22 internet people on 2022’s defining posts
This year, the last thing a starving child read was about all my apes going Goblin Mode over Adolf Hitler’s toxic history after a Subway sandwich air strike took out grandpa in the torment nexus.
Featuring: Daisy Alioto ∙ Rusty Foster ∙ Tyler Bainbridge ∙ Ryan Broderick ∙ Leah Carroll ∙ Charlie ∙ Jessica DeFino ∙ Sasha Frere-Jones ∙ Miles Klee ∙ Olivia Nuzzi ∙ Luke O’Neil ∙ Kathryn Winn ∙ Scott Lapatine ∙ Kate Lindsay ∙ Taylor Lorenz ∙ Parker Molloy ∙ Max Read ∙ Mano Sundaresan ∙ Nicole Taback ∙ Kaitlyn Tiffany ∙ Connie Wang ∙ Cat Zhang
You know what you don’t see much anymore? Tweets about how long the months are.
Or e-cards expressing relief that the year is finally ending.
There was a stretch, roughly bookended by Donald Trump announcing his first run for president and Covid-19 vaccines becoming widely available, when Americans posted all the time about how they couldn’t wait for whatever was happening to be over. The monoculture was reanimated in the form of a mass-cringe event, a ubiquitous griping about what was inevitably referred to as “all of this.”
Horrors still abound. A trans panic, stoked by the media, is flaring into violence. Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers are parading through our “town squares.” Russia is murdering thousands of civilians in Ukraine. But in my bubble, the last remnants of that peculiar claustrophobia of the hashtag-resist, remote-work years finally lifted after the midterms, swept away with the election deniers and forgotten in the dumb excitement of that more fleeting mass-cringe event, the Twitter death watch.
Looking over the defining posts of 2022 that friends of the newsletter submitted, it’s tough to tease out any themes, other than the one that’s missing. As Kate just wrote in her Atlantic piece about the Instagram ick, we now post “primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do.” And while most of the posts below are not from TikTok, only one—“all my apes gone”—is a personal gripe from someone living through history. And we’re laughing at him. That’s progress. —Nick
Daisy Alioto
Co-founder,
I think this JCO tweet, humbling both male bluebirds and autofiction writers, really captured the zeitgeist. For those following along at home, her tweet about “wan little husks” of autofiction was in 2021.
Tyler Bainbridge
Founder,
. Find Tyler on Instagram.
Ryan Broderick
I write the
newsletter about the internet and web culture and I freelance at a lot of place where I write, uh, about the internet and web culture.@toddkramer1’s “all my apes are gone” tweet was posted on, technically, the last day of 2021, but it could not have better encapsulated the dumb, absurd desperation of late-stage Silicon Valley this year. It feels like there hasn't been a single week this year without some bizarre proclamation from a tech giant or venture capitalist about a bold new direction for the internet to go on. And what did amount to? Nothing! Just a big year-long wet fart. Now, everyone’s getting laid off. All our social platforms are broken. No one got rich. And @toddkramer1’s apes are still gone.
Leah Carroll
Author, Down City: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory, and Murder
This thread on the Dunkin’ rebrand was the smartest business analysis I read all year and, more importantly, served as a takedown to the “cute-ification” of the chain. Dunkin’ Donuts was such a central part of my childhood in Rhode Island … and my childhood was basically terrible!
A formative memory is waiting in line on a Saturday morning while a woman took her sweet time choosing a dozen donuts until my increasingly agitated (Vietnam vet, ptsd-level) father bellowed “lady they’re FUCKING DONUTS” and then everyone in line clapped as the poor woman scampered out. I actually like the Ben Affleck memes of him sighing wearily while bobbling a Dunkies because that resignation tracks with me.
But Gronk and his egg-white tortilla wrap can fuck right off. When I did a FOIA request about my mom’s murder in 1980s Rhode Island, Dunkies came up again and again and it was because it was open late to cater to cops and crooks and killers. Here’s a sample of some testimony.
Luke’s tweets got at the raw indecency of pretending that Dunkies is anything but a fake-ass megacorp breaking the backs of workers while indulging in an entirely fabricated nostalgia. The Dunkies I know is cigarettes, crimes, and puking in the parking lot.
Another note: We need a Dunkies union now.
Nick Catucci
Editor,
. Senior Editor, The AtlanticIn this video, a sexy New York City grad student cuts up an onion on a plate with a dull knife and combines it with Liquid Death for some kind of health elixir (caption: “#onionwater Bc I feel sick and I have an accounting test tomorrow”). It’s duet-bait—fodder for second-order videos of TikTok wags grimacing through her chaotic prep work (and/or ogling her cleavage).
But there are layers to the onion. While the duetters must pretend that she doesn’t, peachmangojuice777 obviously knows what she’s doing, and as a scroll through her profile reveals, that includes sneaky burlesques of not only gross food but pottery-wheel, ASMR, and crypto-fetish content. An Instagram influencer could never. The fact that she’s promoting Lucky Beans Coffee and has a ShopMy account only completes the costume.
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Charlie
Charlie is the voice behind
, a blog about culture, aesthetics, and political economy.Brad Troemel’s enlightening infographic on the problematic history and rhetoric of Adolf Hitler starts an important conversation that is much-needed in our current political situation.
An honorable mention, if it counts as a “post,” is Andrea Long Chu’s piece for Vulture, “Hannah’s Boys,” in which she eviscerates Hanya Yanagihara and her production of a new genre of literature somewhere between travel writing and gay men trauma porn.
Jessica DeFino
Jessica is a beauty culture critic whose work can be found in The New York Times, VICE, Vogue, and more. She writes the newsletter
.I think this Julia Fox post perfectly captures the spirit of beauty culture in 2022. The vibe is performative push-back!! Fox says that “aging is in” on TikTok while posting paid ads for wrinkle-reducing Xeomin on Instagram; consumers rail against terms like “anti-aging” while getting Botox injections in record numbers. Maybe in 2023 we’ll realize that words are not an effective weapon against the aesthetics of oppression??
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Rusty Foster
Writer,
The post is actually from late 2021 but 2022 was the year we created the Torment Nexus.
Sasha Frere-Jones
Writer,
My president.
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Miles Klee
Writer for Rolling Stone, author of the novel Ivyland and the story collection True False.
An all-time Twitter reply that expresses how fed up we got with forced attempts at identity discourse in 2022. As a sweeping dismissal of content, it’s the poetic heir to 2020’s “i ain't reading all that / i'm happy for u tho / or sorry that happened.” And, of course, “Gootbye” is a deliberate typo par excellence, infusing this absurd statement with a heartbreaking air of confused finality. I will treasure it always. (Original post is deleted, but Know Your Meme has more context.)
Scott Lapatine
Founder/Editor-in-Chief, Stereogum
Aside from TikTok every social media platform is dying or at least reinventing itself. And a lot of musicians seem confused about how they’re supposed to be harnessing social media to support their careers these days. Maybe Bandman Kevo figured it out. Here’s the Chicago rapper (who got tattoos of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk this year) posting an Instagram Story promoting a trucking ebook for sale on his OnlyFans last month. I miss LiveJournal.
Kate!!!
I write
!!!!!Technically comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez’s “TJ Mack” character first posted on TikTok in November of 2021, but he took a few months to find himself. The TJ Mack that fans now know and love took a more permanent form in March of 2022, when Alvarez landed on his accent (he’s called “TJ Mack” because that is how he pronounces the name of his favorite store, TJ Maxx) and backstory (he’s married to another one of Alvarez’s TikTok characters).
One of the most difficult things about being an internet culture writer is that very often there’s no deeper meaning behind what’s popular and funny. I like TJ Mack because the joke is so profoundly simple and stupid—he just has a silly voice and an exagerrated filter on his face—and the more seriously Alvarez takes the universe of the character, the funnier it is. Case in point: TJ Mack’s collaboration with Joe Jonas. But the TJ Mack post I’m choosing for my best of 2022 is simply the one that burrowed furthest into my brain. Out of nowhere, I find myself quoting “at Rrrross” in Mack’s addictive singsong voice, and I’m sure that will continue long into 2023.
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Taylor Lorenz
Technology columnist, The Washington Post
This was another huge year for Pete Davidson and soon I predict we’ll abandon the Gregorian calendar and begin charting time solely by Pete Davidson’s relationships. Personally I am rooting for this couple!
Parker Molloy
Writer, The Present Age
Trying to stop a war with poetry. Just A+ stuff. Very 2022. And like ... look, I get it, we all want to feel like we’re doing something to change things that are actually pretty wildly out of our control, but I keep trying to think about what she hoped would happen here. Was Putin going to see this, a single tear rolling down his cheek, and call up the generals and tell them that the war was off?
“Dear President Vladimir Putin, I’m so sorry that I was not your mother” is one of those lines that will stick with me for years to come.
Olivia Nuzzi
Washington Correspondent, New York magazine
My favorite post of 2022 is this girl texting the phone number listed inside her vintage leather jacket, absolutely unaware that the previous owner, Bill, is in all likelihood dead. Awe inspiring. Beautiful. Pure.
Luke O’Neil
Writer, Welcome to Hell World. Luke’s book A Creature Wanting Form is available for pre-order now.
I'm gonna repeat myself from a recent issues of Hell World but this post right here delighted me more than most any I can remember from this year:
God that is such a good joke. hello IDIOT
The economy of it.
It reminds me of a passage from my forthcoming book of stories that goes like so:
Kids aren’t especially funny although when I was young my sister who is still the baby even though she has children of her own by now that are older than she will ever be in my memory used to tell me she had a joke for me and I’d say ok what is it and she’d say she could only whisper it to me so she’d come in close and look around conspiratorially and say poo poo and I always thought that was a pretty good one.
Then she’d lean back in and say here’s another joke.
Someday decades from now you and I will no longer be especially close although we will still love each other in our own way.
I thought that was a pretty fucked up thing for a seven-year-old to say to a guy.
Elsewhere one of my favorite things that happens online is when you stumble upon a series of words that you've never heard before in that specific order and the uniqueness of it amounts to a sort of accidental music that later pops into your head off an on when you least expect it. Could be something simple like “do him job”, “all my apes gone”, or “food restaurant”, “I;m thinking about thos beans”, or something you wished you hadn't read like “pimped out cumdump event no loads refused.” Maybe “gorgeous enchilada lunch”, or “Bean Dad”, or “Cliff Wife”, or “don't e-mail my wife” or “large adult sons” or “‘The boyfriend’ looks nice and the girls seem to have eaten their spaghetti and meat balls!”
Most of those are old though so the one from this year came from a report about the most hospitalized bird-bitten Covid-chasing man in the world Jair Bolsonaro shortly after he ate shit in the recent election.
“Cannot wear pants.”
You’ve never heard those words put together like that before and now you have. Poetry finds you when you least expect it.
Max Read
Max Read is the proprietor of
, a newsletter about the future.Subway sandwich air strike takes out grandpa
Mano Sundaresan
Producer, Louder Than a Riot. Founder, No Bells
My mind keeps going to the kinda bleak, kinda beautiful suburban experience of the weedtuber Fulcrum. He just goes to random nondescript public areas, smokes his “blinkertons” and “penjamins,” gets more “faded than a hoe” and eats good food. That’s all there is to life in ‘22.
Nicole Tabak
Freelance writer, content strategist, and the author of
, a weekly newsletter about mental health and wellness for content creators and social media marketers.The TL;DR is how Queen Elizabeth II passed away the same day as internet celeb Trisha Paytas announced she was heading into labor, so the internet ran with the idea that the Queen was being reincarnated as Trisha’s baby. I feel like this post defined this year because when the world is burning and times are dark, I love that you can always count on the internet to come up with a wildly creative and bizarre twist to make it entertaining.
Kaitlyn Tiffany
Staff writer, The Atlantic
One of the best posts of 2021 was Sarah Hagi and Olivia Craighead’s “Ma: Reconsidered,” in which they reconsidered the 2019 horror movie Ma. This year they reconsidered the reconsideration with “Ma Reconsidered: Reconsidered,” which is one of the best blog posts I have ever seen. The first time I read it, I immediately scrolled back to the top of the page to read it again. It’s the end of the year, so I should say that there is something very 2022 about it ... I think funny internet writing started to come back this year, this being the funniest example. Also, I believe that if Twitter really does crumble and disappear, this perfect post will stand as the greatest and most good-spirited parody of the way that over-eager weirdos talk about cultural artifacts on there.
Kathryn Winn
Writer,
, the premiere Meme Criticism newsletter on Substack.It was the year of Julia Fox. She was everywhere, and every time she appeared somewhere new there was something we could take from it and incorporate into our vernacular. There was the eye makeup, uncuh jahms, and “i actually did it myself.” She sparked a lot of conversation and controversy but the post of the year was not actually written by her but inspired by her. She is the muse of all muses and I believe she was Juniper’s muse when she wrote the Goblin Mode post.
To me, Goblin Mode sums this whole year up. Whether you knowingly contributed to the “hoax” of goblin mode, you yourself achieved a kind of personal goblin mode, or you were one of the journalists trying to get to the bottom of goblin mode, everyone on the internet participated in some way. We all had a part to play … internet pranksters, tabloid darlings, party girls, and woke scolds. There was something for everyone. Juniper captured the nation’s attention, and something intrinsic to Julia Fox, with one fake news headline. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t true, it mattered that we believed it. I also love anything that divides the internet-savvy from those who will believe anything. Goblin Mode was a true poster’s post and anyone who ever took it at face value was showing they lacked either the heart or the eye of a true poster.
Connie Wang
Person who used to do internet.
This substack post sat open in my tabs for over a month, and despite 1000000 attempts to complete it, I could not finish it, much less understand it. Not a single proper noun. A single reference. Not one posture, or argument, or even concept!! Attempting to read this was what I imagine it’s like to experience a stroke, when words I recognize have ceased to embody meaning, and everything is fuzzy and vaguely terrifying, but—ngl—it felt kind of good to just give up!! And that, friends, is what 2022 has been all about.
Cat Zhang
Associate Editor, Pitchfork
This is the way to live a life.
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This concludes “22 internet people on 2022’s defining posts.” Yes, I know it was 23. I’m not counting myself. Gootbye. —Nick