There’s a meme I think about often, a dumb joke that originated in a New Yorker cartoon from the nineties and exploded from there. In the original image, a dog sits in front of a desktop computer, a browser window open on his screen. He’s turned his head toward another dog sitting on the ground beside him. The caption elaborates: “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
This evocation of anonymity, the separation between the public and the private self, feels quaintly old-fashioned in 2024, so eroded is the boundary between our real and digital lives. For years, when the internet was the domain of computer engineers and assorted weirdo thrill seekers, the distinction that this meme alludes to was possible. But no more. There may be fewer dogs on the internet these days, but there are an awful lot of writers. And some of them are very online.
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