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146 - Shrimp Jesus and the Death of Facebook (Patreon)

Published:
2024-07-10 06:00:06
Edited:
2026-08-19 00:59:57
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The lads made this episode with their own hands! 😊 Why do episodes like this never get likes? 😢💔 AmenAmenAmen. 🙏🇺🇸 It is our birthday

The lads made this episode with their own hands! 😊 Why do episodes like this never get likes? 😢💔 AmenAmenAmen. 🙏🇺🇸 It is our birthday and nobody wished us one. So excited to begin our cake journey. 🎂 Did you notice when it left you? Why don’t you see these anymore? Gone too soon! ✝️ The joy, the bursts of pleasure, the camaraderie? She did good work, we’re so proud of her! 🤩 This is a place of ghosts. King Charles visited Sudan to feed the hungry children! 🫅🇸🇩 And soon you will join us in the mist. Wow, made it to 100, who else can relate? 💯 Amen.

TICKETS TO OUR LIVE SHOW IN COLORADO SPRINGS ON AUGUST 8 ARE AVAILABLE NOW! CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS AND TO BUY YOUR TICKETS

Media Referenced in this Episode:

Facebook blog posts

September 5, 2006 - Facebook deprecates the original Wall in favor of the News Feed. A post made to someone else’s profile can now show up on the home page of anyone who is friends with that person

September 5, 2006 - Mark Zuckerberg makes a highly defensive and condescending post responding to negative feedback about the shift to the news feed

September 8, 2006 - Zucc makes a considerably more measured follow-up post introducing new privacy settings but doubling down on his commitment to “free flow of information on the internet”

November 6, 2007 - Facebook introduces its new social ad platform in tandem with Pages, implementing the final piece of its core user monetization strategy

February 12, 2009 - Facebook introduces the Like button

February 24, 2016 - Facebook rolls out Reactions (love, haha, wow, sad, angery) globally

News articles:

“Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users” by Harry Davies. The Guardian. December 11th, 2015.

“A timeline of Facebook's privacy issues — and its responses” by Alyssa Newcomb. NBC News. March 24, 2018

“Five Points for Anger, One for a ‘Like’: How Facebook’s Formula Fostered Rage and Misinformation” by Jeremy B. Merrill and Will Oremus. Washington Post. October 26th, 2021

How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth by Renee DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein. Pre-print paper, Stanford University.

Facebook’s Algorithm Is Boosting AI Spam That Links to AI-Generated, Ad-Laden Click Farms by Jason Koebler. 404 Media, March 19, 2024

Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet by Jason Koebler. 404 Media, May 2, 2024

Misc.

”AI is Ruining the Internet” by Drew Gooden.

Commercial: “Scrolling Through Your Old Facebook Feed at 4AM”

Round Here Piano Cover by John Baumgardn

Files

Comments

YOU

The worst of the episode thumbnails. Thank you.

James Slegers

I got FB when they extended it to Dordt College in 2006. I've tried pulling up some videos my friend posted around that period, and had to wait for several minutes for the files to begin loading. The site is old enough that a lot of the early data (from nearly 20 years ago) is in "cold storage" on tapes and media that physical robots have to wander the cavernous halls of a data warehouse, retrieve a dusty old tape, then plug it in, read it, and upload your file in order for you to view it Just imagine, we have tomb-like datacenters littering the exurban cornfields of the minor Midwest cities, packed like the warehouse in Indiana Jones with those hundred-photo albums of your 2007 ragers, which will likely sit there untouched for the rest of time.

Sir.Craze

After a quick Googling Facebook "cold storage" refers to special data centeres using sata drives not rated for constant reading and writing. Not like actual cold storage. That was a fun few seconds though imagining the Facebook robots shuffling through dusty boxes looking for tapes. As insane as that would be.

Elaine Åhlfeldt

There is still a poke feature, though I couldn't tell you how to access it normally. Every now and then a friend with whom I did that ironic "poke war" thing like 16 years ago will somehow find it and send me one. It still shows up as a notification, which you can click as a shortcut to a page where you can poke back anyone who's sent you an unanswered poke. So that's the only reason I'm sure it still exists.

Elaine Åhlfeldt

Oh lol, jumped the gun on saying that. Good on Josh for finding that horrible feature

Lain of the Wired

I never had a face book cuz I had to make one for an assignment and thought it was stupid and never touched it after that was done and you know what I was right

Lain of the Wired

either way I would like the internet to be about human connection in any capacity pls

Catgirl Asha

I always find these kind of episodes where you talk about the internet and how it evolved/is evolving very interesting.

Benalish Transexual

Enjoying the ep so far :) honestly really interesting to hear about the extent of fb's degredation as someone who was never on it until it really went to heck i just gotta say that when it comes to talking about things like 'ai art' where the common name that has been picked up for it is both innacurate and also contains within it a very particular meaning which supports the narrative of a currently ongoing and dangerous political project, i think its important to find words that more accurately describe what the thing is. I still try to reffer to them as things like 'generative images' unless the person im talking to has absolutely no idea what im talking about Just wanted to add my opinion to that conversation since its one of my bug bears and i think language can have a propagandising effect this also might just be my ocd brain doing things so lmk if that feels unreasonable i guess

Benalish Transexual

but yeah i guess im just saying like we dont need to use the language of opressers kind of thing

NotSoWeird

Great episode, would love more of this stuff!

miramask

As a 99 baby I remember Facebook being sort of usable when I started using it in 8th grade, so 2013? I think but wow it fell off pretty quick after that. Was nice hearing about the real good old days I was too young to experience. In high school the preppy kids went to twitter, snapchat or Instagram and my friend group of gay ass fandom dorks went on tumblr

Luckie

That episode description reads like a Dr. Bronner’s soap label

Ned Ludd's Hammer

I'm in a delirious state in Singapore airport after a sleepless 13 hour flight before another likely sleepless 8 hour flight...this episode is exactly what I needed lads!

Jeff Martin

I really liked the delve into Facebook's arc into being scam-based. It reminded me a bit of the stuff Ed Zitron has talked about a lot lately, but from a user perspective. AJ's ad really landed for me, though, because the first time I experienced the death of someone I knew from school was via their Facebook page being a "remembering" page. It started as "huh, I haven't thought about them in a long time, I wonder what they did after school" and I was very much unprepared for the answer!

BarFly

Two of my best friends from college will periodically get on Facebook to exchange pokes, simply as a bit.

BrailleCortex

At about 41 minutes in, at the end of the Farkle discussion, Brian quietly says that that's what he calls pencils. This was a reference to Andrew Clements' 1996 book Frindle, where the main character decides to call pens "frindles" and this becomes so popular that the word is added to dictionaries.

BarFly

I really did enjoy this episode, both sections were very interesting

The Worst of All Possible Worlds

That was actually A.J. and a good way to tell us apart is that Brian will never mention frindles and A.J. will ALWAYS mention frindles.

kegna

this is one of your best ones to date

Elaine Åhlfeldt

Oh, Deep Dream. Truly the peak of image generation as a cute but ultimately pointless diversion, we should have stayed there. No shitty fake birthday cake slop, just eyes, grant us eyes, as you once did for the vacuous Rom, plant eyes on our bodies and cleanse our beastly idiocy. I first saw the "this post was made with generative AI" disclaimer just the other day, on a post by a Swedish comedy poster who makes absurd fake newspaper headlines, often with highly photoshopped images. Stuff like a politician with his face toned redder than is realistically possible and cocaine residue under the nostril, no one is mistaking it for real photos but it dances just on the edge of looking almost realistic but too over the top, in a way that takes serious skill and effort to accomplish. When I saw that disclaimer, I thought "oh, yeah I guess he might have generated some part of this and then worked with that", like it'd neither be out of place nor take anything away from the real work he does in modifying the images. But if you can get that mark just for saving an image from Photoshop, he might not even have done that and be entirely falsely accused. That, uh, sucks.

Wilko

This one was great, though I kept wanting to SEE just how much and in which ways the Facebook site changed over the years. Well, that's the limit of an audio-only format. Still - a wonderful episode. The ad made my eyes well up, OF COURSE.

Nemo

"Get me pictures of Shrimp Jesus!" -- Jane Joan Jameson

Nemo

I was at sixth form in the peak Facebook era so this was a real trip down memory lane for me. I mostly used it as Mark Zuckerberg intended (a way to be weird about my crushes), but the period of Facebook dominance happily coincided with the time I actually started making friends and putting any effort into my appearance. As a result there are probably more pictures of me on Facebook than have been taken in the entire rest of my life put together

Rob F

For the record: I was TWOAPW’s 4th or 5th Facebook page follower. I did it a few months ago - at the same time as I subscribed to the Patreon - because I really like the stuff you do.

Trojan Zebra

I Love you, Man would be a very funny Fancy Movie Time pick

The Squeaky Bunny

Loved this, loved Xanga. I think that was my peak online presence. So cringey too, but I was free. (Give eProp?)

max graves

it sucks how the internet used to be a way to communicate with other people and now it's mostly apps trying to push algorithmic slop on you.

titus virginia

i deleted my facebook in 2014, so this has been part nostalgia for a past internet and part morbid curiosity. it wasn't until a few mastodon instances collapsed that i realized that i was using a "social" platform essentially as a diary and everything wrong with that. ended up deleting last mastodon and twitter a few months before elon bought it, so i guess i dodged a bullet

Evan Hawkins

Shrimp Jesus seems to have appeared, in prominence, about April/May 2024. Red Lobster announced that "Endless Shrimp" was responsible for them filing for bankruptcy around March 2024 with the filing occuring in May. Anyways my point is that these AI images are scrapes from the Internet and put into some AI program that churns out images about what most of the US is taking about. They used to shit out the Jesus coming out of the sea, now they shrimp Jesus. Because of Red Lobsters hubris.

S-lappin

As someone who was a kid when Facebook got big, I never really used it, the profile was made for me, and I'd use it just to play the Facebook games and that's about it, by the time I was the age that would be using a lot of social media, app based social networks started to get much more popular so I defaulted to them instead

S-lappin

Great ad this time too, a feeling that I think will be the one that defines Facebook

Em

Really enjoyed this one, would give my mark for further episodes along these lines.

Kyle Reesman

Really good, like the social view of Facebook.

Fruitless

Can’t believe you would go after Jesus Support, my one source of income

Peter Flynn

Yall should get Jonathan Holmes on to discuss MTV Road Rules!

LaboratoryXI

Great episode! Definitely be happy to listen to more of this sort of thing.

Nathan Woods

Can confirm that 5th grade with AJ was incredibly long

Breathplay

[EPISODE WHERE JOSH PICKED THE TOPIC] JOSH: This shit is sick, twisted, and evil. It embodies the cruelest aspects of capitalism and damns all of us in the process. I love it. I kind of never stop thinking about it. BRIAN: Yeah, I know you never stop thinking about it because you've been tormenting me with bits about it since college A.J. [clutching head, whimpering]: my god. this broke me. i just want to to back to a more innocent time when I only vaguely knew about this [EPISODE WHERE AJ PICKED THE TOPIC] A.J.: this work of art has enormous personal significance to me. I've loved it ever since I first encountered it, and I also have a really heartfelt anecdote about how it shaped a particular time in my life. I'm so glad I could share it with the two of you and our listeners. JOSH: I loved it too, although its central thesis, ideological aims, and overall structure all rubbed me the wrong way, and the execution didn't really do it for me either BRIAN: You know, I'm not really plugged into culture that much, so this was brand new to me. Anyway, here's the biography of everyone who ever worked on it, a pin-sharp analysis of its historical context, and an executive summary of all its ancillary media [EPISODE WHERE BRIAN PICKED THE TOPIC] BRIAN: I am the only person who's ever heard this. It gave me a lifelong fixation on the color teal. I found out about it because as a kid, I was really into CB radios, and there was one guy in Gallup who squatted on a CB frequency by broadcasting this on a 24/7 loop. Of course you can't use CB radios these days, because the signal reflects back at you off of 7G towers and gives you Havana Syndrome A.J. & JOSH: Brian are you okay buddy BRIAN: NO

Breathplay

there was an extremely weird period before the AI models came out when the engagement farmers had cracked that being bizarre and uncanny was the optimal strategy, but had to come up with the material by hand. this was where those videos of women in athleisure making disgusting unsanitary food came from, a lot of them reportedly from the same network of stage magicians trying to get by during lockdown. Wild stuff

John Leavitt

Great episode but man way to make me feel like the oldest man who ever lived (Facebook got big when I left college and I wasn’t going to go on some Harvard asshole website and refused to go along out of sheer stubbornness) - one thing that the Trashfuture episode on Facebook points out is that no one is doing anything about this, the safety and moderation teams have been fired or cut, Facebook just seems like abandonware at this point and whatever the fuck Zuck is doing can best be explained as “having a mid-life crisis through the medium of a multi-billion dollar company”

June Morris

Really liked the structure you used of setting posts from your pages along the timeline of Facebook's history. great episode

Dry Boss

What's fascinating about the AI hands is, they've so clearly over-trained them on getting five fingers right that they're now incapable of hands that show less than five fingers even when they should due to perspective

Breathplay

It's an entirely different kind of sandwich.

Nick Gully

I worry we are not paying you enough to take on dangerous cognitive hazards like scrolling modern FB.

Haru

I listened to *Two* podcasts released today that mentioned Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Very strange.

Jimmy McMillan

I definitely would like more episodes like this

Evelyn

Both the episode and the commercial were excellent. I'd love to hear more stuff like this.

Sam Milne

This was so good. Anyone interested in this topic should also check out the book The Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the time bomb at the centre of the internet by Tim Hwang.

Neural Damage

fascinating, one of my favorite eps so far

Jonathan V. Cann

Big thumbs-up for calling out the implications of not having away messages anymore, as well as the way reacts limit our very language to something more easily analyzed by and for capital (I wouldn't put it past platforms to start gating some of the "words" in even that limited language behind a pay structure at some point). I literally just wrote about this subject for my school, upon realizing that my current group of students is so young they've never lived through a time without feeds, read receipts, and the little "..." that tells you when somebody's typing. They were practically born commodified, and they deserve to know that the social anxieties defining their lives (how many likes did I get vs. this person? is this vaguepost about me? what does it mean that my crush hasn't responded immediately?) are entirely manufactured and weren't even launch features.

Förfäders spår

On alternatehistory.com (one of my main places on the internet as a teenager, because I was extremely cool), people who signed their posts were referred to as “regarders”. They were treated as a harmless curiosity more than anything, I assume in part because no one really had a leg to stand on when it came to calling anyone else a dork

Ms. Charlie

Converting to Southern Baptistism (Baptistry?) so I can properly pray for AI's downfall 🙏

s

This weeks interstitial inexplicably feels like a “when they cry” monologue

Nancy Carr

Loved this episode and hope you do more about means of communication/types of media. Twitter/X and the whole “tits in bio” and crypto scam bots would be especially fascinating. The worst thing is the way this type of bot invasion is happening just about everywhere that used to be a social network online.

Jay H. Holloway

This is definitely in my top 3 of episodes! I’d love to hear more like this. Amazing work.

Alexander Gebhardt

The episode was excellent as always and I'm for occasional deep dives into that type of media/communication. That ad break however... It touched something inside my soul and I got a bit misty-eyed as I thought about how I would remember the people I care about or how I would be remembered. Not really what I expected from the episode, but thank you regardless, it was entertaining, educational and helped my soul grow a bit

Twat Snatch Beaver

Great ep. I do wish I could see all the visuals you guys describe or pull up for each other, maybe you could screen record the Zoom call and share the screen when pointing these things out?

Harold Gottfried

It’s amazing that you got Kevin Perjurer to read out the posts from Zuckerberg.

J

That interstitial...Jesus

Braonán

Fantastic episode as always. It's funny to me though not surprising that the only social media I use is the least popular (tumblr). Still got chrono feed in 2024, praise the crustacean lord!

synthmage

I'm letting you know I want more episodes like this in the comments. Very good stuff!

Tuesdays

about time someone took down that bastard josiah sutton of the fruitless podcast 😤 thank you for your service 🙏🫡

Tuesdays

*also through tears* many such cases

Adam Kelly

Goddamn you Aj for that interstitial. I am on a road trip and had just driven through a town I last visited with a friend who died when we were 21. It was over 30yrs ago but your bit hit hard.

Trevor Seyfried

I really love these episodes that are a deep dive into a particular medium. This one is definitely in my top 3, alongside Slenderman/Marble Hornets which was a similar glimpse into the way the Internet used to be. It might be because I'm a similar age to y'all (HS class of 2008) that I also feel the same sense of loss at what the Internet used to mean to us as a form of media. It went from small social communities around shared interests to a corporate megalopolis and now to this slop that is created by no one for no one. I'd love to see more episodes diving into the evolution (or destruction) of a medium like this. On the subject of AI books, they have completely taken over my kindle recommended books to the point where they're all that I get advertised. Every day I get a new recommendation for some crap like this https://a.co/d/c1VJnrU. There must be thousands of them already, and they're so easy to spot because of the garbage art, gibberish text, and obviously chat GPT'd summary. Is this just what everything will be now?

Max

Sometimes I’m listening to this podcast and AJ mentions something like the Witch Creek wildfire or the Escondido Barnes and Noble and I am reminded that we are of similar age and grew up in the same area. Disconcerting to have someone across the country talk about hyper local things that shaped my childhood.

Jimmy McMillan

It's funny hearing AJ and Brian be embarrassed by their old Facebook bits. I don't think their sense of humour has changed much. Thank god they're no longer doing cringe comedy and do cool bits like 'AJ's horse corner' and 'Goku inflation'. You guys were always awesome don't ever change

Raevn Ohn

Love these dives into social media and the general enshitification of the Internet.

Justine Moore

I don't have anything to add. Just wanted to say that I liked this and I hope you do more episodes like this.

Max

Now I want a sandwich

Allison Newgas

Hi! This was a really excellent episode. Loved the narrative structure and appreciated the chance to reminisce about my own FB history (got it right before college in 2006 so pretty in sync with you guys). My husband and I spent a while speculating on the origin of all the AI spam after we listened, and it turns out 404 Media has just published an investigation into just that. Thought I’d share: https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

PinkLamingtonsPlease (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-07 00:00 More of this! I'd love to see your takes on Something Awful, Newgrounds or even Neopets.
2024-09-02 03:07

I Love Brian Alford's Bible Corner

I'm super late to this party but one thing I will say for Facebook is that it was great for organizing real-world events. I wouldn't have gotten so deeply involved in local progressive causes had it not been for Facebook. More than that, though, was a network that existed from 2018 and is fading now. It was a national network of people in various cities along Greyhound bus routes. We would coordinate in order to meet buses carrying asylum seekers recently released from border custody. Each city in the network had its own team of volunteers who would gather supplies: medicine, clothing, food, hygiene products, toys. etc. For example, New Orleans or McAllen would give us a heads up regarding numbers coming our way. These bus trips could last 4-5 days sometimes, and Homeland Security usually took everything from asylum seekers before releasing them: no food, little clothing in the dead of winter, etc. DHS often took Bibles and rosaries (sorry AJ) and trashed them. Our Facebook groups were private and we tried not to draw attention to ourselves because, you know, fuckheads want to play vigilante. But I still work in immigration now because of that period of my life. It was my first real leadership role outside of just being a teacher. So, way too long story short, I have good memories of Facebook -- at least up until I finally deleted my account a few years ago. Anyway, thanks for what you guys do.

Mulloy

The goon nostalgia is real

The Best Sean

I first saw Facebook as a youngin when my college age cousin was posting about his holiday one reunion, when you had to be a college student to get it. Boy did things change

Ingrid Johnson

This was a fascinating episode to listen to in the near future where AI is defining everything. I got Facebook when I went to college in 2007 and then ended up in a career in political opposition research, which I fortunately quit so I don't have to scroll through Facebook and Twitter as part of my job. Really enjoyed this episode!

Adi

this remains the greatest twoapw comment of all time

Tay

I liked deep dream, it was like the Working-Joe android to the modern replicant. You always knew it was a generated image because it was made of dogs. I never imagined in highschool that the weird dog mushrooms I was generating would later become a tsunami of bullshit I have to wade through everytime I use good

Pascale Andor

Late on this episode, since I joined post Beast Games season 2 (through Ill Conceived). Anyways, it’s really weird how Facebook changed over time. Bc when I went on it at 14yo in 2008, my mom was against me showing her face on Facebook in my albums. Fast Forward today, my parents are big users and I only keep my account bc of Messenger.