Topic: Archival Media

A montage of early No Agenda openings features various soundbites, including technical difficulties, jokes about Drupal websites, and early catchphrases. The clips highlight the show's evolution from its first few hundred episodes, including a segment where the hosts realize a previous show failed to record properly. These snippets capture the raw, unedited nature of the program's early years in the late 2000s.

An archival clip from a social media conference features a song titled "Let's Get Social," which is described as having "disturbing" lyrics about viral videos and Instagram. The recording was restored from old files to serve as a humorous interlude. It highlights the early, often cringeworthy corporate enthusiasm for social media platforms.

The hosts revisit classic clips from 2009 and 2010, including a media frenzy over a "bedbug epidemic" that suddenly disappeared from the news cycle. They also play a humorous old Hyundai commercial parody. These "classics" are used to illustrate how media narratives are often manufactured and then abandoned once they have served their purpose.

Twitter has introduced a new tiered pricing structure for its API, charging nearly $2,900 per month for full streaming access. Separately, the Library of Congress has abandoned its project to archive every tweet, citing the overwhelming volume of data.

The FBI and social media sleuths investigate a manifesto and website, LastRhodesian.com, attributed to Dylann Roof. The site, registered through a Russian registrar, contains 100 megabytes of photos and a political screed. The hosts question the authenticity of the site, noting that it appeared on Archive.org only after the shooting and that most EXIF data had been stripped from the images.

The final episode of the David Letterman show prompts a discussion on the poor quality of archival television footage, much of which exists only on degrading VHS or two-inch Ampex tapes. Concerns are raised about the "15 minutes of legacy" for modern humans as digital formats become obsolete. The technical difficulty of maintaining vintage reel-to-reel machines for digitization is highlighted as a crisis for cultural preservation.

Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak introduce a special "Clip Edition" of the No Agenda podcast, departing from their usual media assassination format. The hosts explain that the collection represents years of work curated from the past five years of the show's history. They highlight how the clips demonstrate the cyclical nature of media memes and political stories, specifically mentioning past warnings from Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Verbatim has released a gold-layered archival disc designed to preserve data for 100 years. The discussion addresses the reality of "disc rot" and media failure, with one participant recounting the use of a high-quality Plexstore drive to recover data from a failing 20-year-old CD-ROM. The conversation questions the necessity of physical archiving in an era where most data is stored on Google or Apple servers.