Death of the Podcast

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something Freud wrote in an essay on transience. I’m likely misremembering (or misconstruing) his point, but the statement was, unsurprisingly, about death—how death, or the transience of life, gives our existence meaning. It brings pleasure to a fleeting moment; it makes nature beautiful. Death, as of late, seems to be the primary diagnosis we prescribe to the state of the internet. Twitter, since Elon Musk’s takeover, is dying. So is Instagram and YouTube and influencer culture and…you get the point. None of these things are really dying; they’re just transforming. But I suppose transformation is, in a sense, a slow death. An observer attuned to certain slight changes, which occur almost imperceptibly, is aware of the transience of our digital lives.