🆕 Never Post! Mad Chat

Friends! Better late that later. A new episode of Never Post for you, finally.

In this'n, Mike talks with artist, researcher and online harassment expert Caroline Sinders about blocking people online. What’s it for, and what kinds of feeling do we have when using it? Then, friend of the show Meghal Janardan speaks to children’s book author Laura Dower about her series “From the Files of Madison Finn”, an early exploration about what it was like being young, and online, at the turn of the millennium. Also: ssshhhhhh library asmr

Listen here on the website, wherever you find pods and members: an ad-free version awaits you in your private feed!

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voicemail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
• See what interstitials we need submissions for

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Intro Links

• Wired Establishes Itself as the Digital Thorn in Elon Musk’s Side, The Wrap 
• Introducing ChatGPT Gov, OpenAI
• As Trump Offers Buyout to Get Rid of as Many Government Workers as Possible, OpenAI Announces New Version of ChatGPT Designed to Do Government Work, Futurism
• Union lawsuit seeks to block ‘deferred resignation’ program, Federal News Network
• EU sets out guidance on banning harmful AI uses, TechXplore
• The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers, Advait.com
• Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance, Washington Post
• Google scraps its diversity hiring goals as it complies with Trump’s new government contractor rules, APNews
• Vance gets the TikTok portfolio, Punchbowl

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What If There Were Fewer Connections?

Journalists’ Use of Social Media Disconnection Practices: ‘I Try Not to Block People, but…’

Dr Dawn Wheatley, dcu.ie

Find Caroline:

• convocation.design
• cord_labs on IG

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From the Files of Madison Finn

Find Laura:

• lauradower.com

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

The soft rumor of spreading weeds. The sound of things ruined by the wind. The come to me as if I were the heart of all that exists. I would like to be dead, and also to go inside another’s heart.

Summer Goodbyes, by Alejandra Pizarnik

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

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 Sunday, 02/09/2025 at 09:11PM, and we have a stellar show for you this week. First, with the help of artist, researcher, and online harassment expert, Caroline Cinders, I take a look at a feature found on all social media, the block. What is it for?

What kinds of feelings do we have when using it? And then, friend of the show, Meghal Jynarden, speaks to children's book author, Laura Dower, about her series, From the Files of Madison Finn, an early exploration about what it was like being young and online at the turn of the millennium. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have six news stories for you this week. Long running tech outlet Wired has emerged as defiant scoopster in these, the first weeks of president Elon Musk and glorified pen with a hand attached to Donald Trump's term.

The outlet published 20 stories about the administration in eighteen days, many of them first to press scoops about Musk, his so called Department of Governmental Efficiency, and the band of children he toes around ransacking government agency computer systems, including those of the Treasury, the Department of Education, and the National Oceanic chat GPT gov last month, which it describes as a new tailored version of Chat GPT designed to provide US government agencies with an additional way to access OpenAI's frontier models. Futurism.com reports that federal employees will be able to input, quote, non public sensitive information to chat gptgov and that there are several unnamed agencies interested in the technology. This announcement came just before the administration offered a since deemed illegal deferred resignation to federal workers via a now twice famous fork in the road email. The EU has put forward guidance on circumstances in which AI could be banned. The commission laid out eight areas where the technology might be curtailed or forbidden altogether, including identifying people in real time using cameras in public spaces, social scoring for loan or social welfare receipt using data unrelated to financial risk potential, data such as race, ethnicity, etcetera, emotion detection in workplaces and places of education, inferring political opinions or sexual orientation based on biometric data, and more.

The regulations are currently active, but each EU member state has until August to, quote, designate a regulator to enforce them, according to TechExplore News. Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts released a paper this week titled, The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking, in which they find the transition from task execution to task oversight by knowledge workers when using gen AI tools, can lead to lowered critical engagement with those tasks. Research has begun looking closely, the authors write, at how different activities are impacted by Gen AI and the extent to which cognitive offloading occurs and whether this may be an undesirable thing. The paper, linked in the show notes, demonstrates that some knowledge workers can experience diminished critical engagement in their tasks and suggests, quote, AI tools could incorporate feedback mechanisms that help users gauge the reliability of AI outputs, when to trust the AI, and when to apply their own critical thinking skills. Within a twenty four hour span, it was reported that Google deleted its pledge not to use its its AI technology for weapons and surveillance and announced it would be complying with the Trump admin's anti DEIA executive orders by suspending all of its goal based diversity recruitment efforts.

WaPo reports that Google's AI principles page had read since 2018 that it would not use the technology in situations which quote, cause or are likely to cause overall harm. That clause is gone now, and according to the AP, Google joins Meta, Disney, McDonald's, Ford, Walmart, Target, Lowe's, John Deere and others who have suspended their diversity initiatives since Trump took office and passed the related executive order. Google CEO Sundar Pichai as well as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and of course Elon Musk all held literal front row seats at the inauguration last month. And finally, president Trump has tapped VP Jorkin d's Vance to manage the sale of TikTok ahead of its now extended deadline in April, brokering a deal between ByteDance, the senate, including the all riled up intelligence committee, and any potential buyer. Who might that buyer be?

Not sure. Will ByteDance retain a stake? Not yet known. Might the app be partially owned by the US government? Who can say, is mister Jimmy Beast Donaldson on the shortlist of potential owners?

Why not asks an impatient and indifferent god? In show news, folks, Neverpost has relaunched its membership program. You can listen back to our state of the pod twenty twenty five episode for more details, but the long and short is Never post now has one membership tier, $4 a month, for which you get the entire podcast kit and audio caboodle. That's an ad free feed. Extended and member only segments.

Access to side shows like posts from the field, slow post and never watch, which just put up its second episode where the staff and pals sit down to watch the movie Hackers Together. It is a lark.

Hack the planet.

$4 a month, forty eight bucks a year, a massive massive deal, and you can also feel very cool and proud that you're supporting independent media and technology criticism in an audio first format. We have seen a huge uptick in new members over the last couple weeks. Not quite wired numbers, but we're really excited and thrilled to have so many new folks on board. So if you have become a member, hello. Awesome.

Thank you. We love that you are here. And if you haven't, neverpo dot s t $4 a month cheaper than any cold brew coffee at any of the coffee shops in my neighborhood at least. Get on in here. The never posting is fine.

Okay. That's the news I have for you this week. In our first segment, me and Caroline unblocking, then Meghal and Laura on being a y two k Internet team. But first, in our interstitials this week, library ASMR.

Okay, hello everybody. This is Mike. I cut out the extremely sensitive microphones to flip to the pages of a few books to see how they sound. This first book is a copy of Moby Dick that I bought in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's got a blue cover.

It looks really cool. Here I'm gonna pick it up off the table and flip it around. The back cover is completely blank. I didn't realize this when I planned to do that. There's nothing here.

It's just black.

Connection is the Internet's technological premise, and also its ideology. Like all ideologies, it can be difficult to counteract, but there are ways. It is, I guess, inaccurate to say the Internet's ideology. Technology doesn't have ideology, but is subject to it, maybe forged within it. Connection is the ideology of the Internet's architects, and now very much so, its maintainers.

For as far back as ARPANET to as recently as cars that connect your driving data with data vendors, who then, without your explicit permission, sell it to insurance companies, the unquestioned impulse, the schematic, as Terry Eagleton may say, the system of doctrine or the idea followed, perhaps with a hint of fanaticism, is if it can be connected, it will. And in so being connected, the thing itself is extended, if not explicitly bettered. Our devices and appliances and vehicles and homes and financial institutions and cities and governments and recently even the concept of currency are all connected. As of course, so are we. On and through all of the above.

And by Facebook, Whatsapp, X, Blue Sky, Instagram, Goodreads, Reddit, and so on. Infrastructure and utilities have always connected us in one sense. But, of course, we now are connected to the rhizomatic web of machines, meat, cables, concrete, coin, and gadgets. Elsewhere, I've talked about how the one time insistence that the Internet is for sharing has been supplanted by guarantees of being able to express oneself without fear of censorship. I might revise my position now and say, the more common promise is one of connection.

Facebook's login screen even reads, connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook. Not just people, but the world itself. All manner of things connected. An idea which can seem downright banal, even vaguely altruistic. What more base thing is there to seek than connection with ideas, people, our past, the places we live, communities in those places, the world around you.

Connection is anodyne, the simple fact of joining up before any purpose is even imagined. Anodyne that is until one asks to not be connected. We see the dusty fingerprints of ideology all over connection under the light of disconnection. When we ask to have our cars, our thermostats, our televisions, ourselves taken off the network, the prospect of wanting such a thing is strange. Connection is the forethought and the thought.

Disconnection is the afterthought. There are few, very few ways to retreat from the network or parts of it, and many of the most effective ones are all or nothing affairs. A dumb phone, a home without Wi Fi which confines the Internet to a single room, traveling back in time to, I don't know, let's say, 1982. The purpose of this segment is to celebrate one of the more case by case technologies of disconnection, one available in many forms, though its most often considered implementation is found on social media. What follows is part examination, part ode, and briefly, no less than a love letter to the block.

A block can feel like cleaning house, like tossing out the pile of mail that's built up on the counter, chucking the jar of pickles at the back of the fridge. A block can be satisfying in the way all good media interactions are. It feels like I've gotten something done.

One of the projects I was doing actually with Project Include, someone we interviewed sort of described blocking as a form of self care, that it it's it's a thing that they have to enact at times and that it's their choice and that they have no law qualms with blocking folks.

That's Caroline Cinders, a machine learning design researcher, artist, and online harassment expert and founder at Convocation Design and Research, an agency which focuses, quote, on the intersections of machine learning, user research, design for public good, and solving difficult communication problems. I talked with them about blocking, the ways it's implemented, how and why people use it, especially when there are other solutions like muting or logging off or just closing the tab, putting your phone in your pocket.

Well, mute doesn't stop someone from seeing your content. Right? Like, muting stops me from seeing your content. But maybe part of the issue is I don't want you to know anything about me. I don't want you to, like, have my name in your mouth.

Right? I don't want you to know anything that I'm up to, and I don't want you to, like, see really anything like my likes, you know, all these different forms of, of interaction. So I think part of what's nice about the block is that it is again like this, I would say, like, a reclaiming of power. It's like, you know, it's not just I'm ignoring you. It's I'm taking away all this extra information about myself that you don't have access to.

Blocking a form of self care, a way to reclaim power through the simple click of a button, and a ubiquitous one at that. Every social media platform has a block feature. They must, in fact, at least if it's on your phone. Block is a required feature for social platforms that are available in the App Store and on Google Play. Apple's guidelines read that social networking services must include a method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app, a mechanism to report offensive content and timely response to concerns, the ability to block abusive users from the service, and published contact information so users can easily reach you.

There's a similar section later for multiplayer games. Google Play's guidelines read similarly. An app that features UGC, which means user generated content, must provide abilities to report and block both users and content. Developers are free to implement the report and block features in a format that is best for their app as long as they correctly serve their purposes and are readily accessible from within the app. Users should be able to easily identify and access these functionalities.

And every block is a little different. If I block you on Tinder, you're removed from my matches permanently. No takesies backsees. No unblocking. You're gone.

If I block you on Tumblr, you can't see or interact with my posts, send me asks, or see me in search results. You won't be recommended my posts either. On x, if you're blocked, you can see my posts as long as my account isn't private, but you can't interact with them in any way. You can't DM me, and you can't follow me. An Instagram block will hide me in search, hide my posts, and disable your ability to message me.

Also, if I block you on Instagram, it's gonna attempt to block your other current and future accounts. Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr all also implement the soft block. If you're following me when I block you, an unfollow is forced, and that unfollow persists even after the block is removed, even if it's removed immediately. This is one of my favorite techniques of disconnection, and I use it all the time where it's available. If I block you on YouTube, you can't comment on my videos.

It doesn't do anything else. It doesn't hide me from search. It doesn't remove my videos from your recommendations bar or your videos from mine. This is barely a block in my opinion. And as discussed previously on Never Post, the blue sky block is terminal.

Upon blocking you, it is as though you do not exist to me nor me to you. You cannot see, interact with, or search for my account. Neither threads nor posts nor quote posts in which either one of us is present will cross this boundary, usually not even as grayed out boxes. To each other, we are gone. It can feel like a lot.

A lot of these options can feel, in one way or another, drastic depending upon the scenario. Sometimes there's no question, but sometimes, a pause. Do you really need to remove someone? Doesn't that feel kind of like a commitment? I had blocked a few thousand people manually before I stopped posting on x.

And certainly, for a number of them, I hovered thinking, is this overkill? I asked Caroline about that too, that feeling. They said this.

I sort of view blocking as a very necessary form of the Internet and how we communicate. There's, like, a series of tools that I kind of label under an umbrella of seatbelts for online safety and blocking and muting are kind of at the core of that. I will also say that I don't view view blocking as like a forever thing. I think blocking can be ephemeral or temporary for a particular person. I think at times we do view it as like a very sort of I don't wanna say aggressive but like like it's like slamming a door and then like and then the door is locked and then the door is then, like, encased in iron, and you're never gonna open it again.

And in fact, it's just it's it's just a button. It's a widget that you can turn on and off.

This was, I will admit, a shocking revelation to me. Perhaps because the technology treats it as permanent? Or doesn't suggest using it otherwise might be useful? Or even possible? Or maybe I'm really just learning something about my feelings on forgiveness here?

Plus isn't it at odds? I asked Caroline with the idea that by fully blocking someone, you're admitting they've kinda won. Right? Especially if they're trying to start discourse, if they're a troll or a harasser. A block is a form of acknowledgment.

And I've always been told the best thing to do is to simply ignore. Do not engage. I've felt this. And I've felt others feel it. The sense that blocking is an admission of defeat.

The fine, you win of the feed because you've reacted.

Well, it is also like I've heard from a lot of folks and I felt it myself as well where it doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like defeat. It feels like I'm, like, bopping someone just to be like stop and I get to stop them. It's like almost like a Looney Tunes cartoon where it's like boop and then you're frozen and I get to move on and then you're stuck here. Sometimes to be safe, you need to stop an interaction for a variety of reasons, and you can't wait for folks to mediate or come in and intervene.

And it's okay to actively manage the online spaces you inhabit so they work best for you. This can feel weird because of the ambiguity of online spaces. Like we talked about in our writing is death segment from xoxo live, there's not a clearly shared understanding of what the feed is for. Are our posts fleeting casual thoughts or permanent textual commitments? Is any given feed or any given site hours, The platforms.

Everyone's. Besides drawing into question what posts are for, this raises questions about what we are to each other. Are we colleagues? Are we acquaintances? Are we, as the labels say, friends?

Here, I'll sound the parasocial klaxon. To follow, for instance, is ambivalent. It's adopted the anodyne vaguely altruistic implication of connection. But in addition to a vote of support, which says something like, hey, I like your posts. I wanna see more of these.

It can also be understood as a form of surveillance. I wanna keep tabs on you. And it's up to those being followed to judge each instance in the hopes of getting it right so they may effectively manage their online space and by extension, a lot of times, their safety. In her paper, journalists' use of social media disconnection practices, I try to not block people, but doctor Don Wheatley at Dublin City University writes how people, quote, consider their online profiles as extensions of their personal space, and that within such environments, mental health is a resource to be protected and used with care, specifically amid hostile or confronting content. End quote.

Your profile is both nominally and feels like yours. Your space, your mentions, your messages, your profile, the comments under your posts, places which you don't own, which you maybe just barely control, you may not even be able to customize or personalize to your liking, but nonetheless, you feel like they are your space. Elsewhere, doctor Wheatley has noted this in the way people talk about the use of block lists, which are a technique for blocking many people at once. Quote, blocklist users are described as living in an echo chamber, she writes, or igloo. And the blocklist is frequently referred to as a form of shelter, fence, or building.

The conceptual metaphor suggests that Twitter is a place where people are invited in or kept out. Several metaphors connect the target domain Twitter to domestic life by referencing household chores. People are cleaning their feed, taking out the trash, sweeping it under the carpet. They get rid of the garbage and claim my timeline is a little less cluttered, end quote. Guilty as charged, doctor Wheatley.

Doctor Wheatley writes about proxemics, the study of personal space. Though it was developed in the sixties, it remains, Wheatley says, relevant to the digital age, applied to discussions of virtual spaces and users' preferred level of distance and interpersonal involvement. Wheatley looks at how journalists specifically may want to, quote, restructure their surroundings, given the safety concerns occasionally inherent to their work. Caroline also mentioned proxemics to me and how it can be a helpful way to think about how far and how close we may want to keep those who share our digital space.

This idea that there's, like, four zones of communication that there's, like, the most public, it goes all the way to the most private, which is called the intimate. So there's different kinds of conversations you'll have depending upon what zone you're in. So I would say that there's, I think, this idea and citation needed that, that, like, we're kind of allowed or entitled to information. Right? And so I think the reason it feels aggressive is it does feel like this door slam.

But, one of the things I tried to remind myself is that I'm not actually entitled to information online.

Owing perhaps to the ambiguous nature of online spaces as well as the pervasive always insisted upon sense of connection, there seems to be a fair amount of confusion around and feelings of entitlement to access to strangers, acquaintances, celebrities, journalists, scientists, artists, and so on. It feels like these people are in our space. To them, it feels like we are in theirs. The same space is public and private, inside and out. Sometimes those boundaries are well meaningly transgressed.

Oops. I'll sound the klaxon again. But often those boundaries are purposefully flouted. The block is not the end solution to pedants, scolds, bigots, point missing reply guys, too familiar men, harassers, and abusers, not by a long shot. It's really more like the beginning, but, oh, what a beginning.

One tool of disconnection amongst a sea of connections that, like all tools, can have many different uses.

One of the amazing things about tools is that they can be used in unexpected ways. And so I'm sure that there's, like, a thousand ways people use blocking that have maybe less to do with harassment, more to do with something else that I'm just not aware of. So, like, I would rather advocate for the tool knowing that there might be some greater use for it.

The block is one way to engage in the ongoing process of tending to one's digital environment and, by extension, their peace. And an invitation to think, what would it be like if there were fewer connections? Is that bad?

I wonder, would it feel less aggressive if if we didn't assume that every conversation we could see was one that we should interact with.

Yeah. That feels like a norm that people try to develop in new newer online spaces. And I I've seen it a lot in, the move from Twitter to Blue Sky, recently where people are like, maybe now is a good time for us to all consider that we do not need to reply to every post that we see that we can think of a reply for. And that maybe it would be good for us to just think of, like, to read more things and think, ah, nice, and then move on.

See, this is why I never post.

Thanks again to Caroline for chatting with me. You can find their work at convocation.design and at c o r d underscore labs on Instagram. We'll put links in the show notes. How do you feel when blocking someone? Have there been any particularly difficult or maybe temporary blocks in your life?

We wanna know about them. Call us at (651) 615-5007 and leave us a voice mail. You can also email us or leave a voice memo on our air table. Links are in the show notes. We may reply to you in an upcoming Mailbag episode.

On to the next book. This one's a big boy. I'm holding the computer music tutorial second edition by Curtis Rhodes. It's just a really big white textbook. It's got a hardcover and it's maybe five, six hundred pages long.

Maybe you'll get a sense of how big it is when I put it down on the desk. It's not newsprint, but it's pretty close.

Hello?

Hi.

Hi. How are you?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm I'm a little wobbly. Oh, no. I'm here. I hope I give you what you need. Thanks for getting to know.

Of course. I'm so excited. I was, like, over the moon when you responded because I was like, I don't know if, like, this is, like, so random. I will never see it. So very exciting.

No. No. I totally did, and and I'm so happy. I can't believe Madison is still alive, to be honest with you, but she is. She lives on.

I've known Madison since the early two thousands, for over twenty years. But this prep call for an interview was my first time talking to Laura Dauer, in ways I've known of Laura for as long as I've known Madison. Madison was a friend of mine from when I was 10. I would be sitting in my room seeing her log onto bigfishbowl.com to chat with her crush, Hart, or send emails to her online friend, Big Wheels. She was so confident about using the Internet and making friends.

It really encouraged me to try and do the same. As time passed though, Madison never left middle school because Madison, Madison Finn, will stay in those stories as the main character from the children's book series from the files of Madison Finn. Truly, like, I can't emphasize enough, like, it was one of my favorite chapter books when I was younger with also my both of my sisters as well who would, like

Really?

Go to the library, immediately go to that like, the section of chapter books at the library, see if any new additions are there, and then try and get them in chronological order, of course. So we would try and request the other books from the other libraries in our city. That's so fun.

So yeah. So much for being a reader. I appreciate it. Thank you. She's my baby a little bit.

Uh-huh. Laura is the author of the 26 books where Madison lives. From 02/2001 to 02/2006, Laura put Madison in all sorts of middle school scrapes. With her trusty orange laptop and a pug by her side, Madison would deal with the trials of middle school with the help of the early Internet or a version of the early Internet that got me interested in using my own computer. From the Files of Madison Fenn was one of the only middle grade children's books that actually encouraged kids like myself at the time to go online.

I owe a lot of my optimism about the early Internet to Madison. Madison was free to explore a world of curiosity and friendship. Things felt possible, knowable. She would chat to a few people at a time, enter writing contests, and make new friends online. I wanted that to be my Internet.

As a kid, there was really something special about the possibility of the Internet being a place I could be that wasn't school or home. Like, I could have a corner somewhere just for me and a few friends. And I think for at least a little while, I was able to have that corner. Through AIM, Facebook groups, and later Tumblr, I was so excited to chat to my school friends and meet new people. Fast forward twenty years later, the Internet is complete garbage.

I now have access to meet billions of people and can learn so much about each person within a matter of minutes, but without saying a single word to anyone, it feels so disconnected. My little corner for me and my friends is gone, not to mention all of the advertisements in SponCon. My optimism is pretty much gone. But if I'm not optimistic anymore, does that mean Madison is gone, or is she a relic of another time? Is the optimism something I'm nostalgic for, or can Madison and the optimism she embodies live here and now in this Internet?

I couldn't help but just want to talk to Madison and see if I could find that optimism again. But, of course, Madison is a fictional character, so that's how I ended up talking with my next best and arguably better option, the author herself, Laura Dauer. So we agreed to an interview. Alright. First off, thanks again, Laura, so much for talking to me.

Oh my gosh. You're the one that needs to be thanked for even suggesting this. I can't even tell you personally. It's like an honor. Oh, great.

Was there a moment that made you realize that you needed to write a children's book series that incorporated the Internet?

Yes. I didn't go into it thinking, oh, I wanna write a book about the Internet or using the Internet, which is I it came out of the character. I felt like there was a new language that was coming, and it was cool that it was a girl on her own kind of finding her way and figuring it out and learning this new language as well along with, like, really, the rest of the population, really. You know, you kinda live in a lonely box when you're a writer a little bit, but the Internet creates all this possibility. And I really feel like my journey with Madison was a parallel to my personal journey of unlocking different things and aspects in which it could make information more accessible, relationships more accessible.

I think I was in a little bit of a lonely box too as a 10 year old with my whole future ahead of me. And I was also going on a parallel journey with Madison and the Internet. What did the Internet mean to Madison?

You know, I think the Internet was always there for her. So it was her constant. She had this secret life almost. And having a laptop was, like, a huge deal for a kid then. And it was orange, like her favorite color, and everything about it was it was like taking this big thing and making it really personal.

I wanted it to be like a friend, like a resource, like a a place she could escape or go. So here's the thing too. It's, the universe of Madison, the ethos of of her life in middle school, the bullies, the friendships, It really echoes the sort of dynamic of the Internet. You know, you have the trolls. You have the popular trends.

You have all the things. I mean, in a way, the world of the Internet is reflective of those sort of clicks of middle school. Where do you go? Where do you look for stuff? What site do you choose?

What click do you join? And the discomfort of that and just the also the self discovery in middle school. It's like this intense, intense experience, but it's not forever. It's you still will find your your calm place to be, and you'll figure out who you are through middle school. You will be smart and find your way through hit or miss, and Internet's like that.

I never really thought about the Internet being like middle school. All my friends are there, but so on Internet trolls, it can be a lot to navigate. So, yeah, I wonder if I'm looking back on my early Internet optimism with rose colored glasses because I'm not sure if I wanna go back to middle school. Was I really that optimistic back then? I think what Madison was able to do with the Internet, taking this big thing and making it personal, is what really resonated with me.

I could use the Internet as a tool to help me navigate life. If I was struggling with family stuff, I could talk to friends online. In a way, I was able to use Laura's books to understand how to be with myself and other people. Can you explain what the mad chat words are for someone say who hasn't read the series or is unfamiliar with what that is? Yeah.

So at the end of every book, I would have a page that had and I'm gonna open a book and look at this so I get it right. So it had a, a page that basically had mad chat words. And what I did was, at the time, there were no real emoticons per se in most mainstream communicates, so people used punctuation marks to create, you know, like the smiley face, the colon, the little dash, and the the closed parenthesis. And so I used some of those. I scouted online and found that there were some lists of them, and I began to create some of them.

And I often tried to morph even ones that I discovered online into Madison specific.

And you know what's so funny is that when I was reading this when I was, like, nine or 10 when I read the series, I, definitely tried to use some of those mad chat words in my own chat rooms like aim or whatever. And no one knew what they were besides the, like, the obvious ones like b r b l o l, like, g t g, got to go. I my favorite one was Poof, like, when you leave a chat room.

Oh, yeah.

And I used that. And then I think, like, I think only my sisters who also were, like, big fans of the series understood that one. But I was so excited to look up the new list in every single book and see what I could use and see what maybe my friends were using. But, obviously, like, when you get to book 18, you gotta make some of them up.

Yes. Yes. Book 24 was, like, hurting. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, but I was I was 10. Like, I had Yeah. Like, when I would read books, I'm like, this is fact. Like, this has to be the Wingo that the kids are using

online.

The Mad Chat words weren't the only part of Madison's Internet that were different from mine. Laura crafted Madison's Internet to be sort of self contained and nonthreatening in Madison's world. The fictional chatroom website bigfishbowl.com was just for kids and was nothing like an IRL chatroom with adults and catfishing.

The Internet being a little sketchy at that time, it was something really important to me when I wrote the books that I didn't want anything to be actually a thing. So within the confined world of Madison, there was a safety net that I built in. And so she didn't really then, though, go online and look at all these crazy things, and she'd mention it generally, but I never wanted to direct people to a site that potentially could be dangerous.

I'm not sure it really matters whether Madison's version of the Internet was completely real or not. Sure, my optimism might have been built on a false foundation, but it was still real. Just like I believe that Madison's optimism was real. And I guess by Madison's optimism, I mean Laura's. What made you so optimistic back then?

And are you still optimistic now?

I was optimistic because I think that for the same reason that probably many people are and were, which is access to information and the ability to connect in general. Mhmm. I think I grossly underestimated the amount of useless content that would evolve, or devolve on the Internet. But I also think that this weird thing happened where, people became addicted to it. And I never really predicted that that Mhmm.

I thought it was a choice. I always thought it was a choice. You could go in. You could come out. And I never really saw.

And, totally, I am guilty of, you know, oh my god. Where did that last hour go while I was looking at reels? It's just you're just in sucked into this world. And I never I think Madison would have grappled with that. I mean, that was part of Madison's thing.

It was, like, her thing. But I think it's actually just kind of a smokescreen because this really is like middle school. It is really like a, you know, a pit where you go in and you're just, like, surrounded by stuff you can't tell what's real, what's not. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, being online feels almost inescapable. Like I'm being forced to stay here, but I'm being convinced that I can come and go as I please. I mean, even if that isn't really true, I can't even find a corner because I'm being pulled into 20 corners at the same time. Something that used to feel like a key is now a cage.

And I wonder if Madison would be locked in this cage with me. And if so, would she still be as optimistic, or would that also be dampened? How do you think the, tone would change if you were to write new additions?

The character would not be that different in her essence, but how she navigated these things would be her way of seeing them. Yeah. Madison's sweetness would be a little more cynical. And Madison would also just be a little more defensive, but the character's baseline can be innocent. I think that more kids are innocent.

It's the world around that sort of like like a pressure cooker. And I don't know. I mean, you were innocent, but the world around you was not necessarily innocent.

Do you think that the world needs Madison Finn today?

I do. I do. Because I think that, you know, we're all a little boring, but that doesn't mean we really are boring. We're just like, you know, we're we're individuals. And, you know, I think part of the message of that every middle school writer in particular, every writer, is to build up kids to see themselves as just fine as they are and just acceptable.

Wherever you're at, that's good. That's feels good. That is who you are. And using a character in books to show kids how to just be bored and be have open time and explore the Internet being a place to explore or whatever, go in the library, whatever. I mean, those kinds of messages are not very resonant in our society today, in my opinion.

Can I find that optimism for the Internet again? Maybe it's really as simple as finding a way to take my time online and slow down and explore, to be bored online, find my corner, relearning something I did when I was a kid. But maybe that's also impossible. There are too many eyes everywhere. The Internet has morphed into something else that is no longer a tool.

And I'm not a kid anymore reading about a simplified and safe Internet. Maybe I'm too cynical. Does that mean I have to let Madison go? I wonder though if there's a way to keep Madison with me, but this time, it will be offline. I just wanna say thank you so much again for talking to me today, and I would love to know where can people find you?

Where can they find you online?

I am in the process of redoing my website, which has been sadly ignored for a while, but it will be wwwlauradower.com. And it will have Madison as well as all the other books that I've written. And I will write a giant thing about this, sending people to your podcast because this is so cool. So thank you very much for reintroducing this to me and big hugs. Yours till the sun shines.

Thank you so much. Thank you again, Laura, for speaking with me. I'm curious to hear, was there a piece of media that inspired you to get online? Maybe there was another book, a play, a TV show, or you also were inspired by from the files of Madison Finn. Please let us know.

The links to where to find us are in the show notes.

The last book I have is called Legitimate Dangers. It's an anthology of American poetry that has in it a bunch of the poems that you may have heard at the end of Never Post episodes. It's a paperback book. It's pretty tall. It's pretty thick.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, February 26. Neverpost is an independent staff owned podcast with no funding, no runway, no production partners. It's just us. The folks you hear in the show working on it in the time we have between other work we do.

We are entirely listener funded. And that being the case, we need your support to keep making this show. So if you like it and even maybe in some cases if you don't, please consider telling your pals about the show and becoming a member. $4 a month, it's a deal. It's a steal at neverpo.st.

It is only with your help that we can keep doing what we're currently doing. And if we are very, very lucky, do even more of it down the road. Never Posts producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer.

And the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. The soft rumor of spreading weeds, the sound of things ruined by the wind. They come to me as if I were the heart of all that exists. I would like to be dead and also to go inside another's heart. Summer Goodbyes by Alejandra Posarnik.

Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.