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A lot going on at Columbia University in the last week or so.
Um, immigration officers had arrested a prominent pro-Palestinian campus activist.
And now Columbia University is gathering students and faculty from the journalism school and issuing a warning to them.
And this is pretty chilling.
Whether you're a college student, no matter where you are in the political spectrum, this should cause you great concern.
Students who are not U.S. citizens should avoid publishing work on Gaza, Ukraine, and protests that are related to the aforementioned former classmates' arrest.
Uh, that's according to Stuart Carl.
He's a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor.
Uh, with about two months to go before graduation, their academic accomplishments or even their freedom could be at risk if they attract the ire of the Trump administration.
Columbia University.
He said to the gathering in Pulitzer Hall.
And when a Palestinian student objected, the journalism school's dean, Jelani Cobb, was more direct about the school's inability to defend international students from federal prosecution.
Mr. Cobb said, nobody can protect you.
These are dangerous times.
There's a lot more to the article, but, you know, that is what is apropos to us right here, right now, and to everybody in our audience.
These are dangerous times.
Nobody can protect you.
Now, um, you might say it only applies to international students.
First of all, the person who was arrested was, uh, in this country completely legitimately, had a green card.
Marco Rubio is now saying that nobody is entitled to a green card.
Uh, well, the people who got a green card, I think, are entitled to a green card because they have one.
But whatever, uh, they're just throwing that out the window.
Uh, in this particular case, the person, we didn't even know where the person was for days.
You know, again, Soviet times.
Basically, the person was disappeared, and, um, they have not been allowed to speak to their lawyer.
You know, things that we would, in the past, really, really raise a ruckus about, and now it's kind of normal.
And we're becoming a bit, um, uh, a bit hardened to it all.
But these are the times we're in, and it seems every week we have something more dire to talk about.
Uh, and, uh, that's just one I didn't even know about an hour ago.
So, uh, who knows what else we'll find out about in this next hour.
Any, any comments on this before we move on to, to more dire things?
Go ahead, Alex.
I mean, look, I, I don't disagree with, uh, Rubio in the sense that green cards can be revoked,
uh, especially if, if somebody commits a crime in the United States.
You know, the green card can certainly be revoked, but it has to be on the basis of due process.
What I think is the, the very, very big difference here that makes a,
that makes us into a rather scary situation is the fact that what is, and is not a crime,
as being conflated with opinions and constitutionally protected activities.
The First Amendment, obviously, in particular, um, freedom of speech.
And, and that's scary to me.
I, I don't agree at all with the politics of this character from Columbia who was arrested,
but I don't think that America should go down the pathway of revoking the right to be in this country
for people who express views that the administration may, with, with which the administration may disagree.
I mean, that, that is a, a, a terrible thing to base on viewpoint.
Um, I will also add a manual.
So, um, and I should have said good afternoon as opposed to good evening because I am in Seattle
here, um, for the ICANN meeting.
So it's still the afternoon here.
But one of the things that I noticed over the last couple of, uh, flights that I've had
is that, you know, and I was in Denver, I guess it was two weeks ago,
and Seattle this week for the ICANN meeting.
But, um, for the last three flights that I've been on, when I get off the flight,
I go into that gangway area when you deplane.
Every time now there are ICE agents waiting at the plane.
Uh, when I arrived on Sunday night, there were five ICE agents waiting in that gangway
for somebody to get off the plane.
And it's a very scary thing when you see a show of force of immigration and customs
and enforcement agents and CBP right there, uh, waiting for somebody.
It's, it's, uh, it's weird times we're in right now.
And, you know, um, an effect of that, um, people are making themselves scarce.
You, you may not have noticed it where you are, uh, but in some, some areas, I think Corona
Queens is, is one example.
There's a whole lot less people on the street because they're afraid.
They're afraid of being caught up in this, uh, whether, uh, legitimately or illegitimately
doesn't really make a difference.
You know, uh, if you're Hispanic, you're, you're suspect.
And that's kind of how we're living right now.
Um, it's incomprehensible to me that ICE agents would be able to, um, uh, just go onto the
campus of Columbia university and grab somebody as they, as they did.
Uh, but the effects are being felt everywhere.
And yes, Alex, just by seeing ICE agents all over the place, uh, that has a chilling effect
as a very chilling effect.
And, um, there are all kinds of ways that we haven't even imagined how this is playing
out.
I mean, think of, think of how, how kids are in school and how, you know, um, um, they
will taunt the, uh, the, the kid that looks a little different and say, they're going to
send ICE agents to his home, uh, things like that, how that has an effect.
This is what we are teaching our kids that this is okay, that this is normal.
And, uh, every week it just seems like we go further down, uh, a very dark hole.
Yeah.
I, I, I don't disagree.
Um, and, and I'll tell you, it's really unnerving when you get off a plane and you see, uh,
essentially law enforcement waiting for people there.
And I mean, and it wasn't just one or two, you know, there were five of them.
I would have stuck around.
I would have stuck around and see what happened, you know, see what they were.
Well, I think I'm sure if you, if I stood there and waited, they would have told me to
keep moving.
Um, I thought about it.
You guys, I thought about saying something to them as well, but then even that, I mean,
there's a chilling effect on, on your ability, even I think to, to speak out to them because
there's so many of them and you don't know what's going to trigger them.
They all have guns.
They all have weapons.
They have authority there.
And, and everybody on the plane, I think was a little bit unnerved when you walk out and
see this, but nobody said a word.
Nobody said a word because it was a scary situation and nobody wanted to attract the ire of these
five armed persons.
Which is crazy to me.
Why do you need five armed people when, when people are getting off an airplane, the one
place where nobody has a gun except for the one federal marshal that's on board.
It doesn't make any sense, but you know what, what, what you could also do next time this
happens.
And I guess it will happen again.
Uh, you don't have to stand right next to them.
Stand at, at, at the, uh, at the end where they have to come out at some point and see what
happens when they do come out.
I don't think they're going to get back on the plane.
They have to come out that way and, uh, take pictures, you know, documented.
I think we all need to do things like this.
They don't like it.
They'll tell you to stop, but you have the right to do that.
And you know, we, we're going to see this a lot in, in the, uh, days, weeks, months and
years ahead, challenging what our rights are because the people in charge now have no clue
as to what our rights are and they don't care.
They don't care to learn anything about our, our, our system, uh, what, what citizens'
rights are.
So we are going to be tested an awful lot.
We have to keep our cool and we have to not back down.
And, uh, I think that's kind of the theme.
All right.
Um, well, we had a little bit of a, a fun week, I think, um, at the, down at the magazine,
uh, where, um, um, this has never happened before.
All right.
We have all kinds of social media accounts and we're generally very well behaved.
We really are.
We, you know, we try to be model citizens online, all that.
Uh, well, um, got a little email from, uh, the folks over at what they call it now, X.
Is that what the X really was sticking with that?
I, I call them Twitters.
Anybody mind if I keep calling them Twitter?
Because, you know, you can't search for X.
It's one letter.
It's ridiculous.
I don't know what you're saying.
What's it supposed to mean?
It makes no sense to me.
Twitter.
Come on.
It's a good word.
And you had the little burden.
Okay.
Whatever.
Uh, so we got mail from them and, um, uh, they said that our account had been locked.
Our account had been locked for violation of something.
And, um, yeah, so we, uh, you know, it wasn't very specific in the mail what it was, but we
after a while figured out it had to be the, um, uh, the forwarding of the Doge mailing
list, uh, Doge being department of government, uh, efficiency, that's the Elon Musk run government
agency department, whatever you want to call it, uh, just his playground where he goes around
and, and, and fires people left and right and, uh, breaks into computer systems, violates
all our privacy and is answerable to nobody except maybe Donald Trump.
But we don't really know that for sure either.
Uh, so apparently, uh, this had, um, uh, gained the ire of the folks over at Twitter because,
well, they're both owned by, um, uh, by Elon Musk.
Um, I guess, is it fair to say Doge is owned by Elon Musk?
I mean, it's an, it's an agency, it's a department.
We don't really know what it is, but it's certainly run by him.
Um, and it's just kind of odd that this list, which we didn't, um, um, obtain ourselves,
it was forwarded to us and we were simply also, uh, uh, letting people know it exists.
Um, basically, um, uh, that list, I lost my train of thought.
Um, we, we had gotten that list and we simply forwarded it and, um, um, it basically showed
how to get ahold of people at Doge and, um, I think it's the typing that's throwing me
off.
Whoever is typing this week, please stop.
You're doing it all last week and same thing this week.
Yeah.
Um, so basically, uh, the, um, the mailing list, uh, has names and email addresses.
That's it.
That's it.
If you go online, you'll find almost every department.
There's, there's a page on the FCC.
You can go online, you can search for employees.
You get their name, you get their email address, you get their phone.
Not, not personal email address, not personal phone number in the office.
And those is, um, it's in the news quite a bit and they're doing quite a lot of things
that affect many, many people.
Tens of thousands of federal employees, for instance, and, um, no accountability, you
know, uh, for, for all the, um, claims of transparency, uh, we know very, very little
about them.
And in fact, when, um, when Wired revealed a list, a small list of Doge employees, Elon
Musk himself threatened them saying you've broken the law, which is an absurd statement
because we have every right to know who is working for or against us in the federal government.
These are federal employees, however you want to classify them.
They are working for this agency that sprung up out of nowhere.
So we had no problem spreading that around and, um, other social media networks, uh, such
as, uh, Blue Sky, Macedon, uh, they were forwarded there too.
Um, and, um, basically, you know, a lot of people were able to become more informed and
that's kind of what we stand for.
So we were a bit surprised to see that our account had been, uh, locked and, um, didn't
know anything about how this whole process worked.
So apparently what you have to do when your account gets locked, uh, you have to either
appeal, which of course is what we did, uh, or get rid of the offending material.
Now, the odd thing about the latter is that the offending material was no longer there.
They had already taken it away.
So our removing it is impossible because it's not there.
So we went ahead with the appeal.
And of course, within a day, it was simply denied, no comment, anything like that.
Um, they basically concluded that we had posted personal information.
We posted information that listed persons and listed those persons email addresses at the
federal agency or department or whatever it is.
Uh, and, um, and that's it.
That's it.
Less information than you would find at virtually any other federal agency.
So we did not consider that to be a problem.
Elon Musk himself has, uh, has doxed people on, on Twitter.
Other people have, have, uh, posted all kinds of, of, uh, private information far, far more
intrusive than a, a work email address and absolutely no action was taken.
So, um, we spread the word about this.
Uh, and, um, as of today, as of today, we, um, um, finally clicked that button and erased
the, um, um, supposedly erased the list from existing on Twitter, even though it wasn't there.
And in so doing, we gained our account back.
And at that point, uh, we issued a statement saying that, um, all this had happened and,
um, we don't believe that this was, um, uh, private information.
We believe everybody has the right to see who the Doge employees are, to see their email
addresses, to be able to write a concerned email if they, if they need to, the same, the
same rights you have with anyone else.
They're no different.
And to protect that particular list from, uh, uh, from people like Elon Musk or anybody
else that has a lot of power, uh, we are hosting it ourselves.
And that's that, you know, we have, we have, we have a, um, a new story up that has the
links and all that.
And that's what we are going to move ahead and do when we have information like this.
It's very important that we stand up to bullying.
And I think that's what we, um, I came face to face with over the past week.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah.
And it's very interesting, the fact of this list, because it is all over the internet,
you know, thank you, Barbara Streisand.
Um, so it's not difficult to find now, but, um, it is something that, uh, yes, should be
public knowledge or at least publicly accessible.
I mean, so many government records are accessible if you just ask for them.
But, um, you know, as, as we've talked about, Doge is not a functioning public, uh, you know,
utility in, uh, in any reasonable way.
And the fact that the same person runs that and runs Twitter and can just decide they don't
want it.
I mean, it really puts yet another, um, crack in the facade of Twitter being any sort of
public square as it, uh, as it always purported to be since the old days.
But, um, it's, it's very interesting how to see, to see sort of the, the information in
this, uh, I think something very interesting about it.
And this is something about the list and I'm not going to name anyone's, uh, information,
but Elon Musk is on here.
Um, I don't think that's much of a surprise, but there are, there is this list of email
addresses and they all end in at doge.eop.gov.
Yes.
Now let's, uh, let's talk about that because eop.gov, what's that?
If you bring it up on your web browser, it'll just redirect you to the White House website.
Um, and EOP is executive office of the president.
Um, the executive office of the president is basically the, uh, you know, conglomeration
of, uh, of agencies and offices that keep the president's office going.
So the, uh, the addresses are at doge.eop.gov, which puts this as a subdomain of the executive
office of the president.
That's the authority they're all working under here.
And that's the computer that they've gotten their email addresses, um, email addresses
assigned from, except for Elon himself.
His email address on this list just ends in who.eop.gov, which, um, I think would stand
to reason that that would just be White House at, uh, the executive office of the president.
So Elon himself has a White House email address.
White House at the office of the president.
It's kind of redundant, isn't it?
Well, so there are two people on this list who don't have doge.eop.gov emails, the other
one being Susie Wiles.
There is another, yes.
Now, who is she?
She's, I want to say, the chief of staff at the White House.
Okay.
Um, and I don't know, this whole thing, and what is it, because of the type of role that
he has, he's only allowed to work 150 days a year, but they're basically like, oh, he's
only working one day a week.
So, the question I have, the question I have about so many things is, even if what is happening
is blatantly illegal and blatantly unconstitutional, and it's being ruled illegal and appealed against
and all these things, but if we, how do you make people do what they need to do when they're
ignoring the legal system?
How do we work around that?
Well, you know, I think one way is to annoy them by doing things by the rules, by refusing
to back down and play their game, because that is what they're doing.
They're playing a game.
They're trying to change how everything works, and, you know, we're not going to give that
up.
We're not going to say that, oh, because, you know, you're going to strong-arm us and tell
us we're not allowed to have this information that's normally publicly available.
We're just going to cave and buckle down.
No, we're not going to do that.
We're going to do it anyway.
We're going to do it in your face, because the people have the right to know.
And, you know, the fact that this is an organization, this is a government that claims to be transparent,
that claims to be doing things in, you know, a more fair way, except if you express an opinion
they don't agree with, or if you show some public information they don't want to share,
then you become the problem.
Well, we're ready to become the problem.
I think we already are the problem.
And it's an honor to be a problem to people like this.
So, yeah.
So it's on our site now.
If you go to 2600.com, the top story will have the link in there.
I'm not going to read it on the air, because it's just too many letters and dashes and things like that.
And I'd have to repeat it.
And, yeah, it's easier to do it that way.
Go ahead, Rob.
I think another thing this illustrates very well is that the face of functional social media,
where you can do things like report on information in the public interest, is vastly changing.
You can put this on Blue Sky.
You can put this on Mastodon.
You can put this other places.
Twitter, what, you know, it's the property of somebody who, looking at this list, is an employee or a function of the White House.
And so is Twitter now to be considered a branch of the U.S. government?
I don't know.
Good question.
Good question.
And the interesting thing, the irony is that the people in Doge have accessed some of the most sensitive computer systems in the world.
And we're told to just trust them, even though they're barely out of school, a lot of them.
They're going to do the right thing.
They couldn't even keep this list secure.
This is an internal list that got out of their own people that somebody either just left lying around.
Somebody shared it at some point.
So forgive us if we don't just go along with that statement.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah.
I think there's a couple of points here.
We've talked about this numerous times with respect to platforms and social media in particular.
But these are private companies, as Rob has indicated.
And they have no obligation, Emanuel, to keep your account active if they don't want to.
Correct.
They can turn it off.
They can edit and curate as they see fit.
They kicked off Alex Jones before it was owned by Elon Musk.
And he invited them back onto the platform, as I understand it.
But, you know, we applauded that decision when it was kicking off somebody with whom we disagreed, who was spreading dangerous lies and information.
And I remember I was arguing against that, saying, well, this is just bad overall when an account like this can be rugged, number one.
And that I thought that, you know, kind of the best bulwark against misinformation, disinformation, et cetera, and just absolute lies was the gray matter in between our heads.
But there's just yet another indication that you cannot rely on these platforms.
You can't rely on them.
The power is so centralized in the hands of what appear to be one person who doesn't want certain information to be spread.
And he, sadly, does have the right to just turn off whatever account you want.
So you really have to call into question all of the information that you're seeing and whether all of that information is being curated by what appears to be a complete madman.
Now, if you take this same reasoning and you apply it to a different platform, let's say, hypothetically, there was a platform that was controlled not by the United States,
but by a foreign adversary, you know, maybe a foreign power, and lots of Americans were on that platform.
And this foreign power that was kind of dangerous and had ideas that were inimical to the ideals of America might be able to manipulate the information that Americans are seeing on that platform.
You know, that could be seen as potentially a problem.
Now, imagine if it was China that was controlling this massive social media platform that Americans have signed on to.
That would be highly concerning.
So the point I'm making here is what's the difference now between TikTok and Twitter?
They're both controlled and curated by a party that cannot be trusted.
All of that information on this platform now, I think, is suspect.
The same reasoning that the government had used with respect to TikTok, I think now applies to Twitter on the basis of this viewpoint discrimination and all of the information that we're seeing may be funneled through some kind of Doge-related lens.
That's really, really scary to me.
So I totally lost track of my second point there, but it'll come back to me.
Yeah, there's a lot of that going on.
I don't know why that is tonight.
But you raise a very good point.
And also, it speaks to how we feel about our various Twitter accounts.
We don't really care.
We don't really care about them anymore.
They exist.
We know a lot of people are out there that still use it.
We wish they didn't.
We wish they would move.
We're encouraging them to move to different platforms.
But right now, they still exist.
But if they get a shutdown, all right, they have the right to do that, as you said.
But we're not going to let them just push us out.
Not that easily.
Anyway, but this connects to something else, another part of this story, because there are a lot of people who are very, very angry.
And not angry at this so much, at what we're talking about, but angry at us.
And I'm not talking about Doge people.
I'm talking about people on Mastodone.
Yeah, Mastodone, one of the alternate sites that we are encouraging people to go to.
Apparently, you know, this was forwarded to me after the story broke over the weekend, that a lot of vindictive words were being sent our way.
And it was a real surprise to me, kind of baffling.
Like, what are they so upset about?
Apparently, they're upset that we haven't left Twitter yet, you know, completely and entirely, that we haven't deleted our accounts, that we haven't just never spoken their name again.
And, you know, again, while I understand that's a choice that people have, I think you have to realize that that world does not yet exist.
For instance, WBAI, we're still on Twitter.
All right.
The ACLU, still on Twitter.
The EFF, still on Twitter.
Every single congressman on Twitter.
You know, I want them all to be on Blue Sky and or Mastodone.
Believe me, I want that.
And I'm, you know, pushing for that with, you know, every ounce of strength I have.
And I hope other people are as well.
And I know many people in our organization are doing that.
But basically, what I saw here, though, because I got forwarded a bunch of comments, kind of makes me sour to Mastodone, to be honest.
I want to read you some of them.
2600 Magazine is actively pro-Nazi.
Why are they on Twitter, if not to support fascists with advertising money?
Okay.
That was from William.
From George.
Sorry you can't enjoy the Nazi bar any longer.
First of all, what I've noticed is a lot of these people use the phrase Nazi bar.
You know, that is their term for what Twitter is.
And, you know, it's a clever term, sure.
It's not quite accurate, though, because it's a lot bigger than that.
And there are a lot of people on there who are good people.
God, I sound like Trump.
A lot of people who are not part of this at all just are using it to communicate.
Some of them are very insular.
They're just communicating with their friends.
And they have no idea all the other crap that's going on out there.
But, okay, let's continue, because some of these are, pooh.
Wow.
2600, we were using a Nazi site several years after we should have been off of it and somehow hadn't already been banned by the Nazis.
Look at little old us, the victims.
You get a tone here where people are just kind of angry that we even are talking about Twitter at all, that we didn't just vacate it and have nothing to say about it.
Let me tell you something.
The way you find out what these people are saying is by watching what they're saying.
And, you know, the way that you annoy them is by being in their face.
You know, think of, you know, calling everyone Nazis, you know, it's great when it applies.
But calling everybody who drives a Tesla a Nazi, not quite accurate.
Let's be honest about that.
All right.
But, you know, imagine the first round of fighting Nazis.
If you weren't there, if you weren't in their backyard fighting them, how would that have gone?
You know, you can't just run away into the distance and, you know, count your wounds and assume everything's going to work out.
No, you have to fight.
You have to witness.
You have to relay information and get people out of there, too.
Okay, what else?
When the only content is content they decide can be seen by others, you cannot annoy them.
When they don't like your content, they lock your account.
They are not annoyed.
They are in control.
No, I don't disagree with that.
Up until now, you've produced content they like, which means you are helpful to the Nazis.
Okay, you took a real turn there.
They have no knowledge what we are doing except when we annoy them.
All right?
They don't care.
Absolutely right about that.
They don't care, which means they don't like what we post.
We simply exist as a flea on a dog, if even that analogy works.
Continuing here, if this is your level of understanding of where we are as a country, you're worse than useless.
You're complicit in our destruction.
This kind of hatred, this kind of way of speaking to people who are doing things a little differently than you, that is unhealthy.
That is sick.
That is something that we are trying to get away from, and you're just building it all up again.
And the weird thing is, there was not one comment like this on Blue Sky.
I don't know what the difference is, but people on Blue Sky aren't acting like this.
People on Mastodon, my God, I was, here's some more.
Shame on you.
When your bar becomes a Nazi bar, you should leave.
You are on effing Twitter, eff off.
I can't go on.
They just get really nasty, and I don't understand why.
You know, we're talking about spreading a list of Doge information.
Not one of those people is talking about that.
And I think this underlines the problem that so many of us have, where we get caught up in our petty little battles amongst ourselves about what is the right way to resist,
that we completely let the people who are the true threat get away with everything.
So, do not tell us we cannot be on a platform.
We'll stay on that platform as long as we goddamn please.
And we will never shame anybody if they're using a platform.
Hell, I'll use Truth Social if I want to.
In fact, I think I have an account on there somewhere, but I haven't logged in in years.
The point is, okay, the difference.
We remain on Twitter because we built a huge group of people there.
And a lot of them are still there.
Truth Social was always polluted from the start.
So, there was never that community that formed.
Here, there are still people.
And we want those people not to be forgotten, not to be lost, to come with us to better platforms.
We don't post on Twitter except to repeat what has already been posted on Blue Sky and Mastodon.
We're not engaging on there because there are so many people filled with hate on the other side there.
It's not worth it.
I don't want to go the same way with Mastodon.
But this kind of makes it seem like a foregone conclusion that that is the road they're going to go down.
I hope we can save it.
Rob, go ahead.
So, I'm going to, to a degree, disagree with you here.
But I think it is very interesting that these comments are happening on Mastodon.
And I think one of the explanations for that is that a large amount of the population of Mastodon, in my estimation, are people who see Twitter as a problem that Mastodon solved and centralized social media in general as a problem that Mastodon Activity Pub and the Fediverse in general have solved.
Well, that is a fantasy right there because you ask the average person, do you have a Mastodon account?
It's too complicated for them to get.
You know, we have to walk them through it.
And that is not solved.
Yeah, it's a work in progress.
But to say that, yeah, we solved that problem, no, you didn't.
Twitter is still there and people are having trouble getting on to Mastodon.
They're flocking to Blue Sky because it's so much easier.
And, you know, if you want to build something, let's build something.
But this is not how you build something.
If I may finish, the problem has been solved for those people.
And, like, there are many people on Mastodon who that's their daily driver now.
They're no longer on Twitter.
They're, frankly, wondering why anyone else is.
And I see that point of view.
I also see your point.
And I can only speak for myself.
I, as an individual, had a long-time presence on Twitter.
It was a lot of fun back in the old days.
And it was very useful in terms of spreading my work that I do, my creative work, the projects I'm involved with, including this program, and all that.
And I built up a great network and following and, you know, made some great friendships, kept up with people, and so on, the sorts of things you do on social media.
But as Twitter got worse and as Mastodon, which I had begun using, felt more and more comfortable and more and more like what I wanted social media to be,
I started worrying how many of these people on my Twitter followers list are there in part because of me?
How many people are being exposed to the fire hose of crap that Twitter forces on every single user because they're interested in me?
How many people are having the algorithm twist their minds in all the ways it's programmed to do because they're interested in what I'm doing?
And eventually that became too much of an uncertainty for me.
I deleted my Twitter.
I deleted the Twitters for my various projects and moved basically fully into the Fediverse.
And that works for me.
I'm not saying it works for you.
I'm not saying it works for 2600 as a publication.
I'm not saying it works for this program, which still has a Twitter account and also a Mastodon account and, you know, will continue to expand wherever social media becomes useful.
But I can see why people are disappointed in learning that somebody they're interested in, somebody they, you know, want to believe is out there doing good work, that they're still on Twitter.
I can see their point.
But you get it.
It's a choice.
I'm not condemning you for having that choice.
You're not condemning me or the magazine for having a different choice.
And it's not even, you know, we agree that it's a cesspool, that we just disagree on how to deal with a cesspool and to basically tell somebody that they enable Nazis because they still have a Twitter account.
I'm sorry.
I don't I don't see how you can justify that.
That is worse than any algorithm.
That's bullying.
That's that's making people feel bad about themselves just because they don't think exactly like you.
And if that's what Mastodon stands for, I'll go elsewhere because I don't want to be part of that kind of community.
I know it's not.
I know because there are a lot of people there that aren't saying that kind of thing.
But you know what?
They're not saying anything.
They're being quiet because they're intimidated.
And that's not healthy.
Intimidating people is wrong.
And that's the lesson I thought we learned from Twitter.
So let's not do the same damn thing again.
Go ahead, Gila.
I think there's also something to be said.
While I don't necessarily agree with the fact that people are sort of piling on, I do take an exception to the fact that you keep talking about what Mastodon is, because I think the point that it is a decentralized system.
You know, if Elon Musk says something, I almost said X, but that's, you know, if Elon Musk says it right now, that's what Twitter believes.
That's what Twitter does.
There is no Mr. Mastodon or Captain Mastodon that is going to say, this is what we believe and this is what we do.
I do think that because of the decentralized nature of the system, there can be a slightly higher bar to entry.
And because of that, people who have successfully gotten into that system and feel comfortable in it are in that kind of early adopter.
Hey, look at what I do.
It's so cool that I think can happen sometimes.
Oh, yeah.
And I understand that it can be hurtful, but I don't necessarily think that people are saying that you are objectively a bad person or that the magazine is objectively for bad people.
I think that we're also...
Absolutely are.
Also kind of falling prey to the sense of Internet hyperbole that we can all be kind of vulnerable to.
But I would also say that, you know, I left Twitter because I found it increasingly unusable because of the proliferation of bot accounts because...
Well, and also when, you know, the AI training on everything I was saying, I have really unique syntax.
I don't want AI to have access to it.
So I left.
That's fine.
Yeah.
And that works.
That works.
Right.
Um, but I also don't think I'm super cool because I'm on Mastodon.
I'll tell you this, though.
Bernie Sanders is not posting on Mastodon.
He's posting on Twitter.
And I want to see what he says.
And I want to hear what a lot of the idiots in Congress say as well.
So I monitor what they say.
And whenever they say something, there are a hell of a lot of people that attack what they say, too.
But that's happening on Twitter.
It's not happening on Mastodon.
It's not happening on Blue Sky.
I want it to, but we don't get there just by wishing for it.
We don't get there just by condemning people who aren't, you know, on the same platform.
So we need to figure out how to how to how to build this community.
And I'm just pointing out this is not the way to build the community.
Kyle, go ahead.
Yeah, the reaction, it seems as though we are on a network that was designed for this.
And a lot of the networks I think we've covered in the past, like Parler or Gab, those were actually designed for white nationalists and Nazis themselves who didn't like the policies and content moderation of places like Facebook and Twitter.
And we're being treated as though because we're still on Twitter, which was not by design set up for that, we're being treated as though that's what we advocate for simply by association.
And that's what's, I think, astounding in the chasm of logic here.
It's so, so backwards, but and missing the point of what we're actually saying and turning it into this side quest about self-righteousness on one platform or the other.
And to my mind, it should be and I think what we're doing is expanding the amount of places that we are.
And and of course, as people do leave Twitter, I'm sure it'd be open to eventually ending our our contributions to that platform, especially if it's overridden with bots.
But and and and hate groups and and I guess that's that's what we're presuming at all.
It all is. But as he pointed out, like there are a lot of a lot of people that still persist there that feel like it's still their bar and that they can.
It's not a bar.
Yeah, no, it's a it's a dumb way to put it.
But it is this this metaphor for keeping people that are desirable off of your platform, lest it become an undesirable platform.
Well, a lot of the undesirability was outside of the control and it's associated with the leadership, as Gila pointed out.
And it it ultimately it comes back to what I think Corey Doctorow pointed out a lot and and about Facebook and the the switching costs and how that's by design.
It's very hard to leave these communities that you've assembled based on your friends or your family.
Well, oh, if I if I don't if I don't stay on this platform, I can't find out about those good recipes or whatever good things you've you got from it because your closeness to your network is there.
Anyway, I'll just wrap up and say that that we as an organization have had many occurrences of our ability to distribute our ability to share people's people who write for us people who speak to get the word out about what we're doing.
We've had that attacked over and over and over again.
It's it's something we're actually quite familiar with, not comfortable.
I won't say it's a comfort zone, but it almost is.
We're we're we're very familiar with having to rebuild a new and the sense that we have to keep watching our presence on the Internet, something that we're quite familiar with, be diminished by others, whether they're castigating us over our platform presence or over our politics or over some attitude.
Someone expresses in their opinion piece or in a letter or something, it's really beside the point to us.
We deserve to be able to to be on these platforms like anybody else without some sort of some sort of repercussion, especially if you're missing the entirety of the point of the kinds of content that we are providing.
And the relative good we're trying to be on those on the Internet itself.
It's interesting that you mentioned, Corey, because I was talking to Corey about this.
And he informed me that there are people known as scolds on Mastodon.
They're called scolds because they're constantly scolding people and being all self-righteous and all that.
He he got a lot of crap for writing an article that praised blue sky.
They don't like that either.
It's not just Twitter is anything that's not them.
And I find that extremely unhealthy.
And I'm going to say one other thing that's going to annoy the hell out of them.
You know, when that day comes, when, you know, Twitter is completely useless and we don't use it anymore.
We're not deleting our account.
You know, when you work for publications, when you work for radio stations, you save archives.
You save the printed matter.
You know, even if it makes you look bad, even if you make a mistake, that's what happened.
All right.
And we don't believe in just wiping it away because, you know, the times change.
It's not 1984.
We don't do that.
All right.
So we might abandon it ourselves, but our words will remain.
So deal with that.
Go ahead, Alex.
I mean, my position on this is, is I think very consistent with what I've said about social media in the past.
I think all social media, regardless of whether it's Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever, I think it's a cesspit.
I think it fosters the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
I think it harbors a toxic culture.
I think it creates toxic communities.
I think even in Mastodon, as we're seeing, there are toxic communities.
It permits and promotes harassment of individuals as well.
It can negatively affect mental health of adults and children alike.
And as we just discussed, you know, you're constantly exposed to curated content on the basis of somebody else's viewpoints or likes or whatever it is.
I just think the whole thing is terrible, not to be trusted, and is going to be the undoing of mankind.
Go ahead, Rob.
I think due to the decentralized nature of Mastodon, we have all opened our email inboxes and found something in there we didn't like, whether it was spam, whether it was something actually mean and directed at us personally.
But none of us got a mean email and then decided, well, this is what email thinks.
I wonder if I want to be involved with email.
Yeah, but, Rob, spam doesn't talk to spam, okay?
Spam doesn't, you know, gang up on you.
And that's what happens.
You know, I have to tell people, get away from the trauma.
We've been through this before, as Kyle said.
We've gotten kind of good at it.
And basically, you know, people who aren't good at it, they can be traumatized by this.
They can be traumatized by people attacking them and accusing them of things.
And, you know, for somebody who has not been doing this for years, somebody who's new to it, it is really something you don't want to expose them to.
And that's why, you know, we need to speak out against it.
Go ahead, Gila.
I would like to say something about some of the responses that came in.
I was taking a look on Mastodon, and I have a very important thing to say about these responses, which is a friendly reminder that you do not use an apostrophe to pluralize.
There is no apostrophe in the word Nazis.
Oh, boy.
If it's a Nazi's possession, then you would use the apology.
And if it's plural, after the end.
But if you're choosing to refer to everyone who's still using Twitter as a bunch of Nazis, there's not an apostrophe there.
I am now officially taking issue with the people who have responded on Mastodon to this whole thing.
And, yes, now I'm upset.
Are you sure you want to get involved in this, Gila?
Because they don't let go.
They don't stop.
Well, just, again, remember, beside the point, it's just something we observed in the process of sharing about this takedown or whatever, this freeze action that we experienced.
And others, I'm sure, are much more familiar with that.
They transgress, shall I say, more frequently or have been in the crosshairs of this kind of action a lot earlier than us.
But this was seemingly, I mean, quite a surprise in the context of what kind of information we were trying to share.
Yeah, because of that information, because this was an important story, and it got completely eclipsed by, oh, you're not using our platform.
You know, it's like fighting over Linux or FreeBSD.
It's a side quest.
It's so silly and pointless.
It's self-righteousness overflowing as a side quest.
But I just want to point out how much work it is to curate any of these accounts.
It's work, and that is inherent with having to leave these platforms.
Yes, Rob packed up shop, and he felt like, okay, I can't do this.
Because that's within his right ability, but I'm sure the amount of connection or traffic or good virtuistic aspects of that platform that he lost in the process was a big deal.
And it can't go unnoticed, and we feel the same way.
First of all, I have to say that when I said it doesn't mean anything, I didn't mean Linux or FreeBSD.
Obviously, they mean a lot.
It was the battle I was talking about.
I'm sorry if I offended anybody there.
But, you know, the thing that we have to conclude because we're out of time, OTH at 2600.com.
We're continuing the conversation on YouTube, channel 2600 at 8 o'clock, and we'll be back next week at 7 p.m. on WBAI with a call-in segment.
So that'll be fun.
But basically, we just have to remember that people do things differently, and you cannot just blankedly label people.
You cannot label the ACLU as Nazis because they're still on Twitter.
You can't label the Southern Poverty Law Center as Nazis because they're still on Twitter.
The Auschwitz Museum, you know, there's so many entities and groups and organizations and people who still use it.
And, yes, the idea is to get them to use something better and to get away from the pollution that the place has turned to.
But you don't get that by condemning people, mocking them, insulting them, or anything like that.
We are out of time.
So thank you, everybody, for the conversation.
And please write to us again, OTH at 2600.com.
Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube.
See you next week.
You got a lot of nerve
I say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there pretty
You know it's not like that
If you're so hurt
If you're so hurt
Why then don't you show it
You say you've lost your faith
But that's not where it's at
You have no faith to lose
And you know it
I know the reason
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd you're in with
Do you take me for such a fool?
You think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide
But it don't know to begin with
You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, how are you?
Good luck
But you don't mean it
When you know as well as me
You'd rather see me paralyzed
Why don't you just come out once
And scream it
No, don't I feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I'd rob them
And though I know you're dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don't you understand
It's not my problem
Don't tell me to stop
Tell the rain not to drop
Tell me everything I'm not
Don't tell me to stop
Hi, this is Liz Wright
You're listening to WBAI in New York


And welcome everybody here on YouTube. This is Off the Hook Overtime.
Emmanuel here. Kyle, did you make it as well?
Yes, I'm here.
Okay, those little buttons that you're pushing.
Yeah, I made the van appear.
Great, on Signal Land we have Rob and Gila. Are we okay there, guys?
You have us. I'm waiting for the delay on YouTube to catch up with us, and there it goes.
I hear us on YouTube.
How amazing is that? And the phone calls are already coming in.
We're not taking phone calls yet, though, folks, so wait for us to give the number out.
I know people are eager and exuberant.
How bad is it on Mastodon that we kind of – we weren't trashing Mastodon.
We were simply offering constructive criticism.
And I think, you know, people would do well to listen, just as we always listen.
Yeah, we haven't gotten any direct responses on the Mastodon for this program as yet, but we do invite such things.
There's more to say.
I was going on in the break about it.
It's really a bigger issue for people that curate.
They spend a lot of time and effort with all that content.
That's what those advertisers benefit from is all the work people do.
And I was just talking to E about just how fragmented it is each time you choose to be or not to be at one of these places, to be Shakespearean.
There's plenty of examples of places that just the format didn't work for us or we weren't there.
TikTok is one of them, like us doing 15-second or whatever dance videos or Vine or, you know, whatever popular app everybody is.
Why the hell would I do a dance video?
I mean, maybe we would be great.
We don't know we wouldn't be great at that.
Maybe we don't want to know.
It isn't necessarily in our wheelhouse as far as getting information out.
You can't share a screenshot of something interesting or you can't write necessarily in the same way.
So we pick and choose these things.
And then some of them stay around and they become incredibly popular and or some of them just go away.
We've experienced all that.
That's all the things you have to kind of navigate if you're on these things and trying to continue to have a presence online.
Use whatever damn platform you feel like using, okay?
We are not going to judge you.
Nobody should judge you for using a platform.
It's what you say.
It's what you do.
It's who you are, all right?
You don't judge a book by its cover.
You don't judge somebody by their platform.
I guess I'm just pointing out how complicated it is.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, you can't keep track of them all.
There's a new one every week.
You know?
There's threads.
There's Instagram.
There's Facebook.
All meta.
Every time you experience that churn, you lose some of what you build.
That's true.
So you can pack up and go.
But I don't know.
Rob, did you experience it?
Like every last one of your subscribers or followers come with you as soon as you jump ship?
I mean, I don't know if that's exactly someone can say it.
Every time you lose something in the process, when you have to rebuild a new, like the Phoenix, do you have any insight into that?
What was that like?
That's a very good question.
And it was a very big deal for me because I did have, you know, a good-sized following and network over there.
And when I moved, first of all, I said, you know, I'm not using this anymore.
Here's where I am.
Made sure to have the information up there.
This is where I am on Mastodon.
Here's the joinmastodon.org site, which is the newbie-friendly guide to getting started on Mastodon.
Onboarding.
Yeah, the onboarding.
And, you know, a lot of folks did.
I know at least a couple of people that are in my circles on Mastodon now came from Twitter because they followed me.
And, you know, that's a nice feeling because I've also watched those people get involved in the community and, you know, have things on Mastodon to do besides me.
And, but, yeah, there are people who did not come with.
There are people that I lost.
But I think the important thing, especially for people in the social media generation of the present, need to keep in mind, is that I have always directed any social media outlet I've had back to my own site, my own website, where I can always be found.
Which is my forever home on the net, as long as I keep paying for the domain every year.
And so when people, when and if people notice that I'm no longer on Twitter or I'm no longer on TikTok, which I also deleted after trying it out, or other things, they can always find me.
I'm Google-able, and my website is known, and that links to whatever I'm using now.
So, yes, there are people.
What did you just say, Google-able, what?
It's a genericized term, and you can Google people on DuckDuckGo.
But, okay, yeah.
You know, I do, I do, I do see what you say there.
And maybe that's another term I should work on excising from my vocabulary.
What do you think?
I mean, I don't know.
It's like drinking a Pepsi Coke in Atlanta, I suppose.
Well, and I felt this with, when TikTok itself was being sort of deemed to be shut down, we would hear stories.
I mean, there were creators or whatever they identify or label themselves, they would talk about these, like, astronomical numbers of subscribers.
They'd be like, I have a million subscribers, or just huge numbers that, in the sort of fringes of hacker internet culture, we wouldn't even dream of that.
And you'd feel for them because of the amount of effort you know it takes to keep in touch or keep the views up and all of that.
Anyway, it just occurred to me, yeah, it's an individual choice because people have different amounts of presence online.
And sometimes this is their only presence for anonymity or for other reasons.
They don't know how to, they don't want to host a site themselves or they don't want to pay for it necessarily forever.
And they like the free service.
Anyway, those were my insights.
That also speaks to a fundamental difference between centralized and non-centralized social media, because social media that is algorithm driven, like Twitter or like TikTok, there is vested interest in people just getting followers, just getting the numbers up.
And there are also, you know, this idea that people are just following whoever, for whatever reason, maybe they didn't know you before, maybe they don't know you from anything, they just randomly follow you.
And there is a great population of bots to enable people to just get the numbers up.
On other social media, decentralized things, there's no reason to do that.
There is no algorithm to feed.
There's no advertising to, you know, to feed in that sense.
So I think every single follower pretty much that I've got on Mastodon is a person and that person's interest in what I'm doing is worth maybe a zillion bots.
And so like the metrics don't directly compare to one another for that reason.
So I don't have the numbers I did on Twitter, but how many of those numbers I had on Twitter were people that would actually be interested in what I'm doing.
Yeah, you know, it's a good point, too, because it is mostly people that you have following you on a platform like Mastodon.
But sometimes you want to hear from, say, a newspaper or, you know, a department or, you know, something in a different part of the world.
And you need to be able to be able to open yourselves up to that as well as the individual.
Yeah, it's like apples and oranges in some ways.
In some ways, it's very much the same as far as communicating basic ideas and thoughts and distractions and things like that.
But there are differences between these platforms.
Now, you say that a lot of your followers made it over.
I would say in our case, in most of the cases I've looked at, it's about a tenth and sometimes far less.
But again, how many of your original followers were real followers in the first place?
It's hard to really say.
And you're also talking about platforms that themselves have changed, specifically Twitter, over time.
Like Twitter of yesteryear, you being findable by actual people that are exploring is one thing.
There used to be so much more engagement there.
Now you may be as findable, but you're findable mainly by cadres of bots or hate groups or whatever is on there.
But at the same time, you can just hop in a thread or quote something that a public representative or someone that is engaging in civic discourse, you can get in there and be a part of that conversation.
So you're sort of like hopping around this sort of unknown past skeletal version of a platform just so you can be in the same kind of conversation or public square that much of the government and private business is still there.
Like they're still in it.
So as a business or as a publication, if many other newspapers are there, their readers would also – you would be just as findable to their audience, I think, in some regards.
However much the algorithmic side of it has changed or been tweaked.
Go ahead, Gila.
I think there's also – I don't know, I've said this before, but one of the things I enjoy a lot about Mastodon is that it's physically impossible to become the Internet's main character on Mastodon in the way that it was on Twitter.
And I don't know if it's that way on Blue Sky.
I have joined Blue Sky.
I'm mostly a lurker there.
And I don't think that, you know, you can become the Internet's main character there in the same way.
Is that something that I kind of miss about Twitter?
Yes.
But I don't think that those days are coming back.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I also miss, like, one thing that I've definitely felt the absence of.
I got really used to when I had a problem with, like, a store or a public agency or something that was going on, and I could find their official Twitter and, you know, either publicly shame them or DM them and get an answer.
I got a set of stairs fixed in a subway station in our neighborhood because I tweeted at the MTA about it when it was broken.
And, you know, things like that can be very useful.
I'm sorry we didn't bring that up during the show.
But, yes, that still exists to this day.
You can still do that.
That's another reason why it's a good idea to have that level of contact so that you can reach out to some organization or business because odds are they're there.
I haven't been able to do that once on either Blue Sky or Macedon.
I want to, but it's just so easy on Twitter, and that's got nothing to do with who's running the platform or Elon Musk or any of that.
You can just find, like, you know, your cable company, reach them, and within minutes be talking to somebody, or you can call up and be on hold for an hour.
I think that would be a next cadre or the most important cadre of social media accounts to traverse from one platform to the other is getting customer service for private and public institutions onto some of the decentralized platforms.
It would be wonderful if they were also embracing these things instead of just the main commercial apps that are going away or that people are moving away from because that function is beloved.
I mean, especially in emergencies, if you're talking about, like, airline or any other kind of company that might have an incident or have some situation where they have a lot of concern, a lot of the public needing to get help quickly, integrating those tools, allowing people to send information directly to them without having massive phone banks or a huge staff to attend all of that.
I think it amplifies their ability to be responsive to consumers or to the public.
So that would be a great – it would be great to see, like, cadres of those types of functionalities move to these platforms as well because I don't think they're being attacked for being on Twitter or something and their choice to serve the public that way.
They're being attacked for other reasons.
Right.
I'm sure they are.
But it's like, let's – how can we onboard or, like, get more people from various segments of the parts of these platforms that we enjoy to expand?
And that's how we looked at it is that we're expanding.
We're on more of these places that people are interacting.
For better or worse, whether – and until they really, truly disintegrate, I guess we'll keep at least some kind of presence to monitor it and figure out how bad it's getting, especially ones that went from something we had a relative joy and a good experience with that has slowly degraded over time.
We want to bear witness to that for its own historical posterity.
But I think these are the kinds of things, the things we're talking about missing.
Those are good things to encourage well-resourced places that have entire departments doing this stuff, customer service specifically, to embrace it.
Let's make it a project for all of us that want to see Mastodon succeed.
Let's bring – let's become the spectrum, okay?
The cable people everybody hates.
Let's get them onto Mastodon or Blue Sky, you know, maybe it's a competition who can get them first, I don't know, so that we, when we have problems, can reach out to them via that platform.
Or, okay, if not Spectre, how about American Airlines?
Yeah, everyone wants to see them on social media so that you can complain about the various things they get wrong.
You know, when you do that, that's when more and more people will say, hey, this is an effective tool for me to use.
Couldn't they make their entire – an entire, like, customer service Fediverse, like its own network?
I don't know.
Maybe they can.
Then all of them want to be a part of?
I'm not that technically adept to be able to tell.
Yeah, one instance could just be customer service.
Sure, why not?
You'll go set that up for them.
Yeah, I'll be right back.
But, you know, when we get to that stage, then people will say, you know, I don't need Twitter anymore because I can do that over here.
So let's make that happen.
I really want to see that happen.
Go ahead.
Okay, but –
Look official – sorry, dealer.
No, no, no.
It's cool.
I have two questions.
The first of all – first question is how long did it take for everybody to get on Twitter?
How long did it take for Twitter to become Twitter as it was?
You mean, like, critical mass of individuals there?
Yeah.
But also it being worth it for businesses to get their own Twitter and public agencies and so forth.
Yeah, that didn't happen on old Twitter.
When did it take flight, so to speak?
Well, I do know when it crashed and burned.
That was a few years.
We all saw that.
I mean, there were people that were condemning it well before then, but it really had a death spiral about three years ago.
I'm not sure what happened then, but something happened.
And that's when it just changed the way it is.
But that also says that, you know, if the winds change, maybe it could evolve into something else more positive.
It's possible.
You know, it doesn't always have to end in fire.
But these have been cyclical things.
Like, it's predictable.
I'm sure there has been research, probably academic papers, on these cycles of Web 2.0 or now, I guess, 3.0.
These companies emerging, onboarding subscribers, and then there being a deterioration of service.
And that is where I came in with the comment about switching costs, because that was the main thing that Facebook relied on keeping people captive, is that everybody that they would miss if they left.
And combating that with having alternatives and places that people are already establishing dual presences or just sharing in general, like, on one, this is where I am over here, which Rob pointed out was a part of his process for migrating away.
And then ultimately going back to your main page or wherever your landing site is on the web.
How many people have you lost track of because you don't know what platform they're on?
You know, they're there somewhere, they're around, you even see them sometimes, but you don't know how to reach them because they're on a different platform that you don't even know the name of.
I wanted to make a phone call this week, and I had a real, like, existential debate with my, like, just, I was in crisis over what exactly, what type of phone call I should make, because there's so many different types of phone calls I could make.
And it was actually paralyzing.
Wait, hang on.
There's FaceTime.
There's a Skype call, a Signal call.
Signal, yeah.
There's a telephone call.
You can still do that, by the way.
And then Landline, and then, like, WhatsApp.
No, a rotary call is different than a touchstone call.
That's true.
There's dials.
So, and, yeah, exactly.
And does your friend have an odd number or an even number?
That also makes sense.
That matters.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I was really, like.
Tell the kids this.
Don't believe it.
They will.
I was like, wow, this person just wants to talk to me.
I talk to them on four other platforms.
How exactly do I call them?
Oh, wait.
And then there's, like, should it be a video call or just an audio call?
What is the etiquette anymore?
This is why we have 2600 meetings, for people who can't figure out how to call each other
anymore.
At least you can gather together once a month in a place that you know.
No, no, no.
You're not understanding.
I know how to use a phone.
I know how to talk on a phone.
It's not that.
But you have to connect to something.
There are so many ways to call.
Which, how do I, how do people want to hear?
What type of call do you prefer?
What is even the enrollment?
What is the, how do you clarify this in setting, in call setup with other humans?
I'm actually getting a call now.
Gila, you have your hand.
I do, because, E, while you're getting a call, I want to take this moment to say hello to
the almost 70 people who are with us on YouTube right now.
We're having a lively discussion in the chat, especially we're seeing some people who are
not often with us.
So this is very exciting.
And did want to share one thing.
How do we pronounce this?
Del Chi?
Del Chi?
Del Chi.
Del Chi.
How do you pronounce Del Chi is how I say it.
That's our friend out in, where is he?
In Vegas?
Is he in Vegas?
That's where I saw him, but I'm not sure where he is.
I think he might be.
He's out there somewhere.
He's out there somewhere.
In the West.
But.
I didn't mean it that way.
No, I mean, he's out in, he's out there somewhere, I think New Mexico or Nevada or one of those
states.
But says the internet needs a sign that says you must be this tall to ride this ride.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, I think that's a, a really good thing to keep in mind.
And it's, I don't think it's the height that's the problem.
I don't think it's that.
I mean, if you can't actually see the computer, you may have a problem.
I think that's too, that's too, I guess, vague for me.
Because I could say, like, I'm done with all of it.
You know, like, I really detest all of it.
I mean, we even kind of went there, we're talking about, and I think Alex pointed out how much he just hates all of it.
He thinks it's the downfall of men.
It very well may be.
Hey, where's Alex?
We lost Alex.
He was unable to stick with us for overtime this week.
He's busy at his, out in Seattle, where apparently things like that happen.
How did I not realize he wasn't here?
But it's like, it's a ride we're forced to be on.
Are we?
Are we really forced to be on the ride?
We're not quite either tall or short enough to.
Yeah, no, that's true.
That's true.
But I still think that there's, you know, there are some rides that even if you're technically tall enough to be on them, you have to be emotionally prepared for them.
We were talking about this recently.
Remember the gondolas at amusement parks?
I've never taken a gondola at an amusement park.
I have no desire to fall into water on top of everything else.
It's like a, it's like a chairlift, but it just goes around the park and I hate them.
And I actually terrified my brother, scarred the child for life because I'm terribly afraid of heights.
I have been my entire life.
And we were on one of the gondola rides at the amusement park in our hometown.
And I spent the entire time freaking out and screaming and saying, get me down, get me down, get me down, because it was up there too long, too high.
So this isn't a gondola that goes in water.
I thought that's what you were talking about.
No, no, no, no, not like a Venice gondola.
Yeah.
I don't know if this is just a Midwestern thing, but it was like.
Like the thing that goes to Roosevelt Island, the.
Tram.
The hanging cable.
Yeah, they call that a tram, but in Europe, a tram is something completely different.
And that's called a ski lift in other places.
But like, it's like a ski lift, but instead of going up and dropping you off, it just, it does a whole circuit around.
It did a whole circuit around the park.
That park's been demolished.
Sometimes they have them at fairgrounds.
Yes.
Right.
And I have seen them as an adult and been like, no, thank you.
I'm good.
But I think that's the thing.
You need to be tall enough and prepared enough for what you're walking into.
Metaphorically tall.
We should point out.
Metaphorically tall.
Metaphorically tall.
I get that, but I think it makes you a certain type of user on those platforms that isn't really possible, like from a human nature perspective, like to go in and like ignore and not be affected by a whole lot of things.
Because I find myself like when I'm approached by that stuff that irritates me, I start getting hostile, right?
I don't like who I become because I can go that route.
I can feed that just as much as anybody else can and be a total unpleasant person.
I was trying to help.
But that only like it begets more of the same behaviors.
So, yeah, I think it's where we all have an individual threshold.
So maybe that is what you're getting at.
But I think it's forcing us to behave in certain ways when we all inherently have different ways of behaving.
And some of us have bad days.
Some of us are bad days every day.
Yes, that's true.
I've been feeling that way lately myself.
Okay.
Just want to direct people to we were talking about the whole Doge story and how it played out on the various social media platforms.
It's a big story on the front of 2600.com.
And there will be a link to the Doge staff list that we it was taken down on Twitter.
So we put it up on our own sites.
And, yeah, they can't take that down, can they?
It's doge-staff4.jpg is the file name.
And that is the point of this.
We're just trying to share public email addresses so you know who is infiltrating different organizations, who is the staff that they've contracted into doing this to all these different agencies.
And all of the reporting on it, this is to build upon that so that reporters, so that the public, so there's accountability as it's being touted as being full of.
Well, let's practice that.
Exactly.
So people that are investigating, that are writing articles, that are just concerned or curious, or maybe they are representative in certain districts that house some of these agencies or some of the places that are impacted around the world.
They have questions.
They need clarification on those things.
These are the people that you're going to want to contact.
These are the people that we're going to want to hear from.
If there are hearings, if there is an inquiry of some kind as to how these agencies were upended, turned inside out, or just completely flattened, we're going to want to know.
And it's our right as taxpayers, as people that participate in this particular government that is being dismantled so gleefully, it's our right to understand who is at the controls, who's doing this stuff, so that we can seek recourse, so we can get answers and find out exactly what is going on in our name.
Now, remember, you know, elected officials, you can get all that information for them, their email address, their phone number, their physical address, their names, obviously.
And what Doge apparently is freaking out about is the fact that we're printing their name and their email address.
That's all.
I'm kind of embarrassed by that.
We should have more.
I kind of want to be, like, diminishing this, but it's still important and a big deal.
It's an agency.
They're doing a lot of stuff that affects a lot of us and many, many federal workers.
It's the least we could do is share this list.
They're shutting down federal leases for health care for indigenous people all over the country.
And, you know, we need to know who the people are that are doing this.
And maybe you think they're doing good.
You still should know who they are.
You have the right to.
They don't have the right to just silence all that information and keep it secret.
Not in this society.
Yes, Gila, you gasped.
I did.
Because I was thinking about a project we did in some social studies class I had in high school.
And I remember this was, like, early in computer labs.
And our teacher said to us, okay, do you think you could balance the federal budget?
What would you need to do to balance the federal budget?
And I remember I was working with a friend of mine, and we said, we have a plan.
We could save a ton of money for the federal budget if we cut all defense spending.
That's true.
But we were high school students during a fully theoretical exercise in our computer lab, and no one's life was going to be affected by the decisions we made.
The Doge Babies, which, first of all, the whole idea that it was like, oh, well, if they actually find corruption, then that's good.
I mean, they're just not finding it.
Anybody who thinks that this is at all, oh, my God, what is the word I'm looking for?
That this is not a disingenuous project.
If you think that Doge is really there to root out corruption, I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
Everyone says that.
I never get the bridge.
802-321-4225 is our telephone number if you'd like to join the conversation.
We're going to take a limited amount of calls in about a half hour to come.
802-321-HACK is our telephone number.
We're talking about Doge lists and social media platforms and the decline and fall of Western civilization, et cetera, et cetera.
We've got 72 people with us right now, which is crazy.
We can handle a lot more than that.
I know, but it's very exciting.
I would like to – that's a touchscreen.
Thank you, dear.
I would like to share something that a listener says called The Batman has said in a couple of different – he's talking about Doge AI.
Doge AI is a black box.
It could be presenting, adding, and removing things in the data.
It could be playing you all.
Focus on the AI.
You go after it for Ilan is lying to you and using the AI.
So because – I think the contention here is that because Doge is working from AI that is completely closed source, there's no way to prove the veracity of what they're saying.
And Batman, if I have misinterpreted what you're saying, do let me know.
Also, just wanted to quickly – apparently a lot of people in the chat are not huge fans of the gondolas, skyrides, air fairies, whatever you call them.
Basic tech, I believe you that the one at the Henry Dorley Zoo is scary.
I was actually talking about the one at Peony Park, if you go that far back.
Yes.
Again, super lively chat this evening.
Thank you all for being with us.
Before we go to our first call, I just want to point out a couple of hope-related things.
The deadline for early submissions for speakers is this coming Monday, the 17th, St. Patrick's Day, in fact, so don't get distracted.
If you want to be on the schedule, if you have a talk and your talk is accepted, and then we get 10 better talks later on,
your talk is still going to be on the schedule if you submit by March 17th, by next Monday.
So that enables us to start scheduling without completely finishing the schedule.
The conference isn't until August, so we have plenty of time.
But those people that just want to make their commitments now and send those proposals in,
there's all kinds of guidelines up on hope.net as to how best to do that.
But this Monday is the deadline for early submissions.
Not the deadline completely, but early submissions gives you a bit of an advantage.
Also, please, if you're considering going to the conference, buy your ticket now.
It helps us out tremendously.
And we do need to pick up the pace a little bit so we can do more.
We can invest more into the space.
The conference is August 15th, the 17th.
The Hackers on Planet Earth, number 16, I believe.
Wow, I can't believe we've already done 15 of these things.
And it's happening at St. John's University in Queens, which has been awesome the last couple of times.
And we hope to make it even better.
So if you're not going to be around, but you want to support the conference and everything else we do, be a virtual attendee.
It's a way that you can participate, be at the conference without actually physically being there.
You can interact with speakers, with other attendees.
It's a lot of fun.
It's really a community that's built up quite a bit.
So hope.net is the place to go for all of that.
And we hope to see a lot of people showing up and being a part of things.
Yes, hope underscore 16 is our title.
But you can reach us, hope.net.
That is the landing site with tons of information about submissions and tickets and lodging, all of those important details.
And I'm really excited.
I kind of am interested in what people are talking about.
Like, what is the most kind of curious thing that is out?
Because a lot is going on.
A lot of people have areas of interest in technology.
I'm very curious.
Like, what direction, what thing or what area of interest, what subject matter is really taking off that people are talking about?
We talked a lot about artificial intelligence this year or large language models.
There are many other things.
How are people using these things?
I guess they're sort of normal now in many ways and evolving.
They're sort of extending people's abilities as far as having incredibly knowledgeable bots right at your fingertips.
Instead of actually sifting through search results where we're actually interacting with things that are of relative intelligence and also corrupt, wrong intelligence down to entire agencies being processed by these kinds of tools.
So I just am fascinated.
I'm always fascinated by what talks do get approved and are really popular during our events.
So I just really can't wait to sit back and look at the schedule and figure out which one I want to see, what I want to hear about.
I can't say anything publicly, but we have gotten some really good submissions so far.
And I expect to get a lot more good submissions as well, but wow, I'm impressed.
I'm very impressed.
Hope.net, all the information, how to submit a talk and how to buy tickets and all that kind of thing.
We have a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Oh, hi.
Just slightly getting off topic from what I really want to say.
For once, I am in complete unison with Alex concerning social media.
And, you know, the proof is in the pudding or whatever kind of shit we are not on the air anymore we are getting in terms of government.
The damage that social media has perpetrated to humanity is so much more enormous than the minimal benefit that we get for the human race.
That aside, then, you know, the ones who don't see it this way can have their say after I'm finished.
But the thing that I really want to say concerning Doge, it's a lot more perverse than what you said, because not only are they doing what they're doing, but they are essentially, this is a massive redistribution of wealth.
Because what they are doing, and it's becoming very slowly a little more evident every day that goes by, they want to defund the great government that started with FDR.
And, you know, pretty much went undisturbed until Reagan took over.
And then suddenly we had to cut all the little bits and crumbs that were going to the poor.
And don't be fooled about this.
It's not that they care about the poor.
It's just to keep the social peace so that the wealthy can have even more wealth.
But now it's completely shameless.
Now they want to go after programs that are not just for the poor, but the middle class.
And meanwhile, they're going to give themselves a massive tax cut.
So basically what's going on is we are going to pay for the government.
They already, the plutocrats, the so-called billionaires, are already paying no taxes or very minimal tax.
And we, the people, are going to pay for their perverse lifestyle.
The other twofold of this is that the right wing is winning.
They finally are enforcing shamelessly and without any hypocrisy their Hitlerian ideology.
And this is just the beginning.
As I said, you might recall in November, and I'm sorry, you know, it's not that I want to say, oh, I was right.
I wish I weren't right.
But to me, it was evident right there and then.
And they're winning so well.
Just look at what's going on.
Trump was trying to get U.S. out of NATO.
Now he has the Europeans doing it because he's saying, oh, I'm a friend of Russia now.
And the Europeans are running for cover.
It was unthinkable that NATO and American creation would see America getting out.
And now it's happening.
It's automatic.
Well, you know, I think a lot of this, okay, go ahead.
Say it.
It's happening right now in Washington.
They have what they call the stopgap bill.
It already passed the House.
And today on NPR, to which I listen for five minutes of news every few hours, say that some Democratic senators are in doubt whether they should support this bill.
This is outrageous.
I don't do this often, but I wrote an irate message, and I left a phone message to Chuck Schumer saying, if there is one Democratic vote for this shame, screed, that is camouflaging as a bill, I am campaigning actively against you and for your opponent.
Because at least we will know what we're getting.
Spineless opposition is not an option.
And it shouldn't be.
And that's about all I want to say.
And I'll listen to your response.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for your call.
I think you might have gotten through to Chuck because I know he's saying that Democrats are not going to support this budget and the government might be shut down.
And, you know, to say that Republicans are winning, you know, they're getting a lot of what they wanted.
But it's the dog that catches the bus.
You know, now they have it.
What are they going to do with it?
And what's going to be the effect?
Right now, you know, not seeing very good effects.
I'm seeing very expensive eggs.
I'm seeing a lot of people with measles.
I'm seeing the world really taking a second look at this country in disbelief.
We have all kinds of conflicts going on with Canada, Greenland, Europe.
Okay.
You know, it might feel good now if that's the kind of thing that, you know, you fantasized about.
A couple of months, I think you might be very tired of it.
And, you know, what I hear is we're all going to feel the effects heavily within a year of what's going on right now with tariffs and all that nonsense.
So, yeah, interesting times ahead.
So let's just remember to stay together in opposition and not judge each other too much.
You know, let's try and unite on the things we agree with so that we can build something better.
And then we argue.
We argue once we have something better and then we can debate how to make it, how to implement it, what to do, what not to do.
But if you spend all your time in opposition arguing with the other people who are in opposition, you will never get to the point where you actually succeed.
I shouldn't have to tell people that, but it's true.
Yeah.
Anyone who's been involved in activism for any length of time quickly, I think, learns that the biggest enemy to any of it getting anything done is the infighting.
When people are all agreeing on something, they can maybe see their way to doing it without beating each other up in the process.
8023214225 is our telephone number.
Go ahead, Kyle.
I was just going to say the caller had some good points.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
The whole thing of like a relative good, like, oh, I get a couple followers or I'm able to sell my merch or get a bunch of traffic to my website.
Like that relative good of these platforms versus the ways it's upended governments and been used with misinformation and stuff.
There were plenty of examples of how it had allowed far right or extremists to take hold in various places in the run up to the last election.
And it was always a concern in the last several elections.
The whole mess of it has been one of the main themes is how do we have and leverage social media for good discourse in the types of political campaigning that we need to do without having like false images or videos or stuff that's doctored or stuff that's blatantly false or kind of meant designed to get reactions.
Or it's misconstruing some detail or outright falsehoods like mischaracterizing a person.
And slander and libel with zero checks or no content review or content review itself being weaponized for stuff that's totally legitimate to bog down any kind of campaigning that somebody might want to do.
Like that I think is very real when the caller was talking about the disruption, the like the real upending of how we how we have kind of an open election process in a in a fragmented and wholly broken bought paid for media environment.
Like campaign finance and all of that alone and that the steep numbers that the networks make in in running at campaign ads and stuff that that was that was on the horizon years years ago.
Like we know I think we know I think it was at Citizens United and some of the pack and other things that were deteriorating shall I say the honesty of that process and getting back to that with with what with how affordable it then became to target ads and target with social media as an as an additional tool.
It has had ruinous effects more so than just somebody being able to sell their like, you know, handmade sweaters on Etsy or something just because they're getting traffic from an algorithm like that's great on the individual scale, but the entirety of those platforms being leveraged with big advertising dollars and targeting and stuff like that or and then, you know, plus bots and all the other stuff.
Yeah, it's it's been quite detrimental and that's that's where I could say like I would wholesale go off on how bad all of this has been like this entire era like two decades.
I don't know longer since Reagan.
So anyway, that that's my piece on that.
Okay, we do have another.
Oh, we have another call.
Okay, let's let's take that first.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Yes.
How are you, Manuel?
It's rebel rebel.
Let's make it quick this week.
We have a limited amount of time.
I want to say about social media.
I don't have platforms like Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and all that.
It's just, you know, one thing is enough.
It's just too much to handle, too much to, you know, to keep track of, you know, all these.
There's a limited amount of space in your head for this.
Well, you know, that's yeah.
I get it.
You know, um, you know, um, let's see, um, um, you know, there's lots of ways you can make calls now on WhatsApp on, on, you know, um, on, um, if only if only Kyle had had you to guide him while he was trying to make a phone call to a friend.
And that was my point.
There's too many ways.
But you can also make, you could also dial the operator and have the operator make an operator-assisted call.
The operator can't make a WhatsApp call, can she?
Try asking her that.
Well, it's also, it's not just that there are so many.
It's also me weighing, okay, what exactly, how does this type of call work?
How does that type of call work?
Like, cause I'm aware, like I understand a little bit of the underlying technology.
So I know the kind of rudimentary trade-offs for each of them.
And that's another thing I think was the subtext of what I was saying is that there's a, it's kind of loaded.
Like, okay.
Yeah.
Like a regular cell phone call.
Do I have reception?
Has the entire phone system been hacked?
Like there are a lot of different things.
Like maybe that would encourage me to use something more like a commercial, like, like your WhatsApp or, or like a Skype or signal thing.
But okay, wait, what kind of encryption do they use?
Or, oh wait, is that going to generate ad revenue for some, you know, advertising function?
Cause they're going to be filtering through whatever I text or say, kind of like what Google did to eat to Gmail.
This is why you call people at three in the morning, because it takes you that long to figure out what's the right one to call with.
Okay.
You don't know that, but all those calculations.
A lot of annoyed people out there.
When you know a little bit, and I don't know anything like I, I, but I, I do a little and it, it itself can be a little paralyzing.
And I think the absurdity is really what I was getting at, but I hear you.
There are a lot of methods.
Um, let's see what else, um, oh, what was I going to say?
Let's see.
Um, yeah.
And I, back in like 2007, 2008, did we ever think that we would be able to see the person that we're calling?
Uh, okay.
I can take you back to the world's fair in the 1960s where they demonstrated picture phones and they promised that to us.
And ever since I was a child, I've been waiting for the picture phone.
So yeah, you better believe I, I, I expected the picture phones to show up and I'm just waiting for the flying cars.
I would say, I would say I was, I was very aware of, of the technology emerging.
I think in 2008, even it was one of the functions of iMessage or iChat or whatever the early, uh, phones with cameras had.
Uh, I, I think I was probably, this is me personally, probably very resistant.
resistant to using video on any kind of call.
And in fact, strictly used voice for a really, really long time.
I think what changed for me was the pandemic.
I think that was a lot of different people, um, using more video for all kinds of stuff.
But basically when you've been boxed in and unable, and you're unable to physically talk to anybody, uh, I had to kind of let go of that.
And I think that was the case for a lot of people that distance learning or keeping in touch with family when you haven't seen them for years, not by choice.
Uh, that had a really like the trade-off for the mental health, like the wear and tear on you.
Um, it made it less, um, I just felt less, uh, restrained in embracing some of that because it had also been widely kind of established for like a decade.
So me jumping on, it's not like this, some video is video calls are like some new technology.
That's, I mean, sure.
It may be, it's inherently broken as is, but, uh, that I would be on there would, is like a drop in a, a sea of people that are already using video calls.
So I was late to it personally, but it was by choice and mostly, um, the benefit of having connection with people whom I couldn't physically see actually, um, made my experience with telecommunication.
It enhanced it, uh, more than I thought it would.
And I'm not saying I would have chosen it earlier, but I think that's, again, that thing of what platforms and how you do certain things on the internet or with telecommunications, they're personal choices and you, uh, you have to weigh them for yourself.
Rebel, final points, Rebel.
Um, yes.
Remember in the main C, you, see me where it was very choppy and we had like, I do remember C, you, see me.
I remember that spelled with the letter C.
Right.
And then that was video.
I mean, that was like, okay, this is not working.
This is not going to work, you know, but then.
It was so bad, yes.
Yeah.
And then, then the 3G or the 4G came out and, and that's what, you know.
Yeah.
The, the LTE networks being able to like sustain, um, HD video, you had, um, high efficiency codecs like H265 and DSL.
Don't forget that.
You know, that, uh, the widely, the, the wildly faster speeds just enabled, um, uh, video that itself wasn't a distraction.
And your, um, your, um, your, your call itself was, um, more of the focus than how bad the call was going.
All right, Rebel, always a joy to hear your voice.
And thank you for calling.
And, um, we'll, uh, talk to you again soon.
Phone number 802-321-4225.
For those of you who, uh, wish to call in our, um, last few minutes or about 11 minutes left, I would say.
Um, you know, uh, we didn't talk about this at all.
Um, but Twitter got hacked.
Uh, it had nothing to do with us, at least, uh, not that we know of.
Um, but yeah, on Monday, um, Twitter was, was taken down by, um, well, they don't really know who, who, uh, who took it down.
But tens of thousands of users, uh, reported at least three major outages of Twitter throughout the day on Monday.
Uh, the pro-Palestinian hacker group Darkstorm team claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on the, um, uh, on the platform.
Uh, that's according to a public Telegram post.
Now, uh, they're known primarily for targeting countries and entities that support Israel's attack on Gaza.
But Elon Musk, uh, accused Ukraine because that's his thing.
Uh, he suggested a large coordinated group and or a country is involved in a massive hack in a series of posts on Twitter.
Um, get used to that.
He said the hackers had IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.
A cyber operations expert, uh, said it doesn't make a lot of sense that a state actor would be behind the attack.
Um, Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University's School of Professional Studies,
uh, said that a state actor doesn't make a lot of sense given the outage's short duration.
There are two kinds of, uh, cyber attacks.
Uh, there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet.
And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet.
Something like this was designed to be discovered.
So to me, that almost certainly eliminates state actors and the value that they would have gained from, from it is pretty low.
Uh, he acknowledged that a group may have been trying to make a statement with the attack,
but said that such a short outage is not much of a statement to me.
Yeah, I, I'm with all that.
I think that's, that's pretty, pretty fair.
Unless whatever they were doing, uh, was a pretext for, uh, an action that did go unnoticed and they didn't need that much time.
But yeah, like putting, uh, the virtual thumb on their face for like a week while something else was going on, uh, would have been both a statement and, uh, pretext for another, another kind of action going on quietly.
Uh, but who's to say without, without the ability to investigate, without openness about it, a lot of these things, you just don't hear what ultimately happened.
I mean, I've been asking about what happened to the American telephone system for, for a while now.
Nobody seems to want to talk.
Now, Elon said, uh, that, um, uh, IP addresses originated in the Ukraine area.
What does that mean?
The Ukraine area?
Is it in Ukraine or is it not in Ukraine?
Ukraine area that could include Russia, you know, the next door.
It could be Belarus.
It could be all a number of different countries, Ukraine area, you know, be specific.
Let us know what, what, what, what, and plus.
He may not know this, but you can mask IPs.
In other words, you can make it seem like you're coming from a particular place and you're not, you're somewhere else.
Yeah.
I would, I would suggest that if you are masking your IP, you definitely come from a war zone.
I'm not explaining it right.
Yeah.
It's, uh, um, it's, it's, it's technical.
That's why Elon probably wouldn't get it.
Oh yeah.
You gotta like simplify a little.
Yeah.
But just because it's like something in Ukraine, it might be something else.
Yeah.
It's over here, but then it's not over there.
It's over here.
Do we have any phone calls coming in?
Um, I think it's still ringing.
Oh, we're trying to get new callers, uh, people that have not called before.
Yes.
Rebel don't call back.
That was, that was one thing that we forgot to mention that we were interested in people
who have not called the show.
And we only have one line.
So, uh, there's always people that wind up, uh, uh, not getting to us, even though they
hear the phone ring, uh, because, um, uh, we only see the one and you know, I wish, I
wish we could just make it so that we only have one line.
Everybody else got a busy signal.
You would not believe how hard it is to get a busy signal these days.
It's, uh, it's pretty crazy.
The way we're doing it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, it works for us and, uh, we didn't want to redesign the phone network.
Just needed to, uh, you know, connect some calls, but maybe we can add our own.
We'll, we'll like, we'll install the busy signal.
All right.
We'll give another, another minute or so to, uh, have a call come in.
Sure.
802-321-4225-802-321-HACK.
Um, what else, uh, looks like Rob, you've got something.
I'm just, I'm trying to remember the last time I heard a busy signal, an actual busy
signal on a phone call and I I'm finding I can't.
And it's now making me think of how I've had people ask me what that noise is that happens
before the music on off the hook.
Kyle, weren't you trying to call me the other day and you got a busy signal?
I think it was on signal and I was on the phone.
And if you're on the phone on signal, you might get a busy signal that way.
Yeah.
It did not divert me to a voicemail, which on a regular voice call on the cell network,
like cellular network to cell phones or, uh, calling to a cell phone, you would ordinarily
get passed on to the, um, to the voicemail or whatever kind of.
I'm glad you didn't.
Cause I have no clue how I would get a voicemail at a signal, but I noticed, um, right away
it went right to a busy signal, which is accurate.
I mean, it's, it's fine.
I was busy.
You are on the phone.
I was busy.
I get a busy signal.
I know now's not the time I go away.
Go away.
That's what a busy signal is saying.
Go away.
I miss those days.
I really did.
All right.
So I guess we're not getting any more phone calls.
All right.
That's fine.
You know, it's okay.
We only have a couple of minutes anyway, so whoever, whoever calls now has to be brief.
We'll give you one more minute.
802-321-4225.
All right.
I think we can take, go ahead.
Gilot.
Oh, sorry.
I was just going to say, remember when a reorder tone stopped telemarketer bots, and I'm going
to need somebody to explain that to me.
That is, um, the reorder tone is what, uh, what happens at the beginning of off the hook.
And it is also the tone that, uh, would, that used to happen when you called a number that
was not a working phone number.
And there was a trick, and I used to do this on my own voicemail and, uh, people did it
even back in the answering machine days where you would put a sample of a few seconds of
reorder tone at the beginning of your voicemail message so that when telemarketer bots called
you, their computer would hear the reorder tone and think, oh, this isn't a working number.
Let me remove it from my, um, list of people to spam and, uh, a reorder tone sounds like
a busy signal, except it's faster, right?
Some might call it a fast, busy, you know, what other people did, they would put the do
do do sign.
You know, you put that on your answering machine and that tells everybody that they've reached
a non-working number, including some automated systems.
Yes.
I used to experiment with that on the beginning of my voicemail as well.
I think it caught a few, it, it caught not telemarketing.
telemarketers.
Yeah.
It caught a few members of like our family who, uh, were confused by it when trying to
leave me an actual message.
Oh, you want to confuse people?
Okay.
You basically leave a message, uh, an answering machine message.
Hello.
Hello.
Sorry.
I can't hear you.
What's that?
Speak up.
I, you know, can you shout, I can't hear you.
And you go about 30 seconds.
And you say, oh, by the way, this is an answering machine beep.
And, um, sure you make enemies, but it's funny.
It's so funny.
All right.
We have a phone call.
We, I think we have a phone call.
We can try this.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's go.
Uh, good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Go ahead.
Is anyone there?
There's nobody there, Kyle.
All right.
Well, we tried it.
We tried one more minute.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
You guys had something else?
I'll wait longer.
No, I was just saying, I miss novelty answering machine messages.
Um, my, my dad used to use one on his answering machine.
It was a cassette.
I think he got it radio shack and his answering machine greeting was a couple of vocal impressionists
doing a George Burns and Gracie Allen routine.
And, uh, for that reason, George Burns and Gracie Allen still remind me of my dad.
Okay.
I think we have another phone call.
Let's try this one.
Good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Hey, Emmanuel.
Stelchai.
Stelchai.
See, that's how you pronounce it.
That's how you say it.
Stelchai.
So good to hear from you.
How have you been?
I've been doing good.
A little busy, a little crazy, but you know, it's always good to be fun.
Wow.
So, uh, I was, uh, I was, uh, when you brought up a comment about the reorder tone and how
you used to defeat people with that.
Yeah.
I, I, you know, I think it still can work.
It can.
I, I've been fighting the telemarketing spam a lot lately.
Uh, I put together my own asterisk box at home and got a DID in the middle of nowhere.
And I've been trying different techniques.
Uh, there's actually some prebuilt scripts now that will, if they, they determine that
it's a telemarketer call, it just plays random snippets of audio.
Like, hello, I'm sorry.
I can't hear you.
Can you say that again?
And it like keeps repeating them over and over again and keeps them on the line for hours.
That's really cool.
Um, for people that don't know, uh, asterisk is a software program to run your own PBX.
There's other, uh, packages of software out there.
I think free switch is another one, but basically you can run this on any kind of, uh, Linux or
other machine.
Uh, I believe it's multi-platform and it allows you to do a lot of the call setup and functionality.
Like you said, uh, with a DID, I think that's a direct inbound dialing.
What kind of number is that?
There's somebody that'll sell them to you for like $20 a month.
And you got one in like way off, off, uh, in a less populated area?
Well, you know, it's actually in Kremlin, Oklahoma.
The place is called Kremlin?
Kremlin.
Yep.
I heard of Moscow.
I didn't hear of Kremlin.
Wow.
If you dial my number, it plays the Russian national anthem and says, thank you for calling
the Kremlin.
Now relocated to Kremlin, Oklahoma.
Classy.
That's, that's the kind of stuff we like.
That, that's some, some humorous.
Now, if you like that, you'll like my, my latest little toy project that I'm building and
I'm going to, I'm going to put out and in fact, Emmanuel, because you keep asking, it's
going to be my next article submission.
Oh, good.
Okay.
Well, that's, that's, we just polished off the spring issue.
So it's good to know there'll, there'll be at least one more article for the next one.
It's called the Judicious Automatic Contact Keep in Touch or Jacket.
Wow.
Here's the thing.
If you are protesting or if you're minding your own business or you happen to be carrying
a green card and you get caught and thrown in jail, you get one phone call, right?
Well, you're supposed to.
You get one phone call.
You're supposed to.
I'm not sure you'll get it.
Just like you're supposed to be able to talk to your lawyer.
Now, let's say you get your one phone call and you call your one number and you get,
oh, sorry, we're not in right now.
Please leave a message or nobody picks up or you don't get through.
You don't get another call.
No, you don't.
That's true.
My system is a script that plugs into asterisk or free VBS, whatever flavor of asterisk you're
using.
With a GID, you call this number and you put in the IVR code of your choice, right?
And it will record a message.
And then as soon as you hang up, it has a list of phone numbers that it calls and plays back
your message.
Okay.
That's like an emergency contact list gets a voice note from you that you recorded on
an IVR.
That's brilliant.
That's good.
The first thing it does is it grabs the caller ID of where you called from and it puts that
ahead of your message.
So it says, this is an emergency call from federal penitentiary or 800-555-1212.
beep, and then you hear the emergency call, hi, dad, I'm in jail.
I like you here.
That's actually in, I built that into the script.
But yeah, so you can put as many numbers as you want in there and it will call each one
and play back that recording.
That's a very useful tool that I think would be very, very popular because in that situation,
you don't have very many options.
And like you said, if you call a number that doesn't pick up or you call the wrong number,
I suspect if you take the average person, I don't know, under the age of 30 maybe, and
you say, can you make a phone call to your parents or to your friend or something, you
don't know their number because you're just so used to hitting mom on your phone or something
like that.
You don't actually know the number.
How many people know a phone number?
When you're in jail, they don't hand you your cell phone.
They give you a desk phone or a pay phone or something like that.
It might even be rotary.
Who knows?
If you're lucky.
If you're not lucky, they give you a prison phone.
And you can end up paying up to $25 for a call on top of the by-minute charges.
That's the thing.
It's one of the biggest profit centers in prisons right now.
Exactly.
On cop shows, on TV, you know, this has always been a problem with me where basically they
ask, okay, this is the person.
This is the person we're looking at.
You're a suspect.
Tell us where this person lives.
And immediately, they always write down the address.
I couldn't write down somebody's address just based on memory.
I probably wouldn't know their phone number either.
I'd be lucky if I knew their name.
But on TV, they always get it 100% of the time.
Well, that's TV.
I mean...
That's true.
On TV, they have a Stargate that takes you to another planet where Elon Musk doesn't live.
But we aspire to live by those rules.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, look at Star Trek, okay?
From the 60s.
They had the little flip-top communicator.
Now we have cell phones.
They have the little automatic health scanner, the tricorder.
We now have the Raspberry Pi.
I mean, you can make it through a tricorder.
I mean, yeah, we're getting there.
We will get there eventually.
I think we will.
We've got to go through a lot to get there.
And that's a great reason to have tools like the ones you're designing for people that are going to be active,
that are going to take risks, that are going to stick their neck out a little bit to stand up to some of this.
Be prepared.
And these are the types of tools absolutely will help.
We have to run, DelTri, but any final words?
Yeah, one thing I'd like to plug, HDA.
I don't know if you've heard of it.
What's that?
Hackers with Disabilities.
Oh, yeah.
It's a new community.
It's a DEF CON that I run.
Uh-huh.
And it's designed to make DEF CON awesomely accessible.
If you are want to attend or you are attending and you have a disability of any kind,
or if you're afraid to attend because you have a disability,
contact HDA and we will work with you to make sure that you can get there and have a hell of a time.
What's the site?
And not be sure.
It's on the main DEF CON site, defcon.org.
Just type in HDA.
Okay.
And do you know the dates of DEF CON this year?
Uh, they have, I don't think they've been fully announced yet, but I think they're on the website.
For this year, they've announced it for this year.
I'm pretty sure they already have.
Yeah, I'm sure they have.
It's on the website.
I know it's before Hope.
It's in 47 days.
I can tell from my, I've got one of those LED scrolling signs that I got out of the subway in New York.
And I've programmed it to show a DEF CON countdown.
Okay.
Well, I guess we can calculate that.
But it's, um, it's before Hope this year.
It was after Hope last year, but, uh, this year Hope is in mid-August.
It is.
August 7th through 10th, 2025.
August 7th through 10th.
Okay.
And we're August, uh, next weekend, August 15th through 17th.
So, uh, cool.
I've been doing HDA for about eight years now.
Uh-huh.
And we've been key in making things accessible for people in wheelchairs or with medical issues,
uh, guide dogs, things like that.
That is so important and, and so life-changing for all the people who need that.
So thank you for your efforts.
And, uh, let's do everything possible to make sure that's a success and support programs like this.
Uh, Del Chai, it's so good hearing from you.
I'm sorry?
I unveiled Rolling Thunder, uh, my, the first war-driving wheelchair.
Oh, wow.
That's awesome.
It's a power wheelchair that shows movies, it has a Wi-Fi hotspot, it distributes files, and it does war-driving.
You know, you have to make a YouTube video if you haven't already.
You just have to.
I have.
Oh, you have?
I use it.
It's on, uh, Instagram, but I'll get it to you.
Get it on YouTube.
It'll be hit, a big hit, I think.
And I got something especially for you, so check your email.
I wrote a song for you.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Well, I like songs.
Uh, it's all about human rights.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Well, that's one of my, one of my, uh, one of my things.
Yes, I like that a lot.
Yep.
And that, that, there's one particular song that's dedicated to you on the whole album.
It's called Artificial Schoolhouse.
It's a modern interpretation using AI of Schoolhouse Rock.
Okay.
Well, I look forward to hearing that.
And it's in your email.
All right.
Del Chai, great hearing from you.
Always.
Be well.
See you next time.
Take care.
That's a good way to end, I think, this edition of Overtime.
I want to thank everybody who, uh, called in.
Uh, thank everybody for listening.
Our email address, O-T-H at 2600.com.
As mentioned, next week we'll be doing a phone-in show on the radio station from 7 to 8.
No overtime next week.
Uh, so, um, yeah.
If, uh, if you called this week, we ask that you don't call the radio show next week,
as we have a lot of people who only listen to the radio show, and that's their opportunity
to call in.
And, of course, we'll be back in two weeks with both shows.
Um, yeah.
Any other, uh, final words from you guys?
Out there in signal land?
Um, just, uh, that this has been a very good discussion, both on the air and on, uh, on
Overtime, and, yeah, I, I, I really, I really dig what we have going on here.
This is a, this is a great community over here, and a lot of good dialogue happening.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's, it's, it's good to differ.
It's good to have arguments.
Uh, what's not good is putting people down, intimidating people, ganging up on people.
That's the kind of thing, even if we agree with you 100%, we are not going to back that
up, ever.
So, uh, you know, I, I think those are good words to live by for everybody, and I think we'll,
uh, we'll get to a better place.
Uh, I, I think it's also, uh, it's also a basic fact of not only the internet, but human
society, that there's always going to be a jackass who says something mean, and, uh,
I think, uh, it behooves us all to continue working around that.
All right, good words to end on.
Kyle, Gila, Rob, good night, everyone.
Thank you.