On today's episode, we speak with Anna Kachian, cultural critic and co-host of the Red Scare podcast.

I'm Anna Kachian.

We spoke with Anna about the world of alternative media platforms, how parenthood sometimes changes what

you say on the internet, the tumultuous history of feminism and sex work, and being an internet

troll.

So you've played a significant role over the last few years in what some might call this

alternative media movement,

where people such as yourselves are gaining a lot of fame and influence through social media,

podcasts, sites like substack or medium.

So I guess we want to start with, like, what is the significance of like these alternative media platforms in today's world.

Yeah, I'm going to like put my media theorist cap on. I hate talking about media because I can never like answer the question because these are such broad and elaborate questions. But I think, the baseline answer would be that, like,

what alternative media or independent media or whatever you want to call it literally

provides an alternate model to the mainstream media, not only in terms of, like, the financial

structure, the financial incentives, but also in that it, like, provides a counter narrative or many counter

narratives, as we've seen. And like the upside of that is that it contests, like, challenges,

places checks on the mainstream media narrative, which tends to be like very ideologically

dominant and hegemonic. And right now, I think we have a basically like liberal and progressive narrative.

But the real downside of it is that I think it's very polarizing and fragmented.

I mean alternative or independent media.

So it really has led to a big kind of crisis of faith or crisis of credibility in the institutions.

And that's been good for people like me, but I don't know if it's like a good thing on the whole.

You think more polarizing than like mainstream media or?

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