Internet Culture
Story Stream
Young, Cool, Coddled and Raised on the Internet April 30, 2024
“Thank God I won’t have to deal with the internet.” According to Bruce Jay Friedman, those were the last words his friend Mario Puzo ever said to him. We forget — or at least I do — how many writers from the last century made it into the age of email...
How Vice Lost the Future March 01, 2024
When I first started working for Vice, back in 2012, telling somebody you worked there was an exciting revelation, loaded with kudos and intrigue. It was akin to saying you worked for Fiorucci in 1977 or Death Row Records in 1994 – a company that ope...
Of Memes and Magick December 15, 2023
Deep in the labyrinthine tags of TikTok, a group of teenage occultists promise they have the power to help you change your life. ‘Manifesting’ influencers – as they’ve come to be known – promise their legions of viewers that, with the right amount of...
The Buzz on Buzzfeed November 30, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "The Buzz on Buzzfeed" by Tony Spanakos, published at Law & Liberty. In 2023, Buzzfeed and Vice announced that they were shutting down the news sections of their websites. In its short life, Buzzfeed news made ...
Algorithms Hijacked My Generation November 21, 2023
Let’s start with the young women who transform their faces. You know the ones: they have their lips injected, noses chiseled, skin blurred with Botox, and cheeks pumped with filler, each funneling their previously unique features into the same Instag...
Tumblr Is Always Dying November 16, 2023
There’s an image that’s repeatedly appeared on my Tumblr dash in the past few days: a screengrab from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia originally captioned, “Everybody’s dying, bitch. Let’s get you some fruit,” in which a Tumblr user with the handle...
Taylor’s Version November 09, 2023
Taylor Lorenz and her work represent a chasm between the American news media and its readers. While ordinary readers may well be blessedly unaware of the “internet culture reporter” and the drama that follows her and her hundreds of thousands of “fol...
Everyday User November 07, 2023
K. was my first—and probably my only—Stan. I met him at Mood Ring of all places, at a party thrown by a mutual friend. He practically screamed when he figured out that I was the one who’d written that essay about Dimes Square, an essay that had “brok...
On the Barrage of Virtue Signaling October 24, 2023
Nothing will make you take arguing about current events on the Internet less seriously–should you be one of those people in the unfortunate situation of having ever taken it seriously–than watching a few cycles of “The Discourse.” Eventually, you rea...
Millennials Will Age Terribly October 09, 2023
My friend Trevor has a thing he often says, about how in today’s society, there are no elders, only olders. By that, he means there’s decreasing social worth placed on acquired skills and knowledge that comes with life experience—distinct from lived ...
In Defense of NPC Livestreams July 21, 2023
The Pinkydoll NPC TikTok livestream trend has sent me through the five stages of grief. At first, I couldn’t grasp it: Who was this for? Why did people enjoy it? I felt frustrated. I tried to explain it away as some minor blip in the rapid cycle of i...
The Cyborgian Denizens of DIDTok July 13, 2023
Readers who have heard of DIDTok — short for Dissociative Identity Disorder TikTok — were probably introduced to it as I was, through gawking reposts, jokes about “alters,” sherlocking about the legitimacy of DIDTokers diagnoses and DID itself, and, ...
Selling the Drama July 03, 2023
Carmen Hermosillo, better known as humdog, is the patron saint of online communities, and of all of us whose lives have been mediated by a screen. Or she should be, anyway. The grand original promise of the Internet was that it would finally shrink t...
The Dark Corners of the Manosphere June 30, 2023
I first encountered Joshua Citarella’s work during the height of the pandemic. I had just moved to Oakland, dyed my hair purple, and taken a job pouring beers at a taqueria. My only friend was the hot skater I was dating who introduced me to Hito Ste...
Internet Historians & the Joke of Online Culture June 07, 2023
The internet is an endless trove of art and culture. It’s easy to think that it’ll be around forever. Young people are often warned, for example, not to put anything scandalous online because “what’s online stays online.” There’s some truth to this. ...
Cringe-lit May 29, 2023
Back in the late aughts, as I entertained the writing life after a failed stint as a baseball player, I came across the fantastically titled Reader of Depressing Books, a blog manned by the then-unknown Tao Lin. I don’t remember how I found the blog,...
On Internet Culture Reporting May 08, 2023
It’s the op-ed that people can’t stop publishing: “We’re already living in the Metaverse.”It started two years ago when Facebook went all in on its metaverse product‘s hype by changing the company’s name in October 2021. That month, I wrote a short b...
Why BuzzFeed and Vice Couldn’t Make News Work May 08, 2023
During the last years of my run at The New York Times, it seemed possible that digital news start-ups, like Vice and BuzzFeed, could eclipse old, legacy news organizations like us. The Gray Lady was looking every bit her age and she was stumbling in ...
The Strange and Fascinating World of r/meth April 24, 2023
This is r/meth — a shadow-people-haunted forest of madness and intrigue. Everything is chaotic and fascinating, from the moderation panel (stable as an Italian government), to my source, a bright and empathetic drug addict who uses a high-art pet pho...
The Struggle to Recognize Your Own Face Online April 18, 2023
Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. Unable to tear himself from his own image, he wasted away. For the critics who anointed him the patron saint of the selfie generation, the takeaway here was always straightforward: our culture’s hyper-f...
Among the Spiritual Psychotics January 27, 2023
Mass delusions—this sense that you can speak your reality into existence—are everywhere in our digital-first world. To quote the writer Matias Viegener, we exist only in words, “less in the spirit of total revelation than total text.” We are transfor...
Uncurated Pleasures December 13, 2022
An expert has said: “The Internet is a big dumpster. There’s no guarantee that anything you find on it is true.” Yes. The Internet is a dumpster. That’s the appeal. Dumpsters hold treasure. This is why people regularly lower themselves into these ree...
I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person November 07, 2022
Charlie Fang is an internet person. The first time we met, Charlie was sitting at the bar at a sushi spot in Noho—he stuck out like a cartoon character against its muted gray walls, and his orthopedic sneakers couldn’t touch the floor from the barsto...
