My Internet: Liz Franczak
The TrueAnon co-host says that everyone is yearning for an experience that requires you not to document yourself.
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 Liz Franczak, co-host of the podcast TrueAnon (which was recently profiled by GQ, where I am an editor). Liz still uses browser bookmarks like a boomer, likes Instagram for killing braincells when she goes slopmode, and would institute a daily upload cap and ban on front-facing cameras if she were dictator. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Jon Hamm trance meme. It’s sweet watching people react to something that basically doesn’t exist anymore. Clubs are already gone and when they did exist there were no phones, not to mention any of the platforms. He’s in a full body wash of sound and sweat and repetition. He’s got no vibe, no look, nothing branded. Everyone’s yearning for an experience that requires you not to document yourself, which basically can’t exist anymore—or it can, but then you won’t be able to share it (and like and retweet and commodify it), which is the only social meta anyone knows now.
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EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Something happened a few years ago and I feel physically incapable of tweeting which sucks because I shamelessly think I’m pretty good at it. Or was :(
EMBEDDED: Do you post on Bluesky, Threads, or Substack’s Notes? Why?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Never had the urge. I have absolutely no idea what happens on Bluesky or Threads, which I have completely forgotten about, but is apparently massive? X, the everything app, is genuinely terrible (see below tweet) but when news is breaking theres no other place to be.
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Killing braincells when I go slopmode
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Mostly House of Highlights and random searches for fixing stuff around the house. I’d like to thank the handymen and women of YouTube for uploading helpful videos like 12 years ago before it became impossible to find any information on the internet.
EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?
LIZ FRANCZAK: I don’t really like anything about TikTok but I appreciate that every American platform is slowly morphing into them because they’ve run out of ideas.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
LIZ FRANCZAK: From the feed like everyone else. I’ll read Semafor, Bloomberg, FT, Puck, ESPN daily. Some random ass blogs I like to check in with occasionally. They still exist! I still use browser bookmarks like a boomer. I read NakedCapitalism every morning for aggregated links to stories—still the best in the biz—and I have an absurd number of news subscriptions thanks to my job.
EMBEDDED: What are your favorite newsletters?
LIZ FRANCZAK: I really love Clare Frances over at Famous and Beloved for movie reviews and general pop culture stuff. She’s one of the few writers on there who can be extremely online without being captured by it. She’s smart, funny and allergic to lazy consensus and I like that she feels like someone thinking through culture rather than performing a position. She’s a little mean and a little sincere and a bit contradictory which feels fresh and honest, especially on a platform like Substack where, despite its ambitions to the contrary, almost everything tends to drift toward the same.
Kaitlin Phillips’s Gift Guide is always fun. Anything Molly Young posts.
EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?
LIZ FRANCZAK: I’m not exactly moralizing about sports betting so much as structurally suspicious of it, especially with the NBA. The league spent decades turning the game into data—tracking every moment, modeling every possession—and for a long time there was just this surplus of data with nowhere to go. Gambling gets legalized and suddenly boom there’s a market for all this information.
Once that happens, you don’t really watch basketball anymore. You watch micro-events resolve. The game becomes the underlying asset, and your attention shifts to the derivative: props, odds, whether the world is conforming to the model. It’s subtle, but it changes spectatorship in a way that’s hard to undo. But this is all part of a much larger epistemic shift and sports betting (along with Polymarket, Kalshi, etc.) just makes this shift legible—how we’re increasingly trained to experience the world through models and odds and expected outcomes. I think it alters subjectivity in ways we’re barely naming yet.
EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?
LIZ FRANCZAK: I think the phone itself is not the problem, it’s the platforms and primarily social media. But not exclusively. We have an excess of communication and media and it’s making everyone insane in new and novel ways. If I was dictator there would be a daily upload cap and a ban on front-facing cameras.
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
LIZ FRANCZAK: It’s honestly kind of mind-blowing how everyone, across generations, is glued to AI content. I see it daily on the train from New Jersey. I think online commenters confuse the potential for an AI bubble to burst with this technology going away—it’s only going to get more sophisticated, strange, addictive and omnipresent. And people don’t hate it in the way some might hope.
EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?
LIZ FRANCZAK: My dad has an alt that follows me, which I think is sweet.
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Nothing But Respect is the best basketball pod out there. I also listen to Odd Lots every week, like a cliche.
EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?
LIZ FRANCZAK: The last office job I worked was in prime SnapChat launch days (so this had to be like, 2015 or so) and we used to get in trouble sending each other snaps from across meetings and drawing funny hats or whatever on our bosses. You can’t do that anymore these days. Because of woke.
EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, Slack, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Secret: I used to be an r/nba poster.
EMBEDDED: Do you use Slack or Teams for work? What’s the best thing about Slacking with your co-workers? What’s the worst thing?
LIZ FRANCZAK: LOLd thinking about getting Brace on Slack.
EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?
LIZ FRANCZAK: LOVER
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
LIZ FRANCZAK: It used to the be a salute guy 🫡 but I’m regressing back into a cry guy 😭
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
LIZ FRANCZAK: I never even think to text voice notes and I’m always shocked when I get them but I want to start. It feels very 90s, woman on the go, on a power walk sending something important (dictated, not read) but always brief. A very good way to transmit gossip and get across the correct tone.
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?
LIZ FRANCZAK: They are all so awful in their own ways and yet I have all of them. Right now I’m back on my DVD player watching HEIMAT, a German film-TV program that follows a family from the Rhineland from like 1919 through 2000. We just got to 1939, but no spoilers.
EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Posting and reading posts
EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?
LIZ FRANCZAK: Clavicular
Thanks Liz! Subscribe to TrueAnon. 🫡
More My Internet Anthony Fantano ∙ Scott Lapatine ∙ Daniel Kolitz ∙ Mary H.K. Choi ∙ Alison Roman ∙ Cartoons Hate Her ∙ Andrew Yang ∙ Emily Oster ∙ Paul Krugman ∙ Karen Hao ∙ All
Love the point about everyone yearning for experiences they don't have to document. That Jon Hamm meme really captures something we've all felt but couldn't quite articulate. The shift from being fully immersed in a moment to constantly thinking about how it'll look as content is such a quiet cultural change. Makes me wonder if we're even capable of being 'in it' anymore without that performative layer, you know?
Banger