Katherine Dee on Our Internet Age
In this interview: legacy media’s internet addiction, why technology is at the root of culture war, why everything is now a fandom, the coming wave of sex negativity, and more...
I’ve kept running into the work of Katherine Dee, aka Default Friend, while researching a number of the topics discussed here on The Upheaval, including shifting cultural orthodoxies, religion, the impact of technological change, and the evolving weirdness of whatever semi-reality the internet is. I found that she has some very interesting takes on a truly wide range of topics, which you can find on her Substack, on Twitter @default_friend, and at a growing range of online publications.
At first her musings on these topics can seem rather eclectic and sometimes entirely unrelated, but one soon realizes that she is weaving together interrelated strands of a much bigger picture – what the internet is and how it is changing our society. I suppose I am trying to do something similar here, so can sympathize. Plus her writing tends to break categories and styles in a playful and creative way, and nothing she writes is anything like your average professional internet journalist’s herd-like hot takes, which is very refreshing.
I reached out to Katherine a little while ago to ask some questions about a few things I’ve been puzzling over, and she was kind enough to provide some characteristically fascinating answers. I hope you enjoy the resulting discussion below.
To start, how might you describe what you’re up to with your writing at your Substack, Default Wisdom, and with your work in general? I like your description of it as a sort of “scrapbook,” as there’s a lot going on. But is there anything you’d say you’re especially interested in exploring?
Digital life, internet nostalgia and tech’s impact on us, definitely… I think that’s been the through line since the beginning. Arguably, even back when it was a San Francisco Bay Area events listing back in late 2019, early 2020. “At the intersection of art and tech,” without a lick of irony, if you can believe it.
You’ve developed a very interesting argument (which readers can find here and here) that much of what people call the “Great Awokening” (or “identity politics”) can be traced directly back not to the universities or nefarious ideologues, but to the internet of the early 2010s, and specifically to the website Tumblr. Could you explain why you think this was so pivotal? What was it about Tumblr specifically that ended up being so disruptive?
One point that I think the Trump administration really drove home was just how effective legacy media is at setting the national tone and helping to determine the Zeitgeist, but I don’t think the mechanics of that have been fully appreciated.
A lot of my work is about trying to figure out what’s going to trend among legacy media types and how that’s going to impact the rest of country, whether it’s my writing on sex negativity or Tumblr.
My view is this: social media and the press have a symbiotic relationship. They always have, even in very early iterations, like the WELL. Digital communities need the journalists and journalists need them. But this relationship became particularly salient when budget cuts started to happen at publications around the country in the 2010s. It was the perfect storm.
The short version? Because journalists were scraping content from Tumblr (and also Reddit), whatever was happening on those platforms is what ended up working its way into the culture at large, and it was a runaway train.
Here’s an example of how it might manifest: a writer spends a large amount of time on Tumblr and internalizes over the top language about colonialism and cultural appropriation. They see call-out post after call-out post and take for granted that these are not behaviors reflected in the physical world. Maybe they themselves have been called out before. They see a Facebook post one day about how the banh mi at some liberal arts college in the Midwest is really just a sandwich, and not banh mi at all. Maybe someone writes a story about it in the school’s newspaper, neutrally expressing this mistake. The writer re-interprets that story through the lens of the ideologies they’ve internalized online and pitches a story about it to Buzzfeed or Bustle or a similar publication. A sensationalist headline is slapped on the piece, so it generates more clicks. Other news outlets pick it up, and a new story is created: “Cultural appropriation scandal at Midwest college.” Seeing the success of that story, other, similar stories are written, and suddenly it becomes a genre of outrage clickbait.
Another example might be reporting a community that’s quirky, but quite small, and accidentally creating a feedback loop where a new, more extreme community is created off the back of bad reporting. The classic example of this is “Holmies,” which I reference in my article for The American Conservative. This is a great one that also is well documented:
Tumblr’s heyday coincided with another interesting cultural shift. Media outlets were slashing budgets and, notoriously, publishing clickbait. Contributors to websites like BuzzFeed would trawl the internet looking for obscure communities to write about, magnifying trends that may not have ever been real trends at all.
PBS highlights an interesting example of this in their documentary short “Can Fandom Change Society?”:
Holmies arose out of the Aurora shooting tragedy. After it happened, on Tumblr, a group of people, in their fannish engagement, started to post strange photoshops that seemed to be in support of James Holmes, who was the shooter. Within a few hours of that, BuzzFeed posted a listicle about [it]. And then suddenly, it became a story. Originally, it was 6-10 people. But the way it was reported, it sounded like there were tens of thousands of people. The resulting media attention meant that more people were going to be brought to that space.
Today, that same kind of content mining happens, but instead of happening on Tumblr and Reddit, journalists instead use TikTok and Twitter. If you’ve ever read something super out of touch and have wondered, “Wait, are young people converting to Eastern Orthodoxy in droves…?” or whatever, it’s usually because the reporter is reporting on an online trend, not one that they’ve observed in the physical world. Sometimes they include the context that it’s happening online, but not always.
One point that I’ve never had the opportunity to clarify is that when I say this, I don’t mean all journalists, and I don’t mean that there aren’t talented people out there and we should stop trusting reporters as a class. There are certainly people who are still doing great work, and real reporting.
But the reality is that not a lot of publications have the budget to give journalists the bandwidth to take the time they need to really get to know communities and publish interesting, well-researched work.
I know this doesn’t quite answer the question of why Tumblr, but hopefully it gives a decent idea of the climate I’m writing about.
I want to dig a little deeper into your ideas about “fandom.” This is actually how I first discovered your work. I was doing some research for an essay on China that discussed how Beijing has cracked down hard on internet fandom communities, and I was trying to figure that out – like, why the hell would they care about controlling fandoms of all things? I think your piece on Tumblr helped me understand that a bit better. But in your recent posts you seem to have gone even deeper into the idea of how really everything, from internet culture to our current politics, can best be explained by the concept of fandom. But how exactly would you define “fandom,” and why do you think it matters so much? Also, do you think Xi Jinping has been reading your Substack?
You know, I think I have a knack for pointing people in a direction—whether it’s other writers or mysterious Chinese subscribers, so who knows.
I think of fandom as an engagement model, so it’s not in opposition to labels like “cult” or “pseudo-religion.” There may or may not be a spiritual or transcendent aspect to it, like there is with wokeness, but not always.
Fans are communities of people who are passionate about something (in either direction, love or hatred) who participate in fan activity and often, but not always, create fan works, e.g. art, writing, podcasts. When you look at any fandom, there are also behavioral patterns that seem to emerge again and again, for better and for worse: they create infrastructure, do free labor, have archival and curatorial instincts, are attracted to labeling, and, yes, act as a mob.
I think there are a lot of explanations for why everything’s fallen into a fandom model. American culture is deeply consumerist; corporations rule our lives; the Internet elevates some people as “doers” and most of us as “passive experiencers.” The “doers” are the “fan objects”; the rest of us are the fans, remixing or challenging their content in some way. This binary, I think, also explains the rise of people who have affinity-based identities as opposed to experience-based identities.
What is the internet? I mean, I’m honestly still trying to figure this out: what is the internet to us really? Besides a series of tubes. Is it a real place? Some kind of a collective swarm consciousness? I’ve quoted a line from you before on this: “It seems to me that the internet has evolved from being a parallel life to an alternative life to something betwixt and between the two, but the big change is it is always on and fully immersive.” I thought that was very interesting, but it was just one line from a post that was sort of a short collection of thoughts. Can you elaborate on this at all, or have you developed any new thinking on this since then?
It’s something I think a lot about too, and I don’t think it’s a question that anyone has a satisfactory answer to.
There is no logging off; the curtain never closes; it’s like the astral realm, both an overlay on reality and a separate place. And like the astral realm, you’re in some sense always “there,” but you can be more or less there, depending on how much energy you’re giving it.
Generally speaking, do you think culture and politics are ultimately downstream from technology? Or is it more complicated than that? Do you think culture and politics are at all influencing how our technology (the internet in particular) operates and is developing now?
I don’t know much about politics, but as far as culture is concerned, the limitations and possibilities of our technology are reflected in our culture.
Here’s a fun example. People aren’t interested new music anymore. To quote a recent piece in The Atlantic: old music represents 70% of the music market and the new music market is shrinking.
Ask yourself: Is it easier to create and distribute music, or is it easier to go through archives of existing music? With music, our tech emphasizes rediscovering the old music (TikTok; Spotify), versus creating and sharing new music. These same trends aren’t true of podcasting or writing though; we have better distribution tech for both.
Does it work in the reverse? I think new tech might be influenced by reactions to existing tech, i.e. Match.com adding an optional, in-person matchmaker layer. Tech, and the Internet specifically, is the foundation that all of our lives rest on.
“Touch grass,” I know, but only after I book an Uber to the nearest park. There’s a reaction in the mail to that, too.
Let’s leave all the interesting stuff behind and talk about sex. Other than your Tumblr piece, you might be best known for your bold prediction that Western culture is about to swing hard against the norm of “sex positivity” in the relatively near future. Honestly, I find several things about this really fascinating. The first is that conservatives have been bemoaning the sexualization of the culture as basically a total lost cause for like a decade now, but ironically the reversal you’re describing sounds like it will actually come largely from within the young, mostly secular left itself (tell me if I’ve got this wrong) – basically because they’re by now almost all completely miserable with the state of sex relations and have absolutely had it. But you then also predict that as part of this “new life will be breathed into traditional gender norms,” which seems like it would be a strikingly conservative pivot for them to make. Second, you seem to argue that there is a direct connection between the breakdown of healthy relationships and the proliferation of wacky identity fandom-ization (aka wokeness) in the West, that all this is tied up with tech but not necessarily “about” tech, and (all caps in the original): “THIS IS THE REAL CULTURE WAR.” Can you explain what you mean? As well as why you think this is really going to happen in the first place?
Haha, I never expected that post to blow up the way it did. It’s a mess, total manic brain. I get asked about it all the time, but it’s definitely not my most coherent work. I literally couldn’t tell you what was going on with me when I hit publish on that thing… just that it was a moment of insanity.
Anyway, so, the argument I was trying to make has three-parts, and hopefully in explaining these three parts, I answer both of your questions.
One: There’s a separation between how we talk about sex, and what we actually do. How we talk about sex is going to change.
We’re in a “sex recession,” yet the media is unambiguously pornified, and it seems that a lot of people are okay with that, too. You have women who haven’t had sex in years who are the first to defend the rights of and adopt the aesthetics of sex workers. You have women who have never been in a relationship, but have entire spreadsheets dedicated to failed first dates, whom they had no problem hooking up with. I think these kinds of disconnects come because the “media narrative layer” and what’s happening on the ground don’t always reflect one another. The media reflects the digital, though.
My prediction is that this media layer is going to change its tune, and to be honest, it already has. From hormonal birth control to casual sex to porn to dating apps to sex positivity as an ideology, the media class is expressing its skepticism.
Two: Not only are people airing legitimate grievances about the culture that’s influencing how sex is being talked about, and not only are they speaking out about their experiences, it’s also countercultural to adopt a healthy skepticism around sex.
Or, well, to be totally sex negative.
And then, three: Technology enabled a series of structural changes that get pinned on ideology, but the culture war has never been “left vs. right.” It’s a tech-augmented life vs. a natural one. I think people will start to realize this through the lens of sex and gender.
Mary Harrington, James Poulos, and Ardian Tola all argue something similar. Cyborg theocracy. Luxury Gnosticism. It’s all the same direction.
I argue that once we get to the point where the “real” enemy is revealed, the factions would be Big Corporate Tech, techno-optimists (people who think tech can be harnessed for good), and the anti-tech.
It’s like what I’m arguing with my Tumblr thesis. The behavioral patterns underpinning wokeness are present in all fandoms. It isn’t an accident that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, k-pop stans, and the most fervent types of activists were all able to rise under the same system. It’s not a coincidence that certain factions of the Online Right are mechanically the same – even if aesthetically different – to woke Leftists. It’s not a coincidence that pro-anorexics, too, exhibit the same behavioral patterns.
To me, this indicates that how we’re communicating is more, or at least as, important than what we’re communicating. The real culture war begins when people realize the “how” informs the “what.”
Congratulations by the way on being named one of a handful of inaugural Substack Fellows. I’m curious what your experience has been like writing on here so far, and if you have any advice for those readers who may be, or are considering being, Substack writers?
Thank you! I’ve really enjoyed it.
I use Substack like a social media platform as opposed to a business. I think a lot of people want to become a professional Substacker, and that’s the wrong way to go about it.
My only advice is only do it if you love it. Sometimes money comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Money should be a bonus with Substack, not a goal. There are so few domains in life where this is true. You can’t always make your profession your passion or your passion your profession – that’s one of the great lies of the 2010s. With content creation, it can be true though. And that’s an awesome thing.
Finally, is there currently anything in particular you’re excited to write more deeply about in the future, and which readers should keep an eye out for from you moving forward?
My mind’s always all over the place and I’m hoping in 2022 I can slow down and hone some of my ideas. I feel like I’m constantly exploding onto the page. It’s sometimes a good thing, but not always.
I think I’ve said everything I can possibly say about Tumblr. I’ve written at great length about fandom. What’s next?
I’ve been thinking a lot about text-based role-playing games, catfishing, and eating disorders lately. Hopefully those take me to some interesting places…
Oh boy, I don’t think I get it. I will reread it a couple times. Marshal McLuhan just rolled over in his grave.