Kat Zhang

speaker

68 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Kat Zhang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

It's Been a Minute · Will physical media take us back to the future? · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

Thanks for having us.

Thanks.

Yeah, when Donald Trump got reelected, so like the beginning of 2025, it became so clear how platforms were just completely destroying our ability to communicate or shaping discourse in a way that was really distressing.

I felt like I could never see any protest footage and then affected people's

sense of hope and willingness to fight the status quo, you know, the, the content just, just became so much worse and, uh, like AI companies and AI content started coming into fashion.

Um, and so I feel like 2025 was the year that really people really vowed to start like logging off and reassessing their relationship to tech.

Because we saw how the tech oligarchs had ingratiated themselves with Trump and what impact that was having on our democracy.

But also we were just feeling like overloaded by brain rot content and bad news headlines.

And there is just no sense of rest whatsoever.

Yeah, I think because we treat music and media as something that there's an abundance of and something that we can access instantaneously, then we don't spend the time to invest in our relationship with individual pieces of media when platforms have so much control over the distribution of media and your access to it.

they can dictate your personal relationship and cultural memory.

for, for journalists, you know, we're, we're seeing something where, uh, you work for a flashy media startup and then the billion owner, the owner decides it isn't like the startup anymore.

And then all of the stuff that you wrote for the platform disappears.

And so then there's no record of your work or, um, you know, as a, as an internet writer, it's like sometimes I'll cite, um, influential, um,

TikToks or YouTube videos or things like that, comments, and they get deleted or corrupted in some way.

And so, you know, it's becoming really difficult to actually process and have a relationship with media.

Yeah, I think it's just the speed and the churn that feels extremely disorienting.

And I see a parallel with fast fashion, where it's like, okay, there's this, you know, a trend happening, and then Shein or Zara or whatever company...

gives you the, the blouse or whatever, and then you move on.

And I think a lot of people are lamenting the decline in quality of clothing, even among sort of like, more upper tier clothing brands, we're now used to a lot of conversations about like, natural fibers, we want things that are 100% cotton, like we want, like,

Showing 1–20 of 68 · page 1 of 4