Actually Useful

Ariel Butters and Josh Stretten-Carlson

Why do so many once-beloved internet platforms end up toxic, predatory, and unusable? In an age where tech giants have monopolized our attention, privacy, and livelihoods, how can individuals claw back some agency? Every other Thursday, Actually Useful co-hosts Ariel and Josh talk with creators of radically useful consumer tech to explore what it takes to build and protect the loveliest parts of the internet. If you’re exhausted by parasitic products and feel trapped in an ecosystem of unethical, undelightful tech, this one’s for you.

  1. 6D AGO

    LinkedIn Wants You Unemployed

    We chat with recruitment fraud expert Jay Jones about scam jobs, the grift of hustle posting, and how LinkedIn profits from unemployment. In Falcon Mode, an app Ariel has imagined for over a decade is finally brought to life. Links: TheProfiler.org and JonesDoYouCopy.com NeighborCats - on iPhone, on Android We’d love to hear from you. Email us at heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

    44 min

  2. JAN 29

    AI Collisions, Shadow Ledgers, and Implementing AI That Doesn’t Suck

    We chat with AI strategist Allen Martinez about constitutional AI, the cost of multiple AIs conflicting with one another, and how operators tasked with implementing AI can do it without making their product worse. In Falcon Mode, we have another “give me Google but make it actually work” – this time for city cyclists frustrated with Google Maps. Links: Noble Digital, Allen’s personal site, and his book, The Brand Experience AI Operating System From our news segment - 404 Media’s coverage of Palantir’s tech powering ICE We’d love to hear from you. Email us at heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

    46 min

  3. JAN 15

    AI Sexbots, Deepfakes, and the Monetization of Misogyny

    We chat about Laura Bates’ incredible (and incredibly depressing) new book, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny. Between deepfakes and nonconsensual image abuse, the child predators propping up the metaverse, and AI “companions” being explicitly marketed as women who can’t fight back… the AI industry is even darker than we thought. In Falcon Mode, we lighten it up a bit with an idea around learning foreign languages through level-appropriate book recommendations.  Content Warning: This topic is a heavy one, and we reference r*pe fantasies and virtual assault, including some involving children. A more detailed explanation of content warnings starts at 1:05 in the episode. Links: The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates Laura Bates’ website Resources: Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s “Get Help Now” page has step by step advice for victims StopNCII.org for non-consensual intimate image abuse We’d love to hear from you. Email us at heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

    49 min

  4. 12/18/2025

    What We’ve Learned So Far

    After six months and 12 episodes of Actually Useful, what have we learned? We chat about the worst patterns we saw in tech news this year, the most dangerous lie tech workers tell themselves, and the best heuristics for usefulness that we’ve discovered so far. And then, The Falkies 🏆 – Actually Useful’s first inaugural awards ceremony, where, among other categories, we do the important work of ranking which guest had this year’s best falcon sound.  Links: Brian Merchant’s “A Complete Guide to Quitting Spotify” 404 Media’s article about war betting on Polymarket Brian Penny’s Threads account detailing his discovery of the government backdoor being scammed We’d love to hear from you. Email us at heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

    54 min

  5. 12/05/2025

    The Homogenization of Tech: Why Products are Visually Boring

    We chat with JP Candelier, a front-end developer and graphic designer, about how visually and artistically bland today’s tech has become compared to just a decade ago, why private equity firms seem determined to make everything look the same, and which Instagram filters shaped an entire generation’s aesthetic taste. In Falcon Mode, we dig into the pros and cons of a socially connected, gamified app that tracks whether we’re actually doing the virtuous things we say we want to do. Links: JP’s website Meta’s page for their weird (and very false) “Building America” campaign More Perfect Union’s short documentary on the health toll of living near a data center One Sec Check out our YouTube video at 20:11 to see examples of how fast food restaurant architecture has homogenized over the years We’d love to hear from you. Email us at heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

    44 min

  6. 11/20/2025

    Enshittification Nation

    Ariel, AJ, and Producer Josh are finally all together for a very anticipated episode: we’re digging into Cory Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification. We talk about who really owns your shoelaces, how Amazon controls the price of everything you buy everywhere you buy it, and what happens when the company you rent your eyeballs from runs out of business. In Falcon Mode, we discuss how to build a low-tech book swap with like-minded readers. Links: - Cory Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification - What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life, New York Times guest essay - Jeremy Carrasco’s absolutely crazy experiment with YouTube Shorts trained on Cocomelon - Brian Merchant’s crowdsourced project, AI Killed My Job - Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing - Kagi (our favorite search engine) - The Kids on the Night Shift, the New York Times article about child labor on US poultry farms We’d love to hear from you. Email us at heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

    54 min

  7. 11/06/2025

    Inside Amazon While Things Got Bad and Weird

    We chat with Michelle Yang, a former PM at Amazon, about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Amazon product development, and how it felt from the inside as this once-beloved shopping platform enshittified. In Falcon Mode, we discuss apps to find free produce. Hana Fields - use ACTUALLY25 for a discount! Ichigo Farms Cosmic Jelly MutualAidHub.org Produce Good We’d love to hear from you. Email us at ⁠heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com⁠ or find us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ (reluctantly).

    59 min

  8. 10/23/2025

    Make Your Industry Mad!

    We chat with Alex Sanfilippo, co-founder of PodMatch, about imbuing products with personality, building tech as an act of community care, and how culture is shaped by products that price-gouge creativity. In Falcon Mode, we revisit a previous listener submission with a new suggestion. PodMatch.com Commons (sustainable budgeting app) We’d love to hear from you. Email us at heyactuallyuseful@gmail.com or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

    53 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.5
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

Why do so many once-beloved internet platforms end up toxic, predatory, and unusable? In an age where tech giants have monopolized our attention, privacy, and livelihoods, how can individuals claw back some agency? Every other Thursday, Actually Useful co-hosts Ariel and Josh talk with creators of radically useful consumer tech to explore what it takes to build and protect the loveliest parts of the internet. If you’re exhausted by parasitic products and feel trapped in an ecosystem of unethical, undelightful tech, this one’s for you.

Information

  • Creator
    Ariel Butters and Josh Stretten-Carlson
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    16
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Ariel Butters and Josh Stretten-Carlson
  • Show Website
    Actually Useful