AIMing with old internet friends

The online equivalent of driving by your old house & thinking how it looks different

I didn’t really AIM with the people I spoke with for today’s issue, but I hope I’m establishing a vibe here.

I know many of us have been pondering what social media is supposed to do for us these days, whether it’s actually bad or the world is just bad, and what the hell is in store for our kids. Yet I wouldn’t be in the career I’m in, have the friends I have, even the spouse I do, if not for years of noodling around in the early days of blogging, chatting with friends, experimenting with snark and honesty, seeing what connected with people. Then, after my first son was born, I remember reading the first FB message I got from another parent saying that his wife had had a birth similar to mine and was similarly messed up from it. That was my entree into how the internet can help you feel less alone as a parent.

I have a lot of conflict these days as I ponder the internet/social media now. I know I want less of it. But is that very wise of me, as someone who communicates and tries to stay up on what people care about? And why do I feel guilty, sometimes, about being less online? Was the internet more fun in the early days before social media platforms became mainstream? Or am I just old and automatically older things feel better?

I turned to a few old friends/colleagues from my early internet heyday — Emily Gould, AJ Daulerio and Edith Zimmerman — people who now are creative but on different terms than they were earlier. They all had major, public relationship-changes with internet and now have kids and happen to be sober. I wanted to know where they were lately regarding their relationships with the internet/social media and if they also have a nostalgia for an earlier online age they don’t quite know what to do with.

We had these conversations right before the holidays, post-election, and pre-inauguration, and they’ve been edited/condensed.

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Edith Zimmerman runs the Substack

Drawing Links

, sells art, and recently published a cartoon in the New Yorker. She is the founder of the website The Hairpin.

How do you describe your internet use beyond what you use for business and maintenance of your family?

I read a lot of newsletters and spend a lot of time on Instagram. I skim the New York Times app every day, but I read less of it since I got the games app that’s separate from the news.

Ten, 15 years ago, I’d come across something interesting on a blog, follow it, hours would pass, and I’d emerge with a new obsession. That still happens on Instagram occasionally, but generally it feels like I’m having a more passive experience.

What made you decide not to keep the Hairpin going in some other form?

That still haunts me. I stepped away from The Hairpin because I was burned out. And I didn’t do much for about five years after that.

Sometimes I think, “Oh man, I wish I had just taken a vacation instead of quitting, because I’ll never have a job that’s as perfect a fit for me as that one was.” But I don’t think it could have gone any other way. And I like where I’m at now.

It wasn’t like I walked away from The Hairpin to do something better. It was more like, “I’m tired and not having fun anymore.” Something snapped in me, and I was like, “I’m done.”

I think the site was successful because you could tell that someone was having a lot of fun at its heart, and it seemed important to give the reins to someone who could have more fun than I was having.

It’s funny; The Hairpin was such a big deal for me in my life, but I only did it for two and a half years. I remember coming up on the third round of certain holidays, and I was like, “Man, I don’t have any more ideas for this stuff.”

Was the burnout from the workload or being in constant contact?

I loved that job so much. I would log on at 5:00 in the morning and work until 4:00 or 5:00 in the evening. Then I would go out and drink pretty hard. I started taking Adderall, too, to stay awake for the drinking. It was pretty lonely in some ways. So, it wasn’t the workload or the communication. It was more like my overall approach to life at that time was not sustainable.

Do you remember milestones of when things changed regarding how you felt about using the internet?

After my first daughter, Georgia, was born, I started feeling like, “Oh, I have to fix my relationship with my phone, because I don’t want her to see this.” But I don’t worry about that as much now, because it’s just part of our lives. There’s other stuff to worry about.

Do you think of those Hairpin days as good old days or just “that was a younger time in my life”?

I think of it as the good old days, because it was so fun. But it’s also utterly incompatible with any adult version of my life. There’s no grown-up Edith who’s a mom and a wife who also lives online like I did when I was 25. Before I had children, I had a lot of free time and spent an enormous amount of it just refreshing my email. I guess I still do that, though.

Do you do other things for that dopamine rush that the potential of a good email might have delivered in the past?

I’m knitting as we talk. But I still live for email. The high of knowing that any human being in the world might engage with you, or have something cool to share, or to tell you you’re amazing, you’re not going to find that going out and looking at flowers. I still read a lot of books, too. But books aren’t going to talk to me. Tolstoy won’t be like, “Oh, thanks, Edith. I loved that tweet that you wrote about my book.”

Well, thank you for letting me ramble with you on a cold-ass morning.

This is fun for me. I don’t connect with people the way I used to on “the old internet,” before the stakes felt so high. The internet now feels so much more consequential. This conversation requires being on the phone, for instance, but 15 years ago, we could’ve been having a furious and thrilling Twitter back-and-forth. It’s not like that anymore, because now I would never publicly say anything I wouldn’t vet a million times in my head. You know?

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Emily Gould, a novelist and critic, is a features writer for New York Magazine. She is a former editor of Gawker.

I want to know how you’ve been using the internet lately.

I’m still on Twitter, but I mostly use it to share work things. I made a BlueSky account, but I haven’t used it. I don’t have the Twitter following that I used to before I nuked my Twitter [after being hospitalized with mental health issues]. I want to post more funny observations or little joke-type tweets the way I used to, but my brain is organized differently now. I don’t have Tweet thoughts anymore, in part because I spend less time looking at Twitter, but maybe because that part of me died, which is a little sad.

Also, no one appreciates a niche joke or will ever see it, so it’s like, why bother? I wrote one controversial movie review this year. I read the comments, which you should never do. I was like, “Jesus fucking Christ. It is no longer allowed to have an opinion that goes against the countervailing critical consensus.” It’s very discouraging. I don’t have that shitposter gene. I’m not like, “Ooh, I’m a provocateur; look at me, waving a red flag in front of a bull; I’m so controversial.” I would so much rather everyone either like or ignore me.

Is it sad that part of you died? What is sad about it?

There was a point in my life, probably in 2014, when I could tweet an observation about how hard it is to find a hair tie, or the scaffolding in New York, and hundreds of thousands of people would engage with it. It would feel like telling a joke in front of an audience, the feeling of doing good stand-up. But now I would rather have a conversation with a friend in real life than participate in this because it feels like shouting into a void.

How’s your son’s Roblox habit these days?

He is mostly into Blox Fruits, and then he and Ilya both got into this game called Brawl Stars. They both play it now, which is cute because they’ll play it together and be on a team, which is more wholesome somehow.

Has he been asking for a device or an account? What is he allowed to have currently?

He’s been begging for a phone. He claims that “everyone in his class has a phone” except him, which is a lie, but some of them do. In fourth grade! Another big thing is that he wants to spend money on phone games, and we won’t let him. According to him, all of his friends’ parents let them. He has a debit card and a checking account, and he’s like, “What’s the point of having this if I can’t spend my money on the one thing I want?” We haven’t been able to come up with a good answer for him, actually, except for the fact that it’s fucking dumb to spend money on a video game. It’s also diminishing rewards. You get whatever your thing is that you want, and then they offer you a new thing to want. It’s unending.

We’ll probably back down from this. We literally have a conversation about this every day. We drew this line in the sand, and we will eventually renege because it’s too hard to keep having the same fight with him.

We’re not hardass parents at all. We make them do their homework, go to bed, and feed them, but we are bad at making them pick up after themselves, assigning them chores, and making them actually work for their allowance.

When we were younger, 20 years ago or so, we had so much fun on the internet. Do you think it’s a completely different beast, or are we just older, or all of the above?

It seems like the internet is a lot less interactive and a lot more about passive consumption than what we were engaging in back in the early 00s.

I’m a weird person to talk to about social media. Half of my memories are fond. I’ve made lasting friendships through social media and blogging over the past 20 years. But now it’s shifted towards video, TikTok, and other forms of broadcasting. Those are the dominant media now; the written stuff we were consuming and engaging with is much less a part of kids’ lives.

What’s it like to experience that desire to be offline, but then you can’t feasibly?

When I first started this job, I had quit all forms of social media. I was doing a very extreme form of sobriety. Then I had a very gradual process of letting things like Twitter and Instagram back into my life one by one. It was mostly because it was necessary to do my work, get sources, have ideas, and be part of the cultural conversation. It used to be something that I did for work and for fun, and the line between those things was very blurred, which led to a lot of bad situations. Now, it’s purely work, and I miss the fun.

Do you remember what your first forays were online?

In high school, I had this good friend who was a real early adopter of online stuff. We used to read a funny webzine that someone was doing called Blair Magazine. They had fun photo quizzes, like “lesbian or German lady” was one of them. A little edgelordy, a little like the good part of early Vice Magazine, but with a very gay sensibility. I’m sure some random college students were doing this, but we found it and loved it.

I didn’t spend a lot of time online when I was in college. After I started my first job in book publishing, I had to be at my desk to answer the phone all day. There was a lot of downtime sitting in front of a screen. So that’s when I’d check my favorite tabs. I received a personal blog for my 23rd or 24th birthday present from my friend Alice, who could build a website. From there to blogging professionally only took about a year and a half.

Tell me more about being completely sober from the internet to getting back online.

The timeline is a little blurry to me. Once I was in the hospital and had been medicated for a few days, I was still manic, but a more rational part of my brain had begun to kick in. I was like, “I should not tweet through this. I will regret it.” It felt like there was no way to prevent myself from tweeting through that experience except to delete my Twitter permanently.

It took a long time for the repercussions of what I had done to set in, and they didn’t hit me until I had to start trying to rebuild it because, again, I needed it for work. Once I went back to work, at first, I tried to do my job without Twitter, and I found it impossible. Every other thing in Slack was a link to a TikTok, a YouTube video, or a tweet, and I needed access to those things. So that’s when I gradually started to try to go at it again, but with a different purpose.

I don’t want to offend anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder, but it’s like: you have to eat food, but you have to learn how to eat food without having a disordered relationship with food. It’s not a perfect metaphor because I could physically survive without access to social media, but I couldn’t work at this job or any job that I can imagine being qualified for.

I’m curious about what boundaries you have in place.

It’s not like I have rules for myself. Sometimes, I’ll scroll through Instagram when I’m bored or at loose ends, but I am doing it because I can’t get away with doing what I would rather be doing, which is reading a book or watching TV. I have found that always having a book that I’m reading on my phone is key. I do that to relax and unwind after putting the kids to bed.

Have you encountered things or situations where you are specifically worried about the boys in the future?

Unfortunately, I feel like the damage is done vis-a-vis Raffi because there’s a book about his early childhood written by my husband. It’s a good book that should exist in the world, but its publication augured my total nervous breakdown. Also, now Raffi can Google himself and read reviews of the book, and he has done so. It’s given him this inflated sense of himself that he is a Google-able person. That’s a weird situation for a 9-year-old to be in who isn’t a Kardashian child, who’s the child of two middle-class people who live in a rented apartment in New York City.

He’ll need therapy at some point to unpack his feelings about having that aspect of shaping his identity wrested from his control before he was old enough to sign off on it, but in a smaller way, so will every child who has grown up with cute photos of themselves being posted all over our Instagrams and Facebook pages.

I post photos of my kids very rarely now, and I always ask for their consent. The other night, Ilya was doing his homework, and he wrote something funny. I was going to take a picture of it and post it to my Instagram stories, but he wouldn’t let me. He put his hand up to block the camera, and I was like, “Oh, wow, I shouldn’t be doing this.”

They’re old enough, at six and nine, to consent. If I get the go-ahead from them to post something, it’s kosher.

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AJ Daulerio is the founder and editor of

The Small Bow

. He is the former editor of Gawker and Deadspin.

How do you engage with the internet lately, beyond work?

I’m on Instagram a lot. That’s my comfort scroll thing. It may be like, 40 minutes collectively, throughout the day. I don’t keep track.

As far as Twitter goes. I still Google my last name every once in a while, when I want to stab myself. The good news is that the place has become so overrun with bots that it’s like, I don’t even know what’s happening there. Outside of that, I have a good relationship with the Small Bow readers. They’re usually asking questions that I’m qualified to answer, in some way. I haven’t had any dustups with people there.

Do you remember those work days, where it was like, you got up at eight o’clock, you sat down in front of the computer, and then you look up, and it’s 1:30, and you haven’t eaten, you haven’t showered, you haven’t changed? I have the ability to step away from it, and that feels healthy.

I’m not going to Bluesky. I’m not going to Mastodon. I don’t want to pick something else up.

Do you feel a certain sense of nostalgia, or that you owe the internet something for the good times, for the fun Black Table days?

I don’t talk about this with Will Leitch, or Aileen Gallagher, or anybody like that. We don’t pine for the good old days thing.

It was still a very thrilling time of my life to be in my late twenties, in the middle of the Bowery, while everything else was happening internet-wise, to feel that we were in the midst of that. I felt like there was something that I was a part of. Having that creative energy, being surrounded by that 24/7 because of where I lived, was incredible, and I don’t think it could ever be recreated.

Now [December 2024] I don’t want to know what anyone is saying. I don’t want to know what anyone’s take is on the election.

I feel that way, too. It’s also very good that I live in a vacuum in my little internet world that I’ve created. Some of it seeps in, obviously, because people are like, “Oh, I want to drink all the time now, because Trump’s elected.” I said aloud, “I have no desire to work in news.” That would be torturous to me. I don’t want to think about this shit.

What is your current situation with your kids regarding what you allow and don’t allow?

We’ve got YouTube Kids, and we’ve got pretty good blockers on our two younger kids. Our oldest, not so much. We allow Ozzy to look at things related to music, baseball cards, and baseball. We don’t like the fact that he knows who Mr. Beast is. We’re like, “No first person shooter shit, no stuff like that.” I don’t think he's curious about what’s behind the curtain there. He wants so much to keep the stuff that he is interested in that he doesn’t want to risk losing it.

Also, my God, we adults are on our fucking phones all the time. I always keep in mind that the things that my parents were worried about when I was 12 changed a lot when I was 16. It’s like, why even start to put restrictions on things that may not be even relevant right now? What are we going to plan ahead about? Everyone’s going to be microchipped at some point.

What was it that made you decide to pursue better mental health with regard to internet use?

The iPhone lets you know how many hours you were, daily. then, one day, it was like, 16 hours. Jesus Christ. I could have gone to Japan, whatever. What was I even doing? I was not doing anything, except picking it up all day. It was more to curb that.

As of this interview, I’ve been abstinent from the news post-election. It’s like drinking. Can I get back into it and do it moderately? Is that possible?

Not wanting to work in the news has a lot to do with it. I saw something that happened in New York today¹. I didn’t read through, but when there were big stories that would happen, when there would be shootings, and shit, and whatever, it would be like, “Oh, this is the rest of my day, is reading every single story about this one.” Because I have to be informed.

It turns out, you don’t have to be informed about anything. You can actually live your life, and all your hopes and dreams will stay intact.

Do you find yourself doing anything in particular to replace that dopamine hit?

I eat a lot. I eat a lot of candy and pies, and shit like that.

Are you feeling okay about it?

No, no, no. no. Everything is a drug to me, in some ways. I’m always aware of the fact that if I do something that I am into for a while, I get super into it, and then, almost overdose on it, and have a blackout.

What do you estimate you’ve been doing with your time when you’re less online?

This is going to sound very woo, but I am actually a lot more present, minute by minute. Everything slows down, and you’re like, “Oh, this is lovely. What’s missing? Why is it so quiet in my brain?” Then, I start to enjoy the quiet. Then, I’ll pick up a paperback, things like that. I will read postcards that I get from this dude. Or I will rearrange baseball cards that Ozzy has left all over the floor. I spent an hour last week sticking baseball cards into binders. It's like, “I love this.”

When Ozzy starts getting online, and he’s a little bit older, what do you want him to know?

It may be the same exact conversation you have with your kids when they start drinking, which is like, “Now, there’s something genetically inside of that thing, that you may want to be aware of.”

For some reason, I feel this sense of sadness and nostalgia for our early days online, where we had this playground. But it’s weird to feel that way about a bunch of tubes under the ocean, you know?

I’m trying to think of what type of fun that was that is no longer available to me. When I was working at a financial trade publication, and Leitch was at whatever financial magazine he was working at, and we would go into our jobs, and we would be on AOL, and we would figure out who we could prank at Romenesko. That would be our work day. Then, maybe, there would be work somewhere along the lines. It was fun, seeing who popped up on AOL.

That felt like a full day, for whatever reason, and it was like that weird excitement that you get from having crushes on people, right? I’m sure that probably still exists in some form. I mean, I don’t pine for that, but I remember, it did exist.

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One witchy thing

Just how People Magazine equates a group of fathers getting together as being as charmingly offbeat and newsworthy as a dog climbing a fence:

1. This turned out to be the shooting of United Healthcare’s Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione.