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.

Default Friend, enigmatic internet expert

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.

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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?