The Computer Room

In this episode of The Computer Room, Katherine and friends talk about Art Bell's legacy. We meet Leah Prime, who's writing a book about Art Bell, John Steiger who on a mission to hand transcribe every single episode of Coast to Coast AM, and Joseph Matheny, the mind behind Ong's Hat.

Katherine and Gio discuss “Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke,” a novella by Eric LaRocca about a complex BDSM relationship between two women that unfolds through emails, forum posts, and instant messages in 2000. They talk about what it meant to “log on” in 2000, lesbian media, and whether online relationships are uniquely suited to BDSM dynamics. Gio also reveals that, somehow, he didn’t know Katie Herzog of BARPod is a lesbian.

Help make “number go up” by subscribing:

“The most un-American thing you can do is reject fame.”

In a recorded phone call, Katherine and Laura Albert, the writer best known for JT Leroy, explore the fuzzy boundaries of truth and fiction in our digital era. They discuss the telephone as a medium, catfishing, imagination, and lying as a form of storytelling.

Katherine talks to a brony Zoomer about being online, mediated friendships, the fantastical world of My Little Pony, and the revival that the fandom is experiencing right now.

Buy your Mare Fair tickets here, read the infamous MLP fan fic “The Lunar Rebellion” here, and watch the first four seasons of MLP here.

Kickstarter and Metalabel cofounder Yancey Strickler walks in on Gio and Katherine gossiping. Together, they talk about the meaning of gossip, the Internet as a source of power, and what happens when everything moves from main to the group chat.

Check out Metalabel.

Read Yancey's writing:The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet The Post-Individual

Lauren and Grady are Chicago’s hottest couple. Katherine and Grady talk about playing a role that’s not yourself but based on yourself, their appearance on Help! I'm In a Secret Relationship, where all the weirdos have gone on the Internet, if those chamoy pickles were worth it, and his relationship with Lauren.

This week, Gio and I are joined by Benjamin Studebaker, a writer, political theorist, leftist, and former co-host of the infamous podcast “What’s Left?” to discuss the Millennial Left.

One question I wish we had asked, and I invite our audience to leave their thoughts about, is whether there is/was a meaningful difference between the Millennial Left and the Tumblr Left. Was the latter a subset of the former, or did it have its own unique character?

In the future, I’d like to explore the contours of the political communities on SomethingAwful, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook Groups. How were they different? Where was there overlap? As always, if you’d like to share your experience from the Left or Right, please drop us a line.

From Benjamin’s blog post, “The Millennial Left as a Moment in Internet History,” which you can read in full here:

To find a new politics, we have to abandon our old politics. But we cannot abandon our old politics if our old politics still pays our bills. The millennial left is a declining business model rather than a political movement. It was a fluke of a particular moment in the political economy of the internet. That moment has ended. No one in their right mind would try to start a new left media enterprise in 2024. But those that still exist will carry on until they run out of money. This zombie millennial left will be with us for years to come, compelled by the business model to pretend it is still engaged in political activity. But it has been years since this activity could even plausibly appear meaningfully political. The appearance died with the form of internet that generated it.

All told, the millennial left existed in a plausibly political form for just five years. It began in 2015 and it ended in 2020. It peaked the year it was born, and it declined continuously throughout its lifespan, becoming less and less plausible every year. Death finally came for it over the span of four months, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in December of 2019 and Bernie Sanders’ defeat on Super Tuesday in March of 2020. Consign it to the abyss.

What exactly was the alt-right? A digital subculture? A political movement? An umbrella term encompassing several contradictory movements?

What did the press get wrong? Katherine and Gio sit down with Scott Greer and attempt to demystify What Happened eight years ago…

BTW, if you’re reading this, and you know who you are, YOU WILL come on this show and talk to us about the #GamerGate/imageboard component of the history of fringe right-wing politics. This is a threat…I will stop at nothing until you come on this podcast…you promised… in 2022…

What exactly was the alt-right? A digital subculture? A political movement? What did the press get wrong? Katherine and Gio sit down with Scott Greer to attempt to demystify What Happened an incredible eight years ago…

Katherine sat down with cyberethnographer and artist Ruby Justice Thelot and discussed the role of imagination in computer-mediated communication, paracosms, building durable relationships with AI, and more. 

* Ruby's book, A Cyberarcheology of Checkpoints

* Ruby's Twitter

* Ruby's blog

* A really cool video Ruby made, Why Aliens Love America