My Internet: Daniel Kolitz

The ‘Goon Squad’ writer doesn’t think the Hobo Johnson Tiny Desk clip is so bad.

Every other week we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.

Today we welcome Daniel Kolitz, whose recent article for Harper’s, The Goon Squad, inspired a wave of discourse about young men, the internet, and the outer limits of the use of pornography. Daniel compulsively listens to podcasts in which 30-something men joke caustically about the contemporary political scene, uses Apple Music to “test” albums before buying them from Bandcamp, and worries that Henry Winkler is merely playing the role of a guileless old man on Twitter. —Nick

“Frankly at this point I hope Theo Von is shaping young men’s political leanings.”

EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I’ve always personally thought that Nazis, Nazism, etc. were bad. And have been dismayed by things getting sort of confused on that front, culturally. But then I saw that meme where it’s John Goodman in the Big Lebowski and he’s loading his gun and the text says “AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE/WHO STILL LIKES WOKENESS AND PC CULTURE?” Which I guess started to circulate not that recently, maybe last winter, but I still see it popping up pretty regularly, and it’s been kind of a comfort-meme for me this year, in the sense of remaining funny over a dozen-plus encounters and also in the sense that it makes disliking evil seem fun and common-sensical, as opposed to (as this meme’s enemies would have it) hysterical and possibly poisonous to the psychological development of young children.

EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I’ve only ever tweeted links to things I’ve written, which means I’m tweeting like four times a year max. As far as I’m concerned every tweet is an opportunity for thousands of strangers as well as all of my peers and friends to think: this guy’s dumb as rocks, he’s bad at tweeting, etc. So that in my own mind each subsequent tweet could only ever be an attempt to redeem the previous tweet and thus potentially salvage my standing in the eyes of people who aren’t thinking about any of this, could care less what I tweeted, and would be very confused to learn my thoughts on this matter. Obviously that’s not to say I don’t read tweets, I read so many tweets, I surface from eerie dreams of a childhood I barely remember (set always in a lightless version of my parents’ old house) and I lunge for my phone—or rather my vape and my phone—and then I spend, how long, an hour? more? simultaneously inhaling lead-rich flavored vape smoke and whatever the algorithm’s offering that day, sometimes truly frightening far-right odes to racial purity and cleansing violence, sometimes tortured meta-discourse about nonprofit literary magazine salaries, it doesn’t matter to me, I take it all in (the vape-poison and the content-poison) as if without my daily morning ration of poisons I couldn’t possibly face the day, “the day” in my case largely consisting of even more harmful and rarefied varieties of poison-ingestion.

EMBEDDED: Do you post on Bluesky, Threads, or Substack’s Notes? Why?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I don’t! They’re not for me!

EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Mostly I guess I use it to post stories—little jokes and pictures of my friends. Regular Instagram stuff. Weirdly I’ve got no anxiety about posting there, it seems lower-stakes somehow.

EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?

DANIEL KOLITZ: One time I asked my friend Ben Morrison how I might go about “getting into YouTube.” You guys don’t know Ben Morrison but if you did you’d know he really loves that site. One time when we lived together I walked into his room and he was watching a video called “The Top 10 Facts.” Just sitting there rapt like it was Mad Men or something. Anyway the way he explained it was that if you want to get into YouTube, you have to watch YouTube. That seemed really horrible to me so I never did it. Mostly my YouTube use is situational—I look for a specific video, I find the video, I watch the video, I close out of YouTube. To be clear I’m not proud of this and know there are all kinds of interesting world-expanding rabbit holes I could be going down but I have a hard enough time engaging with all the stuff I actually want to engage with, I don’t need some asshole to talk at me about the Thirty Years’ War for three straight hours, or whatever the YouTube algorithm shows 35-year-old men.

EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I guess it used to be that if you wanted to understand your own society’s bleeding-edge sicknesses/psychoses you’d have to watch Jerry Springer or whatever. Which meant your perceptions would be impure, because they’d be shaped in various ways by canny TV producers out to stoke/flatter your sense of a society in decline. So it’s kind of cool that our decline-reports now come straight from the source, although I don’t know if that makes them less or only differently impure. At minimum it’s interesting that our communications technology has advanced to the point that possibly hundreds of everyday Americans can pay their gas bills by semi-professionally hunting pedophiles on camera. Those are basically the only kinds of videos I see when I use TikTok. Actually someone I went to high school with was caught by one of those guys a few weeks ago. He was wearing a ridiculous bucket hat and what I guess he thought was a stylish t-shirt. It seemed pretty clear he’d purchased both specifically for the occasion. Unbelievably grim viewing but I suppose I see why this stuff has an audience.

EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Every day I come home from work, shut the blinds, turn off my phone, and watch MSNBC for six straight hours without blinking, all the while drinking glass after glass of warm tap water. Just kidding, I get my news from podcasts. Also I don’t have a job.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Is something you do helplessly, continuously, and with no pleasure whatsoever by definition “important” to you? If so then I guess keeping up with the discourse is important to me. Mostly I keep up with it on Twitter.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I don’t think the Hobo Johnson Tiny Desk clip is so bad. I think his voice and cadences are kind of interesting. I’m not going around voluntarily listening to Hobo Johnson songs or buying tickets to Hobo Johnson performances but I do think people are too hard on him, he’s going for something in that clip. Maybe as an emo guy (primarily fourth-wave, granted) I just have a higher tolerance for moronic toddler-speak, intolerable mewling, etc., who can say. Also thinking about it now it’s possible the “Hobo Johnson controversy” happened like eight years ago but I saw someone post about it today so it is on my mind.

EMBEDDED: Do you have a take on the “manosphere”? Do you think personalities like Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and Theo Von have shaped young men’s political leanings?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Frankly at this point I hope Theo Von is shaping young men’s political leanings. My understanding is that he is practically Frantz Fanon next to some of what these fellows are engaging with.

EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Obviously I’m ambiently aware of who Jonathan Haidt is, I know he was the safe-spaces-are-bad guy and that he pivoted to being the smartphone guy, but I’ve been meaning to actually look into his deal for a while now. As I type I’m even realizing I’ve crafted a not-undetailed idea of his physical appearance in my mind—feathered shoulder-length hair, long thin nose. Five eleven tops! Googling him now I see I was totally off but nonetheless if the man is saying smartphones are bad we are in total agreement, I am a pure doomer on this front—they are destroying society and they will continue to destroy society until society is actually, fully destroyed. When people try to say, “it’s not the phones, it’s other stuff,” I think: get a load of this completely wrong individual. That said I’m pretty suggestible, I could be convinced I’m wrong. Maybe it isn’t the phones? Certainly I love my phone. In fact when I don’t have my phone—when it breaks and I need to wait a few days for a new one to arrive in the mail, or even when the battery dies on the subway and I still have a few minutes left in my commute—I feel an actual physical discomfort, I feel lost. Which you could argue is a pretty interesting way to feel about a device.

EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I think Zoomers are given way too much credit for the supposed irony/inscrutability of their posts. We’re all on the same internet, if you’re online enough nothing seems that foreign. Also obviously a lot of Millennials and Xers use supposed Zoomer-speak, sometimes ironically, sometimes not. My feeling—and I have felt this for years, since the days when I was myself very young and very online and I would go to media parties and people would use whatever the internet slang-terms were at that time, I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember—is that the only way to proceed with any dignity on the internet is to avoid internet-speak as much as possible, even ironically.

EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Will use this question as an opportunity to plug Stereogum’s just-announced subscription program. I have no connection to Stereogum and in fact have pitched them many times over the years without ever receiving a response but I sincerely view them as one of the essential (frankly one of the last) Real Websites and if they disappeared my listening life would be irrevocably impoverished.

EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Have never paid much attention to the celebrity internet, I mostly just follow friends and other writers. I did notice some amusing Henry Winkler tweets on my For You page on Twitter a little while ago but after a few of them I started to worry he was putting it on, playing the role of the sweet-natured/guileless/befuddled old man because that’s what people were responding to, because that’s what people wanted from Henry Winkler’s Twitter presence. Which made me kind of sad. Even the fucking Fonz, in the twilight of his life, is chasing engagement.

EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I could barely begin to describe to you how mentally sick I am on this front. Often I can barely navigate from my bed to my bathroom without listening to at least two 30-something men joke caustically about the contemporary political scene. Sometimes I’ll be reading in bed and decide to get up and go to the bathroom and I’ll realize my phone battery is at 1 percent, meaning that if I tried to cue up a podcast for the journey, my phone would likely die halfway through. So what I’ll do is plug my phone into the charger and raise the volume such that I can still faintly hear the podcast from the bathroom if I leave the door open and don’t turn the faucet all the way. What is it, a fear of silence, a fear of boredom? There are guys I’ve been listening to so often for so long that I’ve heard them relate the same barely-interesting childhood anecdotes literally dozens of times. Probably it’s notable that the underlying theme of any sufficiently successful conversational podcast is how much the hosts despise their fans and hate doing the show.

EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, Slack, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Until recently I was in a number of Discord servers (Goonsluts 18+, The Goon Garden, The GoonVerse, GOONED, Big Gooners, Discord Wank Battles, etc.) but that was for work. Otherwise: no!

EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?

DANIEL KOLITZ: For a long time—the dawn of streaming to about two years ago—I didn’t pay for any music streaming service and bought all my music on Bandcamp and listened to all my music on the frequently non-functional Bandcamp app. I could say I did this to support the artists I love and I wouldn’t technically be lying but mostly I did it as a way to combat the anxiety of infinite choice. When I used Spotify it was impossible to justify listening to any single album when I conceivably could’ve been listening to any album ever recorded. I still mostly just use the Bandcamp app (follow me!) but at some point I started subscribing to Apple Music, mostly as a way to “test” albums before buying them.

EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? What’s a show that you’re really into right now?

DANIEL KOLITZ: I feel genuine despair every time I watch The Chair Company. It makes anything I could possibly create seem beside the point, small. A ludicrous thing to say as someone who mostly writes reported literary essays and book reviews but that is what great art does, it makes you hate yourself for being lazy and talentless.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?

DANIEL KOLITZ: Someone brought to my attention a TikTok in which some guy was hating on my writing. And watching it I couldn’t help thinking, damn, this guy’s affect is uniquely disquieting! And I guess my feeling is that, if you have to have haters, you’re gonna want them to be as uniquely disquieting as possible, affect-wise.

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Thanks Daniel! Read his Harper’s piece and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

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