'The Scumbag' Is a Podcast About the Weirdest and Worst People on the Internet
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'The Scumbag' Is a Podcast About the Weirdest and Worst People on the Internet

A conversation with Ed Zitron and Felix Biederman about their new podcast on the most niche internet hideouts.

We're in that strange part of the internet again. That place where a young man in a basement makes the decision to go "VolCel." Where a guy with a beer in hand sets up his blurry camera to record "day two of my woman-hate blog." Where over-enthused NRA members discuss violent, hypothetical revenge.

The Scumbag is a podcast that explores online life at its most bizarre. Hosted by Felix Biederman, writer and presenter of the podcast Chapo Trap House, and Ed Zitron, founder of PR company EZPR and author of This is How You Pitch, the show is a rogue's gallery of online life. Its creators describe it as a "a podcast about the strange, the awful, the weird, the niche and the downright horrifying of the internet."

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"I love it," Zitron told me over email of his love-hate relationship with the internet. "It's a sickly addiction at times but there is a genuine joy I get out of it. The positives outweigh the negatives by a huge degree."

Does he hate-read and hate-follow, on the lookout for potential Scumbag subjects? "Definitely yes, there're things I read deliberately knowing I will hate them," he said. "But I sort of want to hate… It's enjoyable in a powerful way."

Gun nuts and pick-up artists are fair game, thought here are some places they'll draw the line: "The Relationships and Relationship advice subreddits for example," said Zitron, who has pledged not to troll lovelorn Redditors. "I don't do that as much anymore because it's dawned on me it's a little cruel and condescending (and hypocritical, as I've called people out a lot for punching down)."

The latest episode of The Scumbag takes on a trio of would-be lifestyle gurus: YouTube bodybuilder Rich Piana, former MMA fighter Dan Quinn (who has since begun a career in promoting the apparently miraculous—and frankly, barely credible—health benefits of stevia, a plant-based sugar substitute), and Texan gamer and noted disliker-of-women DemoniusX.

Other episodes address subjects like performed grief and hot takes, "An Open Letter to People Who Write Open Letters," the politics of online rage, and—a personal favourite—"The Horny Men of the Internet," which zeros in on what Zitron and Biederman call the "mwah sweetie" guys, who send unprompted, vaguely ominous invitations to women to visit them on yachts in Qatar, or Miami, or wherever else oversexed men with yachts are to be found.

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The Scumbag first aired this June and was created after Zitron and Biederman, who knew each other from Twitter, finally met in person last year in a cheese shop in New York. This progressed to talking, then drinking, then shouting about Metal Gear Solid, then finally deciding to make a podcast about the contents of their DMs.

"We'd spent hours and hours of our lives having quasi-intelligent discussions about the weird little internet cliques around us, how people were interacting with each other, or how certain men on Twitter were really transparently running their accounts like some sort of weird lure to attract women to have sex with…" Zitron said.

Navigating the black hole of shock politics and machismo and stevia-snorting, The Scumbag offers a guide for the confused and tweet-fatigued

The aim of the podcast was to channel the pulpy bombast of the very people they wanted to discuss. Zitron asked illustrator Roger Strunk to create the logo, which features guns, cockroaches and the Windows "loading" hourglass. "The design idea was based on those old zines I saw in England, ones called "PUNCH!" or "DUNK AND PISS" or "COMETBUS" or "GUNT!" or "ROGER MY WIFE!" or "MILKMEN?" or what have you," he said.

Part of what drew me to The Scumbag was its grandiloquent name. Who is the "scumbag" in question? Are we all scumbags, by force of our internet addiction? Are Zitron and Biederman on a hunt to find the biggest scumbag of all?

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"It's a really funny word in the antiseptic world of podcast names," Biederman said. "Most shows are called, like, 'Living With Lupus' or 'The Consideration Hour.' The second reason is that Ed and I got really obsessed with online gun guys who speak like James Ellroy characters, bemoaning the 'scumbags' that they will one day have to pump lead into as a course of self defense."

"The SCUMBAG loads up Messenger to email my wife some Grubhub coupons. *I* load my Kimber 1911 .45 ACP Diamond Ultra II…." Zitron imagined.

Self-mythologising and self-importance, sometimes to the point of derangement, are central themes to the show. There is something of a mission to The Scumbag, urging listeners to step away from social media, or at least to question what they see there. Navigating this black hole of shock politics and machismo and stevia-snorting, it offers a guide for the confused and tweet-fatigued.

Over the years, Zitron has curated a long and eclectic list of pet hates. Targets include overly-earnest male feminists, people who write in chain tweets, tech pundit Benedict Evans, people who write open letters to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, and the website PR Daily, which inspires in Zitron a poetic, near-pathological loathing ("it's an absolutely horrible, profit-driven PR webinar sales platform wrapped in some of the worst advice in the industry, set to reinforce tropes to make the worst people feel better about themselves… Every time I read a '5 Public Relations Lessons I Learned From My Terrible Herpes' piece my blood boils, but I also can't wait to roll around in the mud, drinking in the sheer shittiness," he said.)

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Oddly, neither host reported any backlash from The Scumbag's subjects

The result is a blend of observation and disgust, fuelled by a car-crash fascination with the internet as a tool of self-destruction, as well as one of self-fashioning. It's not hard to consider The Scumbag part of a broader anti-internet zeitgeist, one touched on by fake clickbait sites and the startup parody Iterating Grace, or the book I Hate the Internet.

But both Zitron and Biederman work in online and social media, and are careful not to take for granted the medium to which they owe their own following. Nor do they believe these hyperbolic behaviours are particular to online life: It just happens to have made them more visible.

"The Internet is in a weird transitory phase," Biederman wrote. "Only a decade ago it was mostly the province of Counterstrike players, people who ran blogs called Living Under Pre$ident $hrub or The Cannon And The Broadsword Warblog, and men who screencapped nipple slips on live broadcasts. Since then, the media class has taken it up and it's become almost like an extension of the workplace for them."

The Scumbag addresses this juxtaposition head-on, mocking its subjects' thirst for retweets, and probing at their thin veneer of professionalism.

"I feel like someone has to say something about it. Like come on…" said Zitron. "Look at the awful Favstar-retweet-hounds—the ones that post joke after joke after joke. They're their own microcosm of shit, retweeting and back-patting in an endless orgy of sub-Family Guy tweet-skits. When Fuckjerry steals a joke from Jonny Sun [a weird Twitter celebrity who deliberately misspells things, for those unfamiliar], it's as if it's as serious as 100 people getting blown up."

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@jonnysun @FuckJerry thank, but also just stop stealing content??? pic.twitter.com/u0dNaPPadV
— jomny sun (@jonnysun) June 23, 2016

It's that clash between "openness" and fantasy, self-righteousness and delusion, politics and profoundly petty grudges that makes the internet such an entertaining place. Biederman lists stevia fan Dan Quinn as The Scumbag's ideal subject. "If someone told you that there are hundreds of hours of this man screaming about a college football career that ended over 20 years ago, it would seem aggressively uninteresting," he said. Yet he has amassed a niche, highly dedicated following of devotees, trolls, and viewers who—like Biederman himself—appear to fall somewhere in between.

Oddly, neither host reported any backlash from The Scumbag's subjects, on Twitter or otherwise. "I fantasize about Benedict Evans ranting about us," said Zitron. "Saying he does not in fact sound like Mr. Bean, that his glasses are the correct orientation, that he does not only care about carpets, that we are mean and rude boys that must be arrested."

Far off in the internet's unloved corners, there's wisdom to be found. And if not, then at least there's entertainment. And stevia—let's not forget about Dan Quinn's secret to fat loss, superhuman strength, enhanced orgasms and perhaps even life itself.

Forum Cop_ _investigates the ugliest of internet beef, getting to the heart of online squabbles and extricating facts from gossip in digital enclaves.__