Why the Internet Feels So Much Darker Now

This week, guest host Zach Weissmueller is joined by Katherine Dee, a writer chronicling the subcultures of the internet at her Substack default.blog and in columns for The Spectator, Tablet, GQ, UnHerd, and various other publications. Dee also hosts a weekly call-in show that's an homage to the late-night AM radio show Coast to Coast.

Dee talks about the internet as a mystical "other place": fairyland or the astral plane, somewhere you journey and play by different rules, interact with unusual entities, and hope you emerge with your sanity intact.

In this interview, they discuss the shift from the "internet utopianism" of the '90s and early 2000s, where cyber philosophers mused about netizens "forming our own social contract" in a borderless digital space where "governments have no sovereignty," to internet pessimism, where politicians fret about online misinformation and extremism, parents worry their kids are "cooked" by short-form brain rot, and the media tell us AI will replace our jobs, our friends, and our romantic partners.

Dee has a remedy, and she calls it "internet realism." It's time to step out of fairyland and remember what the internet is: a tool. We humans use tools to reshape the world, but so, too, do tools reshape humans. Wield them wisely.

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0:00—Introduction
1:42—Dee's relationship with the internet
7:16—The early days of the internet
13:48—Has the internet changed us?
18:21—Mythological analogies
23:00—Benefits of logging off
27:15—Falling in love with AI chatbots
33:39—Smartphones and anxiety
42:11—Defending pseudonymity
50:46—The death of reading
55:52—Internet nihilism and violence
1:01:20—Embracing internet realism

Producer: Paul Alexander
Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
Illustration: Eddie Marshall