Ian Bogost

speaker

439 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Ian Bogost’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Vergecast · The life-changing magic of touching stuff · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

So imagine you're going to a show, you're going to the theater, you're going to a concert, something where you have to go, you spent like maybe a couple hundred bucks on Ticketmaster and you paid all the fees and you got these physical tickets, or at least you used to get the physical tickets.

You'd go to like Will Call and you'd pick them up and then you'd have the tickets and you'd be like, oh my gosh.

I can't lose these tickets.

I spent a bunch of money on it.

I'm really looking forward to the show."

And you had these physical tickets, and maybe you, like, taped them to the back of the kitchen cabinet so you wouldn't lose them.

Or, you know, you put them in an envelope, and then you forgot where it was, and you had to look for the envelope and rummage through the drawer.

on the day of the show you remember where the tickets are they're on the back of the cabinet and they have like a sort of give to them they're like made of cardboard but they're they're still weaker than it feels like they should be to be so valuable and you kind of hold them and you feel them moving between one another you know there's like a kind of friction between them and you put them in your jacket pocket or you put them in your purse and then you go out to the car and then you're like wait do i

and you check your pocket or your purse.

Yes, I've got the tickets.

And then you do that like 50 times before you actually get to the theater or the venue.

And then you hand over the tickets and they get punched or they get scanned or whatever it is that happens to them and they give them back to you and it says where you were supposed to sit.

And now there's something different.

There's something you don't mind if you lose, but you kind of don't want to because they're a token of having gone to the show.

And maybe you keep them and pin them up on your wall or you put them in a scrapbook or you just store them in your wallet and you remember them later.

So all of that kind of like sensory texture that you experience with the tickets, you don't really need that anymore.

Now what you get is a QR code on your smartphone.

And it's, as you said, now you don't have to worry about losing your tickets, but you don't get all the rest of that.

And you go to the show and you kind of hold up your phone.

And it's always kind of weird to hold up your phone when you feel like you should be doing something different.

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