Teaser Announcement

Hello, I’m Jared White, and welcome to Vibe Coded, a show about the perils & pitfalls of creative intellectual automation; and why the future of good Internet vibes is for the humans, by the humans.

This is an announcement teaser, so first, let’s start with how this all came about so I can explain what’s coming next.

My modern era of writing and podcasting about Internet technology came about because I launched my first real email newsletter associated with my “personal brand” as a “blogger” back in April 2018, and soon followed that up with the very first episode of The Jared White Show (later renamed Fresh Fusion).

That email newsletter attached to my “personal brand” went through a number of permutations and was recently called Creator Class, the goal of which was to focus on what it means to be an ethical “content creator” on the open web and the fediverse. Fresh Fusion as a podcast has also covered similar themes as of late.

Well, it’s not that I don’t care about that topic—I very much do—but I see it as simply one side of a larger coin which somehow has a number of sides.

* What does it mean to be an ethical consumer of content, not just a content creator?
* What does it mean to run an online company ethically?
* What does it mean to design computer hardware and software and protocols ethically?
* How is all this impacted by the rise of generative AI? (Spoiler alert: it has been sesmically impacted in ways we’re really only beginning to grapple with!)

So clearly it was time to shift perpsective just a little bit. There’s more to the story however:

I rebooted an old site of mine (and I mean mid-90s old when you trace the roots of it) last year called The Internet Review, intended as more of a general technology blog with its own vibe so that my personal blog could be more about me as a person and what I find interesting or alarming or just plain goofy. That was such an enjoyable experience that I soon followed that up with the launch of my tech-focused (or should I say skeptical of tech-focused) email newsletter Cycles Hyped No More. That too has been very creatively rewarding for me thus far, and what made it even more exciting is for the last few issues I started recording an audio edition of each newsletter for folks (like me, quite frankly) who sometimes enjoy listening to spoken word more than reading long-form text.

Well…perhaps you can see where this is going.

I starting thinking it was time to expand the newsletter audio edition into a fully-fledged podcast all on its own. This completes the trifecta if you will: The Internet Review as the blog, Cycles Hyped No More as the weekly newsletter, and now Vibe Coded: the ironcally-named podcast which is very much not in favor of vibe coding but very much in favor of being coded good vibes.

This is also a bit of a joint partnership with one other initiative I’m starting up this year, an evolution of an educational website and Discord server for web developers I’ve run for a few years called The Spicy Web. That project is morphing into something else, and Vibe Coded will be the podcast to take you behind the scenes, if you will, of that project as it unfolds. It will no longer be strictly about web development but about the need to rebalance our relationship with the corporate-driven technical underpinnings of web software and thus online culture as a whole. The relaunch will be centered squarely on the growing Pro-Craft advocacy movement and hopefully expand to cover much more than what I alone have to offer in terms of conversation and relevant viewpoints. So stay tuned for that.

All that to say, for the first time in a while now I’m super super excited about podcasting on the regular, and feel pretty confident Vibe Coded has the right, well, vibe for what I most want to focus on going forward.

I hope you’ll decide to stick around, and of course if you aren’t already subscribed please sign up for Cycles Hyped No More, a newsletter I think should definitely be a staple of your inbox. (It even has its own RSS feed if you prefer that to email!)

Link’s in the show notes.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time right here on Vibe Coded!