Friends, it's summer. It's 31 degrees Celsius (about 88 Fahrenheit). It's past my LVWH (Latest Viable Working Hour) and I've used up all of my creativity for the day on playing and painting. And so, this time, it's gonna be a short one. Everybody deserves a break—even me and Ben, who is currently on holiday, eating corndogs and fried cheese curds with ranch and god knows what else. Will he remember what a salad is upon return? You'll just have to tune in to find out.

Anyway: it seems fitting that I take a little back seat this week, because this interview isn't mine. Ben stepped in and spoke with this week's guest about the early internet and what it is to do something for the love of it.

If I'd seen Joanna Walsh's profile at the age of 18, I would have been absolutely starstruck. She is the kind of expansive writer/artist I aspired, in some far-off valve of my little heart, to be—but knew I probably wasn't cool enough for.

Joanna Walsh writes for print, digital, and performance. She's got twelve books out in the world (several of which she's co-written with AI that she coded herself). She's put up installations and art projects and performed collaborative and solo works. She's an arts activist and sometimes a professor. She's everything, everywhere, all at once, it seems—including in a witty, wicked, wry little volume of fairytales about sex that I've had proudly on display in my home for more than a decade.

Today, however, we're here to talk about her more recent book: Amateurs!, a philosophical history of the people who shaped the early internet. It takes seriously the work of bloggers, aesthetic wiki mods, meme accounts, and everyone else who made the I Can Has Cheezburger? days so juicy and delicious. The word "amateur" gets used as an insult, but it never meant unskilled—it just meant you weren't doing it for the money.

This episode, Ben and Joanna dig into a lot that's worth thinking about in an age when we feel so conflicted about all the ways in which we are ONLINE. Personas, and what we choose to share, where, and why; how we're doing more performing of attention online than actually paying any (it's why your friend didn't read your last Substack but DID heart it); and the lost art of braided conversation on Twitter. Also, Ben asks what we can do to feel a little better about being connected all the time—to which Joanna replies, iconically “Don’t log off.” <3 

Ben called this one a summer episode, which I think is right: it's for taking to a barbecue and getting nostalgic about which internet was yours.

More soon,
Caitlin

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