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Foreign.
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Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments. Gain access to that content@ 404 Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other 404 Media co founders, the first being Sam Cole.
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Hi.
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Emmanuel Mayberg.
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Hello.
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And Jason Kebler.
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Hello. Good to be back?
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Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we haven't been here in a while. Maybe I'm misremembering, but we are going to get straight into the stories and we're almost revisiting one from a few weeks ago, but Jason got a frankly hugely significant update to it. It is of course, Ring Again and its search party feature. The headline of the article is leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand search party surveillance beyond dogs. So, Jason, do you just want to give us a super quick recap on what searchparty is and sort of the super bowl ad that they use to pitch it just so people are familiar if they weren't already?
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Yeah. So searchparty is a feature to ring cameras that was launched, I believe in September, but there was not a lot of coverage at the time of it, at the time. And what it is, is it will network together people's ring cameras, like in, in a specific neighborhood, and it will look for lost dogs. So basically like, if you lose your dog, you can go into the ring back end, like one of their websites and upload a photo of your dog and it will kind of automatically begin searching for the dog in the neighborhood based on that photo and it will like alert you if, if it finds it. And so this is obviously technology that is. I mean, it is like specific object recognition. It's like goes. It goes a step beyond like identifying a dog and it identifies your dog or it's supposed to. And so this is essentially like facial recognition technology. And again, this was announced in September, but the big blowback from it came right after the super bowl, which we did talk about in a very recent episode. Um, but basically like they did this big super bowl ad. They had kind of like pretty dystopian map where it was like a map of a bunch of houses and you could see like them kind of form this autonomous network looking for dogs. And then they also had sort of the Traditional, like green box around this supposedly missing dog. And also it featured Jamie Siminoff, who is the founder of Ring, kind of talking about it's the actual, like CEO of the company, was in it and
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left and came back, crucially.
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Yeah. So this sparked like a, like a major backlash. I mean, I've not really seen backlash like this to an ad before, like in recent memory, at least for a tech company. And people just saying, you know, like, this is obviously one step away from doing facial recognition on potential criminals or like, quote, unquote, suspicious people. We know how Ring is already used, which is to like publish footage and videos of, you know, people who homeowners like, deem to be suspicious. And this has disproportionately over the years been black and brown, people like that sort of thing. And so it feels like it's one step away from automating that. So that's like the sort of background to this most recent story.
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B
Yeah, I think the way we phrased it before was that Search Party essentially changes Ring from a passive collection capability where you're filming stuff and then you can go back and review the footage or you can maybe send it to the police as part of one of those sharing features. This search party changes Ring into an active surveillance network where it's looking for something very specific. In this case, dogs. But as you said, everyone saw the writing on the wall. Everybody hypothesized or speculated, like, surely there is no way this is going to start with dogs. Ring is very explicitly now that Simonoff is back a crime fighting organization. They don't even frame it really anymore as like a community safety thing. Right. Very explicitly, they're saying we are trying to wipe out crime. In the same way that Flock, the license plate reader company has that marketing material as. So everybody has those sort of reactions and predictions in response to the super bowl ad. You then get sent these internal Ring emails. Jason, we'll talk about at least a couple of them. But the one specifically to do with Search Party, when was that sent? Obviously you got it later after the fact. But when was this internal email sent and what did it say about searchparty?
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This was sent immediately following the launch of Search Party, which again, so back last year. Yeah, yeah. So I say September, October. I think it launched at the like very end of September. And this email went out like immediately kind of after that, maybe in the first couple days of October. So it is from a few months back, you know, predating the super bowl hype and also kind of predating like Jamie Siminoff did a few. He. He did like the Verge cast. Is that what it's called? Decoder.
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B
That was a episode of Decoder, because I remember listening to it at the time. Yeah, but made by the Verge.
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Yeah. And he talked a lot about this idea of zeroing out crime, which, again, you just sort of mentioned. But he uses that language in some of these emails as well. So here's the email that he sent. He said it was something like team, and then it was like, quote, this is by far the most innovation that we've launched in the history of Ring, and it is not only the quantity, but quality. I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party first for Finding Dogs will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there, but for the first time ever, we have the chance to fully complete what we started. So there's like, a lot going on there. There's like a lot going on there. I think first and foremost, it's like he explicitly says search Party is first for finding dogs, meaning it will be expanded in some way, shape or form. Whether it will be called Search Party or not, I mean, we don't know, but it's like that technology will be expanded. And then he specifically talks about it being used to zero crime. And so right now, I mean, in their sort of damage control about Search Party, they've been like, who could possibly be against looking for dogs? Like, you know, this is what the technology is for. But here is the CEO explicitly saying, like, no, we're just like using this technology on dogs to start with and we're going to expand out from there. And this was an email that went to all Ring employees. So it's like he's telling the whole company this. Yeah.
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B
Frankly, I'm surprised this didn't leak sooner to all Ring employees. Maybe it just needed some sort of catalyst or whatever. But that is a huge admission where clearly, as you say, they've had these discussions internally at Ring, where. Well, we've developed this technology. It could do all sorts of things, but we can't just come out and do say, people recognition, although they have actually done known faces as well, which we'll talk about a little bit in a minute as well. They have to launch with something cute, inoffensive, and as you say, Jason defensible, Basically where they can say, look, why would you be against Finding dogs. But there it is, here it is in black and white in this email. What do you make? And again, we're not, we're not in, of course, a CEO's head. But I do think is a very interesting sentence, the last part of the email. So many things to do to get there. But, and this is the bit I want to emphasize the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started. How do you read that? And again, we're speculating here because we would never put this in an article. We're just chatting on the podcast about it. But that is a pretty ominous sentence.
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It is ominous. I'm glad that you called that out because that's what I was going to try to talk about next, which is. We mentioned this on the last podcast, but basically Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring, started this company. He pitched it on Shark Tank, which is pretty wild. But very quickly he pivoted it to be a crime fighting sort of thing. They did all these partnerships with police departments and this was like how the company rose to prominence. And you know, they had like, internally at least, a lot of the messaging was like, we are a crime fighting surveillance company, more or less. And there was quite a lot of backlash to this, you know, like back in 2018, 2019, 2020. And Ring really like softened its stance and they pulled out of a lot of these partnerships with police and they sort of like tried to rebrand themselves as like a thing that you can use primarily to like monitor the comings and goings of people at your house and like, make sure that you can grab your Amazon package the moment that it arrives. And, you know, that's actually the crime that they were initially trying to prevent was package theft for Amazon. Because Amazon loses so much money on, you know, people having their packages stolen and then, you know, having to replace them and that sort of thing. But basically, like, Jamie Simonoff left Ring at some point, like I believe in 2023, and the company really softened, softened up. Like they, they kind of stopped talking about crime entirely. And the way that I read this is like, I'm back. Simonov came back last year. And I'm reading this as like, I'm back. This is our mission. This has always been my mission. And like, we're gonna do it again. Like, we're gonna do this crime stuff again. Which I think, I guess maybe goes to the second set of emails that I got.
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What were they? What were they exactly?
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They were actually earlier emails. And these were ones that happened immediately after Charlie Kirk was assassinated and basically he sent an all company email or all Ring email saying, like, you know, what happened to Charlie Kirk was really sad. I was just really sad on so many levels, he said. And then he says it just shows how important the community request tool will be as we fully roll it out. It is so important to create the conduit for public service agencies to efficiently work with our neighbors. Time and information matters in these situations and I am proud that we are working to build the system to help make our neighborhoods to safer. And so that's talking about another request or another feature that Ring recently launched. They launched it before Search Party and it's called Community Requests and basically it is a portal where cops can say, we are looking for footage about a specific incident, like something happened near your house on this day. Can we have the footage? And this is very similar to sort of the product that Ring initially had and got rid of. Like they basically brought it back in this format. And notably this is done in partnership with Axon, which is just a massive police contractor. They make body cameras, they make tasers, they make drones, they make like AI software for police, like all sorts of things. And so it's like really integrated with sort of that technology. And so I think taken together, it's like these emails show like Ring is really, really leaning into surveillance for the police, specifically.
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B
Yeah. And to be clear, we don't know what search party may become in the future. Again, it's only dogs right now. The email very clearly says first for finding dogs, so clearly we are comfortable enough to put in the headline. The email suggests that it's going to go beyond dogs. I don't want to speculate too much, but I would just provide one sort of example of another platform that's done a similar thing, which is Citizen. The app used to be called Vigilante and we covered it a ton at Motherboard. We've done a little bit of coverage at 404 Media about them using or pivoting a little bit to AI, that sort of thing. It is this app you download and it sends you push alerts of stuff that's happening in your local neighbourhood.
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Right.
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If you have it set to an area or your location data or something like that. I remember going back and looking back into the Citizen app because we were reporting on it for some reason and they'd introduced a paid feature that would tell you if sex offenders lived near you, like you'd have to pay five or ten bucks or whatever it is a month to get that but they clearly took the public sex offenders registry and then fed that into the citizen apps. You can get alerts on that. Again, we don't know what Ring is going to do. I can 100% see that happening. You know, we have the mug shots of known convicted or put on this list of sex offenders. We're going to scan through search party to see, like, hey, somebody passed by and we believe they're on the sex offenders registry list. Like, I can 100% see that happening. Would you agree, Jason? And again, we're sort of riffing, but I could see it.
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I mean, that technology would be really trivial for them to implement at this point. I think, you know, there would be false positives and, like, false negatives and like, all sorts of things like that. But, like, I mean, I could see something like that for sure. I think that if I had to guess, Ring is going to start rolling out stuff like this, maybe in, like, really high profile, really awful crimes to start with. Maybe like child abductions. Maybe, you know, like the aftermath of a terrorist. Terrorist attack.
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Like a missing child.
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Yeah, missing child. Like this Savannah Guthrie situation. Like, you know, there's this high profile, you know, missing person who's been abducted, kidnapped, like, something like that. Because. And I say that just because, like, that's how these companies tend to work. Often they try to sort of take like, the worst of the worst cases. And then they say, like, look, our technology was used to, you know, either solve or stop or save someone who is either like, well, just like a really bad case usually. We actually saw this from Flock, where Flock told me when I asked her comment about something completely different, some abuse that they were doing. They were like, why aren't you focusing on the fact that our technology was used to help find this guy who shot up Brown University? And so kind of like in the aftermath of any of these mass shootings, assassinations, things like this, it's like these companies really raced to prove that their technology can be useful in some way. And sometimes it is, sometimes it's not, but then that's sort of like what they point to. And that's like the kind of atmosphere that they try to, like, launch these things in. I guess, like, one other thing I want to say, and, you know, we've gotten pretty far into the podcast without addressing this, but like, we speculated in our first article about Search Party that, you know, this could easily be expanded beyond dogs. And I think that that was not an original thought. Like, everyone was saying that that's why it was so controversial. Like, everyone, like, assumed this is going to be used against undocumented immigrants, criminals, like, suspected criminals, et cetera. And, you know, if you thought that, like, a star for you, so did everyone else. You're so smart.
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Just like, very quickly, Joe asked earlier why nobody leaked the email earlier. And I think this is why, because I think internally at the company, they were like, there's nothing to leak, because this is what it is, obviously. Like, it's not a secret. Like, we're gonna use it for people. And that's the same. That goes the same for the backlash for the super bowl ad. Everybody looks at it and they're like, we're not stupid. We know what the purpose of the technology is.
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Yeah, yeah. And so, like, to be clear, I don't think anyone is stupid. It's like, yes, like, obviously. Like, obviously, that's what it's for. And we have privacy experts saying as much. Like, this is obviously where it's going. But I think it is still very important, at least for us as journalists who there's a difference between assuming something is happening and knowing for a fact that it's happening and having documentation that it's happening. And so, like, that is sort of the context in which we're publishing this. I feel it's like, it is important to know, like, this is the plan. This is the stated plan. We don't need to pretend. We don't need to speculate. Like, when Ring does damage control and they put out statements and they're saying, oh, this is only for cute, fluffy dogs. Like, no, it's bullshit. Like this. This iteration of it is. But that's not where it's gonna be, you know, in a few months, in a few years. Like, who knows?
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Can I. I also wanted to bring up the what is her name, Savannah Guthrie situation, because that's a case where it wasn't a Ring camera. It was a nest cam, I believe. And the police went to great length to retrieve the footage because it wasn't supposed to be available, but they somehow fished it out out of Google's system on a server. And then they got the video. We all saw the video. And here you have a case where the police is very much trying, and you would assume that there's, like, a big effort, big investigation in solving this case. And the video shows a guy with a mask, and, like, that is kind of a dead end in a lot of ways. And. And I just bring that up to say that there's all, like, the dystopian problems with Ring, but as A former Ring user. I will say that it's like it doesn't even work, right. It's like allegedly it's for package theft. And you're like, okay, I'm going to put a camera on my front door and that's going to help me with the package theft. And what you end up with is like a bunch of videos of people taking your packages. And what do you do with that? It's like he could go to the police and be like, hey, somebody sold my package, here he is. And they'll be like, okay, that's cool, we have way more important things to do. Right. So it's like they don't really do anything. Like the entire premise of Ring as like a crime stopping company doesn't work unless it activates some sort of enforcement mechanism, which is traditionally historically the police. But I feel like the vibe from that decoder interview and the vibe from the Valley in general is that eventually in order to make it useful, it has to connect with some sort of private security company that actually does something about physical crime. Because at the moment it's like a video of somebody stealing your package doesn't do anything. And we've seen several kind of citizen adjacent companies trying to provide that.
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And citizen tried it as well. Yeah, they tried to get private security involved. So I think that's another parallel. You're right. Yeah, yeah.
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I mean it's also theoretically it's like a deterrent or whatever. Like you see the camera and you're like, oh, I'm not going to steal this package. I don't know whether there's like actual stats that back that up as working. I don't have them in front of me, I would imagine. I don't know.
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Actually anecdotally I think it's like maybe there was a period where people were like, oh, people have cameras now, that's bad. But now people have realized that it's like it doesn't matter. And we have like a huge package package theft problems in my area. And my wife gets a lot of packages for work and the only solution has been to we send it to a different location and then we go and we pick it up because the camera does nothing. There's no point in having a camera and it's no longer up for that reason.
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Some of the cameras in my neighborhood talk to you now, which is horrible. Horrible. It's like you literally like, I'll be walking my dog, just walking by and it'll go, caution, you are being recorded. Caution, you are being recorded. Like it just, it talks to you over a loudspeaker.
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There's one in my area that whistles. It's like it whistles and then say like we're taking a picture of you or something like that.
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Yeah, like whistles inappropriately or like, like
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a cute whistle, like a product chime. Like, like that.
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Okay, still not good.
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Yeah.
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The, the other thing I want to say is that this idea that Ring is going to zero out crime, like let's talk about what that means because it's not, it's impossible. And let's talk about like what kinds of crime because it's not going to zero out tax fraud, it's not going to zero out domestic crime, violence, it's not going to zero out like you know, murder of people who know each other and things like that. It's like it's, it's going to do jack shit for white collar crime that people get away with all day, every day. What they're talking about is like quality of life crimes that are inconvenient for homeowners, like package theft and like car theft and stuff like that. And it's like it's not going to work for that either for the reasons Emmanuel just said. But like the stated goal of zeroing out crime is not gonna happen. It's like, it's this. Like their goal is not. Is going to be this very super narrowly defined set of crimes that annoy people on nextdoor.
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Yeah, I think that's a really, really good way to put it. I'll just round out with one more question and a point which is that I think I edited this piece and I just wanted to double check that. Okay. This is an older email. They're saying it's first for dogs. Since then, since that email was sent internally, Ring did launch this sort of firewatch tool that would see if like, oh, is there a fire that's being picked up by your camera? We can send alerts there. There's also the known faces one where we use facial recognition to detect, well, my sister has come into the camera or something. I've uploaded her face. Hopefully presumably with consent. We should actually look into the consent mechanism of that. I don't fully understand it yet. So they launch those two features. I then ask and chat with you while I'm editing, so assure it's not that. And again, you pointed to the part of this email which is they're explicitly talking about it being a crime tool and neither of those are really crime fighting. So I thought that was a good Thing to highlight, I guess just the last thing, Jason, is what. What did Ring tell you? It sounds like they didn't dispute the leak or anything like that. It sounds like they came out and they admit it.
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Yeah, they admit it. And they also said on background, I didn't include this in the article, but it's okay to say. They're like, this isn't the first time something's leaked and not the last time either. It's like, okay, what Great,
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okay, what is the thinking there? They're trying to save face.
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Or they were like, we have nothing to hide, basically was the vibe. They were like, we have nothing to hide. And they were like, you know, Jamie Siminoff, when he sends emails to this many people, he doesn't say anything that he wouldn't say publicly, although he hasn't said those things publicly.
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So crucially, has not put its first for dogs in the super bowl ad. So clearly that's a disingenuous point.
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Yeah, but they said, I mean, they basically said, like, you know, this is for dogs. They say search party helps camera owners identify potential lost dogs using detection technology built specifically for that purpose. And it does not process human biometrics or track people. And then they say across these features. They mentioned Firewatch and community requests as well. They say across these features, sharing has always been the camera owner's choice. Ring provides relevant context about when sharing may be helpful, but the decision remains firmly in the customer's hands, not ours. Which is bullshit, basically, because they opted people into this. And you can opt out, but you need to know to opt out. And you sort of. And, you know, can talk for hours about opt in versus opt out, but they opted people in to this. And so, you know, it's. It's on by default if you have a ring camera that's capable of doing this and you need to specifically go in and disable it.
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Yeah, all right, we'll leave that there. We'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about a manual story about a bunch of terms I'm not really looking forward to discussing, to be perfectly honest. We'll be right back after this.
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A
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D
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- [30:20]
B
All right, and we are back as mentioned, this is one Emmanuel wrote. The headline is we have learned nothing about amplifying Morons. Emmanuel, you might feel dumb doing this. I'm sorry to ask it, but we do need to get some definitions out of the way. Maybe for listeners who aren't familiar or really for me because I do not follow this whatsoever and I try to stay away from it. But you know, you. You've covered it well. And as we'll talk about, there's actually a long history of coverage here as well. So two definitions. The first looks maxer. What's that?
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C
Looks maxer is a person who believes that the easiest, most effective way to get a partner, specifically a partner of high status, which in their eyes mean someone that meets an arbitrary definition of attractiveness, is by raising your own arbitrary definition of attractiveness. This includes a bunch of stuff that I think most people do and are familiar with, which is like diet, exercise, dressing well, but then also a bunch of really wild and fringe things like bone smashing is the idea that I think a lot of people have heard about in the past couple of months, which means literally like punching your own face with a hard object or your hand. The theory being that it will improve your bone structure in those areas like make your jaw and cheekbones most more pronounced. Almost definitely not how that works. It might look that way for a while because of the swelling because you punched yourself in the face, but it doesn't actually work that way. And then also I've seen this is mostly something that exists in an online form or several online forums. It's people doing DIY surgery and dentistry and things like this.
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B
Just before I go to the next definition, are we talking mostly about men who like generally. Because that's just what I've seen. Right.
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C
I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say almost exclusively men. I would say exclusively men if you asked me like two weeks ago, but apparently there are women, I've learned recently, who are in this world, but far less than men. It is, it is a, it is a male space with like a long history of like, misogynistic origins, which we can get into.
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B
Right wing.
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C
Jason is shaking his head.
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B
Yeah, Jason has been not only participating in it, but shaking his head.
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A
I don't know, I, I, I don't want to say something that gets me in trouble, but I feel like, I don't know, I feel like women have had to looks max for like hundreds of years. No, thousands of years. But it not maybe, perhaps not in this, like, way.
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C
Granted. Yes. I mean, I think it is probably like a less toxic.
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This is maybe not actually, I don't know how to grow online community.
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C
Right. No, I was trying to, I was trying to ask myself whether historically women have mogged each other and it's, the answer is definitely yes. And now we can talk about the definition of mogging if you want.
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A
Samantha, are we doing okay? I'm just, and I'll let you guys keep talking. I'm listening, I'm learning.
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B
Sure. I would just stress before we go to the mogging definition and this will become clearer. You did touch on Emmanuel, but this is like a right wing misogynistic online ecosystem. We're just building up to that basically.
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C
Sure.
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B
So what is mogging, briefly?
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C
Originally the acronym is amog and that is alpha male of the group. Right. That is just like the top male of the group and that was shortened to mog. And then the verb of mogging, like you can mog someone in a sense that, you know, Joe, you and I will hang out and then I'll flex my giant muscles and then I will be, I'll be mogging you because I will make you look puny next to my giant muscles or something like that. This. So mogging is like exhibiting your superiority to someone else.
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B
Yeah, that does often happen when we meet up. So why are we talking about this now? Why is it absolutely everywhere? When I log online, not just on the cesspool of X that I've occasionally been checking recently for stories, or even when I open just an ordinary news website just to catch up on headlines, there is something to do with looksmaxing and Looks maxers and these various characters of this right wing ecosystem. We'll get to sort of the ideology and that stuff in a minute. And of course the whole point of the article. But why is this everywhere now? And who are these characters, if you would call them that, I'm not sure how you'd characterize them.
- [35:48]
C
Yeah. So I would argue that there's a very specific reason why this blew up all of a sudden and that is that a bunch of other right wing racist online personalities, some of them belong to what people describe as the manosphere. I'm talking about Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Sneako. They did a live stream on Kick where they went clubbing in Miami. And one of the the people who joined them there is this guy called Clavicular, named after the clavicle your collarbone. That's what he was known as in one of these forums. And he is sort of like the top influencer in that space. And he was there and that thing went extremely viral because they went from club to club. They were livestreaming the whole thing and they were singing along to Kanye West's Nazi anthem, Heil Hitler. And they're all like zig Heiling. And it's just like a very shocking video. And he's in there. And there was a bunch of viral moments in the stream and I think that made people start to wonder, like, who is this guy? What is mogging? What is looks maxing like it just like he's a eccentric, weird, shocking person. And it's not a form of extremism that a lot of people have encountered yet. And there's a lot of novelty to it. And I think a lot of people, I think rightfully were wondering what it is. But then it turns into like this whole media cycle where he makes the rounds on talk shows and everybody writes opinion pieces about what it is. And also I think some like really unfortunate profiles. There's a profile in the New York
- [37:51]
B
Times, like a glossy one with photos
- [37:54]
C
like the stereotypical one, which we have various beefs with the New York Times. But it's like I don't deny their like, importance and contribution to like, you know, revealing important information. But it's like I think this is like a very bad profile because it's kind of like a gee whiz, look at this guy. And isn't this weird without like fully explaining the underlying philosophy and how toxic and dangerous it is?
- [38:35]
B
Maybe just before we move on to the next part about the article and that sort of thing, what is the sort of that context of the toxicity or the right wing element that maybe the New York Times or other profiles have left out or what do you mean exactly?
- [38:52]
C
So there's a very direct line, there's a three step movement to get to Clavicular, who by the way, I guess I want to refer. I'd refer to him by his real name, which is Braden Peters. And not like do the marketing for him. But the way you get to Peters is a long time ago, early 2000s, late 90s, there was this whole community of what were called pickup artists. It was a completely accepted, almost mainstream thing. I believe there were a couple of them who had reality shows like on primetime tv. And this is where terms like peacocking came from. And it's all about like, hey, you're a loser, you can't get women. We will teach you all the tricks, basically how to like fool women to be with you. And from that community grew like another next generation, more nihilistic community, which is what we refer to today as involuntary celibates, incels. And it's like, it's the same philosophy of we're losers, we can't get women. It's like this zero sum game where one person getting a partner means that I don't get a partner. And that means like I lose out in life. But like the insult perspective on that is less focused on how do I, like, what are the tricks? And more like I'm just a loser and this is my destiny. And I'm sort of embracing like the nihilism of it all. You know, the. There was the mass shooter. I believe he killed a bunch of women in yoga studios. It was Elliot Rodger. He kind of grew up from that community. And then from that you have an offshoot of the looksmaxing community, which it follows all those same philosophies, but it's like they offer a solution. And the solution is it's like you just have to maximize the way you look. That is all you have to work with. And it's like if you optimize that enough, maybe you'll do okay, maybe you'll get a partner. And it's like that is the entire purpose of your being. Everything is in service of maximizing your appearance.
- [41:28]
B
Gotcha. So you start the article about this meeting that I think you and Jason had with Whitney Phillips years and years ago, back when we worked at Motherboards, the technology section of Vice. Who is Whitney? What do they do? And why bring it up here? What's the connection there?
- [41:53]
C
Before I try Jason, do you want to say Because I was introduced to Whitney via Jason, who talked to her back when we were at Motherboard. Do you want to explain kind of her origin story?
- [42:05]
A
Yeah. So Whitney Phillips is an academic who sort of rose to prominence by writing a book called this Is why We can't have Nice Things, which was a. It was like a PhD thesis expanded to a book about 4chan, and she basically was on 4chan for many years. I wouldn't call it like a history of 4chan, because it was more like talking about 4chan's influence on society and their strategies for getting media attention and sort of like, how the media kind of, like, fucked up by taking 4chan both, like, not seriously enough, but also too seriously. Like, paradoxically, it was also like the
- [42:55]
C
first anthropology, I would say, of 4chan. It's like, what are they saying? What are they doing? How does this space operate? Like, what is the language, et cetera? Yeah, yeah.
- [43:05]
A
And I would say that a big thing that came out of that original book and her work was sort of this idea that trolling is not really a good excuse for the behavior of shitheads. Where basically there was a time, and this actually still continues, where 4chan would do something extremely horrible. For example, they would do. I forget what it was called, but basically it was like Facebook memorial trolling is sort of like what they called it, where they would go to the memorial page for someone who had died on Facebook and just, like, harass the fuck out of the family, like, in a really, really horrible way. And often the media would report on this as, like, oh, 4chan is trolling again. Like, they're just joking. And this, like, idea that you can like, hide all sorts of levels of, like, harm behind irony and behind this idea that you're just joking and that, like, the person who is being attacked should just, like, understand that it's a joke, I think speaks to, like, all sorts of, like, terrible things that have happened since, you know, about, like, Trump supporters and the right wing. And like, oh, they're just, you know, liberal tears. They're just, like, trying to trigger the libs, like, all this sort of thing. And, like, the media has kind of, like, messed up over and over again in covering this. But basically, like, her work continued and she did this. This paper for, I believe Data and Society is called, which is. Still exists, I think, is a nonprofit that was doing a lot of Internet research at the time, and it was called the Oxygen of Amplification. And it was about this idea that, like, a lot of this, like, far right online communities, like, rose to prominence because the mainstream media covered them in a really useless way for years. And so she talked to me in Emmanuel for that research. And I think we said smart things because we were covering these spaces in a way that we felt was more responsible. I think it's always kind of like a tricky thing and a judgment call, and not everyone will agree. But I think the long and short of things is you can cover these terrible communities, but you kind of need to say, hey, this is bad. And you also need to demonsh, like, show the harm that they're causing versus doing what was being done a lot at the time, which was taking, like, Milo Yiannopoulos, who, you know, noted shithead Trump guy, and doing, like, really glossy profiles of him, for example, where it's like, oh, we spent, like, four days with Milo and we got drunk with him, and, like, he said all sorts of crazy things. And, like, yeah, you might not like what he says, but he's brave enough to say it. And that was the vibe of a lot of coverage in 2016. And this piece that you wrote, Emmanuel, is like, we're a decade on from that, and we're still doing the same shit.
- [46:27]
B
Yeah, Emmanuel. Yeah. How does that earlier work relate to what we're seeing, like, literally right now with the Lux Maxes, then?
- [46:37]
C
I mean, it just text me book, you know, it's like the exact same situation you have. You know, I've explained the history of how we get to this Peter's guy, and I can talk to you about the terminology and the lingo and, like, the mechanics of his community and how. Why he had this viral moment. And I think that's all fair to discuss, but because you have this very viral moment, and then you have a bunch of people who are not well versed in this world kind of descend on the subject, all they get is, like, the surface level novelty of it, and everybody repeats the terminology. Kind of explains his philosophy. But don't say that it's bad, and don't say things that are very obvious. Like, this is an extremely misogynist space, and he's like a rabid misogynist. And the entire worldview is like, I don't know, it's like, it's phrenology. It's eugenics. It's believing that somebody's entire worth is, like, literally the shape of their skull
- [47:57]
B
and stuff like this, Their jawline or whatever.
- [47:59]
C
Yeah, right. Yeah. Which is all extremely. It's all extremely bad if you don't call it out. And it is, like, the one Thing that. It's like the thing that made it into the report that I talked to Whitney about in that we were thinking about it at the time, our approach, at least motherboard, when we were covering this stuff. And I think we all felt this way. But I remember talking with our then editor in chief, Derek Mead, is like, when in doubt, you can always guide your story by just explaining how stuff works. And I think we got a lot of mileage in our reporting by explaining how these spaces work. Like, where are these people talking? What's happening in these discords? How are they making decisions? And I think we did really good reporting because of that. And the thing that I didn't like is when we started or when we were at risk of using their language. If you remember the 2015, 2016 era, everybody really grabbed onto this word cuck and cucking, and it just made its way into, like, everyday language without people realizing that, like, it comes from this space or, like, alpha ing each other, you know what I mean? Or based and all this stuff, right? And it's like the reason that is bad is like 4chan and looks maxers and all these, like, very fringe communities, they're really minuscule. Like, most people are not like this. It's like they definitely exist and it's definitely a problem. But it's like most people there are tiny, tiny, tiny minorities. But if you kind of dwell on the freak show of it all and then you start adopting their language because it's catchy, then you make them seem more powerful than they are, and they actually do wield more cultural power than they do. Right? It's like if you divide the world into, like, woke and bass or like, cuck and alpha, it's like you start to shape how people talk and how they think about the world. And even though they're a tiny part of the population, it starts to actually change how people think and behave. And that's sort of the, I think, part of the really bad thing that is going on, where it's like, people, I think probably ironically, and I understand why, like, it is funny because it is ridiculous to say that you're looks maxing or you're gesturing or whatever. But we need to be very careful about that stuff because eventually it just changes how the world works. And I wrote something similar about. I think it was last year that Dora the Explorer was explaining what Sigma is, which comes from Sigma Male, which is, again, it's a super toxic, tiny community kind of seeping its way into mainstream culture just by being very weird.
- [51:15]
B
Yeah, I think that's a really, really good way to put it. Definitely go read the article if you're interested in that. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about once again a pretty bad thing that GROK did. No surprises there. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscription subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out. Or tell a friend this has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.
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A
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