Internet

The Washington Post is one of America’s most revered news organizations. Once led by Katharine Graham, an era-defining media CEO, and edited by news legend Ben Bradlee, the Post is famous for the Watergate-era journalism of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which made it the nation’s political paper of record. Today, one of the Post’s most high-profile employees is an internet-culture reporter named Taylor Lorenz. Her involvement in numerous scandals involving reporting errors, frequent falsehoods, violations of journalistic norms and troubling online interactions call into question whether outlets like the Post can continue to function effectively as the Fourth Estate in the age of online clout-chasing and click-based news.

Young men are giving up. They are the losers of the endless beauty pageant that is online life, dating in particular. Their failure to attract women or find rewarding employment is the stuff of jokes: they are “incels” (involuntary celibates), basement-dwellers, forty-year-old virgins. Meanwhile, they sink into a digital swamp of gloom and isolation that leads to resentment, radicalization, murder and suicide. In their internet forums, they call this “taking the blackpill.” The blackpill had yet to be named in 2014, when twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger rampaged through Isla Vista, California, killing six people and injuring fourteen more before his suicide, but he was fueled by its spirit of nihilism.

Who’s on the roster of speakers for the Republican National Convention is just as revealing as who’s not. Nowhere in sight are former GOP standard-bearers like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Included, on the other hand, are several anonymous civilians turned into internet celebrities by viral videos. Among them is Nick Sandmann, the teenager at the center of the Covington Catholic confrontation captured on film at the National Mall last year. Also featured will be Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the couple whose armed confrontation with protesters outside their St Louis home in June also circulated widely online. Their inclusion clearly signals that the party is leaning into the meme warfare strategy that helped propel Trump to victory in 2016.

It’s 1 am. I finally finish preparing my sourdough to go in the fridge. Time for some Netflix. What? No connection. Hulu doesn’t connect either. Dear God, no. Amazon Prime? Nope. It’s worse than I thought. Please just be my router, please just be my router. I unplug the router and wait 30 seconds. Plug it back in. Nope. Where did I put that damn manual? Now I need to find something small enough to stick in the reset hole button. I get a toothpick. I say a prayer. It’s not the router. The internet is down. God has abandoned us. I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if millions of gamers suddenly cried out in terror — and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened.

For an ordinary girl from Florida whose Twitter presence is largely focused on her rescue pets (shout out to Jolene, Dixie Belle and Mean Cat) and her love of pop culture, I get trolled a lot. Perhaps people don’t enjoy my hot takes on J.Lo’s Oscar snub as much as I’d hoped. Or maybe the internet has lost its appetite for cute pictures of dogs — a sign of the apocalypse if ever there was one. But it’s probably because this Florida Man is my older brother. For the record, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Though, like most siblings, we don’t agree on everything, I love him and am deeply proud of him.

Twenty years ago, the death of Bianca Devins would have been a small town horror story. Tragic. Brutal. Stomach-turning. Essentially local. A jealous man stabbed her to death in a fit of outrage before trying, and failing, to kill himself. Something of this kind happens too often for anyone to hear about them all. Bianca Devins's killer did something different, though: he took pictures of the 17-year-old’s dead body and posted them online, to a private forum on the app Discord. He also took pictures of himself after his suicide attempt and uploaded them as well. Little information on the murder is reliable. Rumors spread that Devins's killer was an 'incel' and a 'stalker'. Other rumors spread that he was in fact her boyfriend.

Are you scared of deepfakes? Perhaps you should be. A few years old and continually growing more sophisticated, deepfakes are digital simulacra generated through machine learning that are barely distinguishable from the real thing. They’ve been used to fake celebrity porn videos, make Barack Obama seem to call Donald Trump a ‘dipshit,’ and most recently, superimpose Steve Buscemi’s face on to Jennifer Lawrence’s body in a video that was at once mesmerizing and scary (Buscemi/Lawrence bore a strange resemblance to Tilda Swinton).

As a young digital journalist in the late 2000s, my industry peers and I often reminisced about the era we felt we’d just missed: the glamorous, fin-de-siècle age of New York media, the time of seven-figure budgets for magazine launches and outsize editorial personalities that commanded celebrity attention in New York. We were the ones scrambling to keep our jobs afloat in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. As it turns out, we still had it pretty good. The other evening, right after the brutal layoffs at digital publications such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost were announced, I found myself in a dive bar (of course) with a handful of the aforementioned elder millennials of digital media.