Joanne
McNeil

Joanne McNeil does something most writers are afraid to do: she takes the ordinary seriously. Not the CEOs, not the founders, not the TED-talk prophets of Silicon Valley. The lurkers. The forum moderators. The anonymous commenters in the dark corners of Usenet who never got a think piece written about them. When she published "Lurking: How a Person Became a User" in 2020, she handed readers something that tech publishing had been avoiding for a decade - a history of the internet that started with people, not products.

That move - centering the user rather than the builder, the recipient rather than the sender - is the lens through which McNeil sees everything. She grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working-class city south of Boston more known for boxing champions than literary critics. She ended up writing for Frieze. These facts are not unrelated. There is a quality to her criticism that refuses the gallery's insider comfort zone; she writes about digital infrastructure and net art as though readers deserve to understand both.

How She Got Here

Before the books, there was a blog. McNeil founded The Tomorrow Museum - a site covering art and technology that preceded most of the curatorial language now standard in discussions of net art. It was a genuinely early move, the kind that gets called "prescient" only in retrospect and "niche" at the time. From there, she became editor of Rhizome at the New Museum around 2011, one of the few institutional homes for serious internet art criticism. She edited and published "The Best of Rhizome 2012" and participated in the New Aesthetic conversations at SXSW and the New Museum that were briefly trying to name what the internet was doing to visual culture.

The art world and the tech world kept meeting in her work, and she kept writing - for the Los Angeles Times, for Wired, for the Boston Globe, for Frieze - refusing to specialize in the way that publications prefer. She received the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, which matters because that grant is selective and because it signals that her criticism was landing somewhere it mattered. Then came the inaugural Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation Arts Writing Award, specifically for emerging writers at the intersection of art and technology. She was first. No one else had won it before her, which is either a distinction or just a fact of being early, and with McNeil, those tend to be the same thing.

Lurking: A Radical Act of Listening

"Lurking: How a Person Became a User" is a strange and necessary book. It traces thirty years of online community - from the early BBS systems and Usenet groups through AOL and Yahoo, from Friendster and MySpace through blogging and Facebook and Reddit - and it does so not through the mythology of innovation but through the experience of ordinary people navigating spaces they did not design. McNeil's central question is almost deceptively simple: what does it feel like to be a person online? What happens when personhood gets translated into "user" - a word that strips context, history, and dignity with quiet efficiency?

The book was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020, a OneZero Best Tech Book of the year, and one of Esquire's Best Books of 2020. But the more interesting accolade is what readers kept saying: that it named something they had experienced but could not articulate. That is the specific work of a certain kind of essayist - not to discover what no one knew, but to say clearly what everyone felt.

Her criticism of tech discourse is precise. She does not argue for digital detox or "less internet." She argues for a better internet - a question she finds conspicuously absent from mainstream conversations. "The question doesn't come up so much about how we can make a better internet," she has said. "The conversation defaults to maybe we should use the internet less." That distinction - better versus less - is where her thinking lives.

Wrong Way: Fiction as a Sharper Blade

Her debut novel arrived in November 2023 and proved that the critic's tools translate to fiction. "Wrong Way" follows Teresa, worn down by a lifetime of precarious gig work, who takes a mysterious job with a tech behemoth promising to revolutionize transportation. It is a tech-industry satire but also something quieter - a novel about exhaustion, about what happens to people when labor is made to seem like opportunity and opportunity is revealed as exploitation.

The New Yorker named it one of the Best Books of 2023. Esquire put it in its Top 20 Best Books of the year. These are not small acknowledgments. More telling is what the novel does with the familiar Silicon Valley material: it refuses to be impressed by it. Teresa is not dazzled. She is tired. That is a more honest register than most fiction about tech work manages.

McNeil also writes a column called "Speculations" for Filmmaker Magazine, examining science fiction in film, literature, and art - a natural extension for a writer whose entire project is about how we imagine technology before and after it arrives. Her video essay series "Just Browsing" continues that thread in a more intimate format. And her forthcoming nonfiction book, "Too Early for the Future: Reckoning with Tomorrow from the Present," will turn her full attention to the history and practice of speculation itself - what we get wrong when we try to see ahead, and why we cannot stop trying.

The Residencies, The Fellowships, The Networks

McNeil has been a resident at Eyebeam, the New York-based art and technology center that has incubated some of the more interesting work at that intersection. She was a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, a fellowship that specifically supports long-form nonfiction work. She has taught at the School for Poetic Computation, the small, self-organized school in New York that approaches code as a creative and humanistic practice rather than a technical credential.

The institutions she has moved through share a quality: they are all serious about the cultural meaning of technology without being captured by tech-industry values. Eyebeam is not a startup incubator. The School for Poetic Computation is not a coding bootcamp. The Logan Program is not a content farm. That consistency of institutional affiliation is not accidental - it reflects a sustained commitment to criticism that does not flatter its subject.

She is represented by Sarah Bowlin at Aevitas Creative Management, and her books are published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which is the imprint that handles serious literary nonfiction. She runs two newsletters: a news-focused one at buttondown.email/lurking covering events and updates, and a more essayistic one, "All My Stars" on Substack, covering books, films, and exhibitions. She is also on Mastodon at friend.camp - the detail alone signals something about her relationship to the social web.

What Makes Her Singular

Most critics choose a lane. Arts criticism or technology criticism. Academic or popular. Historical or contemporary. McNeil does not choose. Her work on "Lurking" drew from art history, platform studies, sociology, and personal essay in proportions that do not appear in most editorial style guides. She can cite a net artist and a 1990s AOL policy change in the same paragraph without either feeling incongruous.

That cross-disciplinary ease is rarer than it sounds. It requires not just wide reading but a genuine conviction that the boundaries between these fields are provisional - that a Wikipedia editor and a conceptual artist are doing adjacent things, that the history of search engines and the history of portraiture share a subject. McNeil holds that conviction without making it a thesis. It simply shows up in the work, in the way she handles evidence and example, and in the way she treats every person who ever logged on as someone worth understanding.

She was always pretty cynical towards the big companies, she has said. That cynicism did not produce despair - it produced "Lurking," and then "Wrong Way," and now whatever comes next. Some writers use skepticism as a posture. McNeil uses it as a research method.