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Mammalian e-girls
"It got memed into being something."
Interior spread from "egirl 001” by Katherine Dee; illustrations from Kristina Tzekova, Blaise Larmee, Bubbles, Raighne.
Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer in conversation with reporter and internet culture writer Katherine Dee. Daisy also shares some good links.
This is an excerpt from Wednesday’s episode of Tasteland; listen to the whole thing below.
Daisy Alioto: You have a new release through Metalabel about e-girls. It's a print magazine and it covers everything from JenniCam to Red Scare. Talk about how this came about.
Katherine Dee: I saw this tweet about how someone should write a book about e-girls. And I didn't want to do a book, but I did want to do a historical e-girl project. There's a really cool publisher in Chicago called 2dcloud, and they do a lot of alt comics. They've published Dame Darcy, one of my favorite artists, and a bunch of other interesting people and I was like, “Hey, do you want to do a little internet history mag?” This is the first installment of a series and it's a timeline of the e-girl, a history of what it is, because I feel like the word sort of became bastardized. So it's traveling through the origin of this word: Where does it come from? Who fits into this lineage?
DA: How would you define it?
KD: The defining feature is that she has orbiters. And you can't decide you're an e-girl, you have to be chosen as an e-girl. Some of the verbiage that's still used on image boards today is organic e-girl or forced e-girl. A forced e-girl is someone who comes onto the scene and she decides, “I'm going to be an e-girl, this is my e-girl career.” On the internet for a very long time—I don't think this is necessarily factually true—there was this perception that there weren't many women. This is a well-known trope. No one's really a woman online. The image of the woman, the idea of a woman becomes elevated and rarefied and special. That's where you get the e-girl.
The image of the woman, the idea of a woman becomes elevated and rarefied and special. That's where you get the e-girl.
Francis Zierer: You said the problem with anti-woke is it's an entertainment genre, not a principled position. They're like bags in the wind floating left or right, depending on what's best for engagement.
KD: I don't know why people are taking guidance from these anti-woke characters. It's so obvious. They're not even trying to hide it. They just want money or clout. I haven't seen anyone who feels like they need to be anti-establishment consistently. But what I do see—which I think is closely related to that and more subconscious—is people who have been in the anti-woke media ecosystem for so long, that they forget that ordinary people aren't that lost in the sauce. And so they're kind of post anti-woke, and they're contrarians to anti-woke-ism. And the anti-woke ecosystem will be like, oh, you're on the left. But no one on the left would accept them because they've already made a name for themselves being this sort of obnoxious, heterodox figure. And now it's this weird expression of centrism. There's a lot of people like this.
DA: Our next question is your recent fixation on dolphin accelerationism. I'm just dying to hear from the dolphin's mouth what this means.
KD: The short version is I went to the aquarium. We have a wonderful aquarium here in Chicago. It was in this weird liminal space. It was totally empty for some reason. I started posting about dolphin aesthetics, and then at the same time, I was listening to The Starseed Transmissions by Ken Casey. And it's one of the first books about starseeds. I was like, “Dolphins and starseeds should be combined.” It was just like a New Age word salad.
For my show I spoke to a genetic engineer who gave me this thought experiment: What would change about human social structures if dolphins could talk and we knew about their inner worlds? So maybe that's dolphin accelerationism. I got really into looking into dolphin communication. Dolphins actually have the intelligence of a human two-year-old, but a lot of the research has been halted because New Age people have caused so many problems. It's really hard to get funding for this now.
I was like, “Dolphins and starseeds should be combined.”
FZ: I want to ask about how we should treat AI.
KD: We can easily imagine a future where most customer service is AI-powered, and I don't think we should be rude to them. I think it's anti-social to have this norm of cruelty to human-like, but non-human technology, and we should have a standard of respect for all of these tools, even though they are not living. We don't need to think it's magic, but we should have a level of respect for it. And maybe we don't have to go as far as saying it's ensouled, but it's a bit more than just a tool because it's more anthropomorphized.
FZ: A big reason why reporters often get it wrong when reporting on digital subcultures is there’s 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.
KD: I think a lot of context is going to be lost. And there's information that's going to be gone forever. Really necessary information too, especially as politics become more intertwined with online life. So many things happen in group chats or are decided in these weird backchannels. And you don't really understand why people are making the moves that they're making unless you have the full backstory of what subculture they're emerging from, how online they are, why they're that online, what they're selling—and I feel like it's gonna start causing problems.
Right now, it's just internet studies trivia, but as the internet proves to be more influential, we're gonna wish we had more ethnographers on the ground. The way I ended up in the heterodox scene is I wrote a lot about how certain things came from Tumblr and then were mainstreamed. And then as budgets were being slashed in the early 2010s and late 2000s, people were scraping things from not just Tumblr, but Reddit and 4chan. Then certain words broke containment and certain concepts, too. This is now well known. But the exact context of how those words came to be is totally lost unless you actually interview people who were on Reddit or Tumblr or 4chan at the time.
Latinx is an example of something born from Blogspot. Then an academic used it in a paper later on. And then someone who had seen it on Blogspot started using it on Tumblr, and it became a point of contention on Tumblr. Then from there, it leaked out into digital media. It was in a Buzzfeed listicle, and then CNN picked up the idea and then you go down the rabbit hole and it was blown out of proportion. It got memed into being something.
As the internet proves to be more influential, we're gonna wish we had more ethnographers on the ground.
FZ: A headline from one of your newsletters is that the internet is a private part of your body, which I really liked.
KD: I do these ethnographic interviews of how people use the internet. Something that comes up a lot is problematic internet usage and why parents weren’t able to intervene. It's because there's something so cerebral and private about it. Even when you're not doing anything wrong, I think there's a sense of intimacy with your browser history. There's something very personal about your internet use. And so it makes it really difficult and embarrassing to seek help if you need it or for parents to intervene if their children are doing things that are hurting them because there is unspoken privacy.
THIS WEEK IN TASTELAND
This week Daisy and Francis are joined by Katherine Dee, a reporter and internet culture writer since 2018. She's here to discuss the evolution of e-girls, their cultural significance, and the changing landscape of media and online identity.
PLAYBACK
Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.
BRB traveling north and rebranding myself as DJ Beignet. (Trend-Watching)
A profile that finally settles the question: how tall is MJ Lenderman? (GQ)
Francis Zierer interviews food writer and critic Alicia Kennedy about staying authentic in the creator economy. (Creator Spotlight)
New York indie rapper Mike goes through his latest credit card statement—part of a new series at Hearing Things.
Five Bordeaux wine buys and a reflection on the region’s technologically-mediated terroir. (New Wine Review)
Websites are no longer a good passive investment (duh) (Alts.co)
A podcast investigating why Amy Adams does so many scenes in the bathtub. (Why Is Amy in the Bath?)
MIXTAPE
Good links from the Dirtyverse.
The fourth entry in Ryan Titus’ DIY America series: a highly comprehensive guide to Ithaca, NY (GUNKYARD by GUNK)
Do androids dream of niche animalic ouds? (Vogue Business)
Alissa Quart calls for a media of the precariat. (Columbia Journalism Review)
“Our grand idea was to review every restaurant in America, which seemed like a really easy thing to do, considering neither of us had ever been anywhere.” Influential food and travel writers Jane and Michael Stern interviewed in the Paris Review.
With 63% of men under the age of 29 single, could guys become the new “childless cat ladies”? Dirt contributor Magdalene J. Taylor weighs in.
A short story by Lauren Lavín (Pool Party)
The story of the ongoing Greek refugee crisis, told through a five-year-old girl named Maria. (Harper’s)
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