My Internet: Tavi Gevinson
The writer and actor is on the search for another weird internet rabbit hole.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Some weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Tavi Gevinson, who “has appeared on the internet as a fashion blogger, Rookie editor, troll, goblin, ghost, influencer, and, in the Gossip Girl reboot, a high school teacher who uses Instagram to publicly shame her students.” In 2024, she co-created and acted in an Edith Wharton adaptation, Glimpses of the Moon, for Audible, and published Fan Fiction, a satirical fanzine about Taylor Swift, fame, and the internet. She also writes the “very sporadic” newsletter TGMail.
Tavi used to collect kids’ school projects on YouTube, once instructed Gemini to “sound like less of a cuck” when composing an email (it started the next draft with “Yo!”), and will sometimes become so self-conscious while lurking on Reddit for niche inspiration that she fears she will never make anything again. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
TAVI GEVINSON: My friends and I do YouTube nights for a) laughter and b) performers who commune with God. The former category is mostly bizarre award show speeches. Some favorite performances include PJ Harvey and Bjork doing “Satisfaction,” Ariana Grande arranging “Positions,” Joni Mitchell doing “Coyote” at Gordon Lightfoot’s house with an awed Bob Dylan, all the divas and Soul Train and Unplugged and Top of the Pops ... my friends and I will watch and ask “FREE OR NOT FREE?” and talk about why a performer seems free or not. Yep, we’re the authority! I also recommend watching all of an artist’s music videos in chronological order.
I’m on the search for another weird rabbit hole. I used to collect kids’ school projects on YouTube, because I remember having to make those and upload them for anyone to see (?) and it’s so funny that scores of them are still out there. Here are three. Especially fun when they’re PSAs so you’ll have like a tween pretending to be an internet predator or something. It takes a lot of time to find the good ones, which I appreciate. No robot would know how to distinguish the funny ones.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
TAVI GEVINSON: Like downing a cough syrup-flavored energy drink.
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
TAVI GEVINSON: Here’s what I’ve recommended the most lately: Know Your Enemy, Tara Brach’s meditations (yeah, I went there!), Bandsplain, and Courtney Love’s Women in Music show on the BBC. It’s like half-autobiography and half music history, she’s just traversed across so many unique moments in culture, and it’s satisfying to hear an icon talk about mapping her career instead of pretending she came into the world fully-formed. She tells great stories and does an astonishing performance of a Shakespeare monologue. We listened to all eight hours straight while driving.
EMBEDDED: How would you describe Tumblr’s legacy?
TAVI GEVINSON: Our Life Could Be Your Band.
EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, Slack, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?
TAVI GEVINSON: I lurk Reddit for niche inspiration but sometimes it makes me so self-conscious that I fear I will never make anything again. My last good find:
EMBEDDED: What most excites you about AI chatbots and text and art generators? What most concerns you?
TAVI GEVINSON: All the normal concerns! No excitement so far. I have used Gemini to write perfunctory emails, but I’m not sure it saved me any time. Its drafts are so caretakey, like I was saying I couldn’t go to a reading and it was like “(although I am a major admirer of her writing, going all the way back to her 2012 debut, as well as everything she stands for!)” ... like, chill! Then once my friend and I gave the feedback to “sound like less of a cuck,” and it started the next draft with “Yo!” … But there I go training it, so whatever.
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?
TAVI GEVINSON: “PALosi Destroy Mr. Steak MUNCHKIN HELL? I Barely jakeTAPPER’d HRC.” We did an anatomy of the name recently and a lot of it traced back to texts from Democrats, BUT “HRC” actually comes from Hard Rock Cafe. Ahem. We recently had a light debate about whether we felt bad for a good actor who was in a bad, giant movie. I was on the side of, they’re doing fine.
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
TAVI GEVINSON: The lip bite which is like an emoji equivalent of doing a kind of bimbo, codependent voice. Sort of “no worries if not”-ish. Gemini can use it in their pathetic emails …
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
TAVI GEVINSON: Yes. I love giving and receiving them. They’re like little podcasts by my friends, or little sermons by 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?
TAVI GEVINSON: Ugh, Spotify even though I hate not being able to look at anything on there without being made aware of stats and feeling watched. How grotesque to open an album and immediately know how popular each song is! This feature is for jocks! So many of their features are for jocks. The cutesy year-end data collections are creepy, and this year’s Wrapped “podcast” with two “AI hosts” sounded like two siblings who grew up chained to toilets were on their first day at a corporate job. I do like how you can now organize playlists in folders, and one of my folders is “rabbit holes,” including playlists like Dionne Warwick singing Burt Bacharach, Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage, Calvin Johnson’s mixtapes (a couple of which I got at Ooga Booga as a teen—delightful to find them compiled here), and Steve Erickson’s 100 best L.A. songs (playlist here, he wrote about them here).
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
TAVI GEVINSON: I love are.na. I love how I check it multiple times a day and there will only be like, 2 new things, but I can go down a rabbit hole if I want. It’s so helpful for conducting and organizing research, it’s full of surprises, and it allows my brain to make new connections across the different things I’m working on or ideas I’m circling.
I also love not knowing who any of these other users are. When someone reposts something I’ve shared (seldom my own work—usually stuff I’m reading), the rush I feel is like, ooh, we’re connecting over an idea that is helpful to both of our projects, rather than ooh, someone thinks I’m cool or have good taste (or any other type of social media dopamine hit). I feel like it really activates the same eager, enthusiastic part of me that started Rookie and organized it around themes—that wanted to share good stuff and work out ideas with other people.
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
TAVI GEVINSON: I will always push George W. S. Trow’s Within the Context of No Context which is about mass media in the 80s but is prescient. I also like Ted Nelson’s anti-gatekeeping, trickstery manifestos from the 70s, “Dream Machines” and “Computer Lib.” His characterization of computer technology as a continuation of American fantasy life has stayed with me:
This is the land of the MOVIE, a fantasy fabricated with endless difficulty using various kinds of equipment. The mad tinkerer is a fabled character in our fiction. This is the land of the kandy kolor hot rod, the Hell’s Angel chopper, the drive-in movie. And the wild hot-rod, in fact, is just the flip side of the deep-carpeted Cadillac: each is a fantasy, an extension of its owner’s image of himself in the world. Thus it was not an historical accident, but utterly predetermined, that in the hands of Americans the computer would become a way of realizing every conceivable wild fantasy that was dear to them.
Thanks Tavi! Sign up for her newsletter, follow her on Instagram, and visit her website.
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