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 fulfil…