The Poster's Ailment

If you're after a podcast about the state of the internet that isn't out to farm your clicks by fear mongering or drama reporting, I offer a recommendation: Never Post is the cast for your pod. It's an independent project, which was once not a novel thing in the world of podcasting. For context on that aside, you can check out Tech Won't Save Us talking about how Spotify tried to kill the indie spirit of podcasting to serve you more ad slop.

I love Never Post because it's got independent energy. Guests and hosts alike refer to things as stupid, as worthless, as not worth the time and energy workers pumped into them. It's very... un-precious, without being self-aggrandizing in its cynicism. 

One of my favorite bits from the pod comes from its official second episode, in which they discuss discuss posting disease and its more advanced presentation, poster's madness. I do like the term 'poster's madness' because it sounds like something you could catch aboard a wooded sailing vessel, but I understand it's pretty disrespectful to apply the word madness to something and I'm just going to call it take fever. This puts it in line with, say, scarlet fever, which is a life-threatening advancement of strep throat. That way I'm not making fun of people with anxiety, I'm making fun of dead kids. Anyway, I like Never Post's take on the poster's ailment because it 1) makes it a kind of multi-stage problem and 2) doesn't make it a weird culture war thing wherein only people who disagree with the hosts are susceptible AND 3) treats it through the disease metaphor like this kind of outside vector to which one can be vulnerable. Foremost among these vulnerabilities are:

-A yearning for acceptance and attention, which the metrics of social media feed by offering one an ostensible audience and hard numbers that purport to represent that audience.
-A yearning to feel victimized and aggrieved, or to have a scapegoat for one's ambient sense of aggrievement, which the metric feeds by providing one with a steady supply of enemies who say unacceptable and cruel things things like "That's an absurd connection to draw."

This works, I believe the implication is, because these vulnerabilities hook flawlessly into another aspect of social media that Never Post points out: Engagement is neutral. Just like the shadow algorithms will privilege a post that is despised as long as it's engaged with, the infected poster gets their emotional itch scratched whether they receive adulation or abuse. 

It's this servitude toward these emotional black holes that can lead to poster's disease progressing into take fever, a condition whereby one's posting becomes so prolific and unhinged, so deleterious on one's engagement with the world, that it begins to damage one's social and material wellbeing.