Calm Down Cody | April 2024 | The Wild West of the Internet
Hello everyone, and welcome to the inaugural post of "Calm Down Cody," a blog that will exist right alongside all the shows of the Grapefruit Network where you can directly hear from yours truly.
So, this blog came to be because I have garnered a reputation for being very excitable and ready to talk about anything. However, the guys and I have very different tastes. So, reaching a consensus about what we want to discuss can often be challenging. This blog will be my purview, and I can speak to you directly about what I am excited about. You can expect philosophical rants like the one you are about to read or me freaking out about how Bad Batch is the best Star Wars since Luke in a hallway. It may be random, but let it never be said that it is not truly me.
So, let's begin, shall we...
In another life, I would have worked in a traditional radio station. I had a phase (we won't go into it) that I was obsessed with Talk Radio, and I would love nothing more than to refashion our Entertainment options to be more akin to the "Golden Age of Radio," where we all gathered around the radio to listen to the latest dramas and FDRs Fireside Chats. (No joke, if you are of the political variety who follows the State of the Union or Presidential Debates, try radio. Politics is far more palatable when you do not have to look at them.)
That is a very different track than many kids growing up in the internet age. Most kids want to be YouTubers these days. My parents were Luddites in many ways; they had no steady internet connection until... 2017. (I will spare you some of the travails I went through to get online.) So, very little "streaming video" was available to me for a long time. I did have iTunes, which I used to manage the iPod Video I got for Christmas in 2006.
Well, I ran into a problem. iTunes content notoriously costs money, and I was a teenager who did not have any money. Until I discovered this little-known format: Podcasts. I have been obsessed with Podcasts ever since. So when most of my compatriots zigged into YouTube, I zagged into Podcasts way before Podcasts were cool. I speak highly on D&L of Steve Glosson of "Geek Out Loud" and Riley Blanton of "The Star Wars Report" (now of "Geeky Stoics") because they are the inspiration for doing this show. If you compare them to the shows you get from NPR or iHeartRadio, they are not huge names that dominate today's charts. But they have garnered a respectable following and are venerated in the amateur podcast circles.
As the streaming/social media age began to lock into place, podcasts became a haven of the internet, increasingly dominated by massive platforms and the algorithms they used to control us. I do not think people appreciate what the phrase "find us wherever you get your podcasts" really means. YouTube videos are locked into YouTube. Should Congress ban TikTok, a lot of influencers will lose their livelihood. Instagram has become a Walled Garden of QVC for Millennial/Gen Z influencers. If any of these platforms decide to deprioritize their niche or areas of influence, they are up a creek.
Podcasts, by contrast, are still relatively open formats. RSS feeds distribute it. We have to host our website, and while companies help with the hosting costs and distribution, there is no single dominant player like YouTube in user-generated video space, Meta and TikTok in Social Media, or Spotify and Apple Music in Music. The two most dominant apps for Podcasts are Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but if you want to switch to another podcatcher, you can do so with relative ease since they both draw from the same source of RSS feeds. (I use OverCast because of the simplicity of UI and the lack of Social features and algorithms). Despite the millions, if not billions, being thrown into the industry by big corporate players, Podcasts remain mostly the purview of the open web.
That is something that I have increasingly come to value as algorithms drive us off a civilizational cliff.
As the social web is in flux about what it wants to be, we here at The Grapefruit Network have discussed the importance of building our little space in this corner of the internet. We want to continue to do this show for a long time, and the best way to make this show sustainable in an over-saturated market is to continue to do our own thing on the open web and to use the social platforms as tools - not the primary ends unto themselves. (I have a whole post that I am contemplating about how social platforms are destroying the internet and our minds, but I will spare that thought for another day.)
In an age of AI-generated text, I want it to be a little slice of humanity away from the shenanigans of big tech, and most importantly, this post will belong to myself and the other members of The Grapefruit Network. I will share the links on social platforms, but nothing will make me happier than finding out that you have bookmarked our site and will go to us directly or link us into your RSS Feed of choice. The web will improve if enough people say no more to trillion-dollar companies who control your online reality. I want to be a part of the solution to reclaim the web and, frankly, how we perceive reality from the likes of Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and TikTok.
Care to join me?
- Cody, calmer.
