My Internet: Harron Walker
The writer has a bonkers For You page.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Most weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Harron Walker, who has written for New York magazine, GQ, and Esquire and was one of the organizers and co-authors of the open letter critiquing The New York Times’ anti-trans bias that was signed by more than 1,200 Times contributors. She is currently working on an essay collection for Random House.
Harron gets endless voice memos in a group chat named Low Engagement, High Breasts, hears echoes of Luann de Lesseps in Jessie Ware’s “Shake the Bottle,” and wishes she could stream the VH1 “Movies That Rock” cut of Showgirls in which cheaply-animated bras and panties were edited in over the nudity. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or other post that made you laugh?
HARRON WALKER: In the immortal words of Dr. Roberta Bobby, “Diva down…We need a fucking medic boots…”
EMBEDDED: What shows up on your TikTok For You page?
HARRON WALKER: So, my phone has definitely been spying on me, as per usual. That’s the only reason I can think of as to why I’ve got a video about ragdoll cats (my boyfriend, Mike, has been talking about them a lot after meeting a black ragdoll last week) and a bunch of clips riffing on that post from, like, a month ago where that British lady shared her Chinese takeout haul (I was recently explaining the whole thing to my friend, Jamie Hood, who is beautiful and stunning but doesn’t use TikTok).
Beyond that, my FYP is all the expected: an inhumanly skinny girl (Photoshopped, not real) swinging a sword in fast motion because she’s “fighting celebs in LA during the Ozempic Wars of 2025”; an insane “5-minute craft” video that I suspect might be fetish content; a slideshow about a girl getting her lip filler dissolved; a textbox complaint about being confused for “a conservative tradwife” when you’re simply “a misandrist who likes to dress coquette” paired with an old clip of Sky Ferreira looking slackjawed over it; a video claiming that a megalodon tooth necklace was found aboard the Titanic (Citation needed? Not for me!); a video from Kay, a.k.a., kay_wow, talking about how she knows “we are in a recession” because “two things happen when we go into a recession: skinny girls and business casual”; orange cats being ornery dumbasses; jokey lesbian Ultimatum content; old white ladies on a girls’ trip to New Orleans; and a girl pretending to work at a suicide hotline set to the Nicki Minaj’s “Zon’t… Zon’t zo it…” audio.
EMBEDDED: Has your Twitter experience changed since Elon Musk took over? What would it take for you to quit?
HARRON WALKER: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t get any engagement anymore. I have over 50,000 followers, but my posts only get shown to, like, a few thousand people on average? Not that I’m insinuating anything, I’m simply, like Lady Gaga, looking for evidence…
EMBEDDED: Have you found any good alternatives to Twitter?
HARRON WALKER: No.
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
HARRON WALKER: DMing friends whose numbers I don’t have, posting TikToks to my Story, sharing a photo of me to my grid once every 6-12 months.
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
HARRON WALKER: Luxeria’s 2000s reality TV watchalongs (Bridalplasty, America’s Next Top Model, Dr. 90210…), long videos about video games I used to play back in middle and high school that I can listen to at work, any and all recap content from the Drag Race Industrial Complex.
EMBEDDED: What are your favorite Substack or other independent newsletters?
HARRON WALKER: I’m loving my friend Jamie’s Substack,
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
HARRON WALKER: There’s less transphobia in mainstream news coverage, but also that non-transphobic coverage of trans issues is rarely written or edited by journalists who are, themselves, trans. There’s also no jobs? Like, at all? That’s also bad.
EMBEDDED: How has using LinkedIn benefitted you, if at all?
HARRON WALKER: Not in the slightest!
EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?
HARRON WALKER: Oh, god, no! I briefly had to use Snapchat back in the fall of 2015 when I worked at Fusion (which later became Splinter after parent company Univision bought all the Gawker sites minus Gawker and then got shut down after Univision sold them to the vulture capitalists at Great Hill Partners). We’d gotten some kind of deal to produce content for the app’s then-new news feature, and all I can remember is that I couldn’t figure out the wordless user interface, which functioned via intuitive swiping. I was raised on Windows 98! I need titles and icons!
EMBEDDED: Do you have an opinion about Tumblr?
HARRON WALKER: I miss how non-monetized it was, how many incomparably creative, passionate, and radical people I learned about on there (and occasionally came into contact with), and how much good music I found out about through my feed that I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. I don’t miss the kind of paranoid hostility that it (and Facebook during the slightly later Facebook Groups era) engendered among users towards others who were posting in the same niche communities. Semi-related: Remember “call-outs” and “calling out” and “call-out culture”? What happened to that? Not the act but the concept. Why did we just start calling it “canceling” and “cancel culture” one day?
EMBEDDED: Do you use Slack or another chat tool for work? What’s the best thing about that Slacking with your co-workers? What’s the worst thing?
HARRON WALKER: The best thing about getting laid off and there being no more staff jobs in media is that I haven’t had to use Slack in over three years.
EMBEDDED: Do you typically start searches on Google, Reddit, TikTok, or another source? Have you tried AI-powered search on Bing or elsewhere?
HARRON WALKER: I mostly only use Google to search for things online, but I will use Reddit and TikTok for things that I know are best answered with anecdotal answers—like if I want to know what kind of leave-in conditioners people with fine, wavy hair that’s easily weighed down by product are using because that’s the kind of hair that I have. I’m very happy with my Ouidad, but everyone’s suddenly obsessed with an allegedly overpriced brand called Innersense? I’d never heard about it until about two weeks ago, and now it feels like I’ve been fully cultified from afar. I’ll be giving them my money by the end of July at the latest, I fear.
EMBEDDED: What most excites you about AI text and art generators? What most concerns you?
HARRON WALKER: They seem bad! And ugly! And it concerns me that more people don’t see that.
EMBEDDED: What’s your most-used messaging app?
HARRON WALKER: I mostly use iMessage, but I do use WhatsApp to share TikToks with my token British friend (who’s actually just a Canadian who currently lives there, but still—shout out, Morgan M. Page).
EMBEDDED: Do any of your group chats have a name that you’re willing to share? What’s something that recently inspired debate in the chat?
HARRON WALKER: One of them is called “Low Engagement, High Breasts” because we all have low engagement in the post-Elon Twitter era and also high breasts. It’s three of us, and it’s a mix of text and endless voice memos. We all agree that it feels more like a 24-hour-a-day phone call, what with the endless VMs and all. I usually can’t stand group chats, even those that are text-only, and find myself muting them for days or weeks at a time when I don’t feel invested in whatever everyone else is talking about, but with this one I never do that. Recent topics of debate and discussion include the role that recent mass regressions back to Livejournal-style pro-ana culture played in uniting all the worst people in New York just before COVID and whether my Trump impression is good (it’s not).
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
HARRON WALKER: 👁️ (a direct and insistent “tell me,” very much the same vibe as that edited Simpsons meme where giant-head Homer is staring down Bart who’s cowering in his bed)
EMBEDDED: What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?
HARRON WALKER: I’ve fallen back down another Renaissance hole in the lead-up to seeing Beyoncé play Philly next month. I’ve also been listening to Trio and Trio II, two perennial faves of mine, after catching Dolly’s “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” on the radio two weeks ago. Jessie Ware’s That! Feels Good! has been on regular rotation since it came out. (I can’t believe everyone got mad at that one gay guy for telling her in an interview that he heard traces of the Countess Luann on the album?? There are absolutely Luannian echoes on “Shake the Bottle.”) I’ve also been getting into Jordana LeSesne after recently reading Samantha Riedel’s interview with her from a few years back.
EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?
HARRON WALKER: There’s this one remix of Nicki Minaj’s “Beez in the Trap” that I found on Tumblr in 2012 that I can vaguely recall. What I do remember is frenetic, jarring, forcibly dissociative. It’s so fucking good, and I just can’t remember who did it or what it was called. I remember the artist who remixed it had also released a song (or maybe featured on a song) from around that same time that had an ethereal chorus that was like “you and Iiiiiiiiiii… you and Iiiiiiiiiii…” or something.
I’d also love it if there were an easily accessible version of the VH1 “Movies That Rock” edit of Showgirls streaming somewhere, legally or illegally (though, to be clear, I haven’t looked very hard). It’s the version with all the shitty dubbing and the floating, cheaply-animated bras and panties added in to cover the nudity. A lot of the more graphic stuff was cut out—I swear, most of the first act at Cheetah’s is cut, I had no idea who Penny was until I watched the full, unedited film on DVD—but that also means that a lot of the sexual violence is cut, too. So, what you end up with is Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon duking it out over dogfood to see who can wear the sparkliest outfit before the former abruptly skips town. It was the version of Showgirls that I grew up watching. It’s perfect.
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
HARRON WALKER: Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts!!!! I’m super late on finally reading it, but I’ve never read a better book, fiction or otherwise, about online fandom.
Thanks Harron! Read the open letter to The New York Times and follow her on Twitter. 👁️
