In short
The 404 Media Podcast - Episode Summary: "Ring Is Just Getting Started"
Podcast Overview Title: The 404 Media Podcast Description: A podcast from 404 Media, a journalist-owned digital media company focused on how technology impacts our world through investigative reporting, smart blogging, and breaking news. Host: Joseph with co-founders Sam, Emanuel, and Jason. Episode Title: Ring Is Just Getting Started Episode Description: This episode covers Ring's new 'Search Party' feature, recent discussions around looksmaxxing, and a concerning incident involving Grok revealing a sex worker's identity.
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Episode Highlights
- Ring’s ‘Search Party’ Feature
Duration: 1:11 Summary:
- Launch Recap:
- Ring’s "Search Party" was introduced to help locate lost pets, specifically dogs, using a network of Ring cameras.
- Users can upload a photo of their missing dog, prompting a neighborhood search via the cameras.
- Privacy Concerns:
- This feature has raised alarms about surveillance and its potential evolution beyond pet recovery into broader monitoring of human activities.
- Jason shares a leaked email from Ring which indicates plans to expand this feature, implying a shift from pet recovery to possibly recognizing human faces and aiding in crime prevention.
- Internal Communication:
- The leaked email describes Search Party as foundational technology to "zero out crime," suggesting a future where similar surveillance could be employed against humans.
- Amplification and Looksmaxxing
Duration: 30:26 Summary:
- Definition of Looksmaxxing:
- Discussed as a male-dominated phenomenon, focusing on enhancing physical attractiveness to attract partners, often with extreme methods (e.g., extreme dieting, cosmetic procedures).
- Cultural Context:
- Looksmaxxing is linked to toxic masculinity and reflects broader societal pressures on appearance.
- The episode explores its resurgence in online discussions, especially tied to figures in the "manosphere" like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, who exploit these ideologies for notoriety.
- Media Representation:
- Critique of media portrayals that gloss over the misogynistic undercurrents of these communities and fail to adequately explain their harmful ideologies.
- Calls for journalists to cover these topics responsibly, highlighting the need to acknowledge and critique the toxic aspects without sensationalizing the individuals involved.
- Subscribers-Only Section
Additional Discussion:
- Sam discusses an incident where Grok revealed the real name and details of a pseudonymous sex worker, raising ethical questions about privacy and consent.
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Key Takeaways
- Surveillance Technology: Ring's shift from a passive security tool to an active surveillance network raises significant ethical implications regarding privacy and the potential for misuse.
- Cultural Phenomena: The rise of looksmaxxing and its integration into right-wing ideologies illustrates how toxic narratives can permeate mainstream discussions, necessitating critical examination by media.
- Ethical Journalism: The importance of responsible media coverage in discussing fringe communities, emphasizing the need to expose harmful ideologies without glamorizing the figures involved.
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Closing Remarks
- The episode emphasizes the intersections of technology, privacy, and societal norms, challenging listeners to consider the implications of surveillance culture while exploring the dynamics of male-centric online communities.
- Listeners are encouraged to support journalist-owned media like 404 Media by subscribing for ad-free content and exclusive insights.
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Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroducing the Hosts
0:29 to 0:59
Meet the 404 Media co-founders and hosts of the podcast.
“I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other 404 Media co-founders, the first being Sam Cole.”
Discussion on Ring's Search Party Feature
0:59 to 4:02
An exploration of Ring's new feature for locating lost dogs and its implications.
“but Jason got a, frankly, hugely significant update to it.”
Internal Emails and Future Implications
4:02 to 8:39
Analysis of internal emails revealing Ring's intentions with Search Party.
“this search party changes Ring into an active surveillance network where it's looking for something very specific, in this case, dogs.”
Comparing Surveillance Technologies
8:39 to 14:04
A discussion on how Ring's technology could evolve and comparisons with other platforms.
“I'm glad that you called that out because that's what I was going to try to talk about next, which is...”
Impact of Ring on Public Safety
14:04 to 18:09
Explore how Ring's technology may be applied to track sex offenders and the implications of such actions.
“They clearly took the public sex offenders registry and then fed that into the Citizen apps.”
The Limitations of Ring's Effectiveness
18:10 to 23:10
Discuss the challenges and limitations of Ring's effectiveness in combating crime and the social implications.
“When Ring does damage control and they put out statements and they're saying, oh, this is only for cute, fluffy dogs.”
Ring's Response to Leak and Public Perception
23:11 to 25:56
Analyzing Ring's official response to leaks regarding their technology and how they frame their brand image.
“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?”
Exploring Looksmaxing and Mogging
30:19 to 35:31
Delve into the concepts of looksmaxing and mogging, including their origins and cultural impact.
“As mentioned, this is when Emmanuel wrote.”
The Evolution of Online Communities
35:31 to 42:03
Uncover the history and transformation of online communities from pickup artists to involuntary celibates.
“I'm talking about Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Sneeko.”
Understanding Whitney Phillips' Work on 4chan
42:03 to 46:28
Learn about Whitney Phillips' exploration of 4chan's societal influence and media coverage pitfalls.
“writing a book called This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which was a PhD thesis expanded to a book about 4chan.”
Show all 11 chapters
The Impact of Online Communities on Culture
46:28 to 50:52
Discuss how fringe online communities shape mainstream culture and language.
“How does that earlier work relate to what we're seeing literally right now with the Luxmaxes then?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:05Sam: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 404media.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 at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other 404 Media co-founders, the first being Sam Cole.
0:40Jason:Hi.
0:41Sam:Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hello.
0:45Emanuel:Good to be back.
0:46Sam:Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we haven't been here in a while. Maybe I'm misremembering. But we are going to get straight to 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 Search Party is and sort of the Super Bowl lab that they use to pitch it, just so people are familiar if they weren't already?
1:33Emanuel:Yeah, so Search Party is a feature to Ring cameras that was launched, I believe in September. But there was not a lot of coverage of it at the time. And what it is, is it will network together people's Ring cameras in a specific neighborhood. and it will look for lost dogs. So basically, if you lose your dog, you can go into the Ring backend, like one of their websites, and upload a photo of your dog. And it will automatically begin searching for the dog in the neighborhood based on that photo. And it will alert you if it finds it. And so this is obviously technology that is... I mean, it is specific object recognition.
2:20Emanuel:It goes a step beyond 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. But basically, they did this big Super Bowl ad. They had a pretty dystopian map where it was a map of a bunch of houses and you could see them form this autonomous network looking for dogs. And then they also had the traditional green box around this supposedly missing dog. And also, it featured Jamie Siminoff, who is the founder of Ring, talking about it.
3:08Emanuel:It's the actual CEO of the company that was in it.
3:11Sam:Who left and came back, crucially. Yeah.
3:14Emanuel:So this sparked a major backlash. I mean, I've not really seen backlash like this to an ad before, in recent memory, at least for a tech company. And people just saying, this is obviously one step away from doing facial recognition on potential criminals or quote unquote suspicious people. we know how ring is already used which is to like publish uh footage and and videos of um 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 Yeah.
4:03Sam: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's no way this is going to start with dogs. Ring is very explicitly, now that Simonoff is back, a crime fighting organization.
4:47Sam: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 well 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 Search Party?
5:31Emanuel:This was sent immediately following the launch of Search Party. So back last year, yeah. Yeah. So I say September, October. I think it launched at the very end of September. And this email went out immediately after that, maybe in the first couple days of October. So it is from a few months back, predating the Super Bowl hype and also kind of predating... Jamie Siminoff did a few... He did the Verge cast. Is that what it's called? Decoder?
6:01Sam:That was an episode of Decoder because I remember listening to it at the time. Yeah. But made by the Verge.
6:06Emanuel: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's 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.
6:44Emanuel: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 a lot going on there. There's 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 out crime. And so right now, in their damage control about Search Party, they've been like, who could possibly be against looking for dogs?
7:26Emanuel:This is what the technology is for. But here is the CEO explicitly saying, no, we're just 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.
7:45Sam: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 and offensive. And as you say, Jason, defensible, basically, where they can say, look, why would you be against finding dogs?
8:30Sam: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 the ceo's head but i do think is a very interesting sentence the last the 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 what 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 like that is a pretty ominous sentence to me.
9:04Emanuel: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 how the company rose to prominence. And they had... 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.
9:55Emanuel: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 make sure that you can grab your Amazon package the moment that it arrives. And that's actually the crime that they were initially trying to prevent was package theft for Amazon because Amazon was just so much money on people having their packages stolen and then having to replace them and that sort of thing. But basically, Jamie Siminoff left Ring at some point, I believe in 2023.
10:43Emanuel:And the company really softened up. They stopped talking about crime entirely. And the way that I read this is like, I'm back. Siminoff 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 we're going to do it again. We're going to do this crime stuff again. Which I think, I guess maybe goes to the second set of emails that I got.
11:12Sam:What were they exactly?
11:14Emanuel: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 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. I am proud that we are working to build the system to help make our neighborhoods safer.
11:50Emanuel: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 the product that Ring initially had and got rid of. 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 AI software for police, all sorts of things.
12:38Emanuel:And so it's really integrated with 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.
12:53Sam: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 that 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. You know, the app used to be called Vigilante, and we covered it a ton at Motherboard. We've done a little bit of coverage of 404 Media about them using or pivoting a little bit to AI, that sort of thing.
13:35Sam:it is this app you download and it sends you push alerts of stuff that's happening in your local neighborhood right if you have it set to an area or your location data or something like that um 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 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.
14:15Sam:I can 100 % see that happening. You know, we have the mugshots 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. I can 100 % see that happening. Would you agree, Jason? And again, we're riffing, but I could see it.
14:40Emanuel:I mean, that technology would be really trivial for them to implement at this point. I think there would be false positives and false negatives and all sorts of things like that. But 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 really high profile, really awful crimes to start with. Maybe like child abductions, maybe, you know, like the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Like... A missing child. Yeah, a 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.
15:27Emanuel:Because... And I say that just because that's how these companies tend to work often. They try to sort of take the worst of the worst cases. And then they say, look, our technology was used to 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 at Brown University. And so in the aftermath of any of these mass shootings, assassinations, things like this, these companies really race to prove that their technology can be useful in some way.
16:16Emanuel:And sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. But then that's what they point to. And that's the kind of atmosphere that they try to launch these things in. I guess one other thing I want to say, and we've gotten pretty far into the podcast without addressing this, but we speculated in our first article about Search Party that this could easily be expanded beyond dogs. And I think that that was not an original thought. Everyone was saying that. That's why it was so controversial. Everyone assumed this is going to be used against undocumented immigrants, criminals, suspected criminals, etc. And if you thought that, A +, star for you, so did everyone else.
17:05Emanuel:You're so smart.
17:07Jason:Just 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. It's not a secret. it. We're going to use it for people. And 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.
17:31Emanuel:Yeah. Yeah. And so to be clear, I don't think anyone is stupid. It's like, yes, obviously. Obviously, that's what it's for. And we have privacy experts saying as much, 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 that is the context in which we're publishing this, I feel. It's like, it is important to know this is the plan. This is the stated plan. We don't need to pretend.
18:09Emanuel:We don't need to speculate. 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 iteration of it is but that's not where it's going to be you know in a few months in a few years like who knows
18:28Jason: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 a big effort, big investigation in solving this case. And the video shows a guy with a mask. And that is a dead end in a lot of ways.
19:10Jason:And I just bring that up to say that there's all the dystopian problems with Ring. But as a former Ring user, I will say that it doesn't even work. 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 a bunch of videos of people taking your packages. And what do you do with that? You can 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 enforced 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 like several kind of like citizen adjacent companies trying
20:30Sam:to provide that citizen tried it as well yeah they try to get private security involved so i think that's another parallel. You're right. Yeah.
20:38Emanuel:I mean, it's also... Theoretically, it's like a deterrent or whatever. You see the camera and you're like, oh, I'm not going to steal this package. I don't know whether there's actual stats that back that up as working. I don't have them in front of me. I would imagine... I don't know.
Read the full transcript
20:56Jason: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 a huge 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.
21:23Emanuel:Some of the cameras in my neighborhood talk to you now, which is horrible. Horrible. What do they say? Literally, I'll be walking my dog just walking by and it'll go, So caution, you are being recorded. Caution, you are being recorded. It talks to you over a loudspeaker.
21:39Jason:There's one in my area that whistles. It whistles and then says, like we're taking a picture of you or something like that.
21:45Sam:Like whistles inappropriately? Like a cute whistle. Like a tech product chime.
21:51Jason:Okay, still not good.
21:54Emanuel:The other thing I want to say is that this idea that Ring is going to zero out crime, let's talk about what that means because it's not it's impossible and let's talk about what kinds of crime because it's not going to zero out tax fraud it's not going to zero out domestic violence it's not going to zero out murder of people who know each other and things like that 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 quality of life crimes that are inconvenient for homeowners, like package theft and car theft and stuff like that.
22:41Emanuel:And it's not going to work for that either, for the reasons Emmanuel just said. But the stated goal of zeroing out crime is not going to happen. Their goal is going to be this very super narrowly defined set of crimes that annoy people on Nextdoor.
23:00Sam:Yeah, I think that's a 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.
23:38Sam: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 are sure 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 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.
24:10Emanuel: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. Great.
24:23Sam:Okay. What is the thinking there? They're like trying to save face?
24:28Emanuel:They were like, we have nothing to hide, basically, was the vibe. They were like, we have nothing to hide. And they were like, 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.
24:43Sam:Crucially, has not put its first for dogs in the Super Bowl ad. So clearly, that's a disingenuous point.
24:48Emanuel: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. 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 what, 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.
25:31Emanuel:And you can opt out, but you need to know to opt out and you can talk for hours about opt-in versus opt-out. But they opted people in to this. And so 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. Yeah.
25:55Sam: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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30:19Sam:All right, and we are back. As mentioned, this is when 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'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 A looksmaxer is a person who believes that the easiest, most effective way to get a partner, specifically a partner
31:13Jason: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 month 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 worked that way.
32:19Jason:And then also I've seen, this is mostly something that exists in an online form or several online forms. It's people doing like DIY surgery and dentistry and things like this.
32:32Sam:Just before I go to the next definition, are we talking mostly about men? Generally? Because that's just what I've seen, right? I'm going to say almost
32:43Jason: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 a male space with a long history of misogynistic origins which we can get into later. Jason is shaking his head. Yeah, Jason has been
33:08Sam:not only participating in it but shaking his head.
33:12Emanuel:I don't know. 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 look smacks for hundreds of years, no? Thousands of years. But maybe perhaps not in this way.
33:32Jason:Granted, yes. I mean, I think it is probably a less toxic... This specific... Well, maybe not, actually.
33:41Emanuel:Ultra-aggro online community.
33:44Jason:Right. No, I was trying to ask myself whether historically women have mogged each other. And the answer is definitely yes. And now we can talk about the definition of mogging if you want.
33:55Emanuel:Samantha, are we doing okay?
33:58Jason:I'm just going to let you guys keep talking. I'm listening. I'm learning.
34:03Sam:Sure. I would just stress, before we go to the mogging definition, and this will become clearer, You did touch on the manual, but this is like a right-wing, misogynistic online ecosystem. We're just building up to that, basically. Sure. So what is mogging, briefly?
34:24Jason: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 uh the the the verb of mogging like you can mog someone in a sense that you know uh joe you and i will hang out and 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 my giant muscles or something like this so mogging is like exhibiting your superiority to someone else yeah that that does often happen when we
35:05Sam: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 looks maxing and looks maxes and these various characters of this right-wing ecosystem we'll get we'll get to sort of the ideology and and that stuff in a minute and of course the whole point of the article but like why is this everywhere now and like who are these characters if you would call them that i'm not sure how you characterize them
35:47Jason: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, Sneeko. They did a live stream on Kik where they went clubbing in Miami. and one of the people who joined them there is this guy called clavicular uh named after the 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 uh in that space and he was there and that thing went extremely viral because they went from club to club.
36:48Jason:They were live streaming the whole thing and they were singing along to Kanye West's Nazi anthem, Heil Hitler, and they're all like Zig Heil-ing. And it's just like a very shocking video. And he's in there. And there was a bunch of like viral moments in the stream. And I think that made people start to wonder like, who is this guy? What is Mogging? What is Lux Maxing? like it just like he's a 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 i think a lot of people i think rightfully we're 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 like opinion pieces about what it is uh and also i think some like really unfortunate profiles uh there's a profile in the new york times um like a glossy one with photos like the stereotypical one which we we've have we have various beefs with was the new york times but it's like i don't deny their importance and contribution to
38:08Jason:revealing important information. But I think this is a very bad profile because it's kind of like a gee whiz look at this guy and isn't this weird without fully explaining the underlying underlying philosophy and how toxic and dangerous it is um maybe just before we move on to
38:36Sam:the next part about you know the article and that sort of thing but what is what is the sort of that context of the toxicity or the right-wing element that maybe the new york times or other profiles
38:48Jason:have left out or like what do you mean exactly so there's a very direct line there's like a three step movement to get to Clavicular who by the way, I guess I'd refer to him by his real name which is Braden Peters and not 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 on primetime TV. And this is where terms like peacocking came from. And it's all about like, hey, you're a loser.
39:40Jason:You can't get women. We will teach you all the tricks. Basically, you have to fool women to be with you. And from that community grew another next generation, more nihilistic community, which is what we refer to today as involuntary celibates in cells. And 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 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 uh like the nihilism uh of it all um you know the uh there was the mass shooter i believe he killed a bunch of women in yoga studios it was Elliot Roger he kind of grew up from that community and then from that you have an offshoot of the looks maxing community which it's like 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 like 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.
41:15Jason: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. Gotcha.
41:28Sam: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 Motherboard, the technology section of Vice. um who is whitney what do they do and why uh bring it up here what's the connection there
41:52Jason:uh before i try jason do you do you want to say because i was introduced to to whitney via jason who talked to her back when we were at motherboard you want to explain kind of a
42:02Emanuel:origin story yeah so uh whitney phillips is an academic who sort of rose to prominence uh by writing a book called This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which was a PhD thesis expanded to a book about 4chan. And she basically was on 4chan for many years. I wouldn't call it 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.
42:54Jason:It was also like the 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, etc.?
43:04Emanuel:Yeah, 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 like a good excuse for the behavior of shitheads where basically like there was a time and this actually still continues where like 4chan would do something like extremely horrible. Like 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 harass the fuck out of the family in a really, really horrible way.
43:49And often the media would report on this as like,
43:54Emanuel:oh, 4chan is trolling again. They're just joking. And this idea that you can hide all sorts of levels of
44:07Emanuel:harm behind irony and behind this idea that you're just joking, and that the person who is being attacked should just understand that it's a joke, I think speaks to all sorts of terrible things that have happened since. About Trump supporters and the right wing and like, oh, they're just liberal tears. They're just trying to trigger the libs, all this sort of thing. And the media has messed up over and over again in covering this. But basically, her work continued and she did this paper for, I believe, Data and Society, it's called, which still exists, I think, as a nonprofit that was doing a lot of internet research at the time.
44:50Emanuel:And it was called The Oxygen of Amplification. And it was about this idea that a lot of this far-right online communities rose to prominence because the mainstream media covered them in a really useless way for years. and so she talked to me and Emanuel 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 like the long and short of things is like you can cover these like terrible communities but you kind of need to say like, hey, this is bad and you also need to show the harm that they're causing versus doing what was being done a lot at the time, which was taking Milo Yiannopoulos, who noted shithead Trump guy, and doing really glossy profiles of him, for example, where it's like, oh, we spent four days with Milo and we got drunk with him and he said all sorts of crazy things.
46:11Emanuel: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.
46:27Sam:Yeah. Emmanuel, yeah. How does that earlier work relate to what we're seeing literally right now with the Luxmaxes then?
46:37Jason:I mean, it's just textbook. It's like the exact same situation. I've explained the history of how we get to this Peters guy. And I can talk to you about the terminology and the lingo and the mechanics of his community and 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 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 and stuff like this their jawline or whatever 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 and that we were thinking about it at the time our approach at 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.
48:41Jason: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 everyday language without people realizing that it comes from this space or alpha-ing each other. Or based. You know what I mean?
49:32Jason:Or based and all this stuff, right? And it's like, the reason that it's bad is 4chan and Luxmaxers and all these very fringe communities, they're really minuscule. Most people are not like this. It's like, they definitely exist. It's definitely a problem. But it's like, most people, they're a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. 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 base 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 the uh i think part of the really bad thing that's going on where it's like people i think probably ironically when i understand why like it is funny because it is ridiculous ridiculous to say that you're looks maxing or you're gesturing or whatever.
50:47Jason: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 like, I think it was last year, that Dora the Explorer was explaining what Sigma is. Oh yeah. Which comes from Sigma Mail, which is, again, it's like it's a super toxic, tiny community kind of seeping its way into mainstream culture just by being very weird. Yeah.
51:15Sam:I think that's a really, really good way to pull 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 404media.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 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast.
51:56Sam:You'll also get to listen to the 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 on Tell a Friend. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.
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From the publisher
This week we start with Jason’s follow up to Ring launching its ‘Search Party’ feature. It turns out, according to a leaked email he got, the feature is only starting with finding lost dogs. After the break, Emanuel explains why we’ve learned nothing about amplification when it comes to the recent looksmaxxing trend. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains how Grok produced the real name of a sex worker who performs pseudonymously.
1:11 - Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs
30:26 - We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons
Grok Exposed a Porn Performer’s Legal Name and Birthdate—Without Even Being Asked
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/IEq8dlnLP8o
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