Portrait of an online golden age (2011-2013)

Call it internet history, call it nostalgia, call it personal essay, I don’t give a damn!

I’m going to tell you a story about a glorious chapter of my online life. About my emergence as a dick pic critic during the golden age of Twitter, c. 2011-2013. But first, a quick word about why.

Two stars aligned for me recently. The first was reading a post called “Internet History Must Always Be an Oral History” by Katherine Dee, an analyst and archivist of internet culture in the Sherry Turkle vein, who argues that digital media behaves less like a written record and more like spoken words: “contextual, impermanent, and deeply embedded in its moment.” Meaning, you can’t really understand an online moment without speaking to someone who was there.

I tucked this in some fold in my brain and moved on. Then I read Meaghan Garvey’s second Reality Blues column for Pitchfork, in which she talks about the unrivalled pleasure of the early 2010s internet:

In the past year alone, I must’ve had two dozen conversations with other writers and musicians who look back on this era as uniquely fulfilling—some of them a few years older, some ten years younger than me. I’m not quite sure whether to chalk this up to the fact that we were young and dumb and living in cheap apartments in some kind of delusional Obama-era bubble, or that we had not yet been lobotomized by our willing participation in the “attention economy,” or that digital streaming apps had yet to replace the fun of self-guided discovery with algorithmic slop, or that frivolous pop music could be enjoyed as such without pretending it was of grave socio-political importance. Whatever the case, I don’t know too many people who would agree their life is edified by hanging out online in 2025, the way many of us would have back in 2012.

This was a revelation to me. In recent years, I’d reluctantly accepted the narrative that I became addicted to Twitter in the early 2010s because of attention merchants and their algorithms. Reading Garvey’s column, with Dee’s words echoing in my mind, I felt more confident in my initial theory: I was addicted to Twitter because it actually used to be fun.

Then I remembered that about two years ago, I wrote a draft story with the working title ‘Twitter was good’, which I immediately shelved. Now that the stars are aligned, I’m dusting it off. Call it internet history, misty-eyed nostalgia, or—dun dun dun—personal essay, I don’t care. Here it is.

In the early 2010s, I was living in Auckland, New Zealand, flopping. I’d abandoned a childhood dream of becoming a writer and was working as a graduate lawyer in a suburban firm. I felt proud when my dad told me I was the first university graduate in our family of woodturners and bootmakers. I loved how men on Tinder would say “wow” and “whoah” when I told them how I made a living. Otherwise, though, my heart wasn’t in it. My heart, in fact, was sinking. My student loan was fat, my earnings slimmer than you’d think, and the day-to-day grind was miserable. I came to see, with looming horror, that I’d made a huge, irreversible mistake.

I became heroically depressed. I’d down red wine and benzos most weeknights in barren inner-city flats, about my third most dangerous habit at the time, getting dolled up for selfies in various states of undress which I’d share on SnapChat before passing out. There were silver linings: I had a string of love affairs to tell the grandkids about, plus a group of friends called the Tuesday Night Pool Club—a joke because we never touched an eight-ball—with whom I’d sit around Auckland’s most derelict bars and swimming pools, chatting about music and life. Still, I felt like my life was over at 24.

In Garvey’s column, she writes that she “got into music writing the same way I got into anything in the early 2010s—by accident, and because I needed attention.” Ditto. My most enduring hobby by this point was going on the computer and surfacing music from the recesses of the internet. I had room in my heart for Lykke Li, Okkervil River, M83, and other assorted Pitchfork and Hipster Runoff darlings, but the real soundtrack of this stage of my life was rap and R&B: Clams Casino’s Instrumentals, Danny Brown’s XXX, Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia Ultra, A$AP Rocky’s Live Love ASAP, and this one song by The-Dream on repeat.

One of my friends worked as a music critic for a local print magazine, a type of job and type of media that still existed, and he passed me an assignment reviewing a new ScHoolboy Q album. I did a decent job, and this ramified into a miserably paid side job as a music writer. It was something like salvation.

It was also my path to Twitter. Technically I’d created an account in 2009, after reading that it somehow helped the Arab Spring uprising. But it lay fallow until 2011 or 2012, when I began lurking Rap Twitter. Here, a constellation of underground rappers, DJs, music writers and local enthusiasts spent their days in the YouTube k-holes Garvey describes, plunging the depths of DatPiff and LiveMixtapes and surfacing with treasure to show each other. There was good natured bickering about whether Drake was too soft to take seriously, whether it was too soon to call good kid, m.A.A.d city a classic, whether Pitchfork rode Kanye’s dick too much. The girls were sniffing out the next sensitive thug to steal their hearts.

I liked spending my time this way, too, so I made friends with these people online. Almost all of them lived in America: the music writers clustered around New York City, the DJs and rappers in Houston and the Bay Area, the locals scattered in cities like Cleveland and Newark, enjoying the ride like I was from Arsehole of the World, Auckland.

You might think you know what this scene is called. “Fan culture”. Wrong. Or at least, not in any 2020s sense of the term. On this corner of Twitter circa 2012, we weren’t pledging allegiance to a fave or roaming in packs to bully people with different taste in music. We were just hanging out: yabbering, bickering, joking around, preening, forming crushes.

It was, by and large, an open, curious and chill scene. Once I wired $20 to a struggle rapper in Nowheresville, USA so he could buy a pack of cigarettes, and he was beside himself with gratitude. What a time to be alive! We typed out emoticons then—a retro tic perfected by ubertastemaker Lil B—and the whole scene felt like :’) Every wave of sound had a new name some blogger coined: cloud rap, molly rap, yacht rap—drill and mumble rap were just wee babies. Young Thug, a relative nobody, was hanging out on Twitter too, writing songs about it. Future was blowing up in real time.

Twitter in the early 2010s had distinct zones of interest, as one nerd documented on a hand-drawn map of Weird Twitter at the time (note RiFF RAFF, beloved rap freak, at the centre). I mostly sat at the Rap Twitter table but had friends in Sex Work Twitter and the more prosocial corners of Weird Twitter. Writer Twitter was more inchoate back then, at least from my perspective, but I started working with US editors around 2013, writing about rap for publications like VICE and Wondering Sound (RIP). The work I produced was somewhere between forgettable and actively humiliating, and I was paid $150 a pop for my troubles. It was an honour and a thrill.

A selfie from this era. Real Easter eggs in here for the 2012 heads. Free Teina Pora :’)

In September 2013, I threw myself in the deep end of sex journalism by starting a Tumblr blog called Critique My Dick Pic. It did what it says on the tin. This is, hands down, the fact people find most interesting about my life: even now, when it comes up at BBQs, people want to chat about it at length. I’ve written about critiquing dick pics before, and if you insist, I’ll write about it again. But if I could pinpoint the moment the internet started to feel less fun for me, this would be it. Tumblr’s culture descended from the feminist blogosphere of the 2000s; embodied as a character, it would probably be Hillary Duff in the “don’t say gay” PSA. Duff and her Tumblr mores would come for us all eventually—come, in fact, to define global politics for a long half-decade—but in 2013 the culture war, like Future’s career, was just getting started.

I don’t want to talk about the culture war, though. There’s nothing new to say. I want to tell you about the last gasps of the golden years, then we can both be on our way.

By late 2013, my Twitter and Tumblr following were ballooning into the tens of thousands, and Critique My Dick Pic was receiving glowing reviews in publications like Jezebel, Daily Dot and Salon. Third-wave feminism was doing a real number on my life back then, as it had been since the late 2000s, and I became a minor public commentator on topics like body positivity and consent. In my private life, I was a dirtbag.

Still in Auckland, I spent most of my days hanging with a Twitter friend and trove of Southern rap from Houston, Texas. We’d smoke weed in Western Springs park and scheme about how to meet whichever mid-tier rapper was passing through Auckland on tour—plans we pulled off without a hitch, every time. My friend would simply Twitter DM our target rapper a string of horse galloping emojis or some such nonsense, and nek minit we’d be in their hotel room, listening to Beach House 2 with low-key rap legends, Grey Goose flowing and blunts circulating, debating whether Bloody Jay was destined for the big time. I couldn’t believe how easy it all was, thanks to the website now known as X. Meanwhile, some of my friends in the States were on texting and pillowtalking terms with honest-to-God rap stars—names even your dad would have heard of—and they weren’t telling fisherman’s tales either.

My life felt like it was blossoming with possibility, a rare and maybe unprecedented feeling. I woke up one morning to an email from a literary agent in New York who wanted to turn Critique My Dick Pic into a book. I’m going to be a writer :’), I thought.

I packed in my lawyer job and got the hell up out of Auckland, travelling for four months through the USA. In Los Angeles, I crashed with a friend from Sex Work Twitter, new in her career as a pornstar. Hours after getting off the plane, we attended a pornstar union meeting studded with stars, followed by pornstar karaoke, which is like regular karaoke except pornstars do all the singing. (Only in LA.) Next up, I stayed in Oakland with a handsome DJ from Rap Twitter, listening to Lil B by the lake on a cocktail of prescription drugs—a dizzying, purely platonic weekend that still feels like a dream. In New York the following week, I guzzled molly water at a Nicki Minaj party in Brooklyn, belly laughing with my internet friends like we’d known each other forever. Waves of euphoria surged and surged within me. Even the air felt sweet.

We’ve shaded now into 2014, which is when it all fell apart—for me personally, and for Twitter. The Tumblr takeover was complete by then: users began scouring each other’s language for traces of bigotry, chasing all the unguarded banter from the platform. True to form, I stayed too long at a dying party, slurring and embarrassing myself. But that’s a story for another time. Better yet, a closed chapter.

The chapter before, I’ve realised lately, I love rereading. The internet in the early 2010s was good. Twitter was good. Nearly every God-tier party, brush with celebrity, deep friendship, surreal fragment of internet humour, and buzzy experience, 2011-2013, was routed my way from that site. I didn’t give it my good years for nothing.