897: Intergenerational Space Travel
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What mysterious Spotify comments sparked a generational code‑break in the prologue?
On the next threw line from NPR. Let's listen to Josh Reddick's new walk-up song. Whether you love it or you hate it, walk-up music has become a huge part of Major League Baseball. The need to secure the attention of the fans is relentless. I thought, am I hearing things? I mean I realize everybody's singing along. Listen to NPR Strew Line in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. A quick warning there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this AmericanLife.org. Dave
Blandrip runs the public radio show Wildcard. And one of the less exciting and in fact rather tedious parts of his job. Is that he has to keep an eye on the comments that people post about the show online. And one day last fall, on Spotify, he saw all this activity about this episode they did with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. And Dave thought, Oh Her book was controversial, they must have struck a nerve this episode. And then he looked at the comments.
And it was just like Gibberish. Like I just there was there's a bunch of new comments, but I couldn't make heads or tail of of any of them. They're just kind of these like clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like it it screamed bots, just because like any time that I see just kind of gibberish and like a comment on the internet, I assume it's a bot. But the fact that it was all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seem to be like interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
Can I ask you to
read
some of this comments?
Yeah, I've got some from a later batch, we've got some where it's like, you know, someone says, Ah-O-K-M-H. And two people have hearted that. Someone says, Gilgamesh quit and I'm crying. Um last Friday I broke up with my GF. Your cats are so cute. You're gorgeous in that dress. O M L Pink Heart.
So okay, potsy thought. Some new fangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow. He deleted posts.
And I l I went back to the Spotify comments again and there was a new comment and it said, uh, so it deleted my com. And that w felt not body. That felt very strange that uh a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it letting people know that it had been deleted.
And then there were other responses to that.
So someone says the uh username cotton slash amity parentheses I'm back bitches uh commented weird. Uh Aubrey commented that's weirds, two S's.
This is really not looking like any bot behavior he'd ever seen. So He goes to NPR Slack channels, posts some screenshots, described what these comments are. And one of the higher ups, Matilde. suggests reporting it to Spotify, which Dave does. And then Somebody younger at NPR reads the thread. They're ten years younger than Dave. Gen Z, not millennial. Named Hannah Chin.
And I click into the Screenshots and almost immediately I'm like Oh. My conclusion is really, really different than Dave's and Mathilde's. Um, because I'm like, these are kids. And I think that part of that is because I was a middle schooler on the internet, right? Like posting on forums and stuff. And so I look at their display names. Their display names are like Ella with like five emojis and they're like the special character emojis. They're like the ones that you have to like go onto the internet and type your name into like a special text generator and then it comes out as a special character and then you have to like special paste it into your profile.
The profile pictures are all cartoon characters Hannah's never seen before. And then there's the way that they're commenting back and forth with each other. Short little phrases. I'm sorry, that's weird. Lots of highs. Lots of extra exclamation points. Hannah recognized it. They grew up in a conservative home, was homeschooled, with limited access to social media.
And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What mysterious Spotify comments sparked a generational code‑break in the prologue?
0:00–8:55
2
How does Courtney Maum finally confront her mother about the wedding poem after 30 years?
8:55–18:29
3
What does the poem Courtney wrote reveal about her relationship with her mother?
18:29–27:20
4
How did Ike Sriskandarajah’s teenage movie‑theater job shape his view of “the greatest job”?
27:20–36:54
5
What has changed for Ike when he revisits the theater after two decades?
36:54–46:52
6
Why did Myra Flynn start recording her morning hair battles with her daughter?
46:52–54:50
7
What insights emerge from Myra’s conversation with her mother about parenting and pain?
54:50–1:02:00
8
How do all three stories illustrate the challenges of intergenerational “space travel”?
1:02:00–1:05:51