internet-culture
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Jia Tolentino Writes From Inside the Trap
She became the internet’s sharp observer by admitting that she, too, was caught in it. From a Kyrgyz village to The New Yorker, her subject has remained the same: the systems we enter willingly, and the selves they ask us to become.
Kyle Chayka Is Teaching Us to Want Things the Feed Didn’t Choose
The author of Filterworld has spent his career noticing what platforms quietly do to taste. His answer is neither a digital detox nor a better feed, but the slower pleasure of choosing on purpose.
Danny Gonzalez
Danny Gonzalez is an American commentary YouTuber, comedian, and parody musician who turned a six-second Vine habit into a multi-channel video studio. He calls his audience 'Greg,' co-hosts the Danny and Drew podcast with Drew Gooden, and has built a 10M+ subscriber empire on careful jokes about bad content.
Drew Gooden
Drew Gooden is an American commentary YouTuber and comedian known for sharp, slow-burn deep dives into internet and pop culture. A Vine alum behind the 'Road Work Ahead' clip, he rebuilt an audience on YouTube with a 2018 takedown of Jake Paul's live show and now plays theaters with Danny Gonzalez.
Ethan Klein
Ethan Klein is the co-founder of h3h3Productions and host of the H3 Podcast, a long-running commentary, comedy and interview show he runs with his wife Hila Klein. What started in 2011 as a YouTube channel built around 'reaction' style videos and 'exe' edits became one of the more durable creator businesses on the internet, with a podcast launched in 2017 that has put out more than a thousand episodes.
Nicholas DeOrio
Nicholas DeOrio is an American YouTuber and self-described 'Influencer Drama Tour Guide' who has built a dedicated audience around meticulously researched video essays on internet controversies. Since joining YouTube in 2016, he has investigated, exposed, and occasionally cleared the names of some of the web's most talked-about personalities, co-hosts the Half Baked Podcast alongside Turkey Tom and Lord Vega, and maintains an active presence on Twitter/X with over 81,000 followers.
Ryan Broderick
Ryan Broderick is an internet culture journalist and the founder of Garbage Day, a thrice-weekly newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers that chronicles the 'daily joys and horrors of internet culture.' After nearly a decade at BuzzFeed News, where he rose to Deputy Global News Director, he went independent and built Garbage Media Inc. into an 8-person operation spanning a newsletter, a podcast (Panic World), and a media intelligence research arm. Known for his deeply human voice in an era of AI slop, he argues that the line between 'internet culture' and just 'culture' has long since dissolved.
Max Read
Max Read is a Brooklyn-based journalist, media critic, and newsletter writer who runs Read Max, a Substack publication covering tech culture, internet phenomena, AI, and digital media with acerbic wit and analytical depth. Former Editor-in-Chief of Gawker and founder of New York Magazine's Select All vertical, Read is one of the sharpest observers of how platforms reshape human behavior - a thinker who treats the internet with the seriousness of a literary critic and the irreverence of someone who has watched it eat itself alive.
Taylor Lorenz
Taylor Lorenz is an independent journalist, author, and media operator who has spent her career documenting how the internet reshapes fame, culture, power, and everyday life. After stints at Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, she left legacy media in October 2024 to run User Mag, her Substack-based publication covering tech and internet culture, which quickly grew to nearly 100,000 subscribers. Her 2023 book 'Extremely Online' is a landmark social history of the influencer economy. She is widely considered one of the most influential — and most harassed — tech journalists in America.
Charlie Warzel
Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Galaxy Brain, the publication's flagship newsletter on tech, media, and internet culture. A veteran of BuzzFeed News and The New York Times, he has spent over a decade mapping the collision of technology, power, and human behavior - from smartphone location tracking to AI hype cycles to Twitter's moderation failures. Co-author of 'Out of Office' with Anne Helen Petersen, Warzel writes from Lummi Island, Washington, with a voice that is analytical, empathetic, and stubbornly resistant to easy narratives.
David Perell
David Perell is a writer, educator, and founder best known for Write of Passage, the online writing course that turned thousands of lurkers into published voices. Armed with 474,000+ Twitter followers and a newsletter empire, he spent six years teaching people to think and write better on the internet - then stopped cold in 2025 when AI upended his mental model of education. He is now figuring out what comes next, in public, as always.
Joanne McNeil
Joanne McNeil is an American writer, editor, and art critic who sits at the curious crossroads of internet culture and contemporary art. Best known for 'Lurking: How a Person Became a User' (2020) - a critical history of the internet told from the perspective of ordinary users - she followed it with her debut novel 'Wrong Way' (2023), a tech-industry satire about precarious gig labor. Formerly editor of Rhizome at the New Museum and founder of The Tomorrow Museum blog, she has written for Frieze, Wired, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. She holds the inaugural Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation Arts Writing Award and has been a fellow at the Logan Nonfiction Program, a resident at Eyebeam, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Her next nonfiction work, 'Too Early for the Future,' is forthcoming from MCD/FSG.
Zeynep Tufekci
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-born sociologist, professor at Princeton University, and New York Times opinion columnist who has become one of the world's foremost voices on the intersection of technology and society. Known for being consistently ahead of the curve — predicting Facebook's role in ethnic violence, YouTube's radicalization pipeline, and COVID-19's severity before mainstream institutions caught on — she bridges computer science and humanistic inquiry with a rare clarity. Her 2017 book 'Twitter and Tear Gas' is a landmark study of networked protest, and her Substack newsletter 'Insight' offers rigorous, genuinely open-minded analysis of the hardest puzzles at the edge of science, technology, and democracy.