'Unread' podcast: Friend's death leads author down Britney Spears online fandom mystery

Content warning: The following article contains several mentions of suicide. The Canada Suicide Prevention Service is available via Crisis Services Canada 24/7/365 at 1-833-456-4566 or via text at 45645. For more information, visit the CSC website.

Chris Stedman remembers the moment with crystal clarity.

It was exactly 7 p.m. on a December 2019 evening when he received an email from his friend Alex.

“Listen,” the message read. “I am writing to let you know that when you receive this scheduled email, I will no longer be alive.”

Maybe Alex forgot to unschedule the email, Stedman thought. He tried to get in touch as soon as he could. Alas. He reached out to Alex's family and the body was found the next day. He had died by suicide.

Stedman also remembers exactly what he had to do.

"The way that I deal with things that feel too large to process, I just make myself busy," he says, adding that he volunteered to do anything he can — from running the GoFundMe to pay for the costs associated with his death to planning the memorial so it wasn't on Alex's family's plate.

"When all that stuff was done," he recalls, sighing, "there's nothing else to do. All I have left is to process my feelings around this."

That's when the Unread podcast began to take shape.

In Unread, a four-part series that topped the Canadian podcast charts this summer, Stedman navigates the grief surrounding his friend Alex's surprising death by digging into files posthumously sent to him, including audio clips of a mysterious, elusive "Alice," a woman who sounds eerily like pop superstar Britney Spears.

Stedman, an author and professor based in Minneapolis, Minn., was going to go on this online scavenger hunt his late friend left for him, but it was the voice of "Alice" that made him realize there could be a podcast project in the making.

"There’s something about hearing Alice’s voice…I just couldn’t communicate in the written word," says the author of two books, including IRL, about how our online interactions impact our offline lives.

"You had to hear it to understand just how much this person sounds like Britney and why Alex was so drawn in by this person, enough that he was still thinking about her at the end of his life."

The podcast forced Stedman to "dig into" his emotions around what happened, but "it was very much a leap of faith," he said.

"I don’t know where this process is going to take me. It might lead me to a complete dead end ... This was a person who showed up in Britney Spears' fan spaces a decade ago."

We like to think things live on the internet forever, Stedman says, but actually things disappear all the time, "especially in those spaces where people are more anonymous. I really thought I was going on a wild goose chase."

But that didn't matter to Stedman. Unread was never really about finding Alice (no spoilers here!).

"Everything Alex did after he died was so intentional," Stedman says. "Him putting these files in the email was not random. I just kept coming back to it."

Stedman then found out others got emails like his and after discussing it with them, they all agreed: "It's worth it to try and find this person."

Stedman calls himself a skeptic and extremely cautious, only taking very calculated risks. Alex was the opposite, he says. And let's face it, we all have an Alex in our lives, that friend who you might consider "too much," as Stedman puts it, but adore them because of it.

"Alex was very elusive. He was always on the move. He would go long stretches being out of touch."

His love for Britney was fierce, too, finding the pop superstar's life entertaining and even relatable, like her mental health journey. Stedman adds that it's no surprise the #FreeBritney movement is having such a moment during the pandemic as it's forced so many of us to face our own mental health and even empathize with the larger-than-life icon whose controversial conservatorship that allegedly bars her movements, like travelling with her boyfriend, and even prevents her from getting married or pregnant.

In Unread, Stedman enlists the help of a journalist friend, Carrie Poppy, and tracks down an internet friend of Alex named Duje, a Croatian man he met on Britney fansites. Duje reveals he first came out to Alex online before IRL friends; and Alex spoke to Duje about his struggles with depression.

The internet and these Britney Spears fansites gave them a barrier-free — and more importantly judgment-free — place to share openly and deeply about their lives. The internet can be an especially cruel place to marginalized communities and it's a miracle many queer people can find solace in friendships with people they might never meet IRL.

Looking back and creating the podcast, Stedman could more clearly say the ways in which the "too much" Alex was failed by a society that too often does not support and properly resource people to thrive, health-wise — mentally or otherwise.

Alex died in December 2019, a few months before the global pandemic resulted in lockdowns worldwide. Stedman says Alex's friends came together to not only process their emotions and connect with others who were going through the very specific and exact same thing — but they also developed their own friendships as a result.

"Alex was a little bit of a different person with each of us," Stedman says, "we're all able to bring different parts of ourselves to our relationships."

And while the Unread podcast was born out of Stedman's grief and curiosity about the files Alex sent him, it turns into much more than that: How do we mourn a friend in the digital age, when their impact and friend groups extend to the real world?

Unread is a podcast for our times that's at once heartbreaking and hopeful — about finding community digitally when doing so IRL is impossible. Though the internet can be a hellscape for many, those same communities can also somehow find refuge in knowing they're not alone.

After all, doesn't so much about our digital lives have IRL repercussions?