My Internet: Lauren Oyler
The essayist and author doesn't go viral on purpose.
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 Lauren Oyler, who has published essays on books and culture in publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s. Her debut novel, 2021’s Fake Accounts, is about a woman who discovers her boyfriend is secretly operating anonymous conspiracy theory accounts on Instagram, and her new book, No Judgment, is a collection of essays on gossip, Goodreads and cultural criticism, Berlin expats, and more.
Lauren believes that TikTok is a Chinese spy app, has developed a writing style that resists the idea of a “take,” and before it ran out of money, would see four or five movies a week using MoviePass. —Nick
P.S.: I spoke to Edith Zimmerman for her illustrated kottke.org column, Drawing Media. Read it here.
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
LAUREN OYLER: Here’s the last thing I liked on Twitter:
EMBEDDED: What shows up on your TikTok For You page?
LAUREN OYLER: I don’t use TikTok. I was so happy when it came out and I felt no desire to partake. I don’t understand people who say it makes them feel old. Isn’t that good? You’re free. Also I do believe it’s a Chinese spy app.
EMBEDDED: Do you still tweet? Why?
LAUREN OYLER: I’ll tweet something that isn’t straightforward promotion of my work every few days, and I like to reply to people who are still there having fun or asking for recommendations. I still have some DMs going there that I’d be sad to lose. Not that sad, but you know, this is all justification. I’m still there because of inertia, really, and because it’s still useful for promoting writing, even if the audience has dwindled. I know a lot of people who purport not to be on it but still lurk daily. It’s sort of horrifying to see how little it’s changed in terms of the evil social dynamics that play out there, despite all of the overwrought discussions the media had about how harmful it was. It doesn’t have the same power to destroy it once did, which is good, but I do still find it useful for observing human behavior.
EMBEDDED: Have you found any good alternatives to Twitter? Do you have on opinion on Threads?
LAUREN OYLER: No. I’m glad it’s over. More people should be grateful. I was shocked at how many of my peers and colleagues, with whom I’d commiserated about the true Twitter/phone addiction we had—and I don’t use the word “addiction” lightly—I was shocked at how many of them were publicly lamenting the end of Twitter, eulogizing all the good times we’d had there, and eagerly seeking out a replacement. I don’t believe its benefits outweighed the costs. It should all be heavily regulated.
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
LAUREN OYLER: Keeping up with friends, window-shopping, pet fantasies, manicure ideas, promoting my writing and events. I don’t use Facebook, but I remember the last thing I used it for was to keep up with events; I guess Instagram serves that function now, for readings and launches and parties and stuff. And if you meet someone out in the world, at a party or something, exchanging Instagrams is the best way to possibly stay in contact, without the pressure of exchanging numbers. That’s a genuinely good thing about it, though you could argue it means you can never really forget about people. I like having a lot of people around, though.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
LAUREN OYLER: The BBC World Service app, followed by the New York Times homepage and magazine features.
EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?
LAUREN OYLER: It’s much less important to me now than it used to be, but I do still want to know. Maybe it’s just habit. I do find that the discourses that I care about find their way to me pretty immediately, even if my social media usage is much less than it used to be. I think many people in my generation in New York media—millennials, more or less—cultivated a method of rapidly reading and assessing the discourse that is probably a pretty disturbing use of our journalistic skills: finding obvious plot holes, identifying questionable motivations, tracing a story back to its source.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?
LAUREN OYLER: My new essay collection, No Judgment, is excellent.
EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?
LAUREN OYLER: Primarily through people whose taste I trust, either in person or on social media. I have befriended a couple of booksellers and book bloggers through Instagram who have amazing taste and who often send me recommendations of things they think I’ll like, and I try to return the favor. I follow this Instagram account for rare dance music recommendations, though it’s often painful because you can’t find much of what they post online. Or maybe that’s beautiful.
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
LAUREN OYLER: Boomers are so rude with their phones. Everyone I talk to about this agrees. It’s a real scourge. They play videos loudly in public, interrupt your conversation to show you some meme, text while driving, all of it. They need to be stopped.
EMBEDDED: What are your favorite Substack or other independent newsletters?
LAUREN OYLER: I met one of my best friends through his Substack, where he published smart and absolutely beautiful essays on general themes (lust, honesty, calm, competition, so on; the one on innuendo has a line about kissing that I think about all the time). I discovered it sort of randomly, followed it for a few months, and then asked to meet him in person, which I’ve never done before or since. He hasn’t written one in a while because he’s been busy doing other stuff, but I miss them. It was the only newsletter I actually read all the way through as soon as I got it.
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
LAUREN OYLER: I like the newsletter thing, actually; as many people have already noted, it’s kind of like blogging, which I miss. I do wish there were fewer stats involved; I don’t want people to know how long I (haven’t spent) reading their personal newsletters. It’s been interesting to compare how the media has changed through the lens of promoting a book; my first book came out in 2021, and now many of the websites and avenues for culture journalism have just gone away. As far as I can tell, they’ve been replaced by newsletters (ta da). They are not a suitable replacement for actual reporting, but there is a freedom in them that I like. And I like the sort of “local” nature of developing a smaller, but more dedicated audience.
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
LAUREN OYLER: I’ve always listened to Backlisted, the book podcast about rare or forgotten (or sometimes just difficult but famous) books. Otherwise, I listen to the radio more than podcasts, and radio shows that present as podcasts, like Fresh Air or whatever.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
LAUREN OYLER: Several articles I’ve written have gone viral, but not really posts. It’s been happening to me since I was 24, and I don’t do it on purpose, though I usually know if something I’ve written will generate that kind of response. I don’t shy away from saying things I want to say because I know they have the potential to be misread or misinterpreted and mocked online; because I know how “the discourse” works so well, I am pretty particular about how I express myself, and I have developed a writing style that resists the idea of a “take.” Still, that’s how people understand most of what they read on a device, so that’s how they frame it. It has its ups and downs, but I’d rather have more readers than fewer, and the kind of stuff I write that goes viral (literary essays and criticism, broadly construed) is the kind of thing I think people should be discussing more: culture. So if I have to sacrifice a bit of myself and mental health for that, I can handle it, because I believe in what I’m doing.
But it sort of takes up your entire day, and you have to accept that; even if I didn’t pay attention to what people were saying online, my friends text me about it, which is also interesting: the things they think are upsetting or celebratory are often not the things I think are upsetting or celebratory. I often have to provide a bit of background—that person is actually ironically mocking someone else, that person has hated me since 2016, etc. The worst part of it is that, every time, people who you were definitely friendly with—sometimes even in person!—decide that because you have written a popular piece of magazine journalism, it’s completely acceptable to shit-talk you in public, while still pretending to be friends. I will never understand that. The beloved Barbara Kruger response to a Supreme copyright lawsuit is applicable here, I think.
EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?
LAUREN OYLER: Jack Schlossberg is doing great work, but he’s not a celebrity per se. Isabella Rossellini’s Instagram is excellent. She loves animals.
EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?
LAUREN OYLER: No! I’m too old for that, thank goodness!
EMBEDDED: When was the last time you browsed Pinterest? What for?
LAUREN OYLER: I have not done that in at least a decade, I suspect.
EMBEDDED: Do you have a take on Tumblr?
LAUREN OYLER: I miss Blogspot, which I used anonymously and secretly in my adolescence. Micro-blogging is probably responsible for depleting the attention spans of many people who otherwise would have had more patience for culture today. But was it the worst thing ever? No. You could find a lot of good stuff there.
EMBEDDED: How has using LinkedIn benefitted you, if at all?
LAUREN OYLER: When I was working at Vice, and to a certain limited extent when I do reporting now, it was a good way to find sources and contact them (as was being verified on Twitter). I re-activated my LinkedIn when I was writing my Harper’s piece on the goop cruise and needed to contact someone I’d met on the boat but whose contact information wasn’t working out or I’d missed. I should de-activate it. I don’t want people seeing that stuff.
EMBEDDED: Do you typically start searches on Google, Reddit, TikTok, or another source? Have you found Google’s “generative AI” summaries helpful?
LAUREN OYLER: Google. I guess if I were looking for “the Reddit take” on some issue, I would go to Reddit, but that’s generally not the first take I want. I like it as an alternative viewpoint. I have not found Google’s generative AI summaries helpful, nor do I find many actual humans’ summaries of articles or issues helpful. You have to read everything yourself. But of course, if you’re starting to research something you don’t know anything about, you’re going to start with Google or Wikipedia to find more sources. That’s what it’s for!
EMBEDDED: What most excites you about AI chatbots and text and art generators? What most concerns you?
LAUREN OYLER: Nothing excites me about them. I wish they didn’t exist. I don’t believe the hype that they’ll totally replace all writing, but they probably will and already are replacing the superfluous copywriting, “content” generation, and rote genre work that people use to make a living. Recently I got into a great fight with someone who’d drunk the Kool-Aid about whether AI could possibly replace criticism; my feeling was, you want a human’s perspective and opinion, even if that opinion is totally wrong.
EMBEDDED: Are you currently playing any console, computer, or phone games?
LAUREN OYLER: You could say I’m playing a phone game with a guy on WhatsApp right now. But otherwise no.
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?
LAUREN OYLER: None of the names are particularly good, except one which is nonsense. My friends and I mostly use them to organize parties and outings, so they tend to fall away after the event. (The nonsense group is four of us and involves regular chatting and voice messaging.)
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
LAUREN OYLER: The smiling purple devil, which means I have a genius diabolical scheme. The one I actually use the most, though, is the millennial weeping emoji. (I saw a tweet once in which someone said millennials use this emoji a lot—I couldn’t object.) It means I’m overwhelmed by the poignancy, and often the ironic beauty, of something.
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
LAUREN OYLER: Absolutely, almost always on WhatsApp, though I’ll allow my American friends some inferior iMessage voice note repartee, even though iMessage is truly awful for voice notes. Either way, I love them. I once made it to the time limit on WhatsApp, which is 30 minutes, albeit for a genuinely crazy story that I was telling with my boyfriend as if we were hosting a podcast. I don’t usually exchange them with people who don’t like them; I don’t torture people with them. But some people get it. There’s nothing better to do on a cigarette break than listen to your best friend in London’s surprise assessment of a new cultural issue and/or your shared romantic foibles. I have a lot of friends who live far away from me, and it’s the easiest way to stay in real touch. I still do long emails and phone calls, too, depending on the interlocutor, but I have really taken to voice notes.
EMBEDDED: What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?
LAUREN OYLER: I listen to dance music to work and to work out, so I use a lot of Soundcloud. NTS is better for parties and normal activities, but when I want to focus, and sustain energy, I need a specific kind of high-BPM crazy music that can’t be left to NTS, which is too sophisticated for what I’m talking about. The description of the DJ I’m listening to right now is “fast and hypnotic techno with shimmers of 90s, acid, trance and tribal sounds.” Something funny about the way electronic dance music is often described is that the adjectives are always very intuitive, but unless you listen to it—and I don’t expect you to—you don’t really know what a “driving” beat is. But I like stuff with a driving beat. More accessible is this nuanced but crowd-pleasing house set, which I’ve been putting on lately if people are over and the mood is upbeat.
I also use Shazam a lot. Is that shameful? I don’t know. Most recently I used it to discover the new-to-me ’90s English indie rock band Cornershop, which of course has a song I and everyone knows (“Brimful of Asha”) but which I couldn’t have identified as such before I heard this later—in my opinion much much better—song at a bar.
EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? When was the last time you bought a music download or vinyl record, CD, or tape?
LAUREN OYLER: I have paid for Spotify for who knows how long. I want a record player, and live near amazing record stores that I often browse just to browse, but I live in a sublet apartment with too much furniture in it and genuinely do not have anywhere to put a record player or collection. Or rather, I’m sure I could do some real professional-organizer stuff and find a place, but I hate household chores and do not have the will to organize my space.
EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? In general, do you prefer to get ads or pay more for ad-free tiers?
LAUREN OYLER: Criterion Channel, though it’s hard to sacrifice Mubi. I pay for Netflix and probably others but I never use them. Because I’m a culture critic I can write all those subscriptions off on my taxes, so I don’t mind paying for ad-free tiers, though I do have conflict giving money to Netflix, and Prime Video barely works in Germany, where I live, anyway. I would happily pay for Criterion and Mubi even if it weren’t a tax write-off; the others I would probably give up.
I feel genuinely lucky that I got to use the original MoviePass when I lived in New York during that halcyon period when it allowed you to see one movie per day in pretty much any theater for $10 a month. It was obviously completely doomed, and I remember very distinctly the apocalyptic moment that everyone’s cards suddenly stopping working at once because they ran out of money, but until then I saw four or five movies a week.
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
LAUREN OYLER: See Saw, which collates gallery shows and openings in a few major cities (New York, LA, Berlin, London, and Paris, plus they do a Venice Biennale feature when it comes around). It’s incredibly useful; you can make a map if you’re “gallery hopping,” and it has a list of “editor’s picks” and what’s about to close.
EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?
LAUREN OYLER: Animal videos. Especially unlikely animal friends.
EMBEDDED: Do you regularly use eBay, Depop, or other shopping platforms? What’s a recent thing you’ve bought or sold?
LAUREN OYLER: I use Kleinanzeigen, formerly known as eBay Kleinanzeigen, which is more like the German version of Craigslist than eBay, for anything one might want on Craigslist. It’s pretty lively. I think the last thing I bought on actual eBay was an orange Le Creuset. I’d like to use Depop, etc., for clothes (in Germany there’s no Depop, but equivalents), because I love clothes, but a long time ago I promised I’d stop buying clothes online unless specific conditions could be met. “You can just resell it online later” does drive a lot of my actual clothing purchases, unfortunately.
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
LAUREN OYLER: I don’t tend to read things that are primarily “about” the internet—stuff like “How the Internet Is Making Us More Anxious,” or whatever—but I’m always looking for artists, filmmakers, and writers who depict contemporary life, which necessarily involves depicting technology, in a realistic and smart way in their work. Stuff that doesn’t shy away from the internet, or “devices,” but instead illuminates the major role it plays in shaping our personal, social, and economic lives without sort of beating you over the head with it. The painters Nicole Eisenman and Salman Toor incorporate phones and laptops into their work in a way that is genuinely moving. This German painter Christopher Hartmann did some amazing, large paintings of teenagers on their phones that I think about all the time; I’d say his use of color is a response to Instagram. And I thought Sebastián Silva’s movie from last year, Rotting in the Sun, with Jordan Firstman playing himself, was really amazing at depicting social media as a force that subtly but meaningfully shapes identity and the offline social world more broadly. More people should see it.
Thanks Lauren! Follow her on Twitter, read her writing, and buy No Judgment and Fake Accounts. 😈 😭
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