVID. You can findeverything that has to do with
it. You can see which websites,which documents have been
removed, and find where it ispointing you to. So where is the
preserved copy of the covid.govwebsite, for example.

And part of what we're doing in addition to
pointing people to preservedcopies, which is super
important, is we want to raiseawareness about the scope of
this problem. Like, what does itmean that the Department of
Education may be dismantled?What information is being
collected? What is theirexpertise? What types of work do
they do?

(19:11):
Because even if we can preserveinformation that goes away, what
we can't do is we can't write areport that's not going to get
written this year.

That's one of

the things that stresses me out the most. I
think there was, like, two weekswhen the mortality weekly report
didn't come out. It's themorbidity and mortality weekly
report. The MMWR is intended topublish information that is
timely and related to publichealth. So if there was, like,
an E.
Coli outbreak happening and theyhad some new information about

(19:44):
the outbreak source or aboutsomething to do with the actual,
like, B. Coli bacterium,something to do with that, you
could find that in the MMWR. Andso we don't know what was lost
necessarily, not just becausethe articles weren't published,
but because we don't necessarilyknow what they were about.

We will never get those two weeks back. We
will never get those reportsback. That is a seventy year old
dataset that has a gap for therest of eternity. Even if
everything was snap fixedtomorrow moving forward, that's
never gonna come back. That'sgone forever.
It it was never created becausepeople weren't able to create
it.

This was a big revelation for me in
understanding all of the layersto what's happening. It's not
just that we need to beconcerned with the data being
actively taken out of the publicview, but also the impact of the
government efficiencies in heavyscare quotes that have all
eliminated data gathering byshutting down research. They've

(20:47):
canceled server contracts tohost and store the data, and
they've fired the people withthe expertise that's needed to
contextualize it.

Lynda Kellum (20:57):
If I can't, like, be assured that I'm gonna be
able to access this websitebecause those people aren't
there or the, you know, therethere's link issues or the API's
down or the contract's beenended, I wanna be able to access
that data, and there's no reasonwhy people shouldn't be able to
access that data.

This is Linda Kellum. Linda is a data
librarian with expertise inqualitative data research and
software. And Linda is a leaderin the field of data rescue, so
much so that just the mention ofher name Tamale prompted She's a
big deal. She's a big deal.She's a big deal.
Yeah. I wanted to talk withLinda in her capacity as

(21:39):
founding organizer of the DataRescue Project, which is a
volunteer group that works onemergency archiving of datasets.
And I have to say I was a littlesurprised. Maybe I shouldn't
have been, but I was a littlesurprised by Linda's reaction
when I read her that Marchheadline, Trump signs executive
order to dismantle educationdepartment.

First thing I thought about was I was happy
that we had actually donesomething. So in a lot of ways,
I felt satisfaction at least wehad tried to do something. Wow.
But you're you're right. I mean,I it was it was it's also
disheartening and it's reallydismaying to see, you know, that
considered as something that

could be thrown away, You know, not

it's something that's not worth preserving for
the long term.

That's a very surprising answer to me. Not the
second part. The second part iskind of what I expected. Yeah.
You know.
It's made in things. Let's talkabout the first part of that
answer, though, where you saidyou felt satisfied that you had
done work. When you say that asa data librarian, when you say
that as someone who works with adata rescue project, what does

(22:49):
that mean? What what work haveyou done already when you read
that announcement in in March?

For us, we were just this was rapid response, so
it was really just get what wecan. We knew that the Department
of Education had a target on itsback and wanted to go ahead and
do as much as we could at thattime.

Was there anything specific that that led you to
see that target? Like, how didyou know that target was there?

Project twenty twenty five.

Oh, that was

that's the road map.

Oh, you mean they told you?

Yeah. Yeah. They told all of us what they were
gonna do. So we were looking tosee where they had explicitly
said it would target agencies.We started with the Department
of Education.
That was the very firstdepartment we even looked at,
just to figure out what datasets would be publicly
accessible for us to downloadand preserve.

The first step was to understand what information
they're even looking for.

And that's what we did. We went, you know, with a
spreadsheet and starteddocumenting inventorying, if you
will, the different datasets andsurveys that were available on
that website. What's there?What's the size? What do we can
we get it?
Are there alternative sourcesthat are not government based?

As full a catalog as possible was made of what
needed rescuing, adding metadataand documentation to everything.

We want everything that's associated with that.
Once we felt we had everythingwe could find, we asked others,
people who had expertise inthose areas to add additional
datasets, and then we couldstart the process of a rescue.

Getting the actual data can be either simple or
complex. Some datasets, you canjust click and download. Easy
peasy. Other datasets, not soeasy. Some are so big that they
need to be scraped, and thereare others that are just
idiosyncratic.

Department of Education has this thing called
the Data Lab, which haswonderful data sets, but they're
all in tables and there areabout 900 tables for each data
set. And there's no way todownload the entire we just
can't get it out of the system.There's no API access for it. So

(25:04):
Right.

We've been working

on projects where we just go through and download
each individual table.

What? That's like archaeology. That's like dusting
dusting grains of sand in themiddle of a desert.

Yeah. It's it's definitely tedious work, and I
thank all of the volunteerswho've worked on it.

Once data is downloaded or scraped, it has to
go somewhere as quickly aspossible. Somewhere that has the
space to store it, isn'tcontrolled by corporations in
terms of service, and ispublicly accessible.

When we take the dataset, we don't keep it. We
put it into ICPSR's DataLumos,which is a crowdsourced
repository for public data. Itwas in 2017 in response to
concerns about the loss ofpublic data. And from there, it
becomes publicly accessiblequite quickly and it has all the

(25:59):
fields that are needed fordatasets to include the metadata
in the documentation. The roleof ICPSR is long term
preservation so that they can,you know, help make ensure that
that dataset, that package willbe accessible in the long term,
which is a very different thingfrom just web crawling and, you
know, in mass amounts.

(26:20):
So it's a supplement to whatInternet Archive and others do,
but geared around data.

So that's the process that Data Rescue Project
has been doing with theDepartment of Education since
February. But the Department ofEducation are not the only ones
who have been targeted acrossthe government. We have seen
huge changes to governmentagencies like Health and Human
Services, CDC, NOAA, Departmentof the Interior, and some

(26:53):
nongovernmental like USAID andlots, lots more. This same
crisis is happening all over thegovernment all at once, and all
of it is in need of the samelevels of response. How how wide
is the aperture for this?

Yeah. I think that's a great question and
something we're still figuringout, certainly. Interesting.

So, yeah, we don't really have a sense?

Yeah. Because we don't know like, somebody's
asked us how much data have youcaptured, and we don't have a
way of knowing because there wasno one inventory for all the
federal government data. Evendata.gov is not an inventory for
and and data.gov has its ownissues. I think agency by
agency, we have a sense of whathas happened. And, you know, in

(27:41):
the coming months, this would bea project we could do is look at
the agency by agency and kind ofdetail what has occurred.
And but even then, it's it's itmay be office to office within
an agency. So it's reallychallenging to have a sense of
kind of that whole picture atthis particular point in time.
But in terms of scale, like, Idon't know at this point. I

(28:02):
can't even say.

I find all of this upsetting, not the efforts of
all these wonderful people. Thatis the only thing that's keeping
me from just laying down on thefloor, letting the fates take
me. What I find upsetting isthat all this work, all this
data that we're scrambling tosave, it already belongs to us.

Yes. This is our data. We are all it's it's for
the people, by the people, ofthe people. Right? Like, that's
the whole point of ourgovernment.
And so the government createsthings for us and we have a
right to access it. The role

of the federal government really is to help us
understand ourselves. That's Ibelieve. Right? It's it's the
federal government is the onlyreal entity that can has the
mission to collect public dataand make it accessible to the
public. It's built into ourconstitution that we take a
census.
Collecting data is is part ofour who we are.

Certainly, a democratic ideal is that we
should all have unfetteredaccess to information that then
we're able to get and interpretboth as private citizens and in
the work we do in any way thatwe see fit.

It's how we hold the government accountable. It's
how we inform ourselves aboutour communities. It's how we
understand who we are as apeople. Yeah. Yes.
That's an informed electorate isa fundamental part of democracy.
One institution, my institution,my my library can't replace that

(29:45):
mission on the scale that thegovernment can do it. A private
company can try, but their roleisn't to do that. Their role is
to to make money. And so when itcomes to losing access to any of
the public data that we've had,it's a shame not just from a
from a topic level in the senseof this is what this Department

(30:06):
of Education dataset is for, butin a sense of of this is what
the government should do.
It is gather information aboutus, help us understand
ourselves, help us be able toproject into the future about
ourselves, help us buildservices for our people. That's
the role of the government in myopinion.

One of the hard parts about this moment is that
these ideals, which represent anidea of how the country has been
run, maybe since it became acountry, these ideals are not at
all being met by the actions ofthe people who currently run it.
And that means that, like Linda,Kate, Molly, Jenny, the

(30:49):
volunteers they work with, andthe teams building and running
theirs and other data rescueprojects, these are the people
working to build systems thathold up our ideals and keep our
information free and available.As I was listening to Linda talk
about all this, I startedactually to see a picture

(31:10):
forming in my head. And this wasa picture of, like, pipes being
laid. It was a picture ofstructures being designed and
pathways being paved.
And it suddenly occurred to methat even though this hurts to
feel such a letdown, We might belaying some kind of groundwork

(31:31):
for something new. Are wecreating new infrastructure with
this project that we haven'tseen and that might undergird
longer than just to the nextadministration?

Yeah. I oh, I think there's there's a building
awareness of the existinginfrastructure. Certainly,
people now know about DataLumosbeyond just a few data
librarians. And I give you anexample of that. There were only
a 100 data sets in DataLumosfrom 2017 to 2025.
Since 2025, we have put 700 in.So Wow. Yeah. It gets doesn't

(32:12):
seem like a lot, but each one ofthose takes a lot of time and
and effort. And it is thecreation of maybe a new way of
thinking about what we're doing.
And we're still figuring thisout. Certainly with Data Rescue
Project, one of the things wewould like to do is create a
infrastructure for rapidresponse for digital objects.
Right? So it's not just thatevery time something happens, we

(32:36):
have to spin up this thing, butwe actually have an ongoing
documented, understood way orbest practices and as well as
well as technical infrastructurefor people who who need to do
this.

Even if we have an eye toward the long term, there
is a lot of information beingthreatened and a lot of need to
fulfill right now. Luckily,there are people working on it,
and there are plenty of waysthat we can all get involved in
helping them.

So for example, we've talked a lot about the
Internet Archive and the WaybackMachine. Those started, like, in
the nineties, early twothousands. Those are essential
tools. They're doing such agreat service. And I would
encourage anybody anywhere toadd the Wayback Machine browser
extension to your browser.
And if you see something, savesomething.

Could be on a government website or could be
anywhere that you're justworried about what would happen
if this information goes away.It just takes a second to click
and to save it.

This sort of flagging and identifying, this
is exactly the work that they'rehoping everyone can do. Like
contributing, for example, totheir tracking government
information project.

We have a really simple form where you can just
report this is the link I wanna,share. This is what I know
hasn't been removed or modified.And, again, we know everybody
uses these websites in differentways, and so we need everyone's
expertise. Like, need to hearfrom teachers that are using
lessons plans on these websites,anyone who's using reports on
this website. If there'ssomething that you've used and

(34:12):
you you notice it's gone orchanged or even if you're not
sure if it's changed, go ahead

and submit it, and we

can kind of, investigate on our end.

And if you're really curious and you wanna go
see what data has already beenrescued, you can go to the data
rescue project's tracker to seeall 1,200 data sets and
counting. And that doesn't justinclude their rescues, but
everyone's.

One of our the main things that we wanted to do
is make sure that we wereamplifying what other people
were doing. Mhmm. So it's notjust about us. We we want people
to know about University ofChicago's data mirror or the
Federal Data Forum or America'sEssential Data. Right?
All of those are great thingsthat are doing similar but
different work. And so we wannamake

sure Yeah.

To amplify those. And that's what's great about
this community is we're not It'snot about territoriality. We're
trying to amplify each other andwork together because I don't
want people doing what youdescribed to going and just
hoarding things and putting itin their servers. That's not
useful. And so we wanna makesure that everybody knows where
they can go for the things thatthey are working on.

Everyone I talked to, Molly, Kate, Jenny, Linda,
everyone assured me that you donot need to be a data person or
a programming expert or abackground in library sciences
to do this work to be able tosupport and pitch in. You just

(35:41):
need to be willing to join in.

Speaking for myself, I was like, is somebody
a little more experienced thanme starting this project
already? And I kept kind ofwaiting. And eventually, I think
we kinda decided, well, we haveto be the ones that start this
project. And we're gonna learnas we go, and we're gonna get
other people involved, butsomebody has to be doing this,
and it might as well be us.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to
Jenny McBurney, Molly Blake,Kate Sheridan, and Linda Kellum.
I had long conversations withall these folks, and they were
incredible.
Y'all, librarians are the best.Full stop. Unqualified. I will
be publishing, those longerconversations to our members,

(36:39):
later in August. If you are nota member, but you wanna hear
those conversations, you canalways sign up for just $4 a
month and get access to all ofthe extended interviews, not
just from this episode, whichwill be there, but also previous
episodes.
You can go deep on a lot. Youcan also go deep by looking in

(37:00):
the show notes for this episode.I'm gonna link to all of the
projects that were mentioned inthis piece, to the Wayback
Machine if you wanna startarchiving websites, to the Data
Rescue Project, to the TrackingGovernment Information Project,
and lots, lots, lots more. Ifyou think you might be
interested in learning more orpossibly joining the cause and

(37:21):
volunteering some of your timeto help, you can find a great
starter in the show notes orhead on over to neverpoe.st.

Michael Lowinger, this removal of funding for the
Corporation for PublicBroadcasting is the latest and
most concrete escalation of abattle that has been waging
about public media since itstarted in 1967. When this
amendment passed, Republicanhouse speaker Mike Johnson said,
this is, in our view, a misuseof taxpayer dollars. They're

(38:36):
biased reporting. They're notobjective. They pretend to be
so, and the people don't need tofund that.
In your expert opinion as amedia reporter reporting on
media, is public media any morebiased than CNN, NBC, Fox News,
or any other nationallybroadcast news outlet?

No.

Ryan Broderick (39:17):
I've seen it used a lot now in tandem with,
like, AI content, like,particularly, like, that weird
Italian crocodile that's popularon TikTok. That's Ryan
Broderick. You might

know him from well, here. I'll just let him
tell you.

Hi. My name is Ryan Broderick. I am the author
of the Garbage Day newsletterand the host of the Panic World
podcast. And if you like thisshow, you'll like those slightly
less, but like them probably.

Ryan's being glib. You would love his work if
you don't already know it, butyou probably do. We are huge
fans at Neverpost at least. Andthe crocodile that he's talking
about is called Bombarderocrocodillo and it's maybe the
most well known character, Iguess, in a lineup of characters
featured in a series of nowslightly passe TikToks

(40:09):
collectively called Italianbrain rot. He brought it up
because I asked him to tell mewhat exactly brain rot is.

It's ugly. Like, it's it's it's almost always
ugly. It feels lazy and it feelsunfulfilling beyond just sort of
understanding the references.This feeling of like you're just
consuming this stuff, but itdoesn't really add up. It
doesn't really stay in yourmind.
It sort of pleases you in asensory way, but it's not great,
and you know that deep down. Andpeople really like watching the

(40:56):
videos, but they know thatthey're bad and and and
unfulfilling. The way I seepeople use it seems to be
similar to the way you wouldtalk about, like, eating a lot
of junk food. Like, there's apride to it, but the pride is
kind of making fun of thecompulsive aspect to it.

I wanted to ask Ryan about brain rot because it
seems to be front of mind for alot of people at the moment,
even if that mind is diminishingin its faculties. And it also
seems to be like three differentthings. It's a verb, which is
what happens to your brainlooking at, as Ryan calls it,

(41:37):
unfulfilling content. It's alsoan adjective, the label given
generally to unfulfillingcontent. Celebrity gossip, weird
food challenges, thoselivestreams where they try to
very carefully remove the shellfrom a raw egg while keeping the
shell membrane intact, you mightreasonably call all of that

(41:58):
brain rot, which is also a noun,a genre label for Tralolero
Tralolot, Skibbitty Toilet, LePoisson Steve, and others.
All media with this shared andspecific kind of irreverence or
inanity almost. All of that alsois brain rot, maybe with a

(42:20):
capital b. To put this assuccinctly and confusingly as
possible, not all brain rot isbrain rot, but it may all rot
your brain all the same. So howdo we get these three different
but related senses of brain rot?And what sort of anxieties or

(42:43):
compulsions does brain rot as aconcept confront?
Why was this term coined and whyis it useful is what I'm curious
about in this segment. Thecontemporary Internet usage of
brain rot, of course, echoes aphrase I grew up hearing
sometimes in earnest, but mostlyironically as a throwback to a

(43:04):
very similar set of anxietiesalso related to technology. TV
rots your brains.

Clip (43:10):
But you
should know that watching TVrots your brain. Rot your
brains.

This is a very well worn worry that some new
type of media is somehowdestroying the minds of its
audience, especially if thataudience is young.

Emilie Owens (43:31):
We have evidence to show that when the novel was
introduced as a format for theevery person to read in Denmark,
the newspapers or and and publiccommenters at the time were
like, kids can't be readingbooks. They will essentially rot
their brains.

This is Emily Owens.

Like, this is a very old tradition of young
people doing something, adultsfinding it abhorrent, it making
its way into the mainstream andbecoming our culture in whether
we like it or not, and often inways which are really cringe.

Emily is a doctoral research fellow at the
University of Oslo working inthe Department of Media
Communications.

Broadly, I am interested in teenagers' lives,
meaning their social experiencesand their identity development,
and how, if at all, those areshaped by digital media broadly
and in the case of my research,TikTok specifically.

In June, Emily published an article in the
journal New Media and Societytitled, It Speaks to Me in Brain
Rot, theorizing brain rot as agenre of participation among
teenagers. In it, she points outthat when brain rot was named
word of the year by OxfordUniversity Press in late twenty

(44:44):
twenty four, a parade of handwringing followed with headlines
like, I'm a neuroscientist.Here's the surprising truth
about TikTok brain rot from BBCNews. Smartphone addiction is
leading to brain rot, doctorssay from CBS. Pope warns of
brain rot from phone scrollingfrom Catholic news website

(45:06):
Alethea.
Brain rot, the new generation'sepidemic from the cub. And, of
course, more.

People were freaked out about it. They
thought it was a a genuinemental health condition
affecting young people who usethe Internet too much, but also
older people who use theInternet too much or the type of
content that causes that mentalhealth condition. So that it was
overwhelmingly, like, negative,very little sort of tongue in
cheek. That's maybe emerged morenow as we get more comfortable

(45:41):
with the term, but certainly atthe beginning, it was real,
like, panicky vibes.

In the midst of all this, Emily is conducting
research with, quote, a smallgroup of teenagers at an
international school in Oslo, asshe writes, and something
happens.

And in, workshop three, since the third time I'd
seen them all, they werestarting to get a bit more
comfortable. And that was thefirst time that Brain Rot
actually came up, and it wasbrought up by a a young woman
named Yari, 16 years old. Andshe is the self proclaimed
TikTok expert of the group.

And I say self proclaimed, but others often
also referred to her as theTikTok expert in the group.

And so we were in the middle of a discussion about
why TikTok is valuable to her,why she likes it so much. And
she she started saying to me,like, well, there's
controversies going on in theworld, and there's always
someone explaining it on TikTok.And I went, yeah. And she said,
or I've seen, like, Russianladies describe math to me, and

I understand it. And then another boy, Adrian,
checked in and said, oh, yeah.

I've seen that. I know her. And that's when Yari
said, yeah. It's like it speaksin, like, brain rot to me. I
understand it.
And I embarrassingly respondedjust by repeating slowly, it
speaks in brain rot. But I thinkyou you can see that in that
excerpt, I was I was sort ofcomputing this concept. Like, I

(47:03):
couldn't even take it in. I justhad to say it back to her. And
that's where it essentiallystarted.
And I went on to ask, if youcome across a video on TikTok
explaining something, would youfind it easier to understand in
school? And every single one ofthem nodded or said, yeah. And
then a 16 year old boy, Lennox,said exponentially. And when I
said, really? Yari went on tosay, yeah, and everybody is on

(47:24):
it.

Emily asked the kids in the next session what
they mean when they say brainrot. They say that it's stuff
for younger kids, stuff thatmaybe isn't, quote, cognitively
beneficial, but they also saythat's kinda the point. She
boils down their stew ofresponses in the paper like
this. Brain Rot can perhaps bedefined as a piece of slang

(47:56):
referring to a way of engagingwith childish memes and general
TikTok content which isnonproductive or time wasting by
nature and is humorouslyunderstood to rot the brain of
the user. From this definitionemerge some of the key
characteristics which make upbrain rot as a genre for

(48:18):
engaging meaningfully withTikTok, following its mention by
Yari in the previous example.
One, brain rot is childish orunserious. Two, brain rot
provides no cognitive ordevelopmental benefit. And
three, brain rot is deliberatelynonproductive. Brain rot is

(48:38):
therefore a conscious rejectionof self development and
productive activity in favor ofa childish enjoyment, end quote.
So it turns out teens, likeeveryone else, live in the world
and are under a lot of pressurefrom school, home, friends,

(48:59):
stuff they see on the Internetironically, more on that in a
minute.
And so they, like you, like me,get some scrolling in as a way
to release some of thatpressure. But crucially, they,
we still wanna be engaged. Wedon't want nothing. We just

(49:19):
don't want anything asked orexpected of us in contrast to
every other part of life andthere is only a particular
stripe of media that can reallywalk that line. In an attempt to

(49:39):
capture all this, Emily callsBrain Rot a decompression driven
genre of participation.
I asked her to take me throughwhat that means exactly.

To start, I wanna say that that term actually came
from my childhood best friend'smom, Kathleen Moore. I was like,
I don't know what to call thisthing. I don't have the right
term. And she was like, soundslike this is a a like, you're
these kids are trying todecompress. It's not necessarily
about relaxing.
That's not the right word. It'snot about, like, switching off
entirely. It's more to do withsort of not not trying to

(50:16):
improve in any way or not tryingto produce anything. Not you're
not seeking out a newfriendship, and you're not
seeking out an interest. Youjust wanna you just wanna
decompress.

Emily explained to me that genre of
participation is based on thework of cultural anthropologist,
Mizuki Ito, and is a way ofcentering the idea that people
do things with media. They lookfor it to play a role in their
lives to solve problems, and itexists in a complex aggregate
with the rest of theirexperiences versus how media is

(50:49):
often framed and talked about,especially on the news, as being
this monolithic thing that fliesin and changes an audience, that
it has some effect on them afterthey've experienced it, and then
both they and the media move on.To sit down, scroll through
TikTok, and let one's brain rotisn't the comatose welcoming of

(51:11):
cognitive decline the headlineswould have you believe, but a
purposeful activity which fitsin alongside others that make up
a highly social aggregate. AsEmily says

It's more like this is something they kind of
want or need to do anyway, andnow it has this digital
component.

Yeah. Like, I I I we we love to believe that the
Internet is this reallyaddicting, dangerous force, and
there's this really, like,intense wave of millennial
Ludditeism right now that's,like, I find very
counterproductive. And sothere's this feeling of, well,
you know, the Internet is thisdangerous thing. And, I mean, we
we've been talking about that inregards to every media type

(51:56):
throughout history, like, youknow, go watch David
Cronenberg's Videodrome, like,if you wanna see how VCRs could
be evil. Like, this is just thisisn't new.
But right now, we're reallyinterested in this idea of the
Internet changing our behavior,changing the way we think. So
brain rot,

I think, has become popular as an expression
of that. A tale of two rots,basically. To butcher an old
rhetorical classification, notif by whiskey, but if by rot. If
by rot, you mean the cognitivedecline of a generation of young
people whose attention spans andappetite for involved tasks or

(52:32):
consuming long texts has beendiminished by short form video
and a bottomless feed of clipsexpecting nothing from them,
then of course, I am against it.But if by rot, you mean the
ability to manage one'semotional state through the
selective viewing of low stakesfeel good media available at all
times in which has thepossibility of forming or

(52:55):
reinforcing social bonds amongstpeers, then of course, I am for
it.
I wondered aloud to both Ryanand Emily, does this mean Brain
Rot is more of a lens? Aframework one brings to media

(53:16):
over and above it being a typeof media that one sits down and
is able to make or find onpurpose? Ryan and Emily both
kind of agreed. It's found, andbeing able to find it may be
circumstantial. Ryan's responsewas dialogical.

(53:36):
I I

think in many ways, it's like brain rot is
always being defined by someoneelse in a way. Like, it's it's
it's it's it's a label you puton something, or it's like a
label you put on what you'relooking at as a way to kind of,
like, digest what you've justspent twelve hours looking at
online. I would be surprised ifsomeone could sit down and
effectively make brain rot tomake brain rot. Like, I I feel

(53:59):
like it it's it's almost likeoutsider art in that way. It has
to kind of be discovered andlabeled rather than I'm gonna
sit down and make somethingreally insane, and people are
gonna, like, watch hours andhours of it.

For Emily, this question became one about if
there is a need for teens todecompress, what's the reason
they're going to content, tosocial media to do that? Why is
the activity they're engaging inscrolling or searching or
watching and not anything else?What does it mean that

(54:31):
decompression, as important asit may be, happens in
environments like social mediaplatforms, which adhere to a
very strict hyper capitalistlogic?

One of the themes that emerges in my data a lot, I
which am finding hard to writeabout because I don't know how
best to do it, is that thesekids feel like grown ups do not
give a shit at all, and thatthey are they are left to their
own devices in terms ofeverything that they are warned
about. So they you know, Ibrought up, you know, data and

(55:06):
digitalization. And the firstthing they said was, oh, no.
Companies are taking our data.We know, but there's nothing we
can do.
So, like I wrote this articlebecause I was annoyed at how the
grown ups were understandingBrain Rock. I was like, you got
it wrong, and you're replicatingthis media panic that we've seen
over and over and over and overagain. There are problems to do

(55:30):
with TikTok and BrainRot, butthey are not BrainRot. It's not
that young people are going toBrainRot to turn their brains
off. It's that young peopledon't have other places to go to
switch off.
They don't have the tools to dothat. There's not a lot of
public spaces to go enjoy. It'snot like you can go out to a
park and just switch off and dodumb stuff and be a kid in that

(55:53):
way. To be trapped in a phonewhen you're trying to decompress
because someone makes money fromthe fact that your eyes are on
that phone, I think that'sreally grim. And I think that
these kids, these teenagers thatI was working with, they don't
say it explicitly because maybethey haven't cognitively
recognized it as such, but Ithink they feel that that's not

(56:14):
good.
There are loads of things youcould do to decompress.
Sometimes it is use your phone,but oftentimes it's go for a
walk, like go for a swim, takeyour bicycle out, paint a
painting, write a little story.And we're, I think,
systematically discouraged fromdoing those things because those
things don't make anybody anymoney. And that's yeah. That's

(56:38):
my that's my beef with BrainRot.
It's not that it exists or thatyoung people are doing it. I
think that's fine. We should letkids do what they want. If
they're enjoying it, who cares?It's more that there's this
bigger systematic problem thatall of our time is being
capitalized on, and that's notnice.
Such a lame button to on.

Not nice.

But that's a great button to end on. Thanks a

(57:21):
million times over to both RyanBroderick and Emily Owens for
chatting with me. You can findRyan's newsletter at
garbageday.email and his podcastPanic World wherever you listen
to pods. You can find Emily'swork at emily owens, that's e m
I l I e o w e n s, dot c a andat h f dot u I o dot n o. We'll

(57:48):
put links to all these things inthe show notes.
What happens to your brain whenit rots? Is there something
that's particularly effective atrotting your brain? How do you
feel about that? Would you admitit to us? Send us an email, a
voice mail, leave us a voicememo about your rotting brain

(58:10):
and we may include it in anupcoming Mailbag episode.

(58:56):
Micah, what does the change infunding for the CPB mean for
media over the next few years inThe United States?

Well, we don't know for sure what's going to
happen. We can only guess. Butit helps to have some
understanding of how thisecosystem works. Essentially,
we're talking about money thathas been taken away from the
Corporation for PublicBroadcasting. Federal funds
appropriated by Congress, givento an agency that, in this case,

(59:24):
doles out money to public radiostations and public television
stations around the country.
Some 300 plus TV stations, overa thousand public radio
stations. Now that that money isgone, those stations will have
to ask themselves, what do wereally value? Do we value these
national programs that ouraudience really likes that helps

(59:44):
us fundraise? Do we value localnews? Do we value keeping an
environmental reporter?
Somebody going to thecourthouse? Somebody hanging out
in the State house all day? Whatdo we value? Because we are
seeing that there are gonna beheterogeneous effects. Some
urban radio stations, forinstance, they only rely on,

(01:00:05):
say, you know, less than 5% oftheir overall revenue coming
from the Corporation for PublicBroadcasting.
Really rural radio stations,some of them rely on it like
99%, 90%, 80%. I saw oneestimate from this guy named
Alex Kerley, who's a formerproduct manager who worked at
NPR. He created a tool calledadoptastation.org to help

(01:00:26):
people, like, figure out howmuch their local radio station
is at risk of losing because ofthese cuts. He estimates that
15% of public radio stationsmight shut down in the next
year, because 15% of publicradio stations rely on more than
50% of their revenuetraditionally coming from the
Corporation for PublicBroadcasting. That would be

(01:00:46):
disastrous.
I do think in the short term,we're already seeing this, lots
of huge surges in funding forradio stations and public media
organizations, particularly onesin urban areas. But you know how
it is, like, when there's acrisis, people show up and open
up their wallets, but then lifegoes on and it gets harder to

(01:01:06):
get people to care.

Mike Rugnetta (01:01:08):
With all this in mind, Micah, do you feel like
we're seeing the end of publicmedia?

Micah Loewinger (01:01:14):
No.

Mike Rugnetta (01:01:39):
Okay. That is the show we have for you this week.
We're gonna be back here in themain feed on Wednesday, August
13. Friends, listeners, now isthe time. If you've been waiting
for a moment to supportNeverpost with a membership, we
could use your help right nowmore than ever.
Our runway is quickly ending. Weneed to find a way to make the

(01:02:01):
show financially sustainable bythe end of the year to keep
doing whatever it is we do here.Media criticism? Tech theory?
Synth solos?
Become a member at neverpo.st at$4.07, or $12 a month for which

(01:02:21):
you will get access to a bunchof bonus content, but mostly
knowledge that you're helping anindie podcast to do weird,
wonderful work so off the beatenpath, even we are not exactly
sure what to call it.Neverpost's producers are Audrey
Evans, Georgia Hampton, themysterious. Doctor first name,
last name. Our senior produceris Hans Buto. Our executive

(01:02:42):
producer is Jason Oberholzer,and the show's host, that's me,
is Mike Rugneva.
The green color of the Cheshacosmells of fresh recollections of
what once has been in thedistant, remote past. Cha No Yu

(01:03:04):
by Katherine Christer Annex.Neverpost is a production of
charts and leisure and isdistributed by Radiotopia.

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