What is Further Reading?

Reading too deeply into our weekly obsessions. Sources cited! furtherreadingpod.substack.com

Where can I listen to this podcast?

This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.

All internet users know what it’s like to be trapped in a liminal space. This week, we talk about the liminal horror of the internet and why liminal space horror is so resonant right now. You can listen on <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/31zl1qMryM40bS89PZK4Hj?si=bf55a0830eb64e24">Spotify</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/further-reading/id1888766368">Apple Podcasts</a>! Subscribe to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out. Below is a loose write-up with none of the jokes.First, we define liminal spaces. In their most literal form, liminal spaces are transitional areas like airports, hotels and hospital waiting rooms. Online, though, the term has come to mean any space that feels mundane but slightly wrong. This wrongness usually comes from spaces designed for people (cinemas, shopping malls, offices) being conspicuously empty. It begs you to ask: what happened here?A bunch of internet liminal space content plays on the theme that our childhood is in decay. You’ll see abandoned Blockbusters, Toys R Us stores, playgrounds and classrooms, captioned You can go back but nobody’s there. The liminality in these images comes from the transition between now and then. So if you see a Blockbuster that's been abandoned, it's sort of frozen in time. It represents the transition between the 2000s and the 2020s.(Listen on <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/31zl1qMryM40bS89PZK4Hj?si=bf55a0830eb64e24">Spotify</a> or <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/further-reading/id1888766368">Apple Podcasts</a>)While there are no Backrooms (2026) spoilers in this episode, we do apply our theories to the movie’s themes. When trying to describe the liminal space that the main character explores, he says, “It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog before and asking them to draw it.” The Backrooms are a shoddy reconstruction of its inhabitants’ memories. Faces are warped, and scenes (like coming downstairs on Christmas morning as a kid) are disconcertingly stripped to their bare bones. Backrooms is set in 1990, full of long shots of old car radios, retro TVs and clunky cameras. But the director was born in 2006. The nostalgia is a reconstruction, already fragmented, built from spare images and approximations of an era the director never lived through. It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog before and asking them to draw it.In the 90s people still felt optimistic about the virtual world as an almost physical space, which is why a lot of internet terms are spatial — think of terms like “cyberspace” and “digital footprint”. The internet felt like a portal to a utopian realm. You could even call it a bridge. A liminal space, but a comforting one.Now it looks a bit more like the Backrooms. You can run endlessly through rooms filled with curiosities, memories, horrors and junk. Even time moves differently, folding in on itself, serving you a YouTube video from yesterday right beside one from 15 years ago. You’re stuck in loops and spirals, a labyrinth so big it feels infinite.“You can loop endlessly through the Backrooms, an infinite plane, like the doomscroll. You never know what you're gonna get. You could get a horror, you can get a memory, you can get something nostalgic.”(Listen on <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/31zl1qMryM40bS89PZK4Hj?si=bf55a0830eb64e24">Spotify</a> or <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/further-reading/id1888766368">Apple Podcasts</a>)In this episode, we connect this to Mark Fisher’s argument that the cultural and political imagination has gotten locked into an eternal cycle, endlessly cannibalising its own recent past rather than projecting forward. The past online resurfaces mutated and contextless, or even warped by malicious recontextualisation (“Look at this lovely video of your city in 1982 — BEFORE ALL THE IMMIGRANTS RUINED IT.”)We talked before in a previous episode (<a target="_blank" href="https://furtherreadingpod.substack.com/p/nostalgia-for-the-future-frutiger-aero-2000s-yoga-mom">listen here</a>) about how nostalgiabait content is especially effective at producing emotion, and therefore engagement. There’s a whole genre of AI nostalgiabait (“POV: you woke up in the 1970s”) that misremembers the past by stitching together whatever fragments it finds in pop culture — just like us, when we’re nostalgic for a time we never lived in.The algorithm (and, for that matter, AI) is trained to trap you in a never ending loop. If you ask an LLM a question, it ends its answer in a further question, incentivising you to keep chatting. Just like the Backrooms, it always shows you one more door. You could always go a bit deeper.For more about 2000s nostalgia and retrofuturism…For more about tech + nostalgia… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://furtherreadingpod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">furtherreadingpod.substack.com</a>

June 3, 2026

Unpacking the Generational Trauma of Teenage Dystopias

How did a generation of teenagers who were raised on novels about revolution grow up to become Trad Wives and crypto shillers and BetterHelp paid partners? Was the 2010s YA dystopia craze all just a fad, or did it actually make a dent in the zillenial mindset?This year, we’re seeing some new teen dystopias crop up like The Testaments, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping and Klara and the Sun. But this isn’t our first rodeo! When we were in high school, the teenage zeitgeist was uniquely shaped by The Hunger Games and approximately four thousand other YA dystopias (Divergent, Maze Runner, Matched, Uglies, The 100, The Giver, etc. etc. etc.) In this episode, we talk about the cultural factors that could have led to this explosion.According to a researcher called Melissa Ames, one major factor was authorship. The adults who wrote our YA dystopia novels grew up in the Thatcher/Reagan era reading 1984 in high school, spent their whole youth braced for nuclear war, and then just... lived pretty nice lives. They projected their unresolved fears about authoritarianism onto their work. And because these authors still held 20th century fears, they wrote distinctly 20th century dystopias.Ewan Morrison wrote a piece for The Guardian pointing out that a lot of these dystopias share the common theme of a well-meaning government that tried to make things good and equal and went too far. The dystopia is constructed by some corrupt social planners who decided to eliminate inequality through mandatory plastic surgery or sorting people into Harry Potter houses based on a personality test.Uglies focused on how s**t it would be if the government forces everyone to be the same, but were we ever really at risk of this in the 2010s? YA dystopias warned of the dangers of governments having too much control, during a time of welfare cuts and the slow privatisation of the NHS. In these stories, inequality is always imposed by the hyper-controlling state, not by capitalists who benefited from the government having less control.We also discuss the limitations of teen dystopias. It’s easy to get swept up in grand narratives about exceptional teens saving the world, but they often make change feel fantastical. Sure, yeah, fine we’d all overthrow a dictator but would we stop shopping at Zara…?Many 2010s YA teen dystopias were bad at real world politics but great at representing the extremity of the teenage experience — the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school football. The guy who wrote Uglies has this quote where he says, “Life as a teenager can feel like living in an authoritarian state.” Presumably he hit a kick flip afterwards, but that doesn’t stop him from having a point.Your whole life as a teenager is controlled by external forces. You take an exam that determines your future forever. You’re put into social groups you wouldn’t necessarily choose. You’re surveilled constantly (stop reading my diary, Mum). Because you’re experiencing everything (heartbreak, love, the pressure of a huge decision) for the first time, it all feels huge. It feels like the end of the world.To hear our thoughts on 2010s YA dystopias (including Matched, The Hunger Games, and Uglies), as well as a deep dive into their inception and legacy, please enjoy this week’s episode on <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/31zl1qMryM40bS89PZK4Hj?si=bf55a0830eb64e24">Spotify</a> or <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/further-reading/id1888766368">Apple Podcasts</a> or wherever you like to listen!Subscribe to get more deep dives straight to your inbox: )More episodes:Further Reading:* Ames, Melissa R., “Engaging “Apolitical” Adolescents: Analyzing the Popularity and Educational Potential of Dystopian Literature Post-9/11” (2013). Faculty Research & Creative Activity. 11. https://thekeep.eiu.edu/eng_fac/11* The Rise and Importance of Dystopian Literature for Young Adults, Ooligan Press https://www.ooliganpress.com/ya-dystopian-fiction/* YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/01/ya-dystopias-children-free-market-hunger-games-the-giver-divergent This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://furtherreadingpod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">furtherreadingpod.substack.com</a>

May 25, 2026

Real Life Doomscrolling

Do cities trap us in a man-made version of the internet doomscroll? We didn’t have time for a deep-dive this week, so we chatted about cities, bikinis as a trend slop predictor, and mimetic desire. You can also listen on <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/31zl1qMryM40bS89PZK4Hj?si=bf55a0830eb64e24">Spotify</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/further-reading/id1888766368">Apple Podcasts</a>! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out. Below is a loose write-up with none of the jokes.Today’s mini chat (let’s call these ‘Further Scrolling’) was inspired by this note:In major cities, you can’t escape the algorithm simply by logging off. TikTok can follow you into the real world through the clothes people wear, the cafes menu you order from and the phrases written on billboards. You can map the timeline of trends just by walking down the street. First, you might pass a buzzy matcha shop, then a family-run bar that started serving a brownish diabetic matcha to keep up with said shop, then a new matcha bar with lo-fi vinyl, then, finally, a chain that did something diabolical to the matcha like adding liquorice jam or whatever. You can see the whole arc of the trend (innovation, democratisation, gentrification, corporate ruination) just by walking to the dentist. In cities, internet trends are physically perceptible and all around you.We also talk about mimetic desire — the idea that your desires aren't organic to you, but they're installed by repetition. If you see all the cool city people wearing that hideous brown Zara skirt with blue dots all over, you might start wanting it too, but how many of them only wanted the skirt in the first place because they saw it 500 times on TikTok? We end up living in this 3D algorithm that just forces our tastes. (We did warn you this wouldn’t be a very profound episode lol)Sithara delivers her bikini theory in this episode: The bikini is the purest canary in the trend slop coal mine. It’s cheap, constitutes a full outfit, and it doesn’t take up too much space in your wardrobe, so you can theoretically just get a new one each year to participate in whatever trend it is next time. This summer you might see people in brown-and-pastel bikinis, and your “ugh, that's disgusting" could slowly turn into an "actually, you know what, it's kind of cute."Obviously, the countryside doesn’t protect you from the internet. If anything, some people use the internet more out of boredom and isolation. But cities externalise the internet and then surround you with its trends until the algorithm warps reality. When you live in a city, you're walking around being constantly reminded of all the things that you learn from your phone. Added to that, the chances are you’re in close proximity with people who are discoursed up. It’s slop soup in here.Is this a problem? Probably not, but if you want to hear more about everything above, please enjoy this kind of stupid episode! Listen on <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/31zl1qMryM40bS89PZK4Hj?si=bf55a0830eb64e24">Spotify</a> or <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/further-reading/id1888766368">Apple Podcasts</a>.Subscribe for more deep dives and stupid chats This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://furtherreadingpod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">furtherreadingpod.substack.com</a>

8 total episodes available

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What is Further Reading?: Reading too deeply into our weekly obsessions. Sources cited! <a href="https://furtherreadingpod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">furtherreadingpod.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Information about guest appearances is not available.

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The Liminal Horror of the Internet