The Curious Case Of The Cat In The Bin ft. Sirin Kale

This week, we're joined by Sirin Kale (@thedalstonyears), a writer for The Guardian, GQ and Vogue, to talk about Nextdoor - the billion dollar app that has taken over local neighbourhoods, and has its own wikipedia section entirely dedicated to 'racial controversies'. We discuss how this app has simulated the 'idea' of a neighbourhood as a surveillance project, that incentivises curtain twitching and snitching, while also eradicating the material functions required to actually build and sustain a local community. That means that Nextdoor ends up becoming a bizarre clone of Facebook, but with more hyper-specific forms of racism, even more minions memes, and endless flame wars between moderators and users that, crucially, seeps out into the real world too. 

We also talk about 'Salt Bae', why so many people are going to his restaurant in order to post their receipts, and whether 'Salt Bae' is the logical end point of the experience economy - one in which, rather than enjoying your time, you pursue things in order to make other people online as mad as possible.
----more----

Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and  produced by Devon (@Devon_OnEarth). For bonus content, subscribe to us on patreon for $5 a month at: www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast.