🆕 Never Post! Smooth Moves

Friends! Feel it in your fingers, feel it in your bones! A new Never Post, just for you. In this episode: Jason talks with Hannah Pivo about charts, graphs, truth and proof; Georgia talks with Julian Chokkattu about where all the buttons went. And also: DATA CENTERS

Listen, if you dare, here on the website, and wherever you get pods. Members, an ad-free version awaits you in your 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

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Intro

• Google loses ad tech monopoly case
• [2022] Judge says FTC’s antitrust case against Facebook can proceed
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wraps up testimony in antitrust case
• Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers
• Nvidia to produce AI servers worth up to $500 billion in US over four years
• France and Germany unveil Docs, a homegrown alternative to Google Docs 

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Charts & Curves

• Find Hannah
  • https://arthistory.columbia.edu/content/hannah-pivo

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Where Have All the Buttons Gone?

• Find Julian
  • Wired
• Touchscreen rollback on cars
  • Car and Driver
  • Automotive News
  • The Verge
  • The LA Times
  • Haggerty

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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 aim of constructive uncertainty
lies in the corner between two windows. Such that
we, welcoming the indistinct, unlocks the door
because it likes the sound.We abstracts the whistled body
of the world. The hazards of this opposition
become clear: the ear listens to what
becomes it, the blood flowing through it.

Excerpt of Among the Living by Gary Sullivan

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure, and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 04/22/2025 at 9AM even and forty nine seconds eastern, and we have a touchy feely show for you this week. First, Jason talks with design historian Hannah Pivo about his first love, charts, and how they are used to construct knowledge, truth, and to proof. I don't know about you all, but I've certainly been seeing a lot of lines going down on social media these days.

Then Georgia wonders where have all the buttons gone and talks to senior reviews editor at Wired, Julian Chukotu, about what we gain and what we lose interacting all day every day with perfectly smooth glass slabs of technology and also data centers. But first, gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're listening on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Alright.

Boot up, dial in, and log on. I have five stories for you this week. Google has lost its ad tech antitrust lawsuit. In 2023, the US DOJ and five states brought suit against the tech co. The complaint alleged monopolization of the publisher ad server market, monopolization or attempted monopolization of the ad exchange market, monopolization of advertiser ad network market, unlawful tying, which is where the purchase of one product requires the purchase of another, and they also additionally claimed that The US had suffered monetary damages from Google's violations of antitrust law.

On April seventeenth of this year, US district judge Leoni Brinquima found, quote, plaintiffs have proven that Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange market for open web display advertising, end quote. What happens next? As always, we're gonna have to wait and see. Google intends to appeal the decision, but if the appeal is denied, this has the potential to change Internet ad infrastructure significantly. In other antitrust news, in January of twenty twenty two, the DOJ ruled that the FTC could suit Meta after it sought and was originally granted dismissal of charges that its purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram constitute anti competitive actions.

Fast forward to this month, when Mark Zuckerberg finally gave testimony explaining that MetaFacebook's purchase of the platforms sought not to shut out competitors, but rather improve those services in the interest of consumers, something that Mark Zuckerberg has a long storied and well regarded history of doing. Some might say that making good software better is the main thing that Mark Zuckerberg is known for. The FTC contends that based on Zuck's own messages shown as evidence that he bought Instagram to slow its rapid growth and has since used his constellation of apps to lock people in, even his satisfaction with them declines overall. Lot of Silicon Valley companies being investigated for anti competitive practices these days. I wonder what that's about.

Yeah, it's probably fine. Roblox is, perhaps genuinely unsafe for kids, it turns out. The Guardian reports that researchers find the risk to kids on the platform to be, quote, deeply disturbing, representing a troubling disconnect between Roblox's child friendly appearance and the reality of what children experience on the platform, end quote. Researchers found that age verification was lax, leading to the ability for kids and adults to interact despite supposed interaction restrictions implemented on the app. Kids are also easily able to access what are described as highly suggestive environments.

For its part, Roblox, quote, acknowledges that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and bad actors, end quote. It says it's working hard to fix this, Guardian reports, but, quote, industry wide collaboration and government intervention are needed, end quote. NVIDIA, the American technology r and d company most well known for its GPUs, has said it will expand its manufacturing capabilities in North America. The company's chips are mostly made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, with whom they will partner to construct $500,000,000,000 worth of AI server clusters over the coming years, headquartered in facilities already extant in Arizona and Texas, where they say they're developing AI powered supercomputers. Reuters reports that, quote, the move aligns the AI chip giant, the majority of whose processors are made in Taiwan, with a clutch of tech firms that have pledged to bring manufacturing back to The US amid threats of steep tariffs from president Donald Trump, end quote.

And finally, we have Google Docs at home. The governments of France and Germany have teamed up to create Docs, a supposedly simple and secure document cloud service for on and offline use billed as an explicit alternative to American tech products. I wonder why they'd think that's necessary. According to Techspot.com, France's Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs and Germany's Center For Digital Sovereignty Of Public Administration have both committed themselves to funding digital sovereignty projects. Docs is currently in beta and accessible via France's ProConnect Identification Management Service.

We have previously mentioned that there are very few French listeners to the show, but if you are out there and you have experience with docs, we would love to hear about it. Send us an email. Send us a voice message. Send us a voice mail. How those French docs?

In show news this week, we won that Webby. Holy crap. We won a Webby. The juried award for best live podcast recording is the one that we won, and that is just absolutely wild. Holy cow.

Thank you to everybody who voted for us. We did not win the People's Voice Award. In fact, I don't think we ever left last place, but that is probably just because the other shows that we were up against, all of whom are great, have, huge audiences. The people who won, have 1,700,000 subscribers on YouTube. So, you know, only so much you can do there.

No clue if we're gonna be at the Webbies. That's a pricey ticket. But either way, we are gonna make Jason buy the statue, take a picture with it, and his dog in his backyard. Thanks to everyone for the support, for voting for us, for x o x o and Andy and Andy for having us. And honestly, probably most importantly to the crew of Rev Hall who recorded that show.

Just a truly amazing team of people who were absolutely down for us doing weird stuff, like walking into the audience and handing people things. And at every turn, when we were like, hey. What if we tried this? Not only were they like, hell, yeah. They were like, yeah.

And here's how we can record it. So, I mean, honestly, this Webby would not exist without them. This is very much theirs too. So big big big ups to them. Rev hall crew, you're the best.

Okay. That's the news I have for you this week. Up next, Jason, famous lover of charts, chats charts and truth and Internet with Hannah Pivo, then Georgia on the search for tactility. But first, what does the Internet sound like in a more literal sense? In this week's interstitials pulled from freesound.com, the soothing sounds of server rooms and data centers.

My name is Jason and I love charts. You know, it feels good to say it. So from about 02/2008 to 02/2016, I ran a Tumblr account called I love charts. It began in the Tumblr community as a place to share jokes, observations, and interesting tidbits of information through graphic representation. Folks would scrawl a Venn diagram on a napkin describing how their date was going, take a picture and send it in.

They'd read an article in a magazine articulating some truth about the world, find a chart in that, and send it our way. Then the community grew a little bit. Editors from the online versions of those same magazines would submit what they were making. And after about the first year or two, we were posting a dozen charts a day made by us and our friends, submitted by social media managers from all manner of places, academics, joke makers, journalists, kids in high school, Obama's White House. Everyone had something to say or ran across something that helped them understand the world in the form of a chart.

Suffice to say, I have spent a lot of time thinking about charts. What they tell us, how people react and respond to them, how they move about the world, and how they evolved to be the weird, ubiquitous data adjacent thing they are now. Now I know a bit about the history of data visualization, and what typically gets covered jumps from gorgeous nineteenth century lithographs, charts on stars and climates and topography, the movements of armies and advances in botany, to much more modern fare. The data is beautiful era. Colorful, attention seeking, animated, interactive, big data, grand ambition, weaponized meme material of the Internet age, the era I had stumbled into.

But there was a moment in the early twentieth century, in the middle of this story, where our relationship to charts changed, and where there emerged a new, modern way of looking at information that feels very familiar. So when I found someone who would walk with me into this particular arc of the past, both mine and, the world's, I had no choice but to take a deep breath, turn my head to the side, and lord forgive me, go back to the old me. I am so excited to be joined today by Hannah Paivo, design historian and PhD candidate at Columbia University, writer of, among other things, a recent lecture, Graphic Methods in The United States 1910s and 1920s. Hannah, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Your work focuses on the graphics of the early twentieth century, which is a big turning point for who has access to charts and what they're used to represent as they move from the realm of the sciences and engineers mostly to more common use in the firm, which then means a great expansion of the applications in which charts find common use.

Yeah. Exactly. Once the kind of accountants and statisticians get involved in these corporations, anything you can imagine that they can quantify in the business, they'll put it on a chart.

Right. So we have this expansion of use, which seems pretty natural. And yet your work highlights some lingering tensions around what exactly these charts are being used to represent, and even more broadly in their role of making meaning.

Yeah. So the business community decides in reaction to a bunch of financial crises in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that business itself needs to become more scientific. And this reflects a broader interest in kind of objectivity and trying to emulate the natural sciences that you see in a lot of different arenas in this period. But for businesses, they wanted to eliminate the kind of subjective judgment of executives, these few individuals at the top of the organizational chart working based on their own experience and their own, like, just gut judgment. Okay.

And so the idea is that you could rely on things like data instead and that that will reduce the kind of ups and downs of the market. They they call it at this point in time the business cycle and this natural up and down of the business cycle. How can we, like, smooth that line out and make it so that we don't have such drastic recessions?

So were they able to be objective?

Yes and no. What we see in the techniques that they used was a combination of relying on top of the line statistical techniques of the moment, balanced out with the fact that they were trying to work really quickly and efficiently. So some of the sort of statistical techniques that were being used in the 1920s by statisticians and social scientists involved a lot of calculation, were very rigorous. And the corporate statisticians often were sort of working informed by those but taking shortcuts wherever they felt they could because they were working in this high pressure environment where they had to get the data from the subsidiary or the factory and make it into a chart really quickly so that the executives could look at it the next day. So there's time pressure that they're working under.

And that means that they often turned to graphic methods rather than methods of calculation. What this results in is stuff that maybe we would look at and say, well, that's not particularly objective because they're drawing the curve by hand, eyeballing it, doesn't feel super objective to us. But their aim is not to like add their own kind of subjective commentary on it. It's just that the techniques that they use to be kind of efficient about it involve a lot of judgment. But that judgment is relying on form.

Okay. And and when you say form here, this is actually, like, a big part of the scientific conversation at this period. And even just like the general discourse of understanding the world, there's a conversation around form that is important to the moment. Could you help us unpack that a little?

So all this language that's suggesting stuff about how these visual forms are kind of, like, immediately impacting the human sensorium is part of a larger set of beliefs that develop in the late nineteenth century that other historians have called formalism. The idea that when you see a line or a color or a shape, it like bypasses any sort of like thought or interpretation and it makes an immediate impression on the on the brain is something that we still kind of believe now, the idea that humans can intuitively look at forms and make sense of them. But this is an idea that was, you could say it was invented, you could say it was discovered in the late nineteenth century by people working in the realm of psychophysics who were trying to experiment on the human body and mind and understand how, like, input led to certain kinds of things happening in the human brain. And then its origins get kind of lost. And so then you have all these people sort of repeating these ideas without necessarily knowing where they come from, and it becomes more like a loosey goosey sort of thing about how, like, oh, we just have this intuitive relationship to form.

That's like a human thing.

Sure. Sure. And intuition is a near neighbor of magic.

Sure

is. You spend a good amount of time talking about the role that magical thinking to some extent plays in our acceptance of how charts, how graphic representation of data influences us. How was that narrative working into the time period?

The metaphor that's being made is this idea of, like, data by itself is dull. It's even dead, And we have to bring it to life by infusing it with form. The magic is that form can bring data to life. And the times that they talk about it in these kind of fantastical metaphors I'm fascinated by. There's this one instance where in the late nineteenth century, a French statistician was talking about the tardigrade, which I didn't know what that was when I first encountered this quote.

They can live in space.

They can live in space. Yes. That's that's the first thing you learn when you Google these things. And so that that idea that, like, you can kind of give life through graphs is quite the claim.

Yeah. And so you referenced J. B. Petruska as one historian who has put the rise of data visualization alongside such predictive practices as, like, weather forecasting. How is weather forecasting, astrology fortune telling, all that dissimilar from business forecasting?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Jamie has not made the leap to the graphs. I'm adding that into her arguments.

Basically, the argument that Petruska makes is that there are all of these kind of forms of prediction happening in the early twentieth century in The United States. And some of them we would look at today and say, that seems scientific. And others, we would say, that seems pseudoscientific, like market forecasting.

Mhmm.

And some of them we would say that's not scientific at all, like fortune telling. So I think that these practices of forecasting by using statistical curves belong in that kind of conversation about practices of prediction.

You take a very close look at one company, AT and T, and how they chose to create standards. This was their answer to this, I think, or at least as you're laying it out for me, They they looked at this mess, this menu of misunderstanding around data, and said, okay. We need standards. Like, we need some rigor here. And this is where I really like the way that you've described this, the corporate statisticians' description of their task as turning raw data into curves.

Now in that context, what is a curve? This seems like it's a very important term of art for understanding what charting became.

A statistical curve, oddly enough, does not have to be a smooth arcing line like we usually think of a curve.

Sure.

A statistical curve can be jagged. It can be rippling. It can be straight even. It just has to be a line on a graph representing data.

Mhmm.

All of these things are curves, but there is sort of a preference for smooth ones. And so a smooth continuous curve is kind of the ideal curve even though all these other things are also technically curves.

Right. And I think this is where we run into sort of the aesthetics of it all. Mhmm. This human preference for order and especially when order can be pretty. Mhmm.

Unfortunately, that is not always exactly aligned with an outcome that resembles truth.

Mhmm. Depends on your definition of truth, though. Mhmm. The way that these things are talked about is that there are figures and there are facts for statisticians and business executives at the time. They talk about how business needs to be based on facts.

And what they mean by facts is statistical data properly analyzed. So statistical data properly analyzed means that you have either analyzed it through calculation or through these graphic methods. And the fact is an interesting concept. There's many historians who have written about what the fact meant at different points in time. And so the fact that fact that the fact means statistical data properly analyzed in the early twentieth century is very notable.

It means that we've had this shift to where data, statistical data becomes like the basis for facts and therefore the basis for something like truth. That is an important kind of driver in what they're doing here.

One other quote I wanna settle on here before we sort of move on past this inflection moment in the early nineteen hundreds actually comes from the late eighteen hundreds. And the French engineer, Emile Chesson, who you say, argued the graphic method of forecasting stood apart from other techniques of prediction because it, quote, makes solutions appear not only to the mind, but to the eyes. How do you read that quote?

This is a super important quote in my the arguments I'm framing. Okay. Because I'm really interested in how curves became tools for prophesizing the future. Yes. Chesson is one of the big players in this.

He's one of the key kind of voices in French statistics. He and his co statisticians at the time, you know, are starting to talk about this, the idea that you can take a curve and you can just simply extend it into the future and that because the future will is presumed to resemble the past, like, that's gonna be a good prediction. And in this case, when he talks about the curve appearing to both the mind and the eye, that's really where I I'm seeing a kind of origin point for these formalist arguments about form directly impacting the mind and therefore having some sort of like intuitive ability to communicate to humans. But also, there seems to be a suggestion in his the way he's talking about form that there's some sort of like inherent truth to form. That form has some sort of, like, integrity to it.

And that if you see this form, like, that's believable, we know it's gonna keep going. Because, like, look at that curve.

It tells us it'll keep going.

Look at it go. Yeah. Well, one of the interesting things about the relationship of sort of capital s science and, you know, capital m magic is that it it kind of works in both ways. In some ways, like, the prognostication takes a certain amount of science or data to feel real.

Yeah. There it's it's amazing how these predictions that they're making in these corporations came true to a certain extent. There's no reason they necessarily should have come true except when you start looking at the practices that they're using, it becomes apparent why they are coming true. And that's because they're using their predictions as quotas. And so they're not just purely forecasting the future and then waiting to see what happens.

They're forecasting the future, and then they're telling their salespeople and their manufacturing people, like, okay, this is the quota you have to hit.

Oh, got it. Yeah. So they they are saying, like, here's where the line's gonna go. And then they go down to all the managers, and they say, hey, that's where the line's gonna go.

Exactly. Yeah. And then they they, like, acknowledge that maybe it won't go that way, but then they're always trying to course correct it back to the line that they said it's

gonna go. Yeah. There's there's a quote that you pulled from an AT and T engineer at the time, Dwight Farnam, that I thought was really good. He says, the most remarkable thing about these prophecies by graphs is the regularity and exactness with which the ideals aimed at have been realized. Maybe he meant it in this way, but I certainly read it this way.

That's certainly speaking directly to quotas.

Yes. Definitely. I think so they want to celebrate the success of these things without necessarily acknowledging, like, how it's coming to be.

Interesting. To continue the curve of the past going unbroken towards the future, I would like to sort of bring us closer to the contemporary moment here. Because I think we have, in many ways, presaged the environment that we find ourselves in by looking at the environment that they found themselves in a hundred years ago. If we take a look at this desire for measurable efficiency, I think it was scientific management then was maybe the term. Now it is data driven management.

Like, whatever sort of the fad at the time for how we Mhmm. Consider these things. We find ourselves in another moment of that kind of leadership style, but we also find ourselves in another moment that is dripping with the occult in a lot of different ways, dripping with prognostication, and a moment that is looking towards arcs of the past and trying to envision trajectories for the future. Do you see any resonances with the two moments a century removed?

Something that's very interesting about our kind of present data regime algorithmic moment is that a lot of these forms of prediction are black boxed. So the prediction is still happening based on data, but we no longer get to see the curve. And it's not even that in the early twentieth century, people were seeing the work that went into it in terms of like the statisticians' messy hand drawn stuff. Like usually the executives were seeing the nice cleaned up graph. Right.

So it's possible there are more parallels than we think because it's like those messy curves are what's happening inside the computer and then presenting us with this really nice smooth curve to help us understand or think we understand.

Sure. You know, when I was talking about this with our host Mike last week, he brought up an observation that he thinks that the majority I won't put the word majority in his mouth. I don't know to what extent he cops to this. But a large portion, at least, of how he believes he understands the world is come by and mediated by screenshots of charts from elsewhere that arrive on his timeline.

Mhmm.

I opened Blue Sky and I scrolled and within five posts, I found a chart. In some ways, this is just like sort of a continuation of the world that I saw evolved in the odds, early teens of the two thousands that is, the late two thousand odds and teens, where this material became sort of a form that you shared ideas with because it was easy to share. Mhmm. It could reduce down to an image, and an image could be shared on an image blog, or it could be talked about on a text blog. And could contain various ideas in it.

But it seems like the prevalence of that communication mode has increased so much and has been removed from context so deeply that there's a there's a lot of truth in this idea that we are creating our reality based on screenshots of charts of an article that may or may not be read. How does that feel to you?

Oh, yeah. I mean, something I I wonder a lot about is I think that a lot of people, when you talk to them, they understand that data is biased, that data can be manipulated, that a chart can be manipulated or kind of skewed in a certain way. The same data can be presented in different charts and look totally different. So people understand this when they, like, pause and think about it. But I do wonder the extent to which we're still affected by the image when you see it immediately.

And maybe we forget to kind of use our critical faculties to engage with it more thoughtfully.

And we could certainly spend a lot of time talking about chart literacy and what that means. And even in your example of AT and T, they already knew the things you could do to charts that would make them show you a different outcome with the same data, and that's why the standards were applied. So this is certainly, you know Mhmm. For how not functionally literate we generally seem to be about charts, this has been a concern for a very long time.

Yeah. Certainly. They were well aware that if you take the horizontal axis and make it shorter, that basically you're squeezing the curve, and you can make growth look a lot more extreme.

Right. Now one of the sort of rising forms of chart in the early two thousands was the infographic, which I think is you know, has expanded in meaning to become all manner of things. But part of the challenge is that, is that it has expanded in meaning to become all sorts of things. Yeah. And the the prevalent sin of the infographic was that beyond even configuring the axes or the range of numbers and how they increased over an axis to make data look different, they sort of dispensed with even the idea that you needed axes or needed data or needed much of anything other than directional thought Mhmm.

That could be given geometric constructs.

Yeah. There's kind of two directions that that sends me in. One is diagrams, you know, have a long history and diagrams are really useful for all sorts of things. But also diagrams, you can do anything with a diagram. Like, a diagonal can make absolutely any argument that you want.

The other thing that makes me think of is I I'm really fascinated by a genre of image that I refer to as the data list graph.

Yes.

Graphs that are imitating statistical graphs and don't actually have any data represented. Like, oh, there's no numbers here, but they kind of want you to think there's numbers, but there's no numbers. But then sometimes it's more kind of conceptual or almost like a joke where it'll be like percentage of this, and it's not something you can actually measure by a percentage. Right. Level of anxiety among different professions or like something like that where they're it's actually a ranking that they're showing you, but they're putting it in graph form that is suggesting that there is data there.

Yeah. But it's actually simply they've made curves make some things look higher or lower than others.

Right. I mean, to me, this makes me think that we were right to think that information strikes the eye and the mind in different ways and that the eye is sort of craving a confirmation of order or just directional information. Mhmm. And that largely is satisfied if it only gets that.

Yeah. I think that there is a way that people will sometimes look at a data graphic or an infographic. They'll just let the data sort of wash out. I mean, I do this all the time. Sometimes especially with the more sort of complex things that we see now moving things.

There's, like, know, like digital dashboards where you can scroll and the data moves.

Like Right.

I often feel like it's too there's so much going on. Like, I can't actually gather specific information from it. I'm just sort of impressed by the feat of design that has happened.

Okay. So, I mean, it seems very clear then. We've we are remain in a moment where we are relying on the forecasting power of data to both give us some direction in decision making, but it seems also to, like, assuage our fears, give us a sense of trust? Mhmm. It feels like we've never dispelled the question of the magic inherent in this method.

Yeah. No. Absolutely not. I think we rely on it more than ever now because we have created such powerful algorithmic prediction systems that we believe we believe them because we've made them so big and so powerful and they use so much data to predict things that we only have come to rely on them more and believe them more. And it's interesting because at least when it comes to economic forecasting, I mean, the studies show that people are pretty bad at economic forecasting.

But nevertheless, there's this idea that if you can figure it out with data, then you can predict the future. And it makes sense. It's like it reassures us and calms our hatred of uncertainty. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to speak for all human beings, but I don't like uncertainty.

I like I want to know what's going to happen. And so if data can tell me that, that's reassuring. It all makes a lot of sense.

But isn't it also fair, I think, to hold accountable the graphic designers amongst us who are presenting this information? If if it is real and I'm Mhmm. I am sort of taken to believing that it is real, that information hits our eyes in a very specific and satisfying way, that it is not that shouldn't be dismissed. There is something that feels truthful about it because it is. It helps us intuit the world in a way.

Mhmm. Shouldn't we sort of hold to higher standards Yeah. What gets presented as information?

Well, yeah. I mean, that's interesting because you if you're talking about professional graphic designers or people who are doing data visualization, you know, they they're professionals. For the most part, those people are working really hard to give us images that they they believe to be as truthful as possible. I think maybe where we're actually running into more issues is how easy it is to make a graph for anybody now. That's one of the things that has definitely changed since the early twentieth century to now is that now so many people have the ability to make data visualizations.

And not all those people have thought carefully about what they're doing. And they shouldn't necessarily have thought so carefully about it. Like, we've handed people these tools of Excel and other kind of ways of making charts and asked them to just kind of do it. So I think there's a lot of steps. Like, we should be accountable as viewers, but also the people making the graphics should be thoughtful about what they're doing.

And the people who are designing the digital tools that allow us to make graphics so easily should be thinking about this. So there's there's a lot of steps in the chain of how that graph screenshot gets on your feed.

Yeah. Or maybe we should just go back to lithographs.

Maybe we should just go back to lithographs. Yeah. Those were good.

They were pretty.

They were really pretty.

Well, Hannah, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure to scratch an itch for a niche interest of mine after walking away from the game for so long. Thank you for making this a pleasurable return.

I'm so glad it was a pleasurable return, and thank you for having me. This was a really, really interesting conversation.

Where on the Internet can people find you?

People can find me on Instagram. I'm not even active on Instagram. I'm not as on the Internet as I should be.

Do you wanna be found?

You know what? People can email me. Honestly, people can email me.

How about we just leave it at that? If you wanna find Hannah, you figure out how to email Hannah, and you do it.

Yeah. I love receiving emails. My email is definitely out there. It's not hidden.

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Alright. I'm not saying that the submission box is open again, but I would not mind seeing some good charts. I would certainly prefer to hear how charts may have influenced your understanding of the world and perhaps some deep insight into how you and the world around you function. But, hey, maybe I can have both. If you have anything you wanna send us, chart or otherwise, the ways to do so are in the show notes.

How do you feel about buttons?

Oh, I love buttons. I mean, I I would love to have more products and things that had that level of tactility.

Last week, I talked to Julian Chikatu, who's a senior reviews editor at Wired.

And I test a lot of phones.

Tell me about what kind of phone you have.

This is a very difficult question for me to answer because I because I review phones, I literally am changing phones every two weeks.

Oh my god. Okay. Needless to say, he is the exact person I'd want to ask about the lack of buttons on smartphones and what happens to us when the technology we handle every day consists of a smooth, featureless touchscreen. Virtually all modern smartphones have this in common. Instead of a call button or an end call button or, God forbid, a QWERTY keyboard, we are given instead a single, perfectly flat touchscreen.

The screen becomes the keyboard, the call button, the camera. It can be whatever you want it to be with the mechanics of tapping, pinching, and swiping dictating the entire experience. We can map the adoption of the touchscreen back to the debut of the original iPhone in 02/2007.

It honestly, at the time, was futuristic. Right? Because everyone was so used to buttons, that just wasn't a thing that we thought of, like, oh, I love my buttons. Like, I don't think necessarily at the time people envisioned that everyone would go so far as to basically remove all buttons and make full touch screens for for every single option out there in a phone. But that's kind of where we are now.

Right?

Now, yes, your phone is a touchscreen, but so is the dashboard of your car, your fridge, your washer and dryer. At Taco Bell, you have to maneuver through a gigantic touchscreen kiosk in order to tap your way into ordering a Crunchwrap Supreme.

Everyone switched over to having no buttons at all, but now you have no real choice. Right? Everyone's kinda doing the same thing, and people kind of want that sensation back. And I kind of draw comparisons with cars. It's almost the same exact thing where cars became, oh, electric cars are so cool.

We gotta do something bold and different. And so Tesla had this dash interior that just had no buttons whatsoever, and everything was happening through a screen. And I think a lot of people, you know, didn't love that.

No. They did not.

The Los Angeles Times, bring buttons and dials back to new cars. Touch screens distract drivers.

Hagity, touch screens in cars are still a stupid idea, but help is on the way.

Car and driver.

Shocker. Test shows physical buttons are less time consuming in cars than touchscreens. The verge. Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn a five star safety rating in Europe. Automotive news.

Are touchscreens getting out of control?

This segment isn't going to be about cars, but they do show the ubiquity of the touchscreen and just how common the frustration is about having to use them for everything. A brief power outage can mess up the touch screen that operates the lighting system in your house and make it suddenly impossible to turn on or off your lights. Adding a touch screen to an earbud case is supposed to be more convenient than having to pull out your phone to change the song you're listening to, but it also uses up its battery life. I mean, God, I have a touchscreen on my printer, and I constantly find myself stabbing it over and over again with my index finger because it won't work half the time. There has been some rollback on certain pieces of tech where a touchscreen seemed like a good idea at the time, but is actually more trouble than it's worth.

But the main way we use our cell phones is still through the touchscreen. This perfectly plain and smooth piece of glass that has no texture differentiation and nothing to push or click or flip. And I mean, I do get that to a degree. Our relationship to stuff like cars is physically embodied. You can feel how the steering wheel turns or whether your car has a flat tire.

That stuff matters. But tactility really isn't the dominant experience of using a smartphone. So what is?

The obvious answer to me has to be the content and the social media apps that we're using that are designed to suck up our attention, the colorful app icons that are designed us to keep looking at the screen. Like, the hardware itself is just kind of plain and boring. The it's it's just the software entirely that's now designed to keep us on the device.

The physical presence of the cell phone is useful so far as it facilitates access to content. Content that needs to be as big as possible on a relatively small device. A game, a video call, or a movie can take up the entire size of your phone when there aren't any buttons or a pesky keyboard getting in the way of whatever stuff you're looking at. The screen is infinitely versatile. It can be anything.

But to be anything, the touchscreen also kind of has to be nothing. It has to be featureless, formless, sleek, and flat to better accommodate whatever app you're looking at. It's the perfect blank canvas that can be infinitely erased and used again ad nauseam. And so the tactile experience of using it also has to basically be nonexistent. The screen has to have pretty much no sensory weight at all.

You're simply not going to get any kind of tactile experience from a smartphone. But I wondered what changes in us when the technology we're interfacing with most is just flat. What does that do to us? So I asked Julian that exact question.

Yeah. I mean, I I don't know what it does outside of, like, having us then long for alternative modes of touch in that sense. For example, you might be using the keyboard on your laptop, but I am using a mechanical keyboard that I very much like and enjoy for my computer. So I think there's ways that people would find to mitigate that lack of sensation.

There are phones that try to recapture tactility, but they are specialty devices and show no sign of becoming the norm. And smartphones do offer haptic feedback on their devices in some cases so that when you push your finger extra hard, the phone vibrates or responds ever so slightly to suggest the feeling of pushing a button. But by and large, when we tap or swipe, we don't feel anything. And what we're left with is still a flat, responseless touchscreen. Smooth devices deprive us of physical sensation, and that leaves a void to be filled.

And to me, the most apt solution is to find media on our devices that can satisfy that desire. And when I think of what kind of content deals most directly with tactility, the first thing I think about is ASMR. ASMR content is something that is often extremely tactile. A pair of hands rolling around in a bowl of marbles or handling slime or fingers delicately running down the bristles of a brush. Regardless of the content, the goal is to record it with such highly sensitive microphones that the sound produces that autonomous sensory meridian response, that tingly I'm having my hair played with feeling.

ASMR does, in a way, provide the exact sensory opposite to a touchscreen. It cranks up the experience of touching something to a billion, making the stuff of background noise in our daily lives so textured and luscious that it produces a physical reaction. And even if it doesn't, even if you don't get that tingly feeling, the audio document of an ASMR video still remains this extremely undeniably tactile kind of media. And it's also a pretty new kind of media. The chronology of the ASMR community's growth online is interestingly in line with the adoption of the touchscreen.

Online conversations about that weird tingly sensation were starting to pick up in the late two thousands, lining up around the same time as the debut of the first iPhone in 02/2007. The video speculated to be the first ever ASMR video titled Whisper One Hello, well before the term ASMR even existed, was published in 02/2009, the same year that the iPhone three GS came out. Here's Julian again.

I mean, you could make a very strong argument, I think, that maybe it is that transition that we all made from physical buttons on our devices to an implosion of touchscreen even on things like laptops that there was this mark where maybe ASMR started blowing up, like, little bit after that.

You can see the path. Right? The more that our smartphones limit the kind of sensory experiences we have while using them, the more demand grows for content about touch and tactility on those very smartphones. Handling a frictionless piece of technology lacks an essential sense of satisfaction that tactility provides. So we go searching for it.

And if access to content is the main function of a screen based phone, it makes sense to me how something like ASMR could be an attempt to fill those voids of touch. But it's not that simple, really. Because sure, yes, ASMR videos are this kind of intimately intense simulation of touch. But they're also just that, a simulation. It's still a representation that you are watching or listening to through a flat screen.

Unless you are an ASMR artist yourself, you are not the person handling the slime or touching the bristles of the hairbrush. You're engaging with the idea of touching or being touched. And ASMR does bring its own kind of satisfaction. It can be relaxing. It helps people fall asleep.

It's comforting. But when it comes to tactility, if what we're consuming is still this avatar of touch, not the thing itself, I can't help but wonder if that search for satisfaction can never really end. And it doesn't feel like it's built to end, at least not from the perspective of the tech itself. I think of Julian's point, how the touch screen is really, really good at making you want to look at it for as long as possible by giving you an endless stream of infinite kinds of content. ASMR is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to videos that could fall under the category of satisfying content.

Yes. You can get your fill from videos of people cutting into kinetic sand sculptures. But there's also so much else. Cooking videos showing hands perfectly slicing into an onion to the beat of the song playing in the background. Someone drawing a perfect circle on their first try.

Animations of tiles stacking together neatly. Compilations of perfect three pointer basketball shots. And whenever any single video ends, there's always more. The search for satisfying kinds of content, I mean, that's a great way to stay glued to the screen. And if the satisfaction you get from watching content is only short lived, all the better to keep tapping and swiping and scrolling, looking for more of it.

So it feels like we're left with this texturally blank device that, yes, can bring us whatever kind of content we want that may satisfy our desire for sensation so long as we consume that content through that same glossy screen. It inherently defangs any kind of tactile experience that we are capable of having because even something like

this

can only affect you through other senses. Never touch. But also, maybe ASMR is the best we can hope for when it comes to tactility on our smartphones. I don't think I'm going on a limb here when I say it's very unlikely that any smartphone company is going to change the physical elements of their device in some major way that addresses the general lack of sensory weight. Like, there is not going to be the miraculous mainstream return of the QWERTY keyboard.

The next thing that everyone is, apparently doing is making an ultra thin phone, which I guess in a way connects to tactility. But the overwhelming feedback that I see online when I, you know, see the posts about these devices is, who asked for this? We didn't ask for a thinner phone. We want a bigger battery life, not, you know, we don't need a thinner phone. So that's that's that's the part that's like that's what they're doing, you know?

But that's not necessarily what people might actually want.

We're locked into a relationship with our phones where our sensory satisfaction is up to us. Maybe you could try to get there through mods or, like, some kind of really textured accessory. But I don't really think that having a furry phone case is somehow going to fix this problem. Mostly, we're going to look for that satisfaction through content. And at least there, maybe you'll feel that good tingly feeling for a few moments.

But at the risk of sounding like a major party pooper, I think we need to ask ourselves more directly how much we can actually thrive off of a sensory experience that is still coming to us through two dimensions. Because there is a very real limit to that experience. And I don't know. Maybe it's time to reach out for something else. Hopefully, something with a bit more heft.

A huge thank you to Julian Chikatu for chatting with me. Now, I wanna pose some of the questions that I asked him to you. How do you feel about using touchscreens, this featureless flat device? Do you miss buttons? Or are you glad they're gone?

What do you wish was different? Let us know. All the information about how to reach us is in the show notes.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, May 7. Friends, countrymen, lend me your $4 a month. And in fact, don't lend it to me. Just please give it to me.

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Never Post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer. The show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. The aim of constructive uncertainty lies in the corner between two windows, such that We, welcoming the indistinct, unlocks the door because it likes the sound.

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