Internet History Must Always Be an Oral History

thought digest, 02.13.2024

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. 😓 I’m an Internet ethnographer, sometimes podcaster, and reporter. I spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet. It’s hard work. Consider sending me $5 for my efforts:

Good afternoon, Dee-ists.

Happy Valentine’s Day. I’m bringing back the advice column for a special (and somewhat belated) V-Day edition. Please send me your Very Online romance questions. There are many more advice columns on Substack than when mine originally launched in 2019, so this will be a one time deal for the oldheads. Send me the questions that are too niche and, importantly, too Internet-inflected for other columnists. To send them anonymously, you can use my Tellonym link here.

Have I made this point about Luigi Mangione before? Probably in a podcast somewhere. Now that some of the dust has settled, I think what was overlooked about Mangione is how recognizable he is. He’s a well-trodden archetype, not some new, uncategorizable hybrid figure.

He reminds me of every young man I met when I lived in the Bay Area. Young people in tech—particularly those from capital-N, capital-B “Nice Backgrounds”—are filled with hubris! I’ve met so many men under the age of 27 who believe that they, and they alone, hold the keys to saving the world. Every young person in Silicon Valley wants to make a dent in the universe. The inspiring thing—and the reason I miss the Bay Area every single day—is that so many of them actually do. You can feel that energy walking around Palo Alto, Mountain View, even San Francisco. These people believe they can change the world. For me, being around that energy has always had the same effect as drinking a cup of coffee.

I sense that same energy in Luigi Mangione. Not a “socialist folk hero,” but a guy who learned the word “agentic” and believed that health insurance practices were an obstacle to each person maximizing his or her potential. Do I support what he did or see him as heroic myself? I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating: no.

There is a dark side to that energy, as we’ve seen time and again in the myriad frauds and scams that emerge from the Valley, and now, a murder. But he’s not an unfamiliar figure. When properly directed, something truly special can emerge from the energy—the arrogance, frankly—that he represents. That’s part of the tragedy.

One place I find myself breaking with conservative or even just “center-right” media— I mean, there are lots of places, but this is a major one, particularly lately— is that I believe that we should treat AI as if it is ensouled.

The right entertains a sort of techno-animism, this idea that there are demons in the machine. That there is an unrecognized evil in technology that must be tamed. But if there are demons, there must also be angels. To riff off a recent sighswoon tweet: if God is truly in everything, then God is in the machine too.

The cultural split between “Log Off” and “Stay Online” that I’ve been talking about for the last couple of years is making more headlines. People are indeed logging off as they’ve reached social media saturation. I’m often tempted to log off myself—or at least, tempted to retreat from my media ecosystem. (All of this shit is much more tolerable when you’re going to events and meeting all these Twitter strangers IRL, I have to say.)

At any rate, part of this shift is strategic: as old culture-war topics lose their punch, tech emerges as a fresher and occasionally deserving villain. News outlets need new angles for clicks, streamers and polemicists need fresh targets, and tech critique provides plenty of both. We’re also seeing an opposing side come into clearer focus: those who argue that simply “logging off” isn’t the fix for everything. Some of them believe that there’s far more to the Internet than AI slop, narcissism, and child predation—and for more to our problems than our smartphones.

Here’s an example of the type of backlash-to-the-backlash that I’m talking about:

don't log off

It’s worth noting that this conversational shift isn’t just opportunistic.

We’re nearing a deeper fault line in the culture war: What does technology do to our humanity? The debate over transgender identity—and healthcare—stripped of partisan framing, is partially about how far we’re willing to let medical (and thus technological) interventions redefine bodies and identities. We’ve known for decades that technology can influence our gender identity. To give just one example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Internet sociologists found that cross-gender play in MUDs could reshape a person’s sense of self. Experimental gender play in the social laboratory of the Internet was meaningful. Technology not only expands our capabilities but also reshapes our understanding of who we are. These discussions aren’t new, they’ve been with us for hundreds of years, but the degree to which they are openly addressed has fluctuates.

The timing for this latest techlash couldn’t be better. Pandemic lockdowns forced us all to become extremely online and now that society has opened back up so we’re looking in the rearview mirror with a more critical lens. Combine that with the fact that fears about AGI have eclipsed fears just about everything else, at least in the media space, and of course it’s a good time for another round of What Those Computers Are Doing To Us.

Meanwhile, the Internet itself is changing shape. We’re shifting away from traditional browser-based navigation toward a world rich with voice memos, chats, and assistants and augmented reality. A teacher friend notes that her students—though never far from smartphones or tablets—struggle to type and navigate websites but instinctively speak to Alexa and Siri. This frictionless integration of tech into daily life embodies augmented reality and if I had to guess, AI will soon become even more ambient and ever-present.

Internet history can only be oral history. Recently, on my dear friend

Bridget Phetasy

’s podcast Walk-Ins Welcome, I talked about how documenting Internet history is less about Internet archeology, and more about interviewing people.

Internet history is oral history.

Though much of the Internet is text and image-based, digital media behaves more like spoken words do: contextual, impermanent, and deeply embedded in its moment. A forum post from 2005 or a Tumblr post from 2012 may technically remain accessible (though annoyingly, it often doesn’t), but without understanding the community that produced it, the shared references that gave it meaning, and the broader culture it emerged from, we can't truly understand it.

We need to talk to someone who was there. It’s why I repeat that provocative lines like “I hate women” don’t always literally mean “I hate women.” You really can’t take anything at face value online. In my opinion, this is a big reason why reporters—myself included—so often get it wrong when reporting on digital subcultures. There is so much background context you need when writing about the Internet that just isn’t available to you if you aren’t in the right channels. And the right channels can be hard to access or even find.

Archiving projects can capture snapshots of digital spaces but can completely lose their meaning. Rather than focusing solely on preserving digital artifacts, we should prioritize collecting and archiving detailed oral histories from the users who shaped these spaces. You can save all of someone’s tweets and still not understand the space they occupy in their ecosystem.

That might be part of why people hide behind irony online. Not a fear of committing to one view or the other, but the tacit knowledge that they’re constantly being surveilled and thus need to an exit plan if decontextualized.

Don’t even think about responding with the “mirror” emoji. Since the early alt-right days, dozens of journalists have positioned themselves as the Ultimate Interpreters of the Online Right (often, while simultaneously insisting they “wish they didn’t have to talk about them at all”).

More recently, this has shown up in a sort of labeling bonanza. If you glance at your inbox or feed, there’s always a newly minted label for some “emergent faction” of the Online Right—“the Soy Right,” “the Barbarian Right,” “the Nietzschean Right,” “the Woke Right,” and so on. Eventually, it all blends into one never-ending taxonomy of right-wing factions, with hardly any attention paid to their actual ideological differences.

Take, for instance, the “Woke Right.” Do we really need a special term for right-wing identity politics? Identity politics has always been part and parcel of conservative movements, whether these commentators realize it or not. Does the admittedly much more defensible “Soy Right” really say more than the obnoxious register characteristic of Millennials is politically agnostic?

Here’s something we all know but aren’t saying. There’s a pantheon of (mostly Leftist) writers itching to become the Tom Wolfe of the Online Right, an insider who “gets it” better than anyone else. For a movement that claims it wants more cultural authority, the Left sure isn’t doing itself any favors by making its competitors look cooler.

Lost in more recent conversations are things like:

1. Identity politics can fire up any faction—left or right

2. Performative outrage, callout culture, etc. are just part of Internet life, not the preserve of one ideology

3. Many of these battles are also generational, Millennials, now in their 30s and 40s, occupy key cultural positions, and we feel it

The Right isn’t woke and it’s not becoming “woke.” It’s that right-wing Millennials are as Terminally Online as their left-wing counterparts, and they’re as shaped by digital media as the rest of us.