Being a podcaster is a bit embarrassing. It’s much easier than writing (my intended career) but much better paid. The term itself is dweeby — sounding at once outdated and newfangled — and impossible to say unsheepishly. I think every podcaster who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice (pace Janet Malcolm) knows that what he does is a benign grift, not sordid enough to inspire shame or attract real scorn, but not worthy nor challenging enough to be a vocation. We are brothers and sisters in blameless mediocrity; we evince a dopey ennui.
Last year, there was a lot of talk about whether podcasts won the election for Donald Trump and whether chat shows hosted by people who’d given themselves brain injuries from blood sport or overusing Twitter were the future of politics. Democrats yearned for “their own Joe Rogan,” someone to win back the coveted “podcast vote.” (Now that Rogan and several of his “bro-podcast” peers have turned on Trump, the urgency has dissipated.)
Of course, there was no podcast vote. The form is too various to have one ideological bias. But the fleeting liberal anguish over Rogan registered something real. Successful podcasts do seem to have one thing in common: each creates its own public, an aesthetic and cultural tribe. My girlfriend makes fun of me because whenever we meet someone in the wild who is a fan of my show, they’re always the same kind of person: gentle, unassuming, sincere, in or out of grad school, often religious or “searching,” and usually better informed about the topic of my show than I am.
Likewise, when I meet a fellow fan of my favorite podcast, “Hollywood Handbook,” they are almost always outwardly diffident, but eager to riff — shy people desperate for someone to find out how funny they are. Listeners to “Chapo Trap House” are so kindred in their sensibilities, a new term was summoned to describe their bloc: the dirtbag left. “Chapo” fans were probably demographically alike before they became listeners, but it was the show — by modeling that one could be left-wing without being supercilious or humorless, and that hating Republicans shouldn’t stop you from hating Democrats — that made them into dirtbag leftists.
Even Rogan, whose audience (an estimated eleven million listeners per episode) is obviously too large to be homogenous, cultivates a type. In my experience, Rogan’s fans resemble Joe Rogan. They are curious, good-natured, politically promiscuous, and compelled equally by masculinity and conspiracy: high T (testosterone) and low G (guile).
Why should podcasts generate such uniform publics? For one, it’s nearly impossible to listen consistently to a podcast whose hosts you dislike, or to enjoy a show ironically or with contempt; a podcast is too intimate and too easy to turn off. If I listen to a new show out of morbid curiosity — or for work — I will inevitably either bounce off quickly, or else find myself becoming endeared to the voices in my head. Disquietingly, the latter happened to me while working on a piece about the odious pipsqueak antisemite Nick Fuentes; I was charmed by him. I only stopped listening because the content was repellent enough to rouse me, every so often, from mindlessly enjoying his affect.
Podcasts are simply not compatible with friction. They are intended — like so much content these days — to lubricate the passage of time. And yet they involve what the philosopher Marshall McLuhan called “empathic involvement.” We are half-listening but emotionally enveloped, forming warm, subrational bonds with our hosts and their imagined publics; the podcast listener “bathes,” to borrow McLuhan’s phrase, “in the emotions of post-literacy.” There is something vaguely amniotic about the whole experience of listening to a podcast: the light pressure and muted seclusion of noise cancellation or car-stereo surround sound, the comforting, overloud sound of familiar voices. It’s no wonder podcasters earn the trust of our listeners so easily: we’re addressing them inside the womb!
There’s a vogue for describing the digital age as a whole as “post-literate.” Surely that is an overstatement. (Look at you, for example, reading a literary magazine!) But for some podcasters, the theories of McLuhan and his former student Walter J. Ong have an obvious attraction. (For us, illiteracy is an occupational hazard.) Ong thought the displacement of writing by talking and talk-like writing — the closing of what some call, evocatively, “the Gutenberg Parenthesis” — had regenerated some of the cognitive conditions of ancient “tribal” societies, with their attendant fixations on sound, mnemonics, agonism, kinship, status competition, and relationships over logical argument (i.e., it matters more who says something than what is said). Thus, as “TrueAnon” cohost Brace Belden wrote last October of our shared craft, “Repetition, conversational language, humor, and emotion are significantly more important than actually saying anything interesting.”
Of course, the modern world has not returned to a pre-Gutenberg state. Our dismal expressive present resembles a peculiar synthesis of spoken and textual cultures, reacquiring certain features of pre-literate life without shedding the individualism, acquisitiveness, and introversion characteristic of the print era. We get tribe without community, emotional cathexis without sociality, balladeers without poetry. We’re alone together. Podcasts are a neat synecdoche for this contradiction: an unlovely surrogate form of connectivity, which we experience in solitude.
