Tech Won't Save Us - Reporting Critically on Tech w/ Jason Koebler & Samantha Cole

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole to discuss why they launched 404 Media, how it was inspired by their work at Motherboard, and their reflections on the state of tech media. Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole are co-founders of 404 Media. Jason was editor-in-chief of VICE’s Motherboard. Samantha was a senior editor at Motherboard and is the author of “How Sex Changed the Internet.” Find out more about 404 Media.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Last week the 404 team introduced themselves. Among the stories they published were pieces looking into Apple AirPods Max and AI-generated porn.Vice declared bankruptcy in May 2023.Paris argued in Disconnect that the media failed the public in how they reported on Elon Musk.Support the show

I think people are really hungry for like optimism in this industry for something to make it. And it's that kind of direct accountability to people that I think the. I'm your host, Paris Marx. And this week I have a really exciting conversation for you. It might be a little bit inside baseball, we'll see. But I'm talking to the founders of a new tech media organization that I think you're going to be really excited by and really interested in. You know, if you like this podcast, it's going to be something that will be for you, I think. And so my guests are Jason Kebler, the co-founder of 404 Media and

former editor-in-chief of Vice's Motherboard, which was their tech vertical, and Samantha Cole, who is also a co-founder of 404 Media, as well as the author of How Sex Changed the Internet. And she was previously a senior editor at Motherboard. And so, as I said, they have this new media organization that they just launched. You know, they left Motherboard to create 404 Media, where they are going to continue their kind of critical investigative work into the tech industry that Motherboard has been doing for so long and that they have been doing there. And of course, Motherboard is still around and they still have fantastic journalists, but they're trying this kind of reader focused and reader supported publication, you know, a model that we have seen more and more journalists adopting as

the media industry has been facing so many layoffs and cuts in recent years as, you know, the whole business model, especially of smaller publications that are not like the New York Times seem to really be struggling. And so I think that this is going to be a really important and kind of welcome addition to the tech media ecosystem as we can get more critical journalism from people like Jason and Sam, as well as their other co-founders in 404 Media, Joseph Cox and Emanuel Mayberg. Personally, I have been reading Motherboard for a long time. I'm familiar with a lot of these journalists' work, and I have found out about a lot of people who I respect through reading their coverage on Motherboard. And of course, a number of former Motherboard employees and journalists have been doing fantastic work and continue to do fantastic work were at Motherboard at one point and doing critical work there and then brought those voices to other places.

And so now I'm excited to see what Jason and Sam and Joseph and Emmanuel are going to do at 404 Media and how that is going to contribute to this critical perspective that we absolutely need on the tech industry. And that, of course, I'm trying to promote every single week on this podcast as well. So in this conversation, we talk about what their goals are for 404, what they were doing at Motherboard and how it had this critical perspective that we didn't see at many other tech media organizations. But we also talk about the media industry more generally and the difficulties that have been happening at vice as well as in the media landscape more broadly and then we end off by talking about their approach to reporting at 404 the types of stories that they want to be focusing on digging into and how this is going to be kind of a different way of approaching doing tech journalism for them and you know the excitement that comes with launching

something of their own so i really enjoyed talking to jason and sam about their goals for 404 media and what they hope to achieve through it i think you're going to really enjoy it as well and i highly recommend going and checking out the website if not becoming a supporter so that they can keep doing this and so that this venture actually works out. And so with that said, if you enjoy this conversation that I have with Jason and Sam, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And of course, if you want to support the work that goes into making this show every single week, so I can keep having these in-depth conversations that hold the tech industry to account and that promote this broader critical perspective on tech.

You can join supporters like Mike McDonoghue in Toronto, Matthew from Victoria in Canada, and Andrew R. in Chicago by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Jason, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, thanks for having me. Long time fan. Very excited to be here. Thanks so much. And Sam, very excited to have you on the show as well. Thank you so much. We're very excited.

Now, I'm very excited to talk to you. You know, you have this very exciting announcement that you made the other day that you're starting a new kind of tech media venture, 404 Media, with you and two of your colleagues. So to start us off with the obvious topic, why did you start 404 Media and what is the mission of this new media organization that you're starting? Yeah, so we have worked in journalism and tech media for I think about 10 years each. We're all roughly around the same age. And we all came from Motherboard, which we had incredible editorial freedom there. We're very proud of what we did at Motherboard. But this sort of broader vice company, while it gave us a ton of editorial freedom, it didn't give us very much financial freedom. And by that, it's not like, oh, we didn't make enough money. We

didn't get rich at Motherboard. It's more like we didn't have the ability to make hires when we believed we should. Our team size and sort of the investment in our team was subject to kind of the whims of the broader company, which is a very complicated and huge company. And so even when we were very successful, which we were a lot of the time, our team would get smaller and smaller. And that was hard to deal with over time. But then there's also a lot of things like we were doing a lot of reporting that was being turned into documentary films and things like that. And that was always a very wonderful process to take part in. But it's not something where we benefited from it financially. And I'm not even talking about us as individuals,

but it's like if motherboard reporting was turned into a bigger documentary, those resources didn't come back to the team. And so after a while, things like that and lots of other stuff started to become frustrating. And I think that, you know, I ran this team. I started to feel very frustrated in terms of like being stuck in middle management, for lack of a better term. It's like Vice has a very strong union. I agreed with a lot of the things that the union was saying I was management, but I didn't have like the ability to affect change more or less. And so that's sort of like the logistical reason of why we started this. It's like to have more control over not just the daily output of what we're doing, but also the business side of things. We can decide what we want to spend money on. If it does not work, it is our fault or it's

the economy's fault. I don't know, but it's our fault nominally. And so I think it's just like, we've seen sites like Defector, we've seen sites like Hellgate, the idea of quite literally seizing the means and becoming the company were very appealing to us. And so that's, that's kind of like the ideological reason for starting it. At least mine, Sam, I think is in a similar situation, but I mean, comes from a different perspective as being a big part of the union. Yeah. I mean, I think we're all pretty much aligned on like what Jason said, as far as like the frustrations that we were facing at vice, but it's just the, the state of media right now is really rough.

It's rough out there for a lot of people. And, you know, it was, it was rough working at vice to be totally honest, like constantly facing the possibility of layoffs, like watching your colleagues get laid off. People were amazing at their jobs and you knew that they were doing incredible work, just being told to pack it up and go.

Because of like, like Jason said, the whims of people who just are so out of touch with what's actually happening and what the work is. So that was a big part of it for me. It was just kind of like, what am I going to do next? Like I was looking for a long time about what I want to do. Like, do I want to get into a different media outlet? Do I want to try to get hired somewhere else? Like that's also really hard right now. Do I want to just like get like a normal job doing like copywriting or something or like do something totally different? And yeah, I mean, I think it was we were all just in the same place of like, it feels really, it feels like we have more left in us. And we want to give this another shot. Like we want to try this in a slightly different way and see what happens, see what happens when we have the ability to call the shots. So yeah, it's more creative freedom. It's definitely scary to leave a steady paycheck, to be honest, for who knows what, we don't know what still. So yeah, that was kind of my reason was kind of a complicated mixture of things that just boil down to, I feel like I still have something left in me. I don't want to give up yet. But what is that

going to look like? I think it looks like this. Yeah, no, I think that's great. And there's so many things that I want to kind of drill down on a bit in what both of you said. You know, I would certainly say that, yeah, doing podcasts is pretty fun. My experience, but, you know, just Sam to pick up on the last thing that you were saying there, like there must be some risk involved in this as well, right? Like, you know, you are kind of going out on your own, the four of you together to try to make this thing work. You know, we're in this environment where, you know, the media itself is kind of in flux, it feels like, and we can talk about that a bit more. But how do you reflect on that kind of risk of saying, okay, we had these stable jobs

advice there, you know, were some problems with the conditions that we were under and kind of the expectations of management and stuff. But now we're going to do our own thing. And now we're at kind of the whims of our readers and stuff like that. Like, how are you reflecting on that? I'm still reflecting on it. I'm still processing. I think I had an idea of like what it was going to feel like once it happened. And then it was like, you know, Monday was my last day. And then my email got shut off and it's like, oh my God, I actually quit my job. What have I done? Um, in the middle of like, and then the next day we launched and it's like, now all of a sudden we're

like getting, you know, taken away on this wave of like excitement for launch. So yeah. I mean, just, just kind of reflecting on that and processing. I think the biggest change for me is just, I'm not going to get laid off. Like that's not going to happen. If I lose my job, it's because we have massively fucked up. And so far, you know, it's only been three days, obviously. We don't know what's ahead, but like it's it feels good to have that kind of power in our own hands and say no one else is going to make the decisions for us whether or not we keep doing this. Like we're going to keep doing this because we want to keep doing this. And that's the biggest change. And like my job was stable, but it really,

like there's not a stable job in journalism right now, to be totally honest. Like I think we've all seen playoffs in the news every day. And, you know, especially advice, it just kind of felt like the ground was crumbling a little bit. You know, we were losing access to a lot of really key products that we needed to do our jobs every day while at the same time, executives were making six figure bonuses to do, I don't know what. So yeah, that was kind of the biggest change. Like emotionally, I think is the relief of, Oh, I'm not facing a layoff.

Yeah. I think for me, it was like just the idea of betting on ourselves, knowing that we're doing really good work that we have, you know, people who respect our work, which we're very thankful for. And then just kind of making a decision like, this is going to be hard, but let's try and let's bet on ourselves. And if it works, then we're going to be in charge. And it's like, we had a lot of respect at Vice. There were not obstacles that were purposefully put up by people to prevent Motherboard from doing good work. Motherboard did great work when I was in charge, and it's going to continue to do good work. There's actually a lot of support for Motherboard within Vice, but it's like trying to get very basic things done there is like trying to get the codes for a nuke launch or something. It's like 15 people have to just like sign off on a basic hiring decision. It's like motherboard hasn't made a new hire in over three years. And that

is really hard to kind of like abide as someone who's nominally in charge of the site. And it's like, I had huge freedom there, but at the same time, like we should hire this person. It would be an entry-level position. It would be great for any number of reasons. And there was just like no way of making that happen. And now, I mean, for me personally and financially, it's like, it's pretty scary. Like Sam said, where I got my last paycheck last week. Like, you know, it's. Like Sam said, where I got my last paycheck last week, like, you know, it's been less than a week since I got my last paycheck. And when I don't get a paycheck as like lots of journalists have experienced, but I haven't because I've been

so lucky to have a job for the last 10 years, which I don't take for granted, but I'm going to be like, uh, Oh, like no money game. And so, you know, we're starting this thing. We're asking subscribers for support. We've been overwhelmed by the support, but at the same time, it's like, we're not taking for granted that this is going to work. We have this hope and idea that it will work if we consistently do good work. And if we give people a reason to support our work at the same time, it's like, we're overwhelmed by, you know, all the attention and the readers and the people who've signed up in the first week, but we have a long way to go. It's like, what we've gotten so far is not going to pay any of our rent. And so, you know, we're going to experiment, we're going to try things.

It's also been three days. We didn't expect to create a solvent company in three days. And so I would say very cautiously optimistic about it, but also a little terrified for sure. Absolutely. And I'm sure you haven't run your own media organization in the past, but you've both been tech journalists for quite a long time. You were a senior editor, Sam, and Jason, you were the former editor in chief. So that must also bring some skills and some knowledge of how this kind of works to help you try to make this thing a success.

Would you think that's the case? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think just our combined experience has been, I don't know, it's like creating Voltron over here. We all have our specific skills and we're going to use them. I mean, we're very used to working as a team, so it feels very natural, but I can't imagine just jumping into this without any experience. But I think it's, you know, we take for granted how much experience we have sometimes. We had no idea how many people would subscribe on the first day, like that sort of thing. And so working in the very theoretical, like, I guess,

I don't know, like we had no idea, but like at Motherboard, we used to run Waypoint as well. I mean, really the Waypoint team, which was the video game site advice ran themselves, but they reported up through me. And so when they launched Waypoint Plus, which was a subscriber funded project, it's like, I helped them spin that up logistics-wise. And then I saw how that launch went. And it went really well. But I also saw the pain points for customers, things like that. And then also, part of my job as EIC was pitching Motherboard to advertisers and stuff like that. And so I don't know how to

structure an ad deal, but I do know how to like talk to an advertiser, like here's what we do and here's what we want to do. And here's different things that we could try to do. And, you know, we haven't done any of that at 404. I think that we're open to it. We really want to be like primarily reader funded, but I think we're very cognizant that this is a really hard business. And so we're going to try different things while still always putting the journalism first. I don't think you're going to see chum boxes on our website

and like outbrain taboola, just like crap links. But I think it's like, if some company wants to advertise with us, like we're going to take that meeting and we're going to talk to them and we're going to like see if it makes sense. And I feel personally like I'm equipped to have that conversation.

And then the things that we haven't known how to do, there's like a huge diaspora of vice people who were in the commercial team, were on the audience team, like SEO experts, designers. Like we had a former vice designer, Aaron Shapiro, make our website for us. And he did a fantastic job. And people have been so generous with their time and their labor. And we're just very, very thankful.

And we're three days into this thing, but there's been no disasters yet. And people seem to like it. So that's good. I'm knocking on my fake wood desk. Yeah. Good launch. Hopefully it keeps up. You know, we've talked a bit about 404. You've obviously been mentioning Motherboard and, you know, we're very clear that your experience comes from there. You've both been working there for a long time as well as the two other people on your team, Joseph and Emmanuel. I want to talk a bit about Motherboard itself because it feels to me

like Motherboard occupied this really kind of unique niche within the tech media where it did take a much more kind of critical perspective toward tech and toward the industry than a lot of other publications were doing. And I wonder how you both got involved with that and whether that kind of influenced your desire to work at a place like Motherboard or whether that kind of affected your perspective on tech as well. I can go first with that one, just because I've been very nostalgic on several different interviews so far. So Jason's heard this a couple of times and he experienced it firsthand. I was dying to work at Motherboard for years before I worked at Motherboard. I was signed up for their newsletter where they years before I worked at Motherboard. I was

signed up for their newsletter where they would send like little doodles in them of like whatever they wanted for the week. I drew a doodle to try to get a job there and sent it to like Derek Mead and Adrian Jeffries. I was like, can I please work with you? Please, please. And then I basically just like freelanced until they legally had to give me a phone at my desk. And then they had to give me a paycheck. I was like, I know my rights. I want a paycheck. But yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of where we're all coming from is like, we were huge fan boys of motherboard before we worked at motherboard, just because of the legacy that brand had and has still. And I think they're still going to keep it going as such. You know, if anyone is going to overcome

some of the challenges they're facing, it's going to be that team. We're all like super rooting for each other. So yeah, I think just like Motherboard was always like technology for humans, I think was kind of the underlying ethos there was we're writing about people. We're not writing about computers or like robots.

Like these are humans behind these things and we want to talk to them and i think that's something we're going to continue doing at 404 but it was definitely inspired by all of that work and that kind of like diy punk kind of mindset of like we're gonna fuck up the internet uh today what are we gonna we're going to fuck up the internet today. What are we going to, we're going to log on and like, see who's what like powers that be that we can ruin. Crawl into weird spaces. Yeah. I had been there for 10 years and I found it honestly through one of my friends who was not a journalist, but loved vice and loved motherboard. He was studying nuclear fission at Carnegie Mellon. And he like showed up at vice and knocked on the door and was like, Hey, can Carnegie Mellon. And he like showed up at Vice and knocked on the door and was like, Hey, can I work here? And they were like, sure thing. Like that was, you know, 2009 or something. And then, you know, he wasn't a writer, like he didn't

do anything there, but he was one of my close friends from childhood. And he knew I was a tech journalist and was like, Hey, you should like read this site and apply to like work there. And one day I saw that one of their editors had gotten a job at Gizmodo. So I thought, Hey, maybe they need people to write things for them. So I emailed Derek Mead, who was the editor in chief at the time. And I was like, Hey, I work at us news and world report. Like I cannot possibly think of a stuffier publication than US News and World Report, but that's where I was working. And I was writing a lot about piracy and drones in the United States. And those are kind of motherboardy topics. It was surveillance type stuff. And to be totally honest, US News and World Report was a right leaning publication, like center right, whose entire strategy at the time was like can we

get on the drudge report and i had like an editor who was obsessed with this but drudge like has this weird soft spot or did at the time for just like future type stuff like robots and even at the time ai so i kept writing articles like i would see a scientific study and like write it up and be like oh like wasn't right leaning i've been right leaning, but he would pick it up and then it'd do like massive traffic or whatever. But just because it got on this page that everyone clicked. And that has nothing to do with why I worked at Motherboard, but that's why I started covering those topics in the first place. And that sort of led me to like write articles about Copa-mism, which was this piracy religion that,

you know, still sort of exists. But I like wrote that and that went like very viral on Reddit. And then like, I don't know, I feel like I got sort of like sucked into these communities on the internet that ended up being pretty motherboardy. So anyways, Derek was like, yes, you can write for me, like pitch me a story. So I pitched him a story. And then the next day he's like, here's CMS access, which is crazy. CMS access is like the backend that allows you to publish articles on the website. And to give that to a freelancer who had written one article is like, I could have deleted Vice's website. You know, that's like the fear of sort of giving those sorts of things, or I could have published something libelous or crazy. You know, I never did that for obvious reasons, but it's just like, that would never happen today at any publication.

And then I don't know, from there, I just started writing and writing. And I was really inspired by Motherboard and the people who worked there. And I think the thing that was so inspiring about them is that they did not use or like technology. They weren't gadget freaks. And this was during an age where there was like lots of gadget freaks. It was like a lot of the tech blogs were covering, here's the new iPhone, here's the new iOS update. And oh my God, like the camera has one extra megapixel this year. And it's like, they wouldn't even cover the iPhone launch. And if they did, it would be like, now the iPhone is encrypted. Here's what it means for your privacy, that sort of thing. So Motherboard has always cared about how humans impact technology and how technology

impacts humans and especially like marginalized communities. And that was very inspiring, like from day one, I was really just like proud of that mission. And I think that's why Motherboard always sort of like, and will continue to keep its focus is because it's always put that at the center of what it does. I think that makes a lot of sense, right? And I think that a lot of listeners of the podcast will be familiar with Motherboard and the work that you were doing there because it was such a bright spot within tech media for people who do want

a more critical perspective on the industry and technology and whatnot, right? And it was always a place to go to for that kind of reporting and that kind of a perspective that you might not get as much of or any of if you're visiting other kind of tech-focused publications. I wonder, like, having that experience at Motherboard, which has this very kind of distinct perspective on technology in the tech industry. How does that make you reflect on the broader tech media and how it approaches tech and the tech industry and, you know, these kinds of billionaires and stuff like that? Maybe this is totally egotistical, but I think what I liked about Motherboard before I was even

hired and what they were doing before I was there. And then what we kept doing while I was there was influential on the rest of tech media. You know, it was like, here's like a bunch of like as close to Luddites as you could get doing like tech journalism. And that's what people resonate with. And that's what people want to hear at a time when it was like Jason said, like a lot of like gadget blogging, a lot of really cool, smaller outlets doing similar, more critical, more cynical even blogging. But the big successful ones were mostly writing glowing profiles of executives and things like that. It was just like, what's going on? So I think the tech

journalism landscape has changed and it has become more critical of those systems and those companies that are ruling the world and running everything that are mostly tech companies. And yeah, I mean, it's really cool to see that happen. And I think motherboard was a part of that at least to kind of drive that forward. But yeah, as far as how it looks now, I mean, Jason's got probably a more bird's eye view of that too. Yeah. I mean, I do agree with Sam and this is like, I'm sorry, but I'm going to brag about motherboard for a minute. I'm very, very proud of what motherboard did while I was there. I know that I'm talking about it in past tense. I can only talk about it while I was there. I want to be very clear. Motherboard still exists. The people there are

fantastic. They're doing great work. They're going to continue to do great work, but I'm going to talk about a past tense from when I was sort of running it. It's like Sam was the first person in the world to write about deep fakes, to discover them, to write about them. It's like that was on the cover of every newspaper. Like soon after that. Louise Matsakis was the first person to write about the quote-unquote Google memo, which was kind of the early culture war type situation that we're now seeing, not just in Silicon Valley, but across the entirety of our culture and politics, obviously. I mean, Joseph Cox has just been incredible, incredible leading the way on a variety of hacking topics. Same with Lorenzo when he was there.

Lauren Gurley and Edward Ngueso Jr., some of the earliest and best reporting on the tech labor movement, which now every publication is covering. Motherboard was one of the first to cover that. Right to Repair is something that I found because I broke my MacBook and was like, what the fuck? This is crazy that I can't fix it. And I like talked to Kyle Weins and I fixed it and was type of beat, but we were consistently able to do it. And I think the reason we were consistently able to do it is because of the way we approached our reporting, which was things have changed, as Sam said. But for a long time, tech blogs and tech news websites wrote the articles that the companies told them to. for lack of a better term. They played an access game where if Facebook was launching a new feature, they would go to Wired or Gizmodo or The Verge or whoever. And I like all these publications. They all do good work,

but I'm saying this is how it works. It's like they go to a specific publication. They say, hey, do you want the exclusive on this thing? You can talk to our executives. You have to publish it at this specific time. And then they do it. And the way it also works is if you piss those companies off, you don't get those exclusives. And the way it also works on top of that is even if you have like a young reporter who wants to write a bunch of negative stories about a company, let's say there's someone who's been there for a long time, who has a really good relationship with like the PR people at Apple or something. If you are a junior reporter and you write something negative, like maybe that senior reporter is like, yo, you fucked up my relationship with this company. And so it's not always like so direct as like Apple is mad at you. It might be that someone at your own publication is mad that you wrote

something that their contact might interpret as being negative. And therefore that would make it harder for them to do their job. And it's just like, that was never a thing at motherboard. It's like, we didn't care, did not care what Facebook was launching, did not care what Apple was launching, did not care what Google or Tesla or Elon Musk or whatever. And it's like, we can get into what we did care about, but we never played that access game. We always cared more about how these products were impacting communities and workers and the people who were using them. And that's where we got all our stories from by talking to like people who are low. I mean, I use this not with any sort of like morality or anything, but like entry level workers

and sort of like blue collar workers at tech companies and stuff like that who are saying like this surveillance program Amazon just like rolled out is really affecting us as a delivery driver. Like here's the document they sent us. And in that way, you can get these exclusives about these big companies, but you don't have to be handed them by Jeff Bezos. Yeah. And I'm sure Jeff Bezos is going to hand you a very different story than those entry-level blue-collar workers, right? I think that's really fascinating because I think that's one thing that, you know, as we talk about the role that tech media plays and kind of the perspective of it, the influence of access, I feel like is something that's getting more and more attention recently, right?

Because, you know, if you write something negative about Apple, then your journalist won't be invited to the big keynote or whatever. And, you know, it's the same with the other companies, right? You'll get cut off from that access to these executives, to these events that are perceived as being important. Because one of the key aspects of that coverage to say, look at the new product, look at the new feature, you know, this is what it's going to mean for you. This is how it's going to be so great that as you say, you know, your camera has one more megapixel or whatever. And it does seem kind of divorced from, you know, that broader consideration of what these technologies and what these companies are actually doing in our broader society. And so

I wonder, you know, you were both at Motherboard for a while, what it was like to be working at this place that was doing this very kind of critical journalism on these companies that was not interested in access, but then seeing the kind of broader tech media having this, in some cases on critical coverage, but then also seeing the evolution, I feel like in a lot of those publications where they were starting to be more open to doing more critical work, even if that was still alongside some of these kind of access pieces or what I tend to call like rewritten press releases and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, seeing that, like it feels good, but it also feels like for a long time,

I feel like Motherboard was like a kind of an underdog in the fight. That's not the case anymore. Like Motherboard is one of the most respected tech journalism outlets there are. But for a while we were punching way, way above our weight and we knew it. So seeing kind of the very highly resourced, highly, you know, like air quote, respected tech magazines, getting the access and getting the scoops. It was like, okay, you need to fucking link to us. Like we need some credit. Like we're out here grinding and you're taking the credit for it. So yeah, it's kind of a double-edged sword. It's like, okay, we're kind of inventing the game in a lot of ways. And a lot of these beats like show some respect. I'm really not trying to talk shit about our

competitors. I respect what they do. They do a lot of good stories and like you said it's like they do a lot of critical stuff alongside some of the rewritten press releases and like i'm guilty of when i am getting a new phone it's like i want to know the features of the iphone so i'll go read that somewhere and i'm not i don't like begrudge it you know it's just not how we operated because we knew we couldn't compete on that. But one thing that Motherboard did, and that has nothing to do with a specific strategy at Motherboard or anywhere else, it's that we wrote about the things that people on our team cared about and people's interests change over time. It's like, I do not write about drones anymore because I don't care about drones. Like we never hired for like, this is going to be what you write about and you have to write about it forever. It would be like, we're hiring a writer. Tell us what you care about.

Tell us something we don't know. And you have someone like Edward Ongueso Jr. come in and say, like, I just wrote a dissertation on Uber and its labor policies, and I'm tied into all of these workers' rights groups and things like that. And then you take that and you take Edward and then take his interests and he says, this is actually happening at Instacart too. This is actually happening at Amazon also. And you sort of like ride these people's interests to where they may lead. And that usually goes to really interesting places. Yeah. I think the building of the team, I think was always one of the strongest, if not the strongest part of Motherboard. I wasn't really part of like the hiring decisions, but you know, when someone new came on, it was always like, fuck yeah. Like it was always some

like anti-establishment goblin. It was great. Like it was fantastic to like, like, yes, welcome to the family. You fit in immediately because you are not like trying to get this kind of glowing access type stuff that we don't care about. We want to write what we care about and what we think is interesting. That was always a big strength, I feel. Yeah, I obviously, you know, found out about Ed and his work from reading all his fantastic pieces on Motherboard. And it's great to see him kind of continue what he's been doing since then. And, you know, just as a kind of final question on tech media, and then we'll bring the conversation somewhere else. But, you know, there's a lot of discussion lately, I guess, around how the tech media has covered

people like Elon Musk and these kind of large figures within the tech industry. And, you know, I guess finally, belatedly, maybe coming to the realization that the way that they covered them was probably not the best, right? You know, I think of a piece by Casey Newton a couple weeks ago saying, oh, it's time to change how we cover Elon Musk. And it's like only now in 2023. I guess, what's your reflection on how the media approaches these kind of large figures, not just the tech publications like The Verge and, you know, whoever else, but also the wider kind of mainstream media as they have kind of jumped in on this, you know, seeing just this coverage of like, Elon Musk sends a tweet, and all of a sudden, that's a news story. Like, what do you make of this approach to how they approach reporting on these important figures and then also the effect that that has in how people think about them? Valley VCs, et cetera, have turned on the woke mobs of the media, the quote unquote, like, oh, they're coming after us. They're anti-tech, they're anti-everything. And I think that that happened because there was this very conscious decision, not like

there was some evil meeting where everyone was like, we got to change. But like there was a tide shift where it's like, like all these companies are doing like workers abuses. And a lot of these big VCs are funding really scary things. And, you know, the guy who made Oculus is now making AI drone border stuff with DHS. And so like naturally the coverage started getting more negative. And one thing that I think, like we talked about it earlier, it's like when you have played an access game for a really long time, it's not that these people are necessarily your friends, but you have like a friendly relationship with like, oh, like I'm going to give you a story.

Like, let's grab a drink next time you're in Silicon Valley, blah, blah, blah. And then their best friends in the press start writing mean articles about them. And they're like blindsided by it and they overreact. It's like P. Marka has blocked like almost every reporter is very mad at the press like all the time. And I think that if the coverage was more critical from the outset, this wouldn't have come as such a shock to Silicon Valley and there wouldn't have been like, oh, you guys hate us now. It would have been like, oh, you've always covered us like you cover any other company. We need to either deal with you or figure out how we're going to deal with you. And so quite literally, I think a lot of people are just like... A lot of very powerful people are taking it personally. And that's not a good position to be in because one, that opens you up to harassment like we've seen elon musk tweet really mean things at specific reporters and that's not a fun situation to be in

it's similar to like trying to cover trump or something which i don't proclaim to know how people should cover trump but it's the same playbook where it's like oh let's be fair to this guy like like new y, he's sort of middle of the road. We're going to write a negative story and say climate change is bad, but then we're also going to go talk to a big oil executive or whatever. So I think that right now, some tech publications, like the biggest sort of mainstream ones, I would say like the big generalist publications that have tech reporters are still kind of going through this process where they're like, we're not sure how to cover someone

like Elon Musk because he's clearly important, but then he's also like full of shit most of the time. And then you end up with these sort of like middle of the road articles that say like, well, Elon says he's going to Mars tomorrow. Skeptics say he doesn't have a rocket or whatever. It's kind of like you end up pissing everyone off, basically, is kind of my theory. But I don't know. I don't know what the solution is. Totally. Yeah.

You know, we can't tell the difference. Elon Musk says one thing and people who accurately, you know, assess the capabilities that are available right now say, actually, that makes no sense. How can we know? Who could say? So I want to shift a bit because, you know, earlier you were talking about vice, right? And I feel like possibly one of the reasons that motherboard had this more oppositional kind of energy to it was, you know, that it did exist under a Vice umbrella.

And for a long time, you know, I feel like people turn to Vice for a perspective on the world. And that included tech through motherboard that, you know, gave them a very different perspective and view on what was happening, right. Then what they might get from other publications. But obviously we know that for a while, Vice was kind of at the center where it got a lot of attention. It got a lot of business deals. But then in recent years, I think it's fair to say things have been shifting. And, you know, as you've been describing, the company has been having some difficulties and that has also affected the staff and the people who work there. So I wonder what your reflections are on Vice and how it has evolved and kind of what is going on there right now. Yeah. Um, I want to hear what Sam thinks here, but I had had like not a front row seat to

this, but like a fifth row seat, second row, pretty close. Like I, you know, I've seen a lot there. And the first thing I want to say is the journalists who work at vice are fantastic. They are simply the best. They care about the right who work at Vice are fantastic. They are simply the best. They care about the right things. They're tenacious. They're fearless. They're fantastic. I don't have a bad word to say about any of the journalists there.

And honestly, I don't have a lot of bad things to say about any specific executives or people there either, because I do think that Vice was and still is an important voice out there. And I'm glad it existed. And it gave us the space to do what we did. And I think it's going to continue to do that. The thing that was always sort of clear to me, but also hindsight is 20-20 type things, and I also couldn't have stopped it is like when vice filed for bankruptcy, they have to file a narrative of how this happened. And it was like a 100 page document that explained like, how did we get here? And tell us just for listeners about when would

these documents have come out? So that was in May when vice filed for bankruptcy in May, I live in Los Angeles now and Vice's headquarters is in Williamsburg. And I was going to New York to visit people and, you know, me with my team and stuff. And I walked into the building and the bankruptcy dropped like the moment I got there. So I was like, okay, good. Going to be an interesting day. In any case, the narrative of this bankruptcy and how it happened, it's a tech story, I think. And it's one of venture capital and private equity and a company taking sort of like increasing loans and funding at really high valuations that may have made sense in one economic climate. They probably never made sense, but they weren't like uncommon for what was going on at the time. And like sort of slowly losing control of the company because they kept having to take on more and more investment to kind of like make ends meet.

And then eventually you look up and you owe like all of these VCs and private equity firms and Disney and A&E and the history, like all of these like big companies, you owe them a lot of money at really high interest rates. And they're like, give us our money back and do these layoffs, change your strategy. Like there's sort of this influence coming from a level that is not even in the building. It's like, I don't even know if it's in the boardroom. It's probably above the boardroom where it's like, I don't even know if it's in the boardroom. It's probably above the boardroom where it's like, I don't know, Disney is like, where the fuck is my money? Like Mickey Mouse shows up and is like, I want my money back. And then we're like, we don't have the money.

And then so you go borrow more money to give money back to Mickey Mouse. And then to get that money, you have to go to basically like the payday loans place. So you're getting at a higher interest rate. And then the terms of that are like, if you don't pay us our money back, we're seizing control of the company. And that's what happened. It's like, we sort of saw this happening in slow motion over time where it's like, if I took $500 million to launch a TV network, the TV network did a lot of good stuff, but TV not super popular these days, as many people know. And so then it's like, well, let's try something else. And then you need funding to sort of like start that. And then you owe other people money. And so I think the latest numbers

I saw is like Vice Pardon, like $700 million in revenue in 2022. So like last year, and it's like, that's a lot of money. Like that's a lot of revenue coming in and yet it's still lost a ton of money. And the reason I lost so much money is because it was paying all this interest. It's paying all these office loans in like 50 countries. It's just like a complicated and a big company. And it's a, it's a shame. It's a tragedy. And it's, it's really sad because there's so much good work that has happened there. And it's none of the journalist's fault. And to a large extent, it's not even the fault of these executives who have been making a lot of money. It's the fault of like a million decisions over the course of like 20 years that eventually came due. And it's like, fuck you, give us our money back. We can't. Okay, we're bankrupt. Okay. Don't know what to do now. That's my perspective on it. And that's all like kind of public in this very long document that was interesting to me as an employee, but probably not that interesting to the masses. I think what you're describing there with, you know, a company

that is doing like good work that has some sort of a business model, as you say, brought in $700 million in revenue, but because of just the way that the financing worked and because of like the business deals and because of involvement with private equity and all this stuff, like it just doesn't work out because the amount of money you're expected to make in this sort of a business environment just does not line up with the realities of how the business works. And I feel like we've seen a number of companies kind of be absorbed by or kind of die because of those conditions, even though they might've actually had a working business model. Like I think of some retailers who've gone under in recent years, not because they didn't make money just because the deals they made made no

sense. Right. But Sam, I'll pass it to you for your thoughts. Yeah. I mean, I, I have a different perspective on it, but it's not a disagreeing perspective. It's like the other side of the coin. It's like Jason and Emmanuel were very good at shielding the people doing the writing and the reporting from the craziness of the finances. Like they were looking at things that we never saw because they didn't want that to affect the work. And it probably would have affected the work. It would have freed people out

and made us more careful and try to be safe and things like that. It's very hard when you're worried about your company folding and where's the money coming from? It's like, mom and dad don't want you to know. Everything is fine was kind of the vibe. And I think that was really good. And that was exactly the right call. So my perspective on it is more from being in the union, being on

the labor committee, the leadership committee on the union for about a year or so, maybe a little less, and then in the union the whole time. And that was hard work and also the most fulfilling work, probably the work that kept me going at some days having, you know, people to not just like commiserate with, cause that's always, there's no shortage of that in journalism, but you know, people to say, okay, can we change something? You know, even just something small within this company, can we get like a bike rack on the roof so people can not get their bikes stolen, which happened.

Like, you know, it's like very minor wins kind of keep you going a lot of the times at these places. And then it was also, it was the really big ones, like the contract that they won in, I'm going to fuck up the year and Emmanuel's going to kill me. But like, it was like 2016 or 17 was like the contract that would have affected me when I first got hired. And it changed my life. The raise that I got from the union contract and the raise that would have affected me when I first got hired. And it changed my life. The raise that I got from the union contract and the raise that so many people got from that, like lifted them up so that they could keep going in journalism. It was a very direct thing that happened and that the union did. So there was that side of it. And then there was also like, it exposed you to a lot of, I don't want to say total indifference, but a lot of it was

indifference coming from the company side of things. It was like, we want to help you, but we're in HR. We're the lawyers. Like we work for the company and like, we're going to negotiate and make this go the way that we want to go. And you're going to have to fight us for it. And it was that kind of perspective that was toward the end. It was like, okay, now that we see like, we see some of these like huge bonuses, we see where the company is spending the money. We see it's a very complicated company that is spending all kinds of money in all kinds of ways that aren't the work. And we're begging for like severance payouts that people are contractually owed. And it's like, what's going on? Something has really gone off the rails.

And I mean, that's work that the union is still doing. I helped start the GoFundMe that was for people whose severances were delayed. And that was a huge response to that. People really love vice's journalists. I will say that. And they wanted to see them get the money that they were owed. So it was a huge response to the GoFundMe. And that's reopened now so people can go donate more to that because the money is still not coming through. And that's I think that's public knowledge. But the stuff that's going on at Vice is it's happening at a level, like Jason said, it's like above even the board's control. It's like we don't know who to talk to in the union. It's like the Wizard of Oz. It's like we don't know who's behind the curtain anymore. Who's responsible? You just want someone to shake. And it's like,

that person, we don't know where they are. And the union's still doing that work. And like, they're still advocating for our colleagues, current and former. And that is really grinding, really hard work, but it's so, so important. But for a lot of my tenure advice, that was my perspective was from more of kind of like the bottom up, like who do we get on the phone to even just like get us like a small win would be really good. You know, the contract had huge wins in it, but just the day-to-day stuff was felt really good to be able to say, Hey, give us this, this minor thing, give us better internet, give us cell phones, like that kind of stuff. So. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And to hear what that meant for the workers as this

company is going through all that, I think is super important, right? Because our direct connection as people who are reading motherboard or reading vice generally was not the Shane Smiths of the world or these other kinds of big executives, but where the journalists who were doing the fantastic work that we were reading, you know, the people like the both of you or Joseph or Emmanuel or Ed or all these other folks who you've been talking about, right, who are doing this great work, who we got to know from seeing their stories on Motherboard, you know, these are the people that we ultimately cared about and, you know, felt a connection to, right, and respected for the work that they were doing. And, you know, you've been talking about vice there but i want to expand that to kind of the media more broadly because as you mentioned you

know this is a difficult time for media in general i feel like there was this moment where quote unquote new media was expanding you know this media that was online it had all this attention all this funding and i feel like in the past couple of years but especially in the past like what six months a year there seems to be a real kind of shaking out and kind of, I don't know, reassessment of all of that, or, you know, kind of the new financial situation is finally bringing a lot of things to a head that seemed to have been problems for a while. So what are your reflections on the state of the media right now as we see all of these layoffs and we see these media companies experiencing so much difficulty? I mean, it's really sad. I don't really know what to say

other than journalism is very important and there's so many talented people who have lost their jobs. There's so many talented journalists who are underemployed or are freelancing and have to like sort of work on the side. And it's bad. I can't even like begin to sort of assess why it's happening. Like, I mean, I can, but it would take a very long time. But I think it's this thing where a lot of them are ad supported. The ad supported model fell out the floor, you know, with Google and Facebook. But then also we're now seeing the ad market sort of further erode because of higher interest rates. And like a lot about Vice and Motherboard and the Sins of Vice, and I could talk about it all day. I like it. But I think for us, it's like, we want to talk about Vice and Motherboard this week because a lot of people care about it. But we definitely want to

have our own identity, prove that this new thing is worth paying attention to, is worth reading, is worth subscribing to, et cetera. And I think from a business perspective, it's like, we started looking at how many people were reading Motherboard every month, and it's millions and millions and millions of people. And that's good for Vice. And we made what I would consider to be good money there. I didn't feel underpaid. I think that the union did a very good job at like making sure that our staff made good money. I think everyone deserves more, but you know, it was like, okay. And then you start being like, okay, how many of these millions of people need to actually subscribe for me to be able to pay my rent and then for us to be able to hire someone. And it's not that many, it's, you know, a few thousand essentially. And then it's like, if you can get more than a few thousand, then you can start to hire other journalists and we can start to grow. And we want to be very sustainable and very responsible and not

overextend ourselves and not put us in a position where we hired someone and then there's not money for that person and we have to lay them off. It's like that is the reason why 404 Media is for people and not more. It's because when you start adding people, the numbers start getting very scary in terms of how many subscribers you need in order to make ends meet. All of that said, it's like Vice Pardon $700 million last year. We don't need $700 million. We need not even $1 million. And so it's like, if we can convert a small percentage of the people that we know

care about this work into paying subscribers and then supplement it with ads, or if we do really good work, you know, sell that as a documentary or something like that. It's like, we suddenly are in total control of our company and we're able to make an honest living. And I think that's what we want to do. We're very confident about the journalism side of things because we've been doing it for a long time and we're like confident that people will read articles and be like this is good shit but what we're figuring out is like can we get enough people to give us ten dollars a month and have

that not only sustain us but then be able to hire more talented people to do more great work and sort of make that into a small business. And for me, that's the fun of it. That's like the, I always want to challenge myself and like learn new skills and stuff. And so figuring out how accounting at a company works, like figuring out which costs are actually necessary, like that sort of thing has been really fun. And then the last thing on that point is a lot of these companies, Vice extremely, but also included is like their overhead is astronomical. It's like, there's all these offices in like prime Williamsburg, prime Venice. It's like these

buildings are worth millions and millions of dollars. They're pretty much empty because people have been working remote for a long time. It's like Vice paid all these consultants. There's just all of this overhead that is not needed. It's like Vice has a custom CMS that is not good. And they're underpaid certainly, but there's programmers who have to keep that up and so on and so forth. And it's like, we're using Ghost, which is an open source CMS that it's costing us like $80 a month to like have the site up. And that will scale if we get more subscribers, but it's extremely reasonable and it's extremely like off the shelf. It just works. And that's just to say that the cost of like actually spinning something up has come down to the point where we each put in $1,000 and we didn't spend all of it

to do sort of like all of the things needed to just like get a business and a website up off the ground. And that's really cool. And I know that there's a lot of other people who have done things like that, but I'm hopeful that, you know, this sort of like lower barrier to entry will make it so that you don't have this like built in crazy overhead costs needed just to publish blogs on the internet, you know? Yeah. It's all part of what you just asked. It's like, what is going on in the landscape right now?

And it's like, what you're seeing with the most exciting thing you're seeing is these independent media companies, you know, born out of frustration with the old way. And I think we're a big part of that too. And we are following in the footsteps of a lot of these folks. We're not doing the same exact thing as anyone out there and they're not doing the same thing as us, but like there is this need and this like hunger for like something to work. People are rooting for these things to work. And that means they're giving their money for these things to work. And that's like not a small thing. You know, how many like paywalls do I click by a day of like giant media corporations and getting around them, you know, and then, but I'm paying for like several independent media companies to stay

up to date on what they're doing. I think people are really hungry for like optimism in this industry for something to make it. And it's that kind of direct accountability to people that I think the people doing the work want to have again. It's like, we want to have a community of readers that we interact with more often. And we want to only be responsible for like what they want to read. It's like, we're going to put out things that people tell us are important to them. It's a very direct line in that way. And yeah, getting rid of a lot of that overhead, getting rid of a lot of that kind of like trimming all of that down to just let's do some cool blogs, like put out some cool FOIA reporting, you know, show some cool documents that the government didn't want you to

see, I think is a huge part of that. Yeah. I think that's why we're here basically is the state of everything right now. Yeah. Joseph is keeping us very honest. There's been a few software things where it's like, do we really need to spend $60 on this thing that will enable us to record a podcast and do social videos and all of this other stuff. And he's like, I don't know, man. And I'm like, I think we need it, Joseph. I think we need it. Because despite everything I've said, I'm like, oh, like maybe I should get a new computer. And then I'm like, I'll wait. I'll wait until see if things work. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely understand that impulse, right? Everyone likes

a new computer every now and then. But I think it's great to hear what you're saying. And like when you talked about the overhead that these kind of large companies like Advice has, it just brought to mind, and obviously we're talking about a very different scale and whatnot. But, you know, when you think about Uber and Hubert Horan, you know, the critic of Uber has written about this, how it presented itself as this more efficient model, but actually has this massive overhead, these expensive programmers, you know, all these massive headquarters, whereas you're like little taxi operation has this fleet of vehicles that it manages, that it can insure together. It's much more of an efficient operation than this kind of massive conglomerate that's

trying to be globally relevant. And so, you know, to have you describe what you're doing at 404 and how it works and, you know, how you're hoping readers are going to support you, I think a good way to end off this conversation is really to ask about your focus, right? In, you know, the essay that you wrote kind of introducing 404 to the world, you wrote about how you're focused on ground up reporting and what that's going to mean for the way that you approach these stories that you're doing. So can you talk to us a bit about that approach that you're taking to journalism and the kind of topics that you want to be digging into? Yeah, I think that this is something that we've each kind of mastered over

the last few years and it's ever shifting, but it's really about embedding in communities that we find either on the internet or in real life that we feel are important and that have something to say and then staying there, which is just to say, we don't want to parachute into a world, write about it once and then disappear. I think that's how you tell a story that is both inaccurate and upset the community that you're writing about. It's similar to travel journalism where you don't want to parachute into a country, spend three days there, and then write a huge essay about all of the problems with Cambodia or whatever. That used to be a type of journalism that was very common and has fallen out of style,

although it still exists. And so we want to be that, but for the internet. I'll let Sam talk about what she covers, but I think it's a perfect example with porn and sex work and AI and that sort of thing. So maybe Sam, talk about your approach to reporting. Yeah. I mean, I can use the stories that we've been publishing this week as an example. So this week, a manual published on lunch day, a very in-depth investigation into a generative AI community website system, whatever you're going to call it, that dives into not only how this stuff is made and how it works, but like what it means to people in the actual like human adult industry. So you have these people tinkering with like AI porn and making basically deep fakes of people in real life and celebrities and real people.

And then you have actual like adult performers saying, you know, this is crazy, scary. It's not okay. My images were scraped from Reddit. Like it's, you know, I'm in a database now that I don't know about. I didn't know about until you emailed me about it, that sort of thing. And then after that, you know, I published a story about how people are making, you know, really wild horror porn basically. And a lot of it is very weird and twisted and disturbing. And some of it is actually very interesting and intriguing. And, you know, talking to like sociologists and porn scholars and actually talking to a pornographer who's been in the game for 30 years and who has seen a lot of these changes about what this means so and you know we also are like in the discord

where it's happening and we're talking to the people who are making it we're saying hey why are you doing this like what about this is interesting to you have you thought about the implications of what you're doing and getting their perspectives on this? The embedding part of it happens in the communities where you're like, I actually want to talk to the people making this. I'm not just going to do a drive-by on their weird AI porn hobby.

I'm going to actually say, hey, interesting pastime you got there. Tell me more about it. Why is it intriguing to you to make this? Are you ever a little worried about where this is going and getting their answers I think is really interesting. So it's continuing on a legacy that we've been doing for a really long time of, we were the first people to cover deepfakes of course. And then, you know, we were among the first to actually treat in a really more mainstream way sites like Pornhub as important as like Facebook or Google, treating it like a tech company because it is a tech company, treating the industry like the multi-billion dollar like revenue generating industry that it is and talking to the people who are actually facing the challenges within that, not just like the PR person at Pornhub who's sending me cute graphs about what people are Googling during the Super Bowl, which is what a lot of the reporting looked like before, you know, we started actually doing some different stuff. So yeah, I think

that's, that's an example of just like what that's going to look like into the future too. We're not going to be just a porn site to be clear. No, we're not. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. Unfortunately I can speak for myself and it's like, I have a lot of different interests and I love like going down rabbit holes, et cetera. But I think right to repair is a good one for me to talk about. I've been covering the right to repair movement for a really long time. It's this idea that if you buy something, you should be able to fix it. And companies should not be able to monopolize repair and prevent people, like put artificial blocks to people repairing the things that they bought.

And this is a very popular idea among consumers. It's like there was a bill in Massachusetts a few years ago about car right to repair. And it passed something like 75% to 25%. Quite literally, when I say like ground up reporting, it's like I'm talking to repair people who are opening up iPhones and being like, there's a defect in here. Like they're looking at it under a microscope. You know, I'm talking to those people. And then, you know, you kind of like write about that issue and then publish an article about it. And then consumers say, oh, I didn't know why my touchscreen suddenly stopped working. Turns out I have this issue.

And when I took it to the Apple store, they said my warranty was void and it wasn't a problem. And you start writing those stories kind of like over and over again. One of my first articles was about this thing called condensation death in AirPods Max, which are $550 over the ear headphones. And basically it's like, it's a mixture of like sweat and just like humidity and condensation where if you wear your AirPods max for too long, like water gets in them and it kills the headphones. And this is something that if you

like go on Reddit or the Apple forums or talk to repair people, they're like, yeah, like this is a huge problem. I've had seven pairs of AirPods max. Every time I take it back to Apple, they're like, yeah, this is a huge problem. I've had seven pairs of AirPods Max. Every time I take it back to Apple, they're like, there's nothing wrong here. And you see enough of that and you start writing about it. And I was able to find a court case where Apple admits that this is a problem, but says that users should simply not wear their AirPods Max outside. People should just like, people should know that they shouldn't walk strenuously while wearing these headphones.

And it's basically like starting with this little like rabbit hole where it's like, oh, here's a post on Reddit with like 200 comments and all these people saying that they have a problem and talking to those people, figuring out what's going on and then kind of like laddering up from there. That's not to say that we find all our stories

on Reddit and Discord or whatever, but it's like, it's diving into these communities, figuring out what they care about or what they're freaking out about, and then taking it seriously, reporting out and publishing it. And one thing we've definitely learned is that like, if a niche community that we found is all talking about the same thing at the same time for an extended period of time, it's probably a big fucking deal.

If they find it important enough to be spending their time posting about it or tweeting about it or talking about it or writing their senators about it or whatever, it's probably worth covering. So that's what we're doing. We're doing it on hacking and cybersecurity, cybercrime, porn, AI.

I'm going to be doing right to repair. I'm doing a ton of FOIA work, which I really love doing. Just like filing requests with state and local governments. You can find out a lot about like surveillance companies that are trying to get contracts

with a small local town. And like when they try to get that contract, they're going to send a 40-page PDF that's like, look at all of our capabilities. We can monitor the entire internet all day, every day, and alert you if anyone says anything about your town. It's stuff like that that we're able to pretty consistently do because we've sort of figured out how these power structures work

and how government works and how communities work. And I don't know, we're excited to do it as much as we possibly can. Yeah. And I'm excited to read it. You know, I think that that's a great kind of way to end off our conversation to give people an idea of what 404 is going to do. You know, if you've liked Motherboard before, you know, you should definitely go check what 404 is going to do. You know, if you've liked motherboard before, you know, you should definitely go check out 404 and consider supporting it. If you didn't know about motherboard before, well, now you can go read that. And you can also go read 404 and check out the great work that's happening there. I'm really excited to see what you're going to be

doing at 404. And I wish you all the best of luck with it. Thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about it. Thank you so much. It's 404media.co, not.com. We couldn't afford.com. The M was like a hundred thousand dollars. Yeah. Leave off the M and I will put a link to it in the show notes so people can go check it out along with some of the recent stories that you've been doing since it launched that we mentioned in the episode. So thanks again. Cool. Thank you. Thank you so much. Jason Kebler and Samantha Cole are co-founders of 404 Media, and Samantha is the author of How Sex Changed the Internet. If you want to find out more about 404 Media and support their work,

you can go to 404media.co. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week so we can keep having these critical conversations, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.