A strange shift has overcome NGOs, academia and philanthropy working in the digital politics and culture spheres – a long held commitment to freedom of expression has been overtaken by a new consensus that accepts actively shaping and removing ‘unacceptable’ ideas and information. What is unacceptable or untrue tends to change weekly, if not more often.
This ‘shaping’ is often done under the guise of combating ‘disinformation’, an overfunded industry that has spawned hundreds of “Centers for the study of x,y, and z”. Huge amounts of money have been piped in from the foundation world, and even more, has come from government. The justification is ‘public health’ or ‘safety’, however, the Twitter files reveal that scaled, this approach has the exact opposite effect. It is Orwellian, to be kind.
I have spent the last several weeks supporting journalist Matt Taibbi to develop Twitter Files releases #18 and #19.
Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort led by the Stanford Internet Observatory that brought together elite academia, NGOs, government, and experts in AI and social media monitoring, with six of the biggest social media companies on the planet. They went far beyond their “misinformation” remit. Twitter Files show the Virality Project pushed platforms to censor “stories of true vaccine side effects”.
Partnered in the effort were Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Medium, and Twitter. In partnership with Pentagon and DARPA funded companies, the Virality Project was able to surveil all these platforms using machine learning systems.
The academic ethics of this should always have been dubious.
The result was an approach that sought to control narrative rather highlight untruths. For example, reporting side effects of the now-pulled Johnson & Johnson vaccine would have been labelled “misinformation”. Had Kerryn Phelps (the first female president of the Australian Medical Association) taken to Twitter to describe her and her wife’s vaccine injuries, these too would have been labelled misinformation. German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach would have also been censored for admitting that as a result of the vaccines “there are severe disabilities, and some of them will be permanent”. (Video)
Rather than listening out for safety signals to protect the public, leaders in the “anti-disinformation” field ran cover to protect BigPharma.
The Virality Project, however, is just part of a broader cultural shift that reverses long-standing liberal/left commitments to free expression and allows censorship in the name of protection and safety. However in suppressing “stories of true vaccine side effects” the Virality Project put people in danger.
The centrality of censorship ideology to the digital rights field is illustrated in former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden opening RightsCon 2022, the sector’s biggest civil society event. Ardern claims that “weapons of war” and “disinformation” are one and the same. EngageMedia (of which I was previously Executive Director) co-organised RightsCon in 2015 in the Philippines.
RightsCon 2022 also heavily promoted US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Blinken oversees the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, one of the most egregious US government promoters of “anti-disinformation” as censorship. (See Twitter Files #17)
Western leaders that advocate for censorship in the name of “disinformation” severely undermine those fighting authoritarian regimes around the world. Those regimes frequently evoke the threat of “fake news” to justify their crackdowns.
I encourage you to read both releases in full and hold what you have been told about Elon Musk just for a moment. Musk is neither hero nor demon. The Twitter Files however are a critical catalyst to challenge the new censorship regime we now live under and reinvigorate the movement for free expression.
(Note that I am a paid consultant for Matt Taibbi and have no relation whatsoever to Musk).
If you can walk and chew gum you’ll know that uncovering liberal/left corruption doesn’t imply support for the reactionary right.
Free speech and expression protect us from the most powerful actors on the planet; corporations, the State, and a growing plethora of international bodies. Ultimately we need radically decentralised social media that is more immune to their capture.
Some amount of ‘disinformation’ studies is legitimate, however, the Twitter Files demonstrate that a major part has been weaponised to censor and smear political opposition. A kind of digital McCarthyism.
Academia and NGOs need to take a good look at their ‘disinformation’ programs and evaluate to what degree they are being weaponised to censor unpopular ideas from people deemed worthy of being censored.
The frequent missed calls by government and the media during the pandemic should make it clear that no one has a monopoly on truth. If we cannot re-open conversation (however difficult) as our primary method of truth-seeking we will continue our march into an epistemological totalitarianism.
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Andrew Lowenthal is a Research Affiliate at the Institute of Network Cultures. He is the co-founder and former Executive Director of EngageMedia, former fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.
Who wrote this text? Me or Franco Berardi? Peter Gabriel says the question is irrelevant.
One year ago the visionary musician Peter Gabriel released a book titled Reverberation, a sort of technophile introduction to the science behind deep listening.
“Reverberation is the impact a sound makes after the sound has stopped,” explains Peter Gabriel. Grab hold of any sound and hang on tight, you’ll be amazed how far it reverberates and where you end up.
Now, in an interview with yahoo Gabriel speaks of Artificial Intelligence and the future of music.
The recent innovations in the field of Artificial intelligence sound alarming for artists designers, musicians, and writers too.
Someone told me that chatbot is able to compose the kind of capricious essays that I usual write.
For days I refrained from asking to chatbot GPT: “write a whimsical essay about Peter Gabriel and Artificial intelligence in the style of Franco Berardi.”
Then what?
What if the text you are reading is the reply of a chatbot to the question above?
Who knows?
And also: who cares?
Now I wonder: “Should I be afraid of the next steps in deployment of the Cognitive automaton? Should I fight against the invading Artificial intelligence that is stealing jobs to creative workers? Should I be congratulate with the talking and writing machine?
So far I am unable to answer this question.
However I may ask the question to the chatbot himself (or herself).
Gabriel suggests to take it easy. He knows that what’s happening in the field of automation of cognition is huge and it is evolving fast, too fast for conscious control.
Gabriel writes: “this is something that’s going have way more impact than the Industrial Revolution and the nuclear bomb. So, if we don’t start anticipating what it might do, it’s going to be too late, because it’s very fast.”
Then he says:
“Some would argue [that you can’t replace] the [human] spirit — but I think there are probably going to be algorithms for the spirit, too! So, we might as well just grab the algorithms and dance with them, rather than fight them. … Unfortunately, I don’t think my job or anyone’s job is safe from AI.”
I don’t know what Gabriel means by the word ”spirit”. But I know that my sensible and sensitive point of view is my own experience.
The chatbot is already able to write a love letter, and is able to perform the behavior of a human in love. Of course it can do it: he has read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina so it is able to recombine relevant information and utter a seductive enunciation. But the chatbot is not experiencing that kind of disquieting exciting affect.
Affect is beyond its capabilities.
But Gabriel gets intimidating:
“It’s coming whether we like it or not, so we might as well try and work with it rather than work against it, and make sure that there are programs in there that protect ethics and some sort of morality. “
The story of an ethical regulation of the intelligent technology is untenable. For centuries we have been discussing ethical rules, ethical politics, ethical values. We did not reach any agreement.
Who will decide about moral and political alternatives? Who will establish the ethical rules governing artificial intelligence? Who will decide the limits of its military use?
Artificial intelligence itself?
The Gabriel conclusion, however, is incontrovertible:
“ If an intelligent species is so smart that it can destroy itself, it very often does. I hope we don’t fall into that trap, but we can have a wonderful party on the way to jumping over the cliff.”
We have deserved our own termination, and the extinction of human civilization that is underway.
On Wednesday 8 March 2023, Amsterdam Alternative is organising a discussion on collective digital property. This AA Talk is organised in the context of the web documentary AA is making about collective ownership. During this evening, we will discuss what digital collective ownership is or can be. We will discuss ideas that deal with ownership, use, management, community, knowledge and development around digital assets. Think cables, servers, systems, applications, hosting, privacy, social media, hacking, open source and licensing. Where do we make it collective and where do we run into limits?
Doors open: 19:30
Discussion: 20:00-22:00
Drinks at the bar: 22:00-23:00
Entrance: free
Language: Nederlands/English (mixed)
Location: Ventilator Cinema, 2nd floor OT301, Overtoom 301, Amsterdam
—
We need to Collectivise the Internet
We cannot continue on the current path. That should be obvious. And if not, here’s a refresher paragraph: The internet is the old capitalist game in a new silicon jacket. The colonialization of our attention created a dependency a drug dealer would envy. Half the world despairs when WhatsApp goes down. Old capitalism with old interests hunts for new digital countries to suck dry every day. And as we get sucked into the whirlpool of Google, Meta and Apple, we lose the imagination that technology could also be different. We can no longer even imagine that a phone is not a rectangular piece of black glass. And that you wouldn’t carry it with you all the time. Can we still imagine a world where our sleep time is longer than our screen time? Many an activist could better imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet.
It is time for a collective digital striptease. Collectively, layer by layer, we toss the old internet onto the smouldering heaps of burnt plastic, melting copper and tiny sparkling bits of cobalt. We reject the apps and websites that parasitise our behaviour. We no longer tell our deepest secrets through chat apps that eavesdrop on us, and politely thank cheap electro junk that lasts only a year, but does continue to slow down the world before and after use.
Interest is the main reason for doing this. Whose interest? Whose interest does the internet serve? Is the app there for me, or for shareholders? Is the social network for us to talk to friends, or for ad networks and troll factories to trick society into behaving differently? Whose interest is served by using Google docs? Does a dating app earn more from me if I do or do not find the love of my life? Whose interest is being served? This a crucial question. Unfortunately, manufacturers of modern tech do everything they can to hide and disguise their interests. Easier than continuing to poke around in their annual reports and hoping for whistleblowers is to simply dismiss these unholy conflicts of interest. Just as we did before with collective housing and food co-ops, technology can also be made, managed and used in the best interests of yourself and your community. Then you know for sure how it works, why it works that way and what you get out of it.
And you don’t have to go and invent that yourself. Many have gone before us. We can learn from their work. Also, parts of the internet have never been colonised. These free ports have special powers that we can put to use elsewhere. But first, let me sketch out the landscape where we can start realising our collective dreams: On the one hand, the internet is ephemeral and intangible: the software side.
You use apps and websites. The apps come from an App Store. The websites need a browser. Appstore and browser run on an operating system. In addition, there are agreements about how these apps and websites get and send the information; the protocols of the Internet govern those agreements and we know them by such unimaginative names as HTTP, IMAP, IRC, ETC. (That last one is the protocol that indicates to the reader that there are many more, but I don’t feel like listing them all). Information comes and goes from your own computer to other computers.
And that’s the other side: the internet is also very material. Your computer and smartphone are made of plastic, steel and some other materials from China. The country where they bought in a few thousand different components from around the world to make the laptop. While your own computer is a lovingly cared-for, little thing that gets all the attention, the servers are crammed like boxed calves by the thousands in huge halls full of noise from cooling systems. The data centres are concrete and steel juggernauts, dependent on electricity from power plants, solar panels or windmills. Cables, modems, switches and eventually even thick submarine cables and satellites connect it all together.
The material side and the software side are also intimately intertwined. The smartphone in your pocket is many times more powerful than the computer that opinions used 10 years ago. There is enough power in it to probably provide you with all your computing needs for the rest of your life. But with the economic realities of updates and lack of support for old models, in a few years you will already have a new one. New hardware enables new software and vice versa.
Where do you start if you and your collective want to become owners of your own digital production resources?
There are free havens and settlements of resistance we can visit for inspiration. Some are older than the internet itself. They are websites made for the common good like Indymedia, it is an app like Mastodon, or a collection of services like those of Lurk.org or vvvvvaria.org. They are open protocols on which anyone can build new things like ActivityHub and Matrix, and alternative operating systems like Devuan or LineageOS. Or even whole parts infrastructure with servers and everything needed to keep it running around it like Disroot.org has built over the years. And while there are no collectives (that I know of) that make hardware, there are many that make software with the aim of being able to use existing hardware longer, like postmarketOS, an operating system for old phones, or Q4OS that still does it on a computer 300Mhz & 256MB RAM. For reference that’s a computer from the days when the internet still said kgggg beep when you accessed it. There is a world open to alternatives. We just need to organise around them.
Welcome to the world of Partly Automated not-so-Luxurious Trans*feminist Earth Anarchism. A future where the machine is taken care of by the collective it belongs to. A machine that helps the collective without harming others. A machine connected to other machines in an equal relationship with consent from both sides. No clients, no servers, no up and no download. A world full of friction, discomfort, poetry and happiness. A world where it still matters what is connected to whom, but where we ourselves make the connections we need and disconnect the ones that no longer matter. And the occasional computer that stops working and refuses to apologise for it.
Curious about more? Put this newspaper aside, turn off your phone and come to the AA Talk at OT301 (Fan cinema on the 2nd floor) on Wednesday 8 March. We will then explore the world of collective digital ownership together in an open conversation between creators, thinkers and builders. Because we all see that the current capitalist internet must be broken.
Histories of technology have politics. The way we discuss the emergence and development of media technologies implicates the priorities and interests of those telling the story, and how we understand a technology’s meaning and potential.
Among podcasters familiar with the history of the medium, Dave Winer– the developer behind the RSS feed –is usually credited as the progenitor of the form. This past summer, however, this narrative was challenged by Podnews editor James Cridland–(good naturedly, I presume)–who suggested that the comedian Robin Williams may actually have been the first podcaster, predating Winer’s RSS (“Rich Site Summary,” or “Really Simple Syndication”) distribution model by a few months. These origin stories have important technical differences that lead to political repercussions: the Winer narrative envisions podcasting as open and decentralized, and therefore theoretically an inherently emancipatory technology. The Williams narrative, in contrast, locates the birth of the medium within a closed, corporate-controlled platform – which just might mean there’s nothing inherrently open or democratic about internet-distributed audio content at all.
Though both perspectives are undoubtedly “great white man” visions of the medium’s history–or more precisely versions of Susan Douglas’s “inventor-hero”–what’s particularly interesting here is how both views implicate a politics of what podcasts are and what they ought to be. Although this quarrel was a dispute between colleagues that was ultimately abandoned, I argue it’s well worth a deeper examination, as the ideological conflict at its center isn’t just about the past, but rather competing visions of podcasting’s future – over the continued flourishing or gradual eclipse of RSS.
Indeed, debates over the technical definition of a podcast, and over who was—and who was not–the first podcaster based on that definition, reveal anxieties among long-time podcasters and developers about corporate consolidation in the industry as well as the apparent irrelevance of technical distinctions to listeners and creators who may not appreciate the way in which walled gardens negate the very thing that makes podcasting so special. Likewise, to suggest that podcasting may have first emerged as a proprietary form may retroactively justify corporate platform enclosures in the present. And, though I’m just as suspicious of corporate hegemony as the next person, nuancing the early history of the medium can help us think through the distinctions between technology and cultural form.
In the consensus version of podcasting’s history, the emergence of the medium is typically traced to software developer Dave Winer’s publication – with significant contribution from the former MTV VJ and Internet entrepreneur Adam Curry– of RSS (“Rich Site Summary,” or “Really Simple Syndication”) version 0.92 in December 2000, which allowed for the distribution of digital audio files. The first podcast feed followed in January 2001, and, with the launch of Curry’s iPodder podcast aggregator and his program Daily Source Code in 2004, podcasting began to coalesce as both technology and cultural form. In the 20-odd years since, the medium’s technical infrastructure has remained essentially unchanged: RSS continues to be the predominant format of podcast syndication.
Adam Curry. Photo Credit Kris Krug CC BY-SA 2.0
So this past July, when Podnews editor James Cridland cheekily suggested that it was not Dave Winer, nor “the podfather” Adam Curry, but comedian Robin Williams who had actually been the world’s first podcaster, industry graybeards were quick to push back on his claim.
Cridland’s argument went like this: As an early investor in Audible.com, Williams launched a bi-weekly talk show called RobinWilliams@Audible in early 2000 (several months before Winer’s pioneering RSS), which listeners could download onto their mp3 players. Subscribers who owned an Audible Mobile Player could even have RobinWilliams@Audible automatically pushed to their device. “Of course, that’s what the first podcast was, too,” Cridland noted, “something you downloaded to your computer, then synched to your mp3 player.”
The crucial distinction, however, was that RobinWilliams@Audible was not distributed via RSS. For some, this meant that the show was definitively not a podcast – and Cridland’s claim patently absurd.
On The New Media Show, for instance, Todd Cochrane, founder-CEO of Blubrry, and Rob Greenlee, VP of Libsyn, spent nearly eighteen minutes on the subject, recounting the early history of online file sharing and concluding that a podcast could only be a podcast if it used RSS. For Audible to suggest that they had been the first in podcasting (Cridland’s post relied in part on Audible founder Don Katz as a source) was ego-driven revisionism.
On Twitter (an ancient social media app where people used to go to eviscerate each other), Cridland’s article provoked a squall of exceptions, which generally argued that downloadable audio without RSS does not a podcast make; and though Audible’s platform may have been innovative, and even shared some characteristics with podcasting, the fact that its programs were limited to the company’s proprietary platform meant that they were definitively not podcasts.
Rob Greenlee, for example, replied to Cridland’s article by clarifying that Audible was a precursor platform for RSS, but that its audio programs were definitively not podcasting. When Cridland pushed back, noting the automatic download feature on Audible, Greenlee’s co-host Todd Cochrane replied that this feature still did not make RobinWilliams@Audiblea podcast; and he insisted that he wasn’t going to budge on this point. A minor flap ensued, which ended with Cridland resignedly saying that he wished he had never written the article in the first place.In the end, even Dave Winer got involved, arguing that a piece of downloadable audio media had to have an RSS feed and be open to anyone, using any client, to qualify as a podcast.
To get a sense of the response to Cridland’s article on Twitter, and to let participants speak for themselves, I have selected a sampling of replies to Cridland’s original tweet teasing the article and reproduced them below. The conversation is arranged roughly in chronological order.
Admittedly, this was a very niche dispute – a handful of predominantly white tech dudes arguing over which white dude(s) had been the first podcaster. After a day or two, they all moved on.
To better understand, however, let’s back up a bit.
By the fall of 2000, Dave Winer had earned a reputation as a pioneer of web syndication – he had been credited with launching the first blog – and someone who, according to the podcaster and author Eric Nuzum, “believed in making systems open, democratic, and easily accessible,” pushing back against the trend toward centralization and proprietary control of Internet infrastructures.
David Winer. Photcredit: Joi Ito CC BY 2.0
On a trip to New York that October, Winer met up with Adam Curry, who had been closely following his work. Over several hours in Curry’s hotel room, the entrepreneur attempted to convince Winer that web syndication technologies could be leveraged to distribute audio and video files – a vision of the Internet as “Everyman’s broadcast medium” – if only the so-called “last yard” problem of slow DSL connections could be resolved. By his own admission, Winer at first didn’t quite understand what Curry had in mind, but he was open experimenting with using RSS as “virtual bandwidth” that could deliver large media files during off-peak hours. In January 2001, Winer successfully used an RSS enclosure tag to distribute a single Grateful Dead song (it was U.S. Blues), inaugurating the first podcast feed – though what he had created wouldn’t become known as a “podcast” for some time.
Though interest in RSS-delivered audio files was slow to develop (indeed, even Winer and Curry pursued other projects for a time), “it was not lost on … early adopters,” as Andrew Bottomley has observed, adding “that the technology shifted power to the audience and also opened up opportunities for more democratized radio production” (111-112). The days of corporate gatekeepers exercising oligopolistic control over the production and distribution of audio content seemed numbered; no longer would broadcasting be subject to an economy of scarcity. Theoretically anyone with web hosting, a microphone, and an RSS feed could set themselves up in the radio business.
Since those early days, RSS has become “the currency of podcasting,” to borrow a phrase from Dave Jones, Adam Curry’s Podcasting 2.0 collaborator. Indeed, as Cridland himself wrote in his primer, “What is a Podcast?,” technically speaking, a “podcast” is comprised of an audio file, without DRM restrictions, that is available to download, and is “distributed via an RSS feed using an <enclosure> tag.”
But RSS is not without its detractors. Last July, for instance, Anchor.fm co-founder Michael Mignano argued that while technical standards like RSS (or HTTP, or SMTP, or SMS) provide a “common language” that allows for the rapid spread of new technologies, standardization inevitably stifles growth. “The tradeoff,” he wrote, “is that a lower barrier to entry means more products get created in a category, causing market fragmentation and ultimately, a slow pace of innovation.” The consequence of this “Standards Innovation Paradox” is that even as podcast listening apps proliferate, because they must conform to the RSS standard, the differences between them are superficial. Proprietary systems, Mignano argued, offer an alternative, allowing developers the flexibility to build – and rapidly improve – dynamic user experiences.
Naturally, Mignano pointed to Spotify – which acquired Anchor in 2019 – as an example of how closed systems could break the “curse” of standardization: When the company began to expand from music to other forms of audio content, he wrote, there was some speculation that the company would launch a dedicated podcast app. But, “if they had done so, they’d have to contend with the aforementioned ocean of podcast listening apps which were all offering users roughly the same features that were limited by the standard.” Instead, “Spotify used their existing music user base inside of the existing Spotify app to distribute podcasts to hundreds of millions of users.”
Image used for purposes of critique.
But this framing soft pedals Spotify’s aggressive attempts to steer podcasting away from RSS and toward platform enclosure. As John L. Sullivan argued in a 2019 paper, Spotify’s emphasis on exclusive releases (which has included the removal of content previously available via RSS, like The Joe Budden Podcast), and its $340 million acquisitions of Anchor and Gimlet are all part of an effort to control distribution and “maximize the ‘winner take all’ functions of platforms.” More recently, Anchor has stopped automatically generating an RSS feed at the time of publication, making it an opt-in function (meaning that creators have to know what RSS is to have their podcast distributed to directories otherthan Spotify). “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution,” noted one Spotify executive at a recent investor event, “which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology.”
Image used for purposes of critique.
Given the challenges that platform enclosure poses to RSS, its defenders’ insistence that “it’s not a podcast if it doesn’t have an RSS feed, and it’s not a podcast app if you can’t add your own RSS feeds,” as an episode title of Curry and Jones’s Podcasting 2.0 puts it, is understandable. Or, as Cochrane declaredon The New Media Show, “until you tear my RSS feed through my dead hands, podcasts technically are podcasts that are delivered via RSS.”
And understandable, too, is the prickly reaction to Cridland’s alternate history: To claim that RobinWilliams@Audible may have been the first podcast is to suggest that RSS – and the open and democratic values which it represents – are inessential; and more troubling, that proprietary systems are deeply rooted in the history of the medium.
Image used for purposes of critique.
Of course, there’s also the sticky fact that RobinWilliams@Audible premiered before the word “podcast” entered the lexicon. But even this history is messy. In his original coinage, the technologist Ben Hammersley applied the term to a variety of different forms of downloadable audio media, including Audible originals like In Bed with Susie Bright. According to this early conception, in other words, podcasting described a cultural practice rather than a specific distribution infrastructure.
It is likely, too, that technological distinctions are irrelevant to listeners. Citing data from Edison Research showing that a significant percentage of listeners use Spotify and YouTube to access podcasts (even though content on these platforms don’t meet the strict technical definition of a “podcast”), Cridland has suggested that, for most people, podcasting is simply “on-demand audio. Like a radio show, but on-demand.”
Likewise, the question of whom the first podcaster was is of narrow interest. “Who cares?” an exasperated Cochrane finally concluded.
But reviewing the pre-2004 history of downloadable audio media can open up questions of the interpretive flexibility of technology (how technological artifacts come to have different meanings for different groups of users) and rhetorical closure (when the need for alternative designs diminish) that the late Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker identified as key concepts in the Social Construction of Technology.
And so, rather than arguing about whether RobinWilliams@Audible – or, for that matter, Cochrane’s audio file sharing on FidoNet in the early 1990s – was the “first” podcast, further examination of this complex genealogy suggests the more interesting questions of how and why online distribution of audio files was such a desirable goal that there were severalpaths to its development.
The flap over Robin Williams and the question of the first podcaster also gives us much needed insight into current discourse about corporate influence in the podcasting space. Also It provided a way for proponents of the decentralized Podcasting 2.0 movement to make a technological distinction between a desire for freedom and a desire for control. While the scuffle itself was short-lived, its dust is far from settling.
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Featured Image of Robin Williams (2008) by Flickr User Shameek (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Histories of technology have politics. The way we discuss the emergence and development of media technologies implicates the priorities and interests of those telling the story, and how we understand a technology’s meaning and potential.
Among podcasters familiar with the history of the medium, Dave Winer– the developer behind the RSS feed –is usually credited as the progenitor of the form. This past summer, however, this narrative was challenged by Podnews editor James Cridland–(good naturedly, I presume)–who suggested that the comedian Robin Williams may actually have been the first podcaster, predating Winer’s RSS (“Rich Site Summary,” or “Really Simple Syndication”) distribution model by a few months. These origin stories have important technical differences that lead to political repercussions: the Winer narrative envisions podcasting as open and decentralized, and therefore theoretically an inherently emancipatory technology. The Williams narrative, in contrast, locates the birth of the medium within a closed, corporate-controlled platform – which just might mean there’s nothing inherrently open or democratic about internet-distributed audio content at all.
Though both perspectives are undoubtedly “great white man” visions of the medium’s history–or more precisely versions of Susan Douglas’s “inventor-hero”–what’s particularly interesting here is how both views implicate a politics of what podcasts are and what they ought to be. Although this quarrel was a dispute between colleagues that was ultimately abandoned, I argue it’s well worth a deeper examination, as the ideological conflict at its center isn’t just about the past, but rather competing visions of podcasting’s future – over the continued flourishing or gradual eclipse of RSS.
Indeed, debates over the technical definition of a podcast, and over who was—and who was not–the first podcaster based on that definition, reveal anxieties among long-time podcasters and developers about corporate consolidation in the industry as well as the apparent irrelevance of technical distinctions to listeners and creators who may not appreciate the way in which walled gardens negate the very thing that makes podcasting so special. Likewise, to suggest that podcasting may have first emerged as a proprietary form may retroactively justify corporate platform enclosures in the present. And, though I’m just as suspicious of corporate hegemony as the next person, nuancing the early history of the medium can help us think through the distinctions between technology and cultural form.
In the consensus version of podcasting’s history, the emergence of the medium is typically traced to software developer Dave Winer’s publication – with significant contribution from the former MTV VJ and Internet entrepreneur Adam Curry– of RSS (“Rich Site Summary,” or “Really Simple Syndication”) version 0.92 in December 2000, which allowed for the distribution of digital audio files. The first podcast feed followed in January 2001, and, with the launch of Curry’s iPodder podcast aggregator and his program Daily Source Code in 2004, podcasting began to coalesce as both technology and cultural form. In the 20-odd years since, the medium’s technical infrastructure has remained essentially unchanged: RSS continues to be the predominant format of podcast syndication.
Adam Curry. Photo Credit Kris Krug CC BY-SA 2.0
So this past July, when Podnews editor James Cridland cheekily suggested that it was not Dave Winer, nor “the podfather” Adam Curry, but comedian Robin Williams who had actually been the world’s first podcaster, industry graybeards were quick to push back on his claim.
Cridland’s argument went like this: As an early investor in Audible.com, Williams launched a bi-weekly talk show called RobinWilliams@Audible in early 2000 (several months before Winer’s pioneering RSS), which listeners could download onto their mp3 players. Subscribers who owned an Audible Mobile Player could even have RobinWilliams@Audible automatically pushed to their device. “Of course, that’s what the first podcast was, too,” Cridland noted, “something you downloaded to your computer, then synched to your mp3 player.”
The crucial distinction, however, was that RobinWilliams@Audible was not distributed via RSS. For some, this meant that the show was definitively not a podcast – and Cridland’s claim patently absurd.
On The New Media Show, for instance, Todd Cochrane, founder-CEO of Blubrry, and Rob Greenlee, VP of Libsyn, spent nearly eighteen minutes on the subject, recounting the early history of online file sharing and concluding that a podcast could only be a podcast if it used RSS. For Audible to suggest that they had been the first in podcasting (Cridland’s post relied in part on Audible founder Don Katz as a source) was ego-driven revisionism.
On Twitter (an ancient social media app where people used to go to eviscerate each other), Cridland’s article provoked a squall of exceptions, which generally argued that downloadable audio without RSS does not a podcast make; and though Audible’s platform may have been innovative, and even shared some characteristics with podcasting, the fact that its programs were limited to the company’s proprietary platform meant that they were definitively not podcasts.
Rob Greenlee, for example, replied to Cridland’s article by clarifying that Audible was a precursor platform for RSS, but that its audio programs were definitively not podcasting. When Cridland pushed back, noting the automatic download feature on Audible, Greenlee’s co-host Todd Cochrane replied that this feature still did not make RobinWilliams@Audiblea podcast; and he insisted that he wasn’t going to budge on this point. A minor flap ensued, which ended with Cridland resignedly saying that he wished he had never written the article in the first place.In the end, even Dave Winer got involved, arguing that a piece of downloadable audio media had to have an RSS feed and be open to anyone, using any client, to qualify as a podcast.
To get a sense of the response to Cridland’s article on Twitter, and to let participants speak for themselves, I have selected a sampling of replies to Cridland’s original tweet teasing the article and reproduced them below. The conversation is arranged roughly in chronological order.
Admittedly, this was a very niche dispute – a handful of predominantly white tech dudes arguing over which white dude(s) had been the first podcaster. After a day or two, they all moved on.
To better understand, however, let’s back up a bit.
By the fall of 2000, Dave Winer had earned a reputation as a pioneer of web syndication – he had been credited with launching the first blog – and someone who, according to the podcaster and author Eric Nuzum, “believed in making systems open, democratic, and easily accessible,” pushing back against the trend toward centralization and proprietary control of Internet infrastructures.
David Winer. Photcredit: Joi Ito CC BY 2.0
On a trip to New York that October, Winer met up with Adam Curry, who had been closely following his work. Over several hours in Curry’s hotel room, the entrepreneur attempted to convince Winer that web syndication technologies could be leveraged to distribute audio and video files – a vision of the Internet as “Everyman’s broadcast medium” – if only the so-called “last yard” problem of slow DSL connections could be resolved. By his own admission, Winer at first didn’t quite understand what Curry had in mind, but he was open experimenting with using RSS as “virtual bandwidth” that could deliver large media files during off-peak hours. In January 2001, Winer successfully used an RSS enclosure tag to distribute a single Grateful Dead song (it was U.S. Blues), inaugurating the first podcast feed – though what he had created wouldn’t become known as a “podcast” for some time.
Though interest in RSS-delivered audio files was slow to develop (indeed, even Winer and Curry pursued other projects for a time), “it was not lost on … early adopters,” as Andrew Bottomley has observed, adding “that the technology shifted power to the audience and also opened up opportunities for more democratized radio production” (111-112). The days of corporate gatekeepers exercising oligopolistic control over the production and distribution of audio content seemed numbered; no longer would broadcasting be subject to an economy of scarcity. Theoretically anyone with web hosting, a microphone, and an RSS feed could set themselves up in the radio business.
Since those early days, RSS has become “the currency of podcasting,” to borrow a phrase from Dave Jones, Adam Curry’s Podcasting 2.0 collaborator. Indeed, as Cridland himself wrote in his primer, “What is a Podcast?,” technically speaking, a “podcast” is comprised of an audio file, without DRM restrictions, that is available to download, and is “distributed via an RSS feed using an <enclosure> tag.”
But RSS is not without its detractors. Last July, for instance, Anchor.fm co-founder Michael Mignano argued that while technical standards like RSS (or HTTP, or SMTP, or SMS) provide a “common language” that allows for the rapid spread of new technologies, standardization inevitably stifles growth. “The tradeoff,” he wrote, “is that a lower barrier to entry means more products get created in a category, causing market fragmentation and ultimately, a slow pace of innovation.” The consequence of this “Standards Innovation Paradox” is that even as podcast listening apps proliferate, because they must conform to the RSS standard, the differences between them are superficial. Proprietary systems, Mignano argued, offer an alternative, allowing developers the flexibility to build – and rapidly improve – dynamic user experiences.
Naturally, Mignano pointed to Spotify – which acquired Anchor in 2019 – as an example of how closed systems could break the “curse” of standardization: When the company began to expand from music to other forms of audio content, he wrote, there was some speculation that the company would launch a dedicated podcast app. But, “if they had done so, they’d have to contend with the aforementioned ocean of podcast listening apps which were all offering users roughly the same features that were limited by the standard.” Instead, “Spotify used their existing music user base inside of the existing Spotify app to distribute podcasts to hundreds of millions of users.”
Image used for purposes of critique.
But this framing soft pedals Spotify’s aggressive attempts to steer podcasting away from RSS and toward platform enclosure. As John L. Sullivan argued in a 2019 paper, Spotify’s emphasis on exclusive releases (which has included the removal of content previously available via RSS, like The Joe Budden Podcast), and its $340 million acquisitions of Anchor and Gimlet are all part of an effort to control distribution and “maximize the ‘winner take all’ functions of platforms.” More recently, Anchor has stopped automatically generating an RSS feed at the time of publication, making it an opt-in function (meaning that creators have to know what RSS is to have their podcast distributed to directories otherthan Spotify). “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution,” noted one Spotify executive at a recent investor event, “which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology.”
Image used for purposes of critique.
Given the challenges that platform enclosure poses to RSS, its defenders’ insistence that “it’s not a podcast if it doesn’t have an RSS feed, and it’s not a podcast app if you can’t add your own RSS feeds,” as an episode title of Curry and Jones’s Podcasting 2.0 puts it, is understandable. Or, as Cochrane declaredon The New Media Show, “until you tear my RSS feed through my dead hands, podcasts technically are podcasts that are delivered via RSS.”
And understandable, too, is the prickly reaction to Cridland’s alternate history: To claim that RobinWilliams@Audible may have been the first podcast is to suggest that RSS – and the open and democratic values which it represents – are inessential; and more troubling, that proprietary systems are deeply rooted in the history of the medium.
Image used for purposes of critique.
Of course, there’s also the sticky fact that RobinWilliams@Audible premiered before the word “podcast” entered the lexicon. But even this history is messy. In his original coinage, the technologist Ben Hammersley applied the term to a variety of different forms of downloadable audio media, including Audible originals like In Bed with Susie Bright. According to this early conception, in other words, podcasting described a cultural practice rather than a specific distribution infrastructure.
It is likely, too, that technological distinctions are irrelevant to listeners. Citing data from Edison Research showing that a significant percentage of listeners use Spotify and YouTube to access podcasts (even though content on these platforms don’t meet the strict technical definition of a “podcast”), Cridland has suggested that, for most people, podcasting is simply “on-demand audio. Like a radio show, but on-demand.”
Likewise, the question of whom the first podcaster was is of narrow interest. “Who cares?” an exasperated Cochrane finally concluded.
But reviewing the pre-2004 history of downloadable audio media can open up questions of the interpretive flexibility of technology (how technological artifacts come to have different meanings for different groups of users) and rhetorical closure (when the need for alternative designs diminish) that the late Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker identified as key concepts in the Social Construction of Technology.
And so, rather than arguing about whether RobinWilliams@Audible – or, for that matter, Cochrane’s audio file sharing on FidoNet in the early 1990s – was the “first” podcast, further examination of this complex genealogy suggests the more interesting questions of how and why online distribution of audio files was such a desirable goal that there were severalpaths to its development.
The flap over Robin Williams and the question of the first podcaster also gives us much needed insight into current discourse about corporate influence in the podcasting space. Also It provided a way for proponents of the decentralized Podcasting 2.0 movement to make a technological distinction between a desire for freedom and a desire for control. While the scuffle itself was short-lived, its dust is far from settling.
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Featured Image of Robin Williams (2008) by Flickr User Shameek (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
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