Rascal attempts to dismantle the modern internet

Episode four of the Rascal Radio Hour is a duo affair where Caelyn and Chase take turns staring into the middle distance, the wind whipping their hair in a dramatic fashion while a cigarette burns between their lips. They wonder where corporate journalism all went so wrong. Was it involving corporations? Turning the livelihood and creative output of an entire generation of reporters and critics into the hands of seemingly gormless capitalists?

After an appropriate amount of navel gazing, the pair discuss the inexplicable domain stomping of itch.io by none other than Funko. Tabletop Workers United secures some tentative wins at the negotiation table after a year of hard fights, and Magic: The Gathering's designers find a pretty cool way to handle an insensitively named plane. Elsewhere, Caelyn cajoles Chase into playing more solo narrative wargames before they both take a massive sip from the Question Chalice. Yummy!

You can find Rascal Radio Hour on Apple, Spotify, and all the other various podcatchers. Leaving a five-star review helps us climb the charts and gives the whole team a warm glow in their hearts despite their bitter and jaded exteriors. That's life in the newsroom, baby!

Here's an excerpt:

Caelyn: I find it so ironic that just advertising a board game based on historical events is apparently too political for Facebook when you see the amount of just awful and very much political garbage that goes on that site.

Chase: Yeah. Anyone who's been on Facebook for any amount of time will probably know that there's no rhyme or reason for what goes on. There's plenty of awful—I mean, we're less than a decade away from QAnon thriving on Facebook and them eventually doing something but not ever enough. Not to get too lefty, but it's hegemonic power protecting both itself and the people who let it make money.

Dissident speech has no place on this platform, and we have no real authority to fight for our interests. You can hire a lawyer but Meta's lawyers are going to be so much bigger and so much more powerful. Jason and the people at Fort Circle Games are feeling a lot of the same way that I think you, Caelyn, me and the listeners will feel, which is like, how do you begin? Like there is a certain point where David cannot fight Goliath when Goliath is so big. The fable falls apart.

It's why we're sort of, unfortunately, pinning our hopes on congressional overseeing, on antitrust laws, on the US government trying to curtail big tech without being extremely reactionary about it and like old men who don't understand how their phone works. Unfortunately, our government is a lot of old men who don't know how their phone works.

If you're a board game designer making games that are supposed to tackle these issues, Facebook is unfortunately a very necessary tool. Without it, they're going to have to rely on other routes. They're gonna have to learn how to do Kickstarter or Backerkit in a different way. They're gonna have to reach out to other funds. Or, and this would be the most distressing of all, they stop making games like this. Or stop making games at all.

Caelyn: Yeah, I think the only answer, and it's not even a good answer, is we have got to stop letting so much of what is effectively now public online space be controlled by massive corporations. But there is no easy or simple solution to it. We have to just build new things. Obviously, that's what we're trying to do here at Rascal on a very small level. And we are thankful for everyone supporting us in that endeavor. But there needs to be more.

We need more spaces for this kind of work because even when they are not controlled by big corporations, they're very vulnerable to them. So yeah, we've got to build things. That's it. That's my message for this podcast. Build things. Building things is good.

Chase: I'll co-sign that.