The following dialectic has underpinned our collective relationship with the internet:

Internet-Optimism – The internet will save us! (1990s – Early 2000s) Internet-Pessimism – The internet will destroy us! (Mid-2010s – Early 2020s) Internet-Realism – ??? (Now)

Nobody is an internet optimist anymore. And everyone is aware of the internet’s awfulness—digital dependence, mass surveillance, online harassment, cancel culture, culture warring, and a spectacle of cringe. It was once cool to be a pessimist, but now it’s boring, if not cringe itself.

Being both an optimist and a pessimist carries too much certainty—the belief that something definitively good or bad will happen. Collectively, we are fatigued by such certainty and are searching for a third way—one that is open to the possibility of good without utopian naivety, while remaining aware of the bad without doomer defeatism.

Internet Real Life (IRL) is an interview series and “inverse course” that aims to source the collective wisdom of its participants to discover what an internet-realist position could look like.

Join Katherine (@Default_Friend) and Peter Limberg (of The Stoa) in a four-part series with the following guests:

📅 April 4th → Molly Soda 📅 April 11th → Günseli Yalcinkaya 📅 April 18th → Sean Monahan 📅 April 25th → August Lamm

Each session is two hours:

The first hour will be a presentation from the guest, followed by a Q&A. The second hour will be a collective inquiry, non-recorded.

What’s Included:

✅ Access to live sessions via Zoom ✅ A syllabus with assigned readings ✅ Advance access to the recordings

Participants’ Bios:

Katherine Dee is an internet culture reporter and amateur ethnographer known for chronicling the rise and fall of online subcultures and their impact on mainstream discourse.

Peter Limberg is a writer and founder of The Stoa, a digital space for philosophical inquiry and sense-making in a time of societal uncertainty.

Molly Soda is an artist and internet performance pioneer whose work examines self-representation, online femininity, and the aesthetics of social media decay.

Günseli Yalcinkaya is a cultural critic, researcher and contributing editor at DAZED, specializing in emerging internet aesthetics, digital countercultures, and the intersection of technology and art.

Sean Monahan is a trend forecaster and cultural critic, known as one of the original members of K-HOLE, the trend consultancy that coined the term "Normcore." His work focuses on the shifting tides of aesthetics, vibe shifts, and internet-born subcultures.

August Lamm is an artist, writer, and anti-tech activist whose pamphlet, You Don't Need a Smartphone, urges a profound reevaluation of humanity's relationship with technology.