Endless Thread - Beautiful, Terrible Internet

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Warning: This episode contains multitudes! Hosts Ben and Amory explore how viral clips of DOGE staffers' video depositions found a new life online after a judge temporarily ordered them removed. They also dabble in a Reddit thought exercise with a potentially dubious origin Show notes: DOGE staffer who flagged grants for 'DEI' struggles to define the term (The Independent) LPT: I started pretending my life is a TV show and it made me more productive (Reddit) Credits: This episode was produced by Kalyani Saxena and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Marquis Neal. Sponsor message: INCOGNI: Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code ENDLESS at the link below and get 60% off annual plans: https://incogni.com/ENDLESS  

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at B.U. Questrum School of Business. A recent episode explores the challenges and opportunities in decarbonizing one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, ocean freight shipping. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory Severson, is this an internet as beautiful or internet is terrible story on endless? thread today. Mine is an internet is terrible. Oh man, mine too. Oh, really? Double whammy. Double whammy.

Okay. Well, it's sort of, it's a little bit of both. So like, it's an internet is terrible, maybe-ish, but then also internet as beautiful as the closer? Two things can be true at once? Yeah. Get out of here. All possible futures in this multiverse, something, something.

Would you like to go first? today? Yeah, I'll go first. Okay. All right. So have you ever seen the time traveling meme that's like women go back in time, men go back in time, or whatever, like women go back in time and they go back and they go back and they see their grandmother and they say, I'm your granddaughter and men go back in time. And I don't know. It's like any number of different things. I saw one recently that involved somebody going back in time to Japan and asking a woman not to take a picture of her dog. Okay. Does that mean anything to you yet?

Well, isn't this when we did our cuteness episode, didn't our guest for that episode mentioned like the quote unquote ugliest dog in the world when actually that was a very cute dog and it was in Japan? Well, yeah. I mean, you're trying, but you're failing on this one so far. Okay. We are talking, of course, about Shiba Inos. Yes, okay. Yep. And Doge's.

Yes. And why do you think somebody might utilize a time machine to go back in time and tell somebody to not bring the idea of Doge into existence? Oh, because Doge has taken on a life of its own as the Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk's favorite word or digital currency. Yeah, that's, yep, you got it. Now you're back on track, Sieberts and you're back on track. So everybody knows about Doge. At this point, the Department of Government Efficiency. And what I will say is Doge popped back into my feed with intensity last week.

Do you know why and did it pop back into your feed last week? Wait, this is sort of on the tip of my brain. Your brain has a tip? Yeah. You know, when it's not like on the tip of your tongue, it hasn't made it to the tongue yet. It's still in the brain. Okay. Fair.

I'm not remembering in this moment, so please enlighten me. At the time that we're recording this, there was kind of an explosion of popularity of a set of videos online. These set of videos got posted to YouTube by scholarly groups who are. are essentially, I know it sounds ridiculous. Okay. Yeah, I should say that's the New York Times' description. Scholarly groups, but scholarly because, you know, Doge helped essentially eviscerate all of this funding for, you know,

many different organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, which, you know, gives money to scholarly groups. Oh. So effectively these videos showed two former Doge employees. One, Justin Fox, another Nate Kavanaugh, in depositions for lawsuits, because of course there's been a lot of lawsuits and counter lawsuits around all of this funding. And they both were talking about essentially what they did in order to identify grants that were not in line with this executive order that,

President Trump put out, you know, banning, quote, radical and wasteful government DEI programs. There's not a lot of action in these videos. It's basically young men being interviewed against a gray background. But I found them to be fascinating. It gives you this kind of interesting window into how these people made decisions to pull funding away from organizations. And you get these glimpses of their worldviews or their political views. These employees were apparently using chat GPT to identify programs and grants that included elements of DEI, and this had pretty mixed results. As an example, court documents show that a museum got a grant of about $350,000 to repair and update its HVAC system or repeating in AC.

One potential outcome of this replacement and update might, of course, mean more visitors. to the museum, or as it's described in the grant, more access to the museum's collection. Chat GPT flagged this grant with the rationale that more access to the museum equals more diversity and the grant was terminated. This is the kind of thing these Doge employees are being asked about in these videos. One of the interviews in particular, I found to be interesting, Justin Fox, a former Doge employee who's being interviewed gets into it with the interviewer over the definition of

DEI. How do you interpret DEI? There was the EEO explicitly laid out the details. I don't remember it off the top of my head. That's okay. I'm asking for your understanding of it. Yeah. My understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.

Okay. So can you? I don't remember what was in the EO. So right now do you have an understanding of what DEI is? Yeah. Okay. So what's your understanding as you said? sit here today in this deposition?

Well, it was exactly what was written in the EO. The interviewer is like, okay, well, I get that there's like a definition in this document, but how do you define DEI? And Justin Fox basically says, well, I define it as it's defined in the document. Do you have a present understanding of DEI? Yeah. Okay. Can you explain what that present understanding is? Well, it is just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.

Are you refusing to answer the question? I'm not refusing to answer the question. I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language. So videos of these depositions really popped off. They were all over Reddit. And then they were gone. A judge ordered these videos to be taken down temporarily. Essentially, I think, because the government.

was arguing that these two people would come under harassment and death threats, etc., etc., which I have to say, it's an interesting argument to me in a world in which this stuff is happening to people all the time for myriad reasons, if that makes sense. They're getting harassed online. And what you see here is the U.S. government leveraging its full personnel and influence to protect these two individuals in a way that lots of people don't get protected after getting death threats and harassment for being women, for being people of color, et cetera. So I think there's some inequity here in the way that we think about people getting doxed and getting harassed for the work that they do.

But something changed, which is that almost immediately after the judge ordered these videos to be taken down, we saw them reappear. Can you guess where they reappeared? On Reddit? They did not reappear on Reddit, but they did appear as a bit torrent. Do you know what that is? Loosely.

What? Loosely. That's one of those like terms that's like, oh yeah, it's the bit torrent. Yeah, it's the BitTorne. It's not a BitTorne. BitTorne is effectively an internet protocol that allows people to share files in a more distributed way. A bunch of different computers have copies of a file. They can share part of that file to whomever else wants to download it.

So the downloader gets their file via a bunch of different places. That is my layman's description of BitTorrenting. Okay. Do we all have to download? the 400,000 little bits or the little bits come to get, okay. Oh, well, they automatically come together. They come together as a file. Yeah, yeah.

You don't have to assemble the file. Hymru, much more efficient. That's like an internet jigsaw. No time for that. But so that's one place. The other place that the videos popped back up was the internet archive, which I believe you know about. And this is a place where in recent years, a lot of things that have been,

erased from the internet for, you know, political reasons, potentially, one might say, have popped back up. So this is just, I think, a story that reminds us that nothing really actually disappears when you post it to the internet. It's on the internet forever. Whether it's on YouTube or, you know, even the power of a district court can't really erase something from the internet. internet. It can make it a lot harder to access, but it's just, it's, it's going to be really hard to get rid of this stuff. And there's a little bit of a, of a stricent effect, I think, that happens with these things as well, where as soon as you try to erase it from the internet, people are like, oh, no, no. And they go and they make sure that it's available. Yeah. And, and, you know, on the one hand, nothing ever really disappears, as you said, but on the other, it could. Like, I don't want us to

take for granted the resources like Internet Archive and the people who are doing that archiving because it is, it is time spent, it is dollars needed to sort of power these archives and to keep them alive. And I myself have started taking a lot more screenshots of things that I don't want to see disappear or have a feeling might disappear. I've had a lot of stuff actually disappear on me that was not being protected and backed up by activists because it was not crucial to our government or, you know, society at large. And so, yes, we have ways of backing it up and power to those, but also don't take them for granted. And if there is material that you feel like is important to

people's rights or that people need to know they're important for accountability, which is so, it feels like it's maddeningly fleeting these days, you know, back it up. This is going to take, this is protecting internet resources takes all of us doing our part. All right. Well, that's one story about the internet being maybe terrible, maybe great. certain ways. So, uh, what do you got for me? Do you have a terrible, beautiful story for me? No, no, nothing terrible here. In fact, after the break, Ben, I'm going to teach us how we can all be more productive. Oh boy. Oh, no. It's coming up in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than

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Okay, we're back. And Ben, I have a story for you from one of our favorite subreddits, Life Pro Tips. Love a Pro Tip. This is a post, the title of which is, I started pretending my life is a TV show, and it made me more productive. Okay. Okay. So the body of the post reads, for a while I had this weird habit. At the end of each day, I would give my day, and then in bold, an episode type,

and a cliffhanger, like a TV show. Example. Episode 21. The day everything went wrong. Cliffhanger. Tomorrow might fix it. Dot, dot, dot. Or make it worse.

Strangely, this made life a lot more interesting. Even boring days started feeling meaningful because they were just another episode in the story. That part's in bold. Hard days felt like, quote-unquote, character development instead of failures. It also made me more productive because I started thinking like a main character. Main characters don't quit halfway through the story.

But there were a few problems, and then there's a bullet point list. One, I had to write the titles somewhere, or I'd forget them. Two, coming up with new titles every day was surprisingly hard. Three, I'm lazy and forgetful, so sometimes I skip days entirely. So I tried building a small tool for myself that turns your day into an episode with a title, poster, cliffhanger, and summary so I can look back on weeks like seasons of a show. Now I can scroll back through past days

and it actually feels like re-watching episodes of my life. Curious about something, though, and then this line isn't bold. If your life was a TV show, what would the title of Season 1 Episode 1 be? Hmm. So, Ben, do you have any thoughts on this idea as a productivity tool?

Well, here's a thing I'll say. Something that resonated with me was the idea that, like, bad things are character development, actually. Yes. Like, I have a friend who says, good times or good times and bad times or good stories later. Which I like that. I guess we are all main characters in our own lives. And so, like, that's, we all have that right as individuals to feel like we're main characters.

I could see that leading to some potential toxic behavior. But, you know, I guess I don't, you know, whatever, I mean, to each their own. Better to be a main character than an NPC, I suppose. Do you keep a journal? I have several journals that I've been given over the years that have like one or two pages filled out. Okay. I'm like, I don't mean do you physically keep a journal? I mean, do you?

Because I like this. I like the idea of this as like microjournaling. You know, because it's like I'm not going to take the time at the end of the day to write about what happened. But if I could just at the end of the day write a little title for myself for the day, that's, and then just flip back through all my titles, I think that would be. It's an interesting thought experiment. And many Redditors thought the same thing. One person wrote, this is kind of genius. Suddenly doing laundry feels like a side quest instead of suffering.

And the OP responded, yep. Then harder days feel like tough missions and more interesting to finish. It feels more like a video game than a TV show from this view. Yeah, I like that too. I mean, I had a parent tell me, like a new parent tell me as I was becoming a new parent. They were like being a parent is like playing a video game. Like every level is different. Some levels are really hard.

Some levels are really fun. But every level is different. And you just like get through the level and you get to the next level. And that's kind of. So and I think that's that's life too. right? Yeah. Just with or without kids.

So I'm into it. Yeah. I think it's good. And it's certainly way more doable than, than actual journaling, at least for someone like me. Same. I'm much more likely to come up with a title than a full entry. Same. If that makes sense.

Totally. So I want to read a few more comments for you. Someone said, how in the world is this not a completely dystopian idea? O.P. says, because it's heavily based in your daily, life and we are just adding a little creativity to it. And then someone responds to that comment and says, who is this we? And this is where things started to fall apart for me. Someone says, sometimes the AI posts are so obvious.

And then other commenters jump in and say, there's always a list with exactly three bullet points. someone says, and always a weird question at the end. Someone else says, and totally random bold words. Hmm. So this post... Are there any M-dashes in there? Any M-dashes in that post, Amory? There are no M-dashes, but...

Redditors now believe, in this subreddit, at least, now believe that this post is just AI. And someone said, it's as much scary as it is cool that we can now squint our eyes at a post and say with relative confidence, that wasn't a human. And they say, I mean, it's cool that we can do it, not that we have to.

And someone else says, based on math, about 2 to 5% of people can do it. Eventually, as algorithms sort what is valued semantically, it will drop to less than 1%. So who knows where those percentages are coming from at this moment in time?

But the point being that, like, no, no, people are actually really bad at knowing that this person post is AI, including me and including you, at least from the reading of it. Yeah. And the algorithms are only getting better and better at making posts that seem human but are not. And so other commenters jump in and, you know, someone says, what makes you think that this is AI?

I would like to have this super skill. Then people are like, oh, it's the final part in bold. And people are too selfish to care and ask what would season one, episode one of your life be. Like, no human actually cares what your answer to that is. Well, here's my question for you. Did you look at O.P.'s posting history? Okay. So this is where we get to who this O.P. is the username is Fuzzy Dash Ad 7685. So that does not inspire a lot of confidence that this is a human, at least as I'm viewing it. Well, that's like a, what I would say is that's like a Reddit applied username. Sure. Sure. They could have just said, generate one for me. I don't have any ideas. Which

lots of people do. But it's interesting that a user whose suggestion is, you should come up with titles for your life is not coming up with an original username. Yes. Yes. So I'll get to their history. But first, the very next day, this post was removed. So I'm like, damn it, I saw this post. people thought it was AI. Where is it? It was not in the Internet archive. It was not on a torrent. It was not a torrent.

But I had a feeling that if this was AI and some bot farm generating this, they probably made this post elsewhere on Reddit because there's no shortage of self-improvement subreddits. And indeed, they did. So I was reading you the exact same post, but this time it's on the subreddit productivity cafe where at least last I checked. no one has called this out as being an AI post. That's a much smaller subreddit than Life Pro Tips, but no one has called this out as being AI yet. Interesting. And it's posted there under a different username,

which is Future Dash Swimming 1092. So we have a pattern in the usernames here, word dash word and then a four-digit number. So then I go to these users' Reddit history, and I don't know if this is a relatively new feature then, but both of these Redditors have their post history hidden. In the meantime, I did what we do, and I reached out to Fuzzy Ad 7685, the OPE of the Life Pro Tips. All right, good for you.

And I just said, hey, Fuzzy Ad, I see your LPT post was removed after accusations that you're in AI. Your Reddit username doesn't give me a lot of hope that you're human, but, you know, I figured I'd give you a chance to speak for yourself. Even if you're not human, I want to understand how and why these AI posts are made. Who's behind this? What is there to gain or learn? And I do not expect to hear back.

I have not heard back from Fuzzy Ad 765. Okay. But in the meantime, like, I don't want to see AI generated content on Reddit. I think a lot of people would agree. that we don't want that. And so what can we do to curb AI posts as both Reddors and social media users and moderators? And what is the responsibility of platforms? What can platforms do?

And do they have any incentive to do anything when more content and more engagement means, you know, more advertising dollars, which is how these platforms. survive. You know, I personally, as someone who is trying to spend less time online, I'm always kind of asking myself, like, what is my red line for social media that would get me off of social media or get me off of a particular platform? And AI, bots are it, I have to say. And the anonymity of Reddit, and you and I talk a lot about anonymity and think a lot about anonymity. But the anonymity of Reddit certainly doesn't do it any favors in the larger question of how we prove our humanity on anonymous platforms. And when it starts to feel like we're swimming in a space and we can't

tell what's real or not anymore, that's when I'm like, nope, give me real people right in front of me, who I know, who are not characters in the show Pluribus that are all tapped into the hive mind. Like, give me real people. Okay. So I still like the idea of, like, microjournaling your life. And yet, knowing that it was potentially created by AI and not by a human, just leaves this taste in my mouth that's like, well.

Metallic? Yeah. Is it metallic? It's metallic. Does it taste like silicon? A little like that. Yep. Fair enough.

Well, nonetheless, let's come up with our season one, episode one titles. Okay. Ooh, I know. I went to Providence, Rhode Island, yesterday. Okay. Look, I live in Boston. I love Boston, but Providence is like a cooler Boston right now. Or like Providence is what maybe Boston used to be and is no longer.

and my husband and I saw a sticker in a store there that said, Keep Providence a secret. So I would steal that as like the title of my day yesterday, Keep Providence a Secret. That's good. What about you? Oh, man. Yesterday I won a pool tournament.

Okay. I led a meeting. meeting of a bunch of my neighbors going through bylaws changes. Okay. We're microjournaling, Ben. Microjournaling. No, I know. I'm just trying to come up with the title, though.

It's like, uh, um. Like, like big winds in small places. Big wins in small places. That's good. Yeah. You have like a tight. What about, but I want to get hijinks in there somehow. High jinks, big wins and small places.

High jinks, low stakes. High jinks, low stakes. That's good. All right, hi jinks, low stakes. Okay. That's a good name for our podcast, actually. Yeah. All right, send us your season one, episode one,

Titles, listeners, please. We would like to know whatever day you listen to this episode, name title your day or or the full day yesterday and email us endless thread wb ur.org. We're going to disprove the AI watchers on Reddit and saying that real humans don't care about other people's season one episode one titles. We are not AI and we do care so send them along. Yeah, we do care. Send them to us. Oh, and by the way, before this episode was set to air, the New York Times had an update on the Doge story. Earlier this week, a judge ruled in federal district court that in fact the videos of the former employee's depositions could live online after all.

The judge, who had temporarily said the videos needed to be removed, cited a few key reasons for allowing them back online. For one, the government had not supplied sufficient evidence that the Doge employees were in fact being. harassed. And number two, the internet and platforms, including Reddit, TikTok, and others, had supplied a nearly instantaneous global distribution of the videos, making an order to remove them effectively moot. In other words, the Doge Cat, it's already out of the back. Endless Threat is the production of WBUR Boston's NPR. This episode was co-hosted by myself, Ben Barack Johnson. And me, Amory Seaver. It was produced by Kalyani Saxena, edited by Meg Kramer.

Mix and sound design by Marquis Neil. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernaddo, Grace Tatter, Emily Jankowski, our production manager Paul Vikis, and our managing producer, Summa Tajoshi. If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery, another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Threat at WBUR.org. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast about the MoroTree, Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. Follow is business broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Valerie Thomas, Professor of Industrial

Engineering at Georgia Tech, on whether the ocean freight shipping industry can reach net zero emissions by 2050. It's technically feasible. That's a very simple question. Will we get there? Will it all be deployed? We're going to see. I just want to add in there that, yeah, we've talked a lot about the difficulties for shipping in getting to net zero. This is not the only thing that's going going on. Aviation is seeking to do the same thing, maybe even faster, and the other uses of petroleum are all transitioning. You may think, and in some ways that makes the problem even bigger, there are other ways that it makes it easier. Some of the fuels that are used for shipping are very similar to those used for aviation. So as infrastructure gets built out, shipping can benefit.

Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken, wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more about the Morotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at iBMS.bU.bU.