My Internet: Kat Rosenfield
The culture writer and novelist doesn’t really like that celebrities are on Substack.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Every other week we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Kat Rosenfield, a culture writer at The Free Press and cohost of the podcast Feminine Chaos. Her new novel, How to Survive in the Woods, is out now. Kat thinks that some younger Millennials and Gen Zers dismiss nuanced or otherwise complicated ideas as “engagement slop” and says that every time she see some girl filming a crying confessional into her front-facing camera she feels like she’s witnessing the death of human dignity in real time. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
KAT ROSENFIELD: This very serviceable “Strait of Hormuz” joke rendered transcendent by the impeccable deployment of the Despairing Salieri meme.
EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Not as much as I used to, and I aggressively curate my experience on the site, but yes. I’m a writer, I want a text-based platform! I want to keep an eye on the discourse, make jokes, bat ideas around—and I want to do that with smart and literate people, which pretty much narrows the options to Twitter/X or Substack Notes. (I do use the latter, too, but it’s not robust enough to replace Twitter and it has its own share of obnoxious personalities and behaviors.)
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Book promotion, mostly. I’ve been trying to get better at Instagram but I don’t really understand or like it, and the commenting culture there is… I’m trying to think of a nicer word than “illiterate,” but that’s really it.
EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I am full-on “old man yells at cloud” when it comes to TikTok specifically and short form video generally. Every time I see some girl filming a crying confessional into her front-facing camera I feel like I’m witnessing the death of human dignity in real time.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
KAT ROSENFIELD: By reading my friends’ work, mostly. Also Facebook community groups for local news, and the Pirate Wires and New York Times morning newsletters for national. Also also, because my husband is a spiritual boomer, CNN is on in my house in the morning and I sometimes can’t help looking at it.
EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I have a curated list of maybe 30 Twitter accounts that is my primary point of engagement with the site, people who are smart and thoughtful and all over the map ideologically. That list is how I keep tabs on the discourse in various spaces (also doubles as a news source). I’m not obsessive about it, but it’s obviously central to the sort of work I do; if you’re writing about culture, then understanding how people are interpreting and responding to events is important, maybe even more so than the events themselves.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?
KAT ROSENFIELD: The John Davidson/ Tourette’s controversy at the BAFTAs really got to me. I wrote about it twice, I’m still thinking about it a lot.
EMBEDDED: How do you think Substack has changed media, if at all?
KAT ROSENFIELD: As someone who was around to witness the dawn of blogging in the early 2000s, and the cults of personality that coalesced around it, I think of Substack as a sort of monetized second coming of that medium—one that arrived just as many of the previous professional pathways for writers were disappearing. There’s obviously more to it than that, a lot of moving parts here, but basically, whoever the millennial Joan Didion and Pauline Kael are? They’re probably on Substack.
EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I guess I think that “bad” probably isn’t the most useful yardstick for considering the impact of this technology. It’s here, it has completely transformed our lives, and some of that is for the better and some is for the worse, but it’s not going back in the bag; I don’t think it’s something we can really legislate. But we can be conscious of the tradeoffs; we can ask ourselves how we want to live, and the best case scenario is that we rediscover the value of friction and embodied experience and collectively choose to be intentional about how and when we incorporate technology into our lives. (The worst case, or at least most cynical, is that smartphones are a sort of Darwinian deus ex machina designed to eliminate the people who can’t do this from the gene pool. Would make a good sci-fi novel.)
EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I think of it less as “I want to limit my phone use” and more as “I don’t want to be rude.” It’s bad manners to pay attention to the phone instead of the people around you, so the phone stays in my bag. The only downside to this is that I frequently come back from some really fun event and realize that I haven’t taken a single photo because I was phoneless all night.
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
KAT ROSENFIELD: There’s a thing with younger Millennials and Gen Z where they dismiss nuanced or otherwise complicated ideas as “engagement slop”—like having to think for more than a second about anything must be some kind of scam. I get why this happens; I also hate it.
EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Almost always from a fellow human being whose taste I trust; almost never via the algorithm.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Many times and for all kinds of reasons. It’s amazing what a big deal it feels like when it’s happening—like, one time in 2020 I tweeted something about cancel culture and social trust that went viral, and then Nikole Hannah-Jones took really bizarre offense to it (she had never heard of “social trust” as a concept) and when I saw that she’d quote tweeted me, I was like, “Well, that’s it, game over, time to delete my account and throw my phone in the river and go live the rest of my days inside a burlap sack deep in the forest.” But of course I didn’t, and after a day everything was quiet again. That’s the thing about going viral; it’s rarely pleasant, and invariably meaningless.
EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who is my dear friend and podcast co-host and a criminally underrated Substack humorist.
EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?
KAT ROSENFIELD: None of them! I don’t follow celebrities online and to be honest, I don’t really like that they’re on here; I yearn to return to the days when famous people were like distant aliens whose interior lives were unknowable and inaccessible to us. There was a magic to it.
EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I thank the deities every day that I am too old to have ever Snapchatted.
EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I use a different one pretty much every time, to try to make the game more interesting. It doesn’t usually work, but this one time I got it in 2 guesses and the grid said JUICY FRUIT, and hoo boy have I been chasing that high ever since.
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
KAT ROSENFIELD: The one in the Groucho Marx glasses/mustache. I have no idea what it means, and nobody else does either, which makes it perfect.
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Probably controversial, but I think voice notes are not just annoying but symptomatic of something wildly dysfunctional in the culture, i.e. that we have somehow come to a place where we recognize the practical utility of an answering machine but also live in utter terror of the specific social activity (talking on the phone) for which answering machines were invented. I’m actually kind of obsessed with it—this anti-social conveniencemaxxing impulse dressed up as something analog and romantic is like a George Costanza Seinfeld sideplot come to life, which I find very funny but also very bad. And if you’re ever thinking of sending me a voice memo you should just call me!
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?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I have Spotify premium. I initially subscribed to it because it’s a good way to build and maintain the playlists I use for teaching yoga classes, but lately I like using it to a) listen to albums all the way through the way I did in high school, b) listen to audiobooks while paddleboarding, and c) create vibe-based radio stations as a soundtrack for different activities. My favorite right now is a jivey 60s playlist based on Mel Tormé’s “Comin’ Home Baby” that my husband and I dance to while we cook dinner.
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?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Probably HBO (or whatever it’s calling itself nowadays). They have a nice rotating database of classic films via their partnership with TCM, plus their limited-series scripted dramas are still excellent. And I’m really enjoying the second season of The Pitt right now, although I’ve learned my lesson about not trying to watch it while eating, because it is medically accurate in extremely gory ways.
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
KAT ROSENFIELD: This word game called Addagrams that my brother made. It’s like a smarter, more creative version of Wordle.
EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Absurdist Twitter humor.
EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?
KAT ROSENFIELD: A complete encyclopedia of everyone who got cancelled during the long 2010s for whatever frivolous reason, and what happened, and what they’re doing now. In some ways it may be for the best that this doesn’t exist, but I’m shocked by how completely some of this stuff has been memory-holed.
EMBEDDED: Do you regularly use eBay, Depop, or other shopping platforms? What’s a recent thing you’ve bought or sold?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Poshmark and eBay, mainly for finding dupes of clothes that I love but that have gotten stained or torn or, occasionally, purged from my closet in a state of Kondo-induced mania that I later regretted—like this BB Dakota party dress that I should never have gotten rid of and was thrilled to find again.
EMBEDDED: Do you consume any content about fitness, diet, or other types of “wellness”? What creators or sites do you find most useful?
KAT ROSENFIELD: Yeah, this is how the Instagram algorithm gets me: videos of adult ballet dancers or 40+ year old women doing pull-ups are absolute catnip to me. But having worked in fitness for 10 years, I’m mostly just skeeved out by how much that world in particular has been totally overtaken by AI-generated slop. Ironically, the most useful fitness tool I have is probably ChatGPT; I use it to track my macros, strategize workouts, etc.
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
KAT ROSENFIELD: This deep dive on the cultural implications of the circa 2011 Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer reboot.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?
KAT ROSENFIELD: I’m on book tour right now, and every day I’m getting messages from people who I’ve only ever interacted with online, telling me they’re coming to an event to say hi in person—and then they do! My worlds are colliding and it’s beautiful.
Thanks Kat! Buy her book, listen to her podcast, and follow her on X.
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