From the anus of TikTok comes a version of slop so wacky, so delightfully dumb, so… Italian (???), that its managed to win the hearts of every iPad kid around the world. Introducing: Italian Brainrot, the latest AI craze of anthropomorphic hybrid creatures with Italo-gibberish names and salacious lore that your littlest cousin probably filled you in on over the holidays. If you scroll through Jstor you’ll find tons of articles philosophizing such beloved stock characters as Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala, and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Scholars attempting to get to the bottom of their fundamental tension: are they Dadaist works of art reacting to the chaos of these fascist times, or are they fascist in and of themselves, predetermined for cooption by right wing edge lords? In this bonus episode, Hannah and Maia discuss Italian Brainrot and ask: why children? Why Italy? And why do we kind of f*ck with Ballerina Cappuccina?

Full episode on Patreon:

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Born from a Japanese tech arms race and immortalized in Fred Benenson’s 2009 masterwork “Emoji Dick,” the emoji has become a staple of the way we communicate. Such that the Oxford dictionary named the cry-laugh emoji its word of the year in 2015. Whether you’d like to convey complex feelings such as “pweeeese” or embellish the end of a dry text message, it’s rare that these little symbols would not make at least one appearance in our daily text conversations. And, like most internet artifacts, early adopters of the emoji believed it had the potential to completely collapse the barriers of language and finally realize McLuhan’s predictions of a “global village.” But is that really so? In this finale episode Hannah and Maia discuss the history of the emoji and all its supposed utopian potential. Tangents include: the unasked-for details of Hannah and Maia’s long-awaited reunion, Canadian mennonite literature, and Hannah’s own personal version of the internet, the Web 1.5.

Call them what you will: hactivists, cypherpunks, phone phreaks, e-bandits… these digital vigilantes may be the last bastions of hope in an Information Age where information is not dispersed equally. Growing from a group of pranksters at MIT in the 50s to the “ultra-coordinated mother-f*ckery” of Anonymous and WikiLeaks today, hactivism uses information technologies to achieve political objectives. With their hyper-sophisticated coding skills, hacktivists do everything from leaking classified documents, to providing oppressed citizenry with military grade encryption. They believe that access to computers should be total, that information should be free, and that anarchy reigns supreme. But ever since Chelsea Manning was discovered smuggling over 400k U.S military documents in a Lady Gaga CD case on behalf of WikiLeaks and governments really began cracking down on these hackers, it became clear that maybe the internet wasn’t the anarchic utopia we thought it was. Tangents include: Maia’s primal hatred of Spotify wrapped, The internet’s unfounded hatred of Geese, and Hannah’s dream of putting Maia on WikiFeet.

Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content:

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Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills:

⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic

SOURCES:

Maya Jasanoff, “Revenge of the Quiet American,” Foreign Policy, No. 185 (March/April 2011).

Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, O’Reilley (1984).

Peter Ludlow, “WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture,” The Nation (2010).

Ty McCormick, “Anthropology of An Idea: Hacktivism,” Foreign Policy, No. 200 (2013).

Alasdair Roberts, “The WikiLeaks Illusion,” The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (SUMMER 2011).

Wendy H. Wong and Peter A. Brown, “E-Bandits in Global Activism: WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Politics of No One,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 2013).