Blocked, Reported, and a Fond Farewell
You only doxx yourself once
I’ll cut to the chase: two and a half months ago, I turned in my three months’ notice at Blocked and Reported. At the end of May, I will no longer be a Podcaster’s Apprentice.
It’s been almost three years since I sent my first story in to the podcast, encouraging the hosts1 to talk about how multiple media outlets treated a tiny forum claiming to be “abortion bounty hunters,” run by troll website rDrama, as evidence of a scourge of real abortion bounty hunters. Katie and Jesse covered it thoroughly and accurately, and I went from there, providing more stories as appropriate before deciding it was worth applying for the assistant position while in the military.
Frankly, it’s tough for me to walk away. The podcast has done a great deal for me. I had a chance to work for the best bosses I’ve ever had at the best job I’ve ever had. During my time working for it I’ve come up from obscurity into a spot where I can trust that if I have something important enough to say, people will listen. I’ve made close friends, met some of my own heroes in the writing world, and had the great privilege of helping provide coverage of meaningful stories to a large audience I care about reaching. There’s always a quiet question, when stepping away from something much bigger than oneself, if you will simply fade back into obscurity afterwards, and I confess that, too, made me want to stay on.
All good things must end, though. Balancing things with law school has been tough, candidly, and I didn’t relish continuing to balance as my schedule gets busier. Increasingly, I’ve begun to feel that I’ve told the stories I came to Blocked and Reported to tell, and there are other stories I’m excited to spend more time on. As much as I’ve appreciated my work, at some point every job does start feeling like just that—a job—and rather than growing too complacent in it I’d prefer to step aside and hope it can be to someone else what it was to me.
Before I go, though, walk with me.
A Celebration of Blocked and Reported
A recent episode of the show stood out to me. Of everything I heard or helped with on the show, this, more than anything, made it all feel worth it:
Ana Kasparian, for the unfamiliar, is a cohost of influential leftist web show The Young Turks. I have never been fond of the show, viewing it with a mix of the same sort of detached despair I get when I stare too closely at any news station with specific scorn and frustration at several topics I felt they got horribly, if predictably, wrong. But they are extremely influential, and when I first came across them, I had no discernible online voice at all.
Ana’s interview on the podcast is a poignant one, at least for me. She talks at length about her gradual realization at the flaws of the movement she was within, the ways she had covered stories wrong due to the blind spots of that movement, and the role Blocked and Reported played in persuading her towards a different approach. “The one thing I’ve done in life, I’ve done it wrong,” she says in one particularly wrenching moment.
Look—I can’t take any credit for moments like that. The magic of the show has always been Katie, Jesse, and the chemistry they have. But there is an extraordinary privilege in having even a bit role in a show that has the power to play that role at times. There are times where nobody else can say the things they say in a way that will convince some circles to listen.
I love Blocked and Reported. I was a fan from the beginning, I’ve been a fan throughout my entire time working for it, and I expect to remain a fan for as long as it runs. More than anything else, I think it provides a vector for a hint of sanity in an insane world—hosts peeking into the abyss without being consumed by it, digging up the most deranged corners of the internet or media ecosystem, finding humor along the way as they dig seriously in, and providing space for listeners to smile instead of despairing at the absurdity of it all. Particularly during the pandemic, someone needed to remind people that it was the world, not them, that was going crazy.
More than that, I love the fearlessness of my bosses. I love that they dive into stories other media figures won’t touch with ten-foot poles, but they do so without falling into polarization and extremism of their own. I appreciate that they work to be fair to all sides, that they care about the truth and present it even when it’s inconvenient to causes they’re passionate about, that even as they maintain a sense of humor they avoid cruelty. A show that dives into as murky of cultural waters as Blocked and Reported does needs a combination of fearlessness and restraint, and few have managed the balance as well as Katie and Jesse.
Since I’m headed off, here’s a selection of my favorite episodes I had a hand in:
Detective Herzog and the Millionaire Kitty Cartel, in which Katie and I dug into the world of black market cat medicine Facebook groups. This was an offbeat story without major culture war ties. I have a lot of respect for the people involved and was fascinated by the chance to take a peek into a world I hadn’t imagined existed.
Mormons and Furries and Babies, Oh My! This was my introduction episode. It was always an honor, and a bit intimidating, to go behind the mic, and I was grateful for the chance to explore Dave Rubin’s surrogacy and questions of respectful interactions between religious conservatives and those who step away.
The FAA's Bizarre Diversity Scandal. My readers will be well familiar with this one. I’m still working on a follow-up story, but the story of how the FAA shattered its hiring pipeline remains one of the most important stories I’ve had a chance to personally dig into.
A Can't-Look-Away Nightmare Involving A Sci-Fi Writer, A Maybe-Formerly-Racist Cybersecurity Expert, And, Somehow, A Cabal Of Online "Opie And Anthony" Fundamentalists (two-parter). The production on this one was hectic for a few reasons. It was one of the most fascinating and peculiar moments of internet sleuthing I’ve been involved in, trying to piece together a convoluted, messy story where every narrator who had ever touched it was unreliable.
Saddles and Sadness. This was one of the best examples of a theme I’m fond of within the show: telling the story of someone who would otherwise be drowned out because they were inconvenient for others’ narratives—in this case, Bonnie, who helped found a ranch intended as a refuge for trans people before watching it descend into a chaotic mess.
We Must Fight Against Presentism In Our Analysis of Nazi Dinosaurs. This episode tells the story of a paleoartist and behavioral geneticist who got into hot water with her community for incredibly stupid reasons. I’m proud of this one in part because it relied on, ah, a very specific intersection of interests that made me perhaps uniquely qualified to do the background research for it.
I could mention many others here—there were a lot that I had fun with and appreciated a chance to help cover—but that selection is a good start.
The Jackal
Now that I’m stepping away, I ought to tell a story I’ve been holding in for some time.
My online profile has exploded since starting at Blocked and Reported, but those few who knew me from before will recall something curious:
Almost nobody thought of me as a furry before I joined the podcast. Heck, I hardly even thought of myself as one: I had no “fursona,” I had never commissioned art, I did not participate in the community in any capacity, and I had only briefly attended one convention to help a friend hawk custom socks. As far as I was concerned, I was just a guy who liked anthropomorphic art, and there’s only so much to talk about from that angle. I had years of public writing up to that point, and almost all of it was on different topics altogether.
So what happened? How did I go from that to being known first and foremost, in many cases, as the BARPod Furry?
It’s very simple: I saw a tweet.
Blocked and Reported is an incredibly funny podcast. Neither of the hosts is particularly self-serious, and they constantly poke fun at themselves and the world writ large. I make micro-jokes from time to time, but I’ve never had half the sense of humor the hosts do. When I applied for the job, I figured it would make sense to slot myself into a Type, and what better role than one my boss’s pinned tweet was mercilessly skewering?
The rest is history. You know the old canard: call yourself left-handed, nobody calls you Trace the left-handed. Call yourself an Air Force veteran, nobody calls you Trace the veteran. But call yourself a furry…
I don’t regret it, to be clear, though there’s a certain agony in knowing people associate me with the terribly unaesthetic cartoony suits instead of the styles I appreciate. Part of me will always remain convinced that if people just understood what I actually like, they’d understand—because how could anyone not? But I digress.
It wasn’t a label I’d worn until that point, so I had it in mind as more of a silly little thing than anything else and was a bit startled by the extent to which it shaped people’s perception of me. Some people treat the whole thing as a much bigger deal than I care to. It’s an honest label, though, and a real part of me that I had kept in a quiet lockbox apart from the rest, so I’m happy enough to wear it. To suit my role on the podcast (and, sure, for my own edification), I properly chose a character, commissioned a few pieces of character art and went to a convention or two. I have a handful of close furry friends now. As I’d hoped, it was perfect for the podcast and made for easy fodder for all sorts of jokes.
More generally, it’s a pleasant low-resolution filter. It’s useful to attach at least one low-status identifier to yourself. I really am gay, and I really am a furry (such as it goes). Anyone who follows me knows those are hardly points that land towards the core of my work, but they are catnip for a certain sort of extremely online personality looking for excuses to dismiss me. Have you ever heard the old writing advice that you ought to leave at least one obvious issue in an edited work so the editor has something to fixate on and feel useful about? Low-status identities work the same way with low-grade hecklers, and carrying one or two filters that sort out quickly while having very little impact on those who actually care about your work.
And, well, I’m very fond of my golden jackal character. I like being associated with his image. It’s not something I would have had the courage to do had I just gone around mentioning it to friends instead of placing it as the primary identifier hundreds of thousands of strangers familiar with a popular podcast would come to identify with me, but it does make my online experience more fun.
The jackal stays.
You Only Doxx Yourself Once
I grew up in the antisocial media corners of the internet, where wild pseudonyms were the name of the game and identities jealously guarded. I have always been fond of pseudonymity as a norm, of a world where what you say matters more than who you are, where you can experiment with identity and play with thoughts in secluded settings. For a long time, this left me split between two worlds: in-person, where I defaulted to keeping quiet and staying diplomatic about politics, and online, where I would dive into any topic that crossed my mind at great length.
It has been apparent for some time now that my disparate identities have been on a collision course, ready to come crashing into each other and merge into one unified whole. It’s been years since I started telling the people in my life about my online world. More than a dozen online friends crashed my wedding. It’s gotten me multiple jobs. I even share my writing with my law school professors as appropriate, including passing my article on affirmative action over to my law school’s DEI liaison as part of a thoroughly rewarding ongoing chat. There’s a vulnerablity to that, as topics I maintained a diplomatic silence on in person become exposed for all to see, but on the whole it has been rewarding. Lately, things have blurred even more. It feels a bit silly seeing my pseudonym up next to a bunch of real names of people I respect for the upcoming prediction market conference Manifest, for example. It’s time.
When I started working for Blocked and Reported, prudence suggested I maintain my traditional firewall: at the time, I served in the Air Force and held a top secret clearance. Everything was above-board—my leadership gave permission for me to work on the podcast—but somehow I couldn’t imagine they’d fancy getting dragged into one of my sagas of online nonsense. After I left, much of it was simple inertia, combined with concern for my family: people knew me as Trace, and so long as I was Trace online, I did not need to worry about my world intruding into the lives of family and friends.
I will never retreat from the value and the legitimacy of online pseudonymity. On one level, though, hiding my identity while working for Katie and Jesse never sat quite right with me. They work under their own names and their own reputations, and they have weathered serious attacks for their work. In some ways, I worry that my choice to use a pseudonym reinforced the idea that people should be cautious in affiliating with them—that there was something to fear or even to be ashamed of. I reject that. While my work has not been costless, I went in with eyes wide open and meant what I said. Given that sentiment, I want to make it perfectly clear where I stand before I leave.
Who am I? My friends call me Jack. Or Despain. Or 周鹏 (Zhou Peng), formerly 邓鹏 (Deng Peng). Or Trace, these days. Once I was Elder Despain, then Airman Despain, then—briefly—Sergeant Despain. When I married, I appended the name of the man I love to my own, and that is the name I wear today: Jack Neilson Despain Zhou2. I will not give up my pseudonym altogether. Most people online know me as Trace, and you are more than welcome to keep calling me that3. But I am fond of my name and have no qualms about being known as precisely who I am.
I have always been exactly who I say I am; I have always meant exactly what I say. You will find nothing of importance about me online that you could not already have learned through my pseudonymous work—if, indeed, you can find anything at all. I am grateful to have played some small role in the journey of Blocked and Reported, I respect Katie and Jesse and deeply appreciate their decision to take a chance on me, and I am proud of the stories we told together.
What comes next?
Aside from an upcoming legal internship I’m eager to begin and summer study demands in my law school’s Law and Public Policy program, I’m excited both to write a number of stories I’ve been putting off here and to dip my toes into some longer-term projects again. Other than that, I’d like to take it easy for at least a month or two before committing to anything major—I have a long backlog of half-written posts begging to be finished, and I hope to have a bit more time to do so this summer.
You can find me in Washington, D.C. for most of this summer, with stops in Berkeley June 7-9 to present at Manifest and in Maryland approx. June 13-16 for Vibecamp. As ever, feel free to contact me at tracingwoodgrains@gmail.com if you have project proposals or would like to meet up.
Other than that, I like to stay open to opportunity. I’m excited to see where the wind will take me next. Thanks, as always, for following along.
Journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, for the unfamiliar.
My surname is Despain Zhou, following old British tradition of double-barreled unhyphenated names, like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Sacha Baron Cohen. No hyphen, please, nor truncation. There are plenty enough Jack Zhous in the world already, and while it is an excellent name, it is not mine, nor I its.
It remains the canonical name of my golden jackal alter ego, anyway.
Jack Despain is a fantastic name -- definite protagonist vibes.
This was very heartwarming to read. I hope you’re successful at whatever comes next :)