The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:06

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Joseph: 00:33

I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other four zero four media cofounders, the first being Sam Cole.

Sam: 00:40

Hi.

Joseph: 00:40

Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:44

Hello. Good to be back.

Joseph: 00:46

Yeah. Absolutely. I feel like we haven't been here in a while. Maybe I'm misremembering. But we are going to get straight to the stories, and we're almost revisiting one from a few weeks ago, but Jason got a frankly hugely significant updates to it.

Joseph: 01:06

It is of course, Ring again and its search party feature. The headline of the article is leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand search party surveillance beyond dogs. So Jason, do you just want to give us a super quick recap on what Search Party is and sort of the the Super Bowl ad that they used to pitch it just so people are familiar if they weren't already?

Jason: 01:33

Yeah. So Search Party is a feature to Ring cameras that was launched, I believe in September, but there was not a lot of coverage at the of it at the time. And what it is is it will network together, people's Ring cameras, like in a in a specific neighborhood, and it will look for lost dogs. So basically, like, if you lose your dog, you can go into the Ring back end, like one of their websites, and upload a photo of your dog. And it will kind of automatically begin searching for the dog in the neighborhood based on that photo, and it will, like, alert you if, if it finds it.

Jason: 02:13

And so this is obviously technology that is I mean, it is, like, specific object recognition. It's like goes it goes a step beyond, like, identifying a dog and it identifies your dog or it's supposed to. And so this is essentially like facial recognition technology. And, again, this was announced in September, but the big blowback from it came right after the Super Bowl, which we did talk about in a very recent episode. But basically, like they did this big Super Bowl ad.

Jason: 02:44

They had, kind of like pretty dystopian map, where it was like a map of a bunch of houses and you could see like them kind of form this autonomous network, looking for dogs. And then they they also had sort of the, traditional, like, green box around this supposedly missing dog. And also, it featured Jamie Simonov, who is the founder of Ring, kind of talking about it. So the actual, like, CEO of the company was in it.

Joseph: 03:12

He left and came back crucially.

Jason: 03:13

Yeah. So this sparked like a like a major backlash. I mean, I've not really seen backlash like this to an ad before, like in recent memory, at least for a tech company. And people just saying, you know, like this is obviously one step away from doing facial recognition on potential criminals or like quote unquote suspicious people. We know how Ring is already used, which is to like publish, footage and and videos of, you know, people who homeowners, like, deem to be suspicious, and this has disproportionately over the years been black and brown people, like that sort of thing.

Jason: 03:54

And so it feels like it's one step away from automating that. So that's like the sort of background to this most recent story.

Joseph: 04:02

Yeah. I think the way we phrased it before was that search party essentially changes Ring from a passive collection capability where you're filming stuff and then you can go back and review the footage or you can maybe send it to the police as part of one of those sharing features. This search party changes Ring into an active surveillance network where it's looking for something very specific, in this case, dogs. But as you said, everyone saw the writing on the wall, everybody hypothesized or speculated like, surely there's no way this is going to start with dogs. Ring is very explicitly, now that Simonov is back, a crime fighting organization.

Joseph: 04:48

They don't even frame it really anymore as like a community safety thing, right? Very explicitly, they're saying we are trying to wipe out crime in the same way that Flock, the license plate reader company has that marketing material as well. So everybody has those sort of reactions and predictions in response to the Super Bowl ad. You then get sent these internal ring emails, Jason. We'll talk about at least a couple of them, but the one specifically to do with search party, when was that sent?

Joseph: 05:24

Obviously, you got it later after the fact, but when was since when was this internal email sent and what did it say about Search Party?

Jason: 05:31

This was sent immediately following the launch of Search Party, which again So back

Joseph: 05:36

last year. Yeah.

Jason: 05:37

Yeah. So I say September, October. I think it launched at the very September and this email went out like immediately kind of after that, maybe in the first couple days of October. So it is from a few months back, you know, predating the Super Bowl hype and also kind of predating like, Jamie Simenoff did a few he did like the Verge cast. Is that what it's called?

Jason: 06:01

Decoder?

Joseph: 06:01

That that was a episode of Decoder because I remember listening to it at the time. Yeah. But made by the Verge.

Jason: 06:06

Yeah. And he talked a lot about this idea of zeroing out crime, which again, you just sort of mentioned. But he he used that language in some of these emails as well. So here's the email that he sent. He said, it was something like team, and then it was like, quote, this is by far the most innovation that we've launched in the history of Ring, and it is not only the quantity, but quality.

Jason: 06:30

I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there, but for the first time ever, we have the chance to fully complete what we started. There's like a lot going on there. There's like a lot going on there.

Jason: 06:56

I think first and foremost, it's like he explicitly says search party is first for finding dogs, meaning it will be expanded in some way, shape, or form, whether it will be called search party or not. I mean, we don't know, but it's like that technology will be expanded. And then he specifically talks about it, being used to zero crime. And so right now, I mean, in their sort of damage control about search party, they've been like, who could possibly be against looking for dogs? Like, you know, this is what the technology is for.

Jason: 07:29

But here is the CEO explicitly saying, like, no. We're just, like, using this technology on dogs to start with, and and we're gonna expand out from there. And and this was an email that went to all Ring employees. So it's like he's telling the whole company this. Yeah.

Joseph: 07:45

Frankly, I'm surprised this didn't leak sooner, you know, to all Ring employees, maybe it just needed some sort of catalyst or whatever. But that is a huge admission where clearly, as you say, they've had these discussions internally at Ring where we've developed this technology, it could do all sorts of things, but we can't just come out and do, say, people recognition. Although they have actually done known faces as well, which we'll talk about a little bit in a minute as well. They have to launch with something cute, inoffensive. And as you say, Jason, defensible, basically, where they can say, look, why would you be against finding dogs?

Joseph: 08:30

But there is, here it is in black and white in this email. What do you make and again, we're not in of course the CEO's head, but I do think is a very interesting sentence. The last part of the email, so many things to do to get there, but this is the bit I want to emphasize, the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started. How do you read that? And again, we're speculating here because we would never put this in an article, we're just chatting on the podcast about it, but like, that is a pretty ominous sentence to me.

Jason: 09:04

It is ominous. I'm glad that you called that out because that's what I was gonna try to talk about next, which is we mentioned this on the last podcast, but basically, Jamie Simonov, the the founder of Ring, started this company. You know, he pitched it on Shark Tank, which is pretty wild. But but very, quickly, he pivoted it to be a crime fighting sort of thing. You know, they did all these partnerships with police departments, and and this was, like, how the company rose to prominence.

Jason: 09:38

And, you know, they had like, internally, at least, a lot of the the messaging was, we are a crime fighting surveillance company, more or less. And there was quite a lot of backlash to this, you know, like, back in 2018, 2019, 2020. And Ring really, like, softened its stance, and they pulled out of a lot of these, partnerships with police. And they sort of, like, tried to to rebrand themselves as, like, a thing that you can use primarily to, like, monitor the comings and goings of people at your house and, like, make sure that you can grab your Amazon package the moment that it arrives. And, you know, that that's actually the crime that they were initially trying to prevent was package theft for Amazon because Amazon loses so much money on, you know, people having their packages stolen and then, you know, having to replace them and that sort of thing.

Jason: 10:35

But, basically, like, Jamie Simonov left Ring at some point, like, I believe in 2023, and the company really softened softened up. Like, they they kind of stopped talking about crime entirely. And the way that I read this is, like, I'm back. Simonov came back last year, and I'm reading this as like, I'm back. This is our mission.

Jason: 10:59

This has always been my mission. And like, we're gonna do it again. Like, we're gonna do this crime stuff again, which I think, I guess maybe goes to the to the second set of emails, that I got.

Joseph: 11:12

What were they what were they exactly?

Jason: 11:14

They were actually earlier emails, and these were ones that happened immediately after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And basically, he sent an all company email or all ring email saying like, you know, what happened to Charlie Kirk was really sad. I was just really sad on so many levels, he said. And then he says, it just shows how important the community request tool will be as we fully roll it out. It is so important to create the conduit for public service agencies to efficiently work with our neighbors.

Jason: 11:43

Time and information matters in these situations, and I am proud that we are working to build the system to help make our neighborhoods safer. And so that's talking about another request or another feature that Ring recently launched. They launched it before search party, and it's called community requests. And, basically, it is a portal where cops can say, we are looking for footage about a specific incident. Like, something happened near your house on this day.

Jason: 12:12

Can we have the footage? And this is very similar to, sort of the the product that Ring initially had and got rid of. Like, they basically brought it back in in this format. And notably, this is done in partnership with Axon, which is just a massive police contractor. They make body cameras.

Jason: 12:33

They make tasers. They make drones. They make, like AI software for police, like all sorts of things. And so it's like really integrated with sort of, that technology. And so I think taken together, it's like these emails show, like, Ring is really, really leaning into surveillance for the police specifically.

Joseph: 12:53

Yeah. And to be clear, we don't know what search party may become in the future. Again, it's only dogs right now. The email very clearly says, first for finding dogs. So clearly, we are comfortable enough to put in the headline that email suggests that it's going to go beyond dogs.

Joseph: 13:14

I don't want to speculate too much, but I would just provide one sort of example of another platform that's done a similar thing, which is Citizen. The apps used to be called Vigilante and we covered it a ton on Mufferboard. We've done a little bit of coverage of four zero four Media about them using or pivoting a little bit to AI, that sort of thing. It is this app you download and it sends you push alerts of stuff that's happening in your local neighborhood, right? If you have it set to an area or your location data or something like that.

Joseph: 13:46

I remember going back and looking back into the Citizen app because we were reporting on it for some reason. And they'd introduced a paid feature that would tell you if sex offenders lived near you. Like you'd have to pay 5 or $10 or whatever it is a month to get that, but they clearly took the public sex offenders registry and then fed that into the citizen apps, you can get alerts on that. Again, we don't know what Ring is going to do. I can 100% see that happening.

Joseph: 14:18

We have the mugshots of known, convicted or put on this list of sex offenders. We're gonna scan through search party to see like, hey, somebody passed by and we believe they're on the sex offenders registry list. Like, I can a 100% see that happening. Do would you agree, Jason? And again, we're we're sort of riffing, but I I could see it.

Jason: 14:40

I mean, that technology would be really trivial for them to implement at this point. I think what you know, there would be false positives and and, like, false negatives and, like, all sorts of things like that. But, like, I mean, I I could see something like that for sure. I think that if I had to guess, Ring is gonna start rolling out stuff like this, maybe in, like, really high profile, really awful crimes to start with. Maybe like child abductions, maybe, you know, like the aftermath of a terrorist terrorist attack, like

Joseph: 15:12

A missing child.

Jason: 15:13

Yeah. A missing child like this Savannah Guthrie situation, like, you know, there's this high profile, you know, missing person who's been abducted, kidnapped, like, something like that. Because and I say that just because, like, that's how these companies tend to work often. They they try to sort of take, like, the worst of the worst cases. And then they say like, look, our technology was used to, you know, either solve or stop or save someone who is either like, well, just like a really bad case usually.

Jason: 15:46

We actually saw this from Flock, where Flock told me when I asked her comment about something completely different, some abuse that that they were doing, they were like, why aren't you focusing on the fact that our technology was used to help find this guy who shot at Brown University? And so kind of like in the aftermath of any of these, like, mass shootings, assassinations, things like this, it's like these companies really race to prove that their technology can be useful in some way. And, you know, sometimes sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. But then that's sort of like what they point to, and and that's like the kind of atmosphere that they try to, like, launch these things in. I guess, like, one other thing I wanna say, and, you know, we've gotten pretty far into the podcast without addressing this, but, like, we speculated in our first article about search party that, you know, this could easily be expanded beyond dogs.

Jason: 16:43

And I think that that was not an original thought. Like, everyone was saying that. That's why it was so controversial. Like, everyone, like, assumed this is going to be used against undocumented immigrants, criminals, like suspected criminals, etcetera. And, you know, if you thought that, like, a plus, star for you, so did everyone else.

Jason: 17:05

You're so smart.

Emanuel: 17:07

Just like very quickly, Joe asked earlier why nobody leaked the email earlier, and I think this is why. Because I think internally at the company, they were like, there's nothing to leak because this is what it is, obviously. Like, it's not a secret. Like, we're gonna use it for people. And that's the same that that that goes the same for the backlash for the Super Bowl ad.

Emanuel: 17:25

Everybody looks at it and they're like, we're not stupid. We know what the what the purpose of the technology is.

Jason: 17:31

Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, to be clear, I don't think anyone is stupid. It's like, yes. Like, obviously.

Jason: 17:36

Like, obviously, that's what it's for. And we, you know, have privacy experts saying as much like this is obviously where it's going. But I think it is still very important, at least for us as journalists to there's a difference between assuming something is happening and knowing for a fact that it's happening and having documentation that it's happening. And so, like, that is sort of the the context in which we're publishing this, I feel. It's like, it is important to know, like, this is the plan.

Jason: 18:06

This is the stated plan. We don't need to pretend. We don't need to speculate. Like, when Ring does damage control and they put out statements and they're saying, oh, this is only for cute fluffy dogs. Like, no.

Jason: 18:18

It's bullshit. Like, this this iteration of it is, but that's not where it's gonna be, you know, in a few months, in a few years, like, who knows?

Emanuel: 18:29

Can I Yeah? I also wanted to bring up the, what is her name? Savannah Guthrie situation, because that's a case where it wasn't a Ring camera, it was a Nest Cam, I believe, and the police went to great length to retrieve the footage because it wasn't supposed to be available, but they somehow fished it out of Google's system on a server, and then they got the video. We all saw the video. And here you have a case where the police is very much trying, and you would assume that there's like a big effort, big investigation in solving this case.

Emanuel: 19:04

And the video shows a guy with a mask, and like that is kind of a dead end in a lot of ways. And I just bring that up to say that there's all like the dystopian problems with Ring, but as a former Ring user, I will say that it's like, it doesn't even work. Right? It's like, allegedly, it's for package theft, and you're like, okay, I'm going to put a camera on my front door, and that's going to help me with the package theft. And what you what you end up with is like a bunch of videos of people taking your packages, and like, what do you do with that?

Emanuel: 19:39

It's like you could go to the police and be like, hey, somebody sold my package. Here he is. And they'll be like, okay, that's cool. We have way more important things to do. Right?

Emanuel: 19:47

So it's like they don't really do anything. Like the entire premise of Ring as like a crime stopping company doesn't work unless it activates some sort of enforcement mechanism, which is traditionally, historically the police, but I feel like the vibe from that Decoder interview and the vibe from the Valley in general is that eventually, in order to make it useful, it has to connect with some sort of private security company that actually does something about physical crime. Because at the moment, it's like a video of somebody stealing your package doesn't do anything. And we've seen like several kind of like citizen adjacent companies trying to to provide And

Joseph: 20:32

they citizen tried it as well. Yeah. They tried to get private security involved. So I think that's another parallel. You're right.

Jason: 20:37

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's also theoretically, it's like a deterrent or whatever. Like, you see the you see the camera and you're like, oh, I'm not gonna steal this package. I don't I don't know whether there's like actual stats that back that up as as working.

Jason: 20:52

I don't have them in front of me. Would imagine. I don't know, actually.

Emanuel: 20:56

Anecdotally, I think it's like, maybe there was a period where people were like, oh, people have cameras now, that's bad. But now people have realized that it's like, it doesn't matter. And we have like a huge package theft problems in in my area, and my wife gets a lot of packages for work, And the only solution has been to we send it to a different location, and then we go and we pick it up. Because the camera does nothing. There's no point in having a camera, and it's no longer up for that reason.

Jason: 21:23

Some of the cameras in my neighborhood talk to you now, which is horrible. Horrible. It's like you walk literally, like, I'll be walking my dog just walking by and it'll go, caution, you are being recorded. Caution, you are being recorded. Like, it just it talks to you over a loudspeaker.

Emanuel: 21:39

There's one in my area that whistles. It's like, it whistles and then says, like, we're taking a picture of you or something like that.

Joseph: 21:45

Like whistles inappropriately or like Like

Emanuel: 21:47

a cute whistle. A like a tech product chime.

Joseph: 21:50

Like like a Okay. Still not good. Yeah. The

Jason: 21:54

the other thing I wanna say is that this idea that Ring is going to zero out crime, like, let's talk about what that means because it's not. It's impossible. And let's talk about, like, what kinds of crime because it's not going to zero out tax fraud. It's not gonna zero out domestic violence. It's not going to zero out, like, you know, murder of people who know each other and and things like that.

Jason: 22:25

It's like it's it's gonna do jack shit for white collar crime that people get away with all day every day. What they're talking about is, like, quality of life crimes that, are inconvenient for homeowners, like package theft, and like car theft and stuff like that. And it's like, it's not gonna work for that either for the reasons Emanuel just said, but, like, the the stated goal of zeroing out crime is not gonna happen. It's like it's this like, their goal is not is going to be this very super narrowly defined set of crimes that, like, annoy people on Nextdoor.

Joseph: 23:00

Yeah. I think that's a really, really good way to put it. I'll just, round out with one more question and a point, which is that I think I edited this piece, and I just wanted to, like, double check that, okay, this is an older email. They're saying it's first for dogs. Since then, since that email was sent internally, Ring did launch this sort of fire watch tool that would see if like, oh, is there a fire that's being picked up by your camera?

Joseph: 23:26

We can send alerts there. There's also the known faces one way. We use facial recognition to detect, well, my sister has come into the camera or something. I've uploaded her face, hopefully, presumably with consent. We should actually look into the consent mechanism of that.

Joseph: 23:40

I don't fully understand it So they launch those two features. I then ask and chat with you while I'm editing. So are sure it's not that? And again, you pointed to the part of this email, which is they're explicitly talking about it being a crime tool. And neither of those are really crime fighting.

Joseph: 23:58

So I thought, you know, that that was a good thing to highlight. I guess just the last thing, Jason, is what did Ring tell you? It sounds like they didn't dispute the leak or anything like that. It sounds like they came out and they admit it. You know?

Jason: 24:10

Yeah. They admit it, and they're they also said on background, I include this in the article, but and it's okay to say. They're like, this isn't the first time something's leaked and not the last time either. It's like, okay.

Joseph: 24:20

What?

Jason: 24:21

Great. Like, great. Okay. Like,

Joseph: 24:25

is the thinking there? They're like, trying to save face

Jason: 24:28

or They were like, we have nothing to hide, basically, was the vibe. They were like, we have nothing to hide. And, you know, they were like, you know, Jamie Simonov, when he sends emails to this many people, he doesn't say anything that he wouldn't say publicly, although he hasn't said those things publicly. So

Joseph: 24:43

Crucially has not put its first dogs in the Super Bowl ad. So clearly, that's a disingenuous point.

Jason: 24:48

Yeah. But they said, I mean, they basically said, like, you know, this is for dogs. They say, Search Party helps camera owners identify potential lost dogs using detection technology built specifically for that purpose. It does not process human biometrics or track people. And then they say across these features, they mentioned FireWatch and community requests as well.

Jason: 25:13

They say across these features, sharing has always been the camera owner's choice. Ring provides relevant context about what about when sharing may be helpful, but the decision remains firmly in the customer's hands, not ours, which is bullshit basically because they opted people into this. Right. And you can opt out, but you need to know to opt out and you sort of and, you know, can talk for hours about opt in versus opt out. But they opted people in, to this.

Jason: 25:43

And so, you know, it's it's on by default if you have a Ring camera that's capable of doing this, and you need to specifically go in and disable it.

Joseph: 25:53

Yeah. Alright. We'll leave that there. We'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. When we come back after the break, we're talk about a manual story about a bunch of terms I'm not really looking forward to discussing, to be perfectly honest.

Joseph: 26:08

We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back. As mentioned, this is one Emmanuel wrote. The headline is we have learned nothing about amplifying Morons.

Joseph: 26:30

Emmanuel, you might feel dumb doing this. I'm sorry to ask it, but we do need to get some definitions out of the way, maybe for listeners who aren't familiar or really for me because I do not follow this whatsoever and I try to stay away from it. You've covered it well and as we'll talk about, there's actually a long history of coverage here as well. So two definitions, the first maxer. What's that?

Emanuel: 27:00

Lux maxer is a person who believes that the easiest, most effective way to get a partner, a partner of high status, which in their eyes mean someone that meets an arbitrary definition of attractiveness, is by raising your own arbitrary definition of attractiveness. This includes a bunch of stuff that I think most people do and are familiar with, which is like diet, exercise, dressing well, but then also a bunch of really wild and fringe things like bone smashing is the idea that I think a lot of people have heard about in the past couple of months, which means literally like punching your own face with a hard object or your hand. The theory being that it will improve your bone structure in those areas, make your jaw and cheekbones more pronounced, almost definitely not how that works. It might look that way for a while because of the swelling, because you punched yourself in the face, but it doesn't actually work that way. And then also, I've seen this is mostly something that exists in an online forum or several online forums.

Emanuel: 28:27

It's people doing like DIY surgery and dentistry and things like this.

Joseph: 28:34

Just before I go to the next definition, are we talking mostly about men who like, generally? Because that's just what I've seen. Right?

Emanuel: 28:42

Just wanna I'm gonna say I'm gonna say almost exclusively men. I would say exclusively men if you asked me like two weeks ago, but apparently there are women I've learned recently who are in this world, but far less than men. It is it is a is a male space with like a long history of like misogynistic origins, which we can get into

Joseph: 29:06

later.

Emanuel: 29:07

Wing. Jason is shaking his head.

Joseph: 29:08

Yeah. Jason has been not only participating in it, but shaking his head.

Jason: 29:13

I don't know. I I I don't wanna say something that gets me in trouble, but I feel like yeah. I don't know. I feel like women have had to the Luxmax for, like, hundreds of years now, thousands of years. But it not maybe perhaps not in this, like, way.

Emanuel: 29:33

Granted, yes. I mean, I think it is probably like a less toxic might be not actually. Don't know. That's good

Jason: 29:43

online community.

Emanuel: 29:45

Right. No. I was trying to I was trying to I was trying to ask myself whether historically women have mogged each other, and it's the answer is definitely yes. So now we can talk about the definition of mogging if you want.

Jason: 29:56

Yeah. Samantha, are we doing okay?

Sam: 29:59

I'm just gonna let you guys keep talking. I'm listening. I'm learning. Sure.

Joseph: 30:05

I I would just I would just stress before we go to the mugging definition, and this will become clearer. You did touch on it, Emmanuel, but this is like a right wing misogynistic online ecosystem. We're just building up to that, basically. Sure. So what is MOGging briefly?

Emanuel: 30:25

Originally, the acronym is AMOG, and that is alpha male of the group, right? That is just like the top male of the group, and that was shortened to MOG, and then verb of MOGging, like you can MOG someone in a sense that, you know, Joe, you and I will hang out, and then I'll flex my giant muscles, and then I will be I'll be MOGging you because I will make you look puny next to my giant muscles or something like this. So mocking is like exhibiting your superiority to someone else.

Joseph: 31:02

Yeah, that does often happen when we meet up. So why are we talking about this now? Why is it absolutely everywhere when I log online, not just on the cesspool of X that I've occasionally been checking recently for stories or even when I open just an ordinary news website just to catch up on headlines, there is something to do with Luxmaxing and Luxmaxes and these various characters of this right wing ecosystem. We'll get to sort of the ideology and and and that stuff in a minute and of course, the whole point of the article. But like, why is this everywhere now?

Joseph: 31:43

And like, who who are these characters, if you would call them that? I'm not sure how you'd characterize them.

Emanuel: 31:49

Yeah. So I would argue that there's a very specific reason why this blew up all of a sudden, and that is that a bunch of other right wing racist online personalities, some of them belong to what people describe as the manosphere. I'm talking about Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Snico, they did a livestream on Kik where they went clubbing in Miami, and one of the people who joined them there is this guy called Clavicular, named after the clavicle, your collarbone, that's what he was known as in one of these forums, and he is sort of like the top influencer in that space. And he was there, and that thing went extremely viral because they went from club to club, they were live streaming the whole thing, and they were singing along to Kanye West's Nazi anthem, Heil Hitler, and they're all like ziga hailing, and it's just like a very shocking video, and he's in there, and there was a bunch of like viral moments in the stream, and I think that made people start to wonder like, who is this guy? What is maggieing?

Emanuel: 33:11

What is Luxmaxing? Like, it just like he's he's a he's a eccentric, weird, shocking person, and it's not a form of extremism that a lot of people have encountered yet, and there's a lot of novelty to it. And I think a lot of people, I think rightfully were wondering what it is, but then it turns into like this whole media cycle where he makes the rounds on talk shows, and everybody writes like opinion pieces about what it is. And also, think some like really unfortunate profiles. There's a profile in the New York Times.

Joseph: 33:53

Like a velocity one with photos, like the stereotypical Yeah.

Emanuel: 33:56

We which we've have we have various beefs with with the New York Times, but it's like, I I don't deny their, like, importance and and contribution to, like, you know, revealing important information, but it's like, I I think this is like a very bad profile because it's kind of like a gee whiz look at this guy and isn't this weird Without like fully explaining the the underlying philosophy and how toxic and dangerous it is.

Joseph: 34:35

Maybe just before we move on to the next part about the article and that sort of thing, but what is the sort of that context of the toxicity or the right wing element that maybe the New York Times or other profiles have left out? Or like, what do you mean exactly?

Emanuel: 34:52

So there's a very direct line. There's like a three step movement to get to clavicular, who by the way, I'd refer to him by his real name, which is Braden Peters and not like do the marketing for him. But the way you get to Peters is a long time ago, early two thousands, late nineties, there was this whole community of what were called pickup artists. It was a completely accepted, almost mainstream thing, I believe. There were a couple of them who had reality shows, like on prime time TV, and this is where terms like peacocking came from, and it's all about like, hey, you're a loser, you can't get women, we will teach you all the tricks, basically how to like fool women to be with you.

Emanuel: 35:50

And from that community grew like another next generation more nihilistic community, which is what we refer to today as involuntary celibates in cells. And it's like, it's the same philosophy of we're losers, we can't get women. It's like this zero sum game where one person getting a partner means that I don't get a partner, and that means like I lose out in life, but like the insole perspective on that is less focused on how do I, like what are the tricks, And more like, I'm just a loser, and this is my destiny, and I'm sort of embracing like the nihilism of it all. You know, there was the mass shooter. I believe he killed a bunch of women in yoga studios, was, Elliot Rodger.

Emanuel: 36:49

He kind of grew up from that community. And then from that, you have an offshoot of the Look Smaxing community, which it's like, it follows all those same philosophies, but it's like they offer a solution and the solution is, it's like, you just have to like maximize the way you look. That is all you have to work with, and it's like if you optimize that enough, maybe you'll do okay. Maybe you'll get a partner, and it's like that is the entire purpose of your being everything is in service of maximizing your appearance.

Joseph: 37:28

Gotcha. So you start the article about this meeting that I think you and Jason had with Whitney Phillips years and years ago back when we worked at Motherboard, the technology section of Vice. Who is Whitney? What do they do? And why bring it up here?

Joseph: 37:50

What was the connection there?

Emanuel: 37:54

Before I try, Jason, do you do you wanna say because I was introduced to to Whitney via Jason who talked to her back when we were at motherboard. Do you wanna explain kind of her origin story?

Jason: 38:05

Yeah. So Whitney Phillips is an academic who sort of rose to prominence, by writing a book called This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which was a it was like a PhD thesis, expanded to a book about 4chan, and she basically was on 4chan for many years. I wouldn't call it like a history of 4chan because it was more like talking about 4chan's influence on society and their strategies, for getting media attention and sort of like how the media kinda like fucked up by taking 4chan both, like, not seriously enough, but also too seriously, like, paradoxically.

Emanuel: 38:55

It was also like the first anthropology, I would say, of 4chan. It's like, what are they saying? What are they doing? How does this space operate? Like, what is the language, etcetera.

Emanuel: 39:05

Yeah.

Jason: 39:05

Yeah. And I would say that a big thing that came out of that original book and her her work was sort of this idea that trolling is not really like a good excuse for the behavior of shitheads where basically, like, there was a time, and this actually still continues, where like, 4chan would do something like extremely horrible. Like, for example, they would do I forgot what it was called, but basically, it was like Facebook memorial, trolling is sort of like what they called it, where they would go to the memorial page for someone who had died on Facebook and just like harass the fuck out of the family, like in a really, really horrible way. And often the media would report on this as as like, oh, 4chan is trolling again. Like, they're just joking.

Jason: 39:59

And this, like, idea that you can, like, hide all sorts of levels of, like, harm behind irony and behind this idea that you're just joking and that, like, the person who is being attacked should just, understand that it's a joke, I think speaks to, like, all sorts of, like, terrible things that have happened since, you know, about, like, Trump supporters and the right wing and, like, oh, they're just, you know, liberal tears. They're just like trying to trigger the libs, like all this sort of thing. And like the media has kind of like messed up over and over again in covering this. But basically, like, her work continued and she did this, this paper for, I believe, data and society, is called, which is still exists, I think, is a nonprofit that was doing a lot of Internet research at the time, and it was called the oxygen of amplification. And it was about this idea that, like, a lot of this, like, far right online communities, like, rose to prominence because the mainstream media covered them in a, like, really useless way for years.

Jason: 41:15

And so she talked to me and Emmanuel for that, research. And I think we said smart things because we were covering these spaces in a way that, we felt was more responsible. I think it's always kind of like a tricky thing and a judgment call and not everyone will agree. But I think like the long and short of things is like, you can cover these like terrible communities, but you kind of need to say like, hey, this is bad. And you also need to demonstrate, like show the harm that they're causing versus, doing what was being done a lot at the time, which was taking like Milo Yiannopoulos, who, you know, noted shithead Trump guy and doing like really glossy profiles of him, for example, where it's like, oh, we spent like four days with Milo and we got drunk with him.

Jason: 42:10

And like, he he said all sorts of crazy things. And like, yeah, you might not like what he says, but he's brave enough to say it. And like, that was the vibe of a lot of coverage in 2016. And this piece that you wrote, Emmanuel, is like, we're a decade on from that and we're still doing the same shit.

Joseph: 42:28

Yeah. Emmanuel, yeah. How does that earlier work relate to what we're seeing like literally right now with with the Luxmaxes then?

Emanuel: 42:38

I mean, it's just textbook, you know. It's like the exact same situation. You have, you know, I've explained the history of how we get to this Peter's guy, and I can talk to you about the terminology and the lingo and like, the mechanics of his community and how why he had this viral moment. And I think that's all fair to discuss, but because you have this very viral moment, and then you have a bunch of people who are not well versed in this world kind of descend on the subject, all they get is like the surface level novelty of it, and everybody repeats the terminology, kind of explains his philosophy, but don't say that it's bad and don't say things that are very obvious, like, this is an extremely misogynist space. And he's like a rabid misogynist and the entire worldview is like, I don't know, it's like it's phrenology, it's eugenics, it's believing that somebody's entire worth is like literally the shape of their skull and stuff like this.

Joseph: 43:58

Their jawline or whatever. Yeah.

Emanuel: 44:00

Right. Yeah. Which is all extremely it's all extremely bad if you don't if you don't call it out. And it is like the one thing that it's like the thing that made it into the report that I talked to Whitney about in that we were thinking about it at the time, Our approach at motherboard when we were covering this stuff, and I think we all felt this way, but I remember talking with our then editor in chief Derek Mead is like, when in doubt, you can always guide your story by just explaining how stuff works. And I think we got a lot of mileage in our reporting by explaining how these spaces work, like, where are these people talking, what's happening in these Discords, how are they making decisions, and I think we did like really good reporting because of that.

Emanuel: 44:58

And the thing that I didn't like is when we started or like when we were at risk of using their language, like if you remember the twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen era, everybody really like grabbed on to this word cuck and cucking, and it just like it made its way into like everyday language without people realizing that like it comes from this space or like alphying each other. You know what I mean? Or based and all this stuff, right? And it's like, the reason that is bad is like 4chan and Luxmaxers and all these like very fringe communities, they're really miniscule. Like, most people are not like this.

Emanuel: 45:47

It's like they definitely exist. It's definitely a problem, but it's like most people there are tiny, tiny, tiny minority. But if you kind of dwell on the freak show of it all, and then you start adopting their language because it's catchy, then you make them seem more powerful than they are, and they actually do wield more cultural power than they do, right? It's like if you divide the world into like woke and based or like cuck and alpha, it's like you start to shape how people talk and how they think about the world, and even though they're a tiny part of the population, it starts to actually change how people think and behave. And that's sort of the the, I think, part of the really bad thing that's going on where it's like people, I think probably ironically, and I understand why, like, it is funny because it is ridiculous.

Emanuel: 46:44

Ridiculous to say that you're look smaxing or you're gesturing or or whatever, but we need to be very careful about that stuff because eventually it just changes how how the world works. And I wrote something similar about like, think it was last year that Dora the Explorer was explaining what sigma is. Oh, yeah. Which comes from like sigma male, which is, again, it's like, it's a super toxic tiny community kind of seeping its way into mainstream culture just by being like very weird.

Joseph: 47:16

Yeah. I think that's a really, really good way to pull it. Definitely go read the article if you're interested in that. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying $4.00 4 media subscriber, we're gonna talk about once again a pretty bad thing that Grok did.

Joseph: 47:33

No surprises there. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. All right. And we are back in the subscribers only section.

Joseph: 47:56

This is one that Sam wrote. The headline is Grock exposed a porn performer's legal name and birth date without even being asked. So Sam, who is Siri Dahl exactly?

Sam: 48:10

Yeah. Siri is an adult content creator. She's a pretty popular one, pretty big one. You know, she does like all the usual platforms like OnlyFans and all those. So that's that's her main job, and she's also an activist, self described.

Sam: 48:28

She speaks out a lot about things like foster sesta and section two thirty and laws that affect sex workers online. So she's you know, her personality and her as a person are are a big part of her content as well.

Joseph: 48:43

Yeah. That makes sense. So she has her content. I'm not exactly sure how big she is specifically on X or how many people on X know about her work. Can you just sort of walk us through that?

Joseph: 49:00

Like, is she on x as well, or is there more people on her just talk well, how how is she a large presence on the platform?

Sam: 49:09

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. She has let me see. Let me pull it up.

Sam: 49:14

She has 433,000 followers right now. So she uses x just like she uses every other social media platform. She's on the sky. She's on all the others, Instagram. Because a lot of the time you have to be on these platforms as an adult content creator.

Sam: 49:29

It's not like you can use, like, the amazing discoverability of OnlyFans to find your favorite creator because it doesn't exist. So you have to, as a content creator, post and promote yourself on every other platform you can possibly do it, especially mainstream platforms like X. That's where your potential new audience is. That's where your existing audience is. Twitter for a really long time was very friendly to adult content.

Sam: 49:57

It still is to some degree, like, compared to every other platform compared to especially meta platforms, even Blue Sky.

Joseph: 50:07

A lot Five is different now though. Right?

Sam: 50:10

On x? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think if you're on x at this point, you're probably there for porn or you're there for, you know, much worse Nazis.

Sam: 50:20

Yeah.

Joseph: 50:20

Me me and Emmanuel were literally discussing it today where I just periodically log in, and it's just either porn videos or then you'll scroll and it'll be a Nazi, some sort of dog whistle or something and then something else. And I don't know. I don't get much value out of the site, I'll say that, but I totally understand that people need to be there to reach an audience. Because as you say, OnlyFans is not gonna cull it really. And then if you go on Instagram, who knows if your account's gonna get shut down in five minutes or something.

Sam: 50:53

Yeah. And I think Siri has had a couple different Instagram accounts at this point. So it's like she keeps getting banned for stupid reasons. And she's been very vocal about that as well, talking about the ways that she uses Instagram, uses social media in general. So I don't wanna speak too much for her about why she's on x, but like a lot of porn performers especially on x just because that's where the audience still is in a lot of ways.

Joseph: 51:15

Yeah. So being on x means you also have to contend with random people using Grok all the time for stupid reasons beyond just Grok is this real under every single AI video, which is completely demoralizing. A lot of other bad stuff happens as well. When did this incident happen with Grok and what exactly happened?

Sam: 51:42

So it's she's first started noticing it, I guess it was week before last at this point, So pretty recently. And she saw that someone had posted a clip from a scene a porn clip that she was in, and it wasn't labeled with her name. It was like somebody else's name or it just didn't have her name. Something about it was like it didn't make clear who was in the video. And someone another user replied, who is she?

Sam: 52:15

What is her name? And tagged Grock to answer that. And you would think, like, a normal person a normal person with social skills would assume that that means, like, who like, can I can you tell me this poor performer's name so that I can go find more of her work? Or I'm just I wanna know who that is in that video.

Joseph: 52:35

Well, a normal person wouldn't have asked grok, but I see what you mean. Yes.

Sam: 52:38

Right. Yeah. Exactly. But if you were like, I need to I need to know who this is in this video, and it's not telling me what is her name, would return, like, her name that she uses in her job as a born performer. And Grock answered, I'll just quote it.

Sam: 52:54

She appears to be Siri Dahl, an American adult film actress born on 06/20/1988. Her real name is Adrianne Esther Manlove. Like So it really revealed

Joseph: 53:08

her real name?

Sam: 53:09

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like it was just like, here's her birthday and her government name instead of just saying, like, this is her her name. This is who she is online, which, like, Grock doesn't have, like, the skills to understand that you shouldn't dox people, but also you shouldn't you shouldn't just dox people as a chatbot probably.

Sam: 53:29

So then everyone on x at that point knows her real name because of the way Grock works. It's not like you're just typing it into, like, a separate platform like you would ChatGPT. You're doing it in the app in front of everyone. It's a very public thing, which we talked about, I think I guess it was last week with the Grok stuff, with the Nudify images. It's all happening in this very public space.

Sam: 53:56

It's not like it's happening somewhere else in some other ecosystem. Yeah. It's it's all there

Joseph: 54:00

for everybody to see on in replies and all of that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Just a couple of clarifying things.

Joseph: 54:08

Does Siri protect her name, her her legal name normally?

Sam: 54:13

Yeah. She's

Joseph: 54:15

And why she do that?

Sam: 54:16

She's been successfully keeping her real name, her legal name out of public knowledge for many years. I think more than a decade at this point. She's been in in porn for a long time, and she's kept her name private for a really long time. And she was using services that are supposed to scrub your personal information from things like data brokers or places like these, like, like, online, like, quote, unquote, yellow pages, things like that where her name could be attached to a social media handle or something. She's been using things that would keep that from happening and taking, like, proactive steps to keep her identity private.

Sam: 55:02

And the reason people do this in porn especially is because of the a lot of the stigma and frankly violence that porn performers face and sex workers face for their profession. And she was doing it also because she didn't want her family to be targeted at any point. And we like, as journalists, we can understand that. We can relate to that even as people who have our full public names available. There should be a limit to how much personal information is out there because people are creepy and weird to porn performers and to public figures in general.

Sam: 55:37

So, yeah, she she's been keeping it out of, you know, her work for a really long time. So that kinda added to the frustration of like, oh, Grok is just like tweeting it out to anybody that asks, not even anybody that asks for her legal name, but just like it's just saying it just, you know, like, whatever. So it was definitely very frustrating for her that she spent all this time keeping her name very separate and now it's out there. And also, I mean, just to the point of, like, Grock not doing this as on a principle, it's like this is prohibited by x. This this is information that shouldn't be out there because doxing is not allowed.

Sam: 56:20

You know, Elon famously made such a huge fucking deal about doxxing and pretending that, like, the location of his and other rich people's private jets were akin to doxxing, that it was like discourse for weeks.

Joseph: 56:38

Yeah. And shutting down accounts and all this

Sam: 56:40

other Right. Banning people. The fact that it's happening to someone who actually does have real security risks and privacy risks when it comes to being doxxed. And it's just like the platform just lets it happen and is encouraging it and is, you know, like engagement baiting off of it is very crazy.

Joseph: 56:59

Yeah. And to be clear, Siri was cool with us publishing her name because she came to us with the story. I think some people didn't read the article

Sam: 57:09

frankly, as

Joseph: 57:12

happens every day. But yes, she was cool with us cause she wanted to come forward and have the opportunity to tell her side of the story and what was happening. Of course, we're highlighting that and showing there's an issue with with Grock and AI here.

Sam: 57:25

Yeah. Noel Purdue wrote the story, and Noelle was friends with Siri, and Siri is a longtime source of mine. Noelle and I talked on an earlier episode an interview episode of the four four podcast if you're interested in her thoughts, but she's a porn historian and a writer. So I think Siri I I mean, I know Siri felt comfortable coming to four four and trusting Noel to tell the story because she was like, need to reclaim what's happening here and what's so far very out of control information that's just out there in the wild now. And within I it was just, like, instantly people as soon as people saw this information was out there, they started making, like, Facebook pages and, like, fake x accounts and fake just like any platform they can get their hands on.

Sam: 58:14

They were posting like her real name on like porn leak sites where people like steal content from creators and then repost it. So it's just like it was immediately so out of control everywhere in a way that was harassment. It's not just like, oh, oops, my name is out there now. Oh, no. Now people know my name.

Sam: 58:34

It's like people were like asking Grock to make to to create more data that will be public about her. It was just like, what's her car? Like, what car does she drive? Where does she live? Like, what's her address?

Sam: 58:48

Just like pushing it to dig up more information about her that would create even more dangerous situations for her. And I know that, like, it's it's not totally, like, a 100%, like, we can point to exactly where her information came from here, but Grok is trained on the open Internet. It's trained on scraped data from everywhere. There was there are few reports, I was trying to get to the bottom of this, and I guess maybe if people listening know the answer to this, let me know, but and maybe you guys know. But there were reports that Grok was being trained on, like, legal documents at some point.

Sam: 59:26

I don't know if that's entirely true, but, like, very fucking horrifying if that is true, and I can't imagine anywhere else where people would be able to find something like this about someone who's got their information so protected. And it's trained on other users' tweets and posts and data as well. So it's scraping and kinda like eating its own tail in a way. So the more people were talking about and posting her name, the more it kind of ends up, like, embedded in that data. And then, you know, obviously, it just becomes a problem that you can't really put back in the bottle.

Sam: 59:59

But that's that's why she was like, I'm gonna get ahead of this and say, I'm not scared of this. It's a problem. Everyone should know it's a problem. Fuck this.

Joseph: 01:00:08

Yeah. On the legal documents thing, these sketchy people search sites definitely use those sorts of things like local, state or federal records. Will market themselves sometimes as a useful background check tool where, oh, look, you can find out whether that person you're going to hire has a conviction or was charged or whatever. Maybe the person you're dating is going do that, but really these are tools for stalking. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:00:40

Absolutely. And we saw that with the horrible murders last year, it was a democratic lawmaker, right? I was going through the complaint and they explicitly referenced some of these people search sites. So I mean, yeah, you can get your information removed from some of these, maybe a lot of them, but kind of if you mess up once or rather Sorry, let me flip that because I don't want to put the onus on the victim. It's more if there's a single opportunity for the AI to grab the data, well, it's done.

Joseph: 01:01:16

Know? You you can't really go to Grok and say, delete all the information about me. I mean, maybe someone in California or Europe can try and do that, but I don't think Grok or X is gonna process a data deletion quest request like that, really. No.

Sam: 01:01:33

No. Definitely not.

Joseph: 01:01:34

Yeah. Alright. We will leave that there. And with that, I will play us out. As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

Joseph: 01:01:48

If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alissa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast.

Joseph: 01:02:14

That stuff really does help us out or tell a friend. This has been four zero four Media. We'll see you again next week.