The problem with podcasts

A few months ago, a clip from a podcast went mildly viral online. A lightly dressed woman sits in front of a microphone, explaining her sex life in pedantic detail to an offscreen interviewer. It was strange and unpleasant, which was why people couldn’t stop looking at it. What kind of podcast is this, exactly? Who’s listening to it? The answer was nobody. The woman was a porn actress called Vicky Banxx, and the podcast didn’t exist.

Across the world, thousands of people are doing the same thing: plonking themselves down in front of mics, setting up a camera and talking in a genial, conversational style to absolutely no one. They give business tips or wellness advice or share embarrassing details about their lives in 20-second fragments, that they pluck from a long, loose, free-form chat that didn’t actually take place. It’s a mass sustained illusion of conversation.

I get why they do this. If you’re being interviewed on a podcast, it means that at least one other person – a person with a podcast studio, no less – is interested in what you have to say, which means that the things you’re saying are plausibly interesting. (This might be why the single most boring person I’ve ever met spent nearly a year trying to get famous with her podcast.) The mic has a kind of magic function: it turns any ordinary idiot into a piece of the general discourse, even if you don’t actually turn it on. Maybe a few decades from now, the post-apocalyptic priests who govern the ruins of our cities will all wear holy scrap-metal mics around their necks.

The media’s chosen term for this phenomenon is ‘fake podcasts’, which is unfortunate. Not just boring and unimaginative: it misses something important about these ghostcasts.