The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Did the Internet Break Our Sense of Reality?

31 snips

Dec 17, 2025

Katherine Dee, a writer and internet ethnographer, shares her insights on the evolving landscape of online culture. She reflects on how the internet has shifted from a utopian playground to a source of anxiety. Dee introduces the concept of 'internet realism', emphasizing the importance of using the internet as a tool rather than losing oneself in it. They discuss the impact of COVID on online habits, the legitimacy of digital friendships, and concerns around AI and privacy, advocating for conscious engagement and boundaries in our digital lives.

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ANECDOTE

Late-Night Chat Room Creativity

Katherine Dee spent nights in chat rooms inventing characters and testing them like creative exercises.
She treated early online interaction as collaborative storytelling rather than deception.

INSIGHT

Internet As Liminal Fairyland

Early internet felt like a parallel, liminal fairyland with disembodied voices and blank spaces to fill.
That imaginative, story-like quality made online interaction feel intimate yet uncanny.

INSIGHT

Utopia Was Mixed With Commerce

Some argue internet utopianism never truly existed because online life always had transactional elements.
Yet Katherine sees the early web as more conducive to creativity and uniqueness than today's platforms.

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This week, guest host Zach Weissmueller is joined by Katherine Dee, a writer chronicling the subcultures of the internet at her Substack default.blog and in columns for The Spectator, Tablet, GQ, UnHerd, and various other publications. Dee also hosts a weekly call-in show that's an homage to the late-night AM radio show Coast to Coast.

Dee talks about the internet as a mystical "other place": fairyland or the astral plane, somewhere you journey and play by different rules, interact with unusual entities, and hope you emerge with your sanity intact.

In this interview, they discuss the shift from the "internet utopianism" of the '90s and early 2000s, where cyber philosophers mused about netizens "forming our own social contract" in a borderless digital space where "governments have no sovereignty," to internet pessimism, where politicians fret about online misinformation and extremism, parents worry their kids are "cooked" by short-form brain rot, and the media tell us AI will replace our jobs, our friends, and our romantic partners.

Dee has a remedy, and she calls it "internet realism." It's time to step out of fairyland and remember what the internet is: a tool. We humans use tools to reshape the world, but so, too, do tools reshape humans. Wield them wisely.

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing "free minds and free markets."

0:00—Introduction

1:42—Dee's relationship with the internet

7:16—The early days of the internet

13:48—Has the internet changed us?

18:21—Mythological analogies

23:00—Benefits of logging off

27:15—Falling in love with AI chatbots

33:39—Smartphones and anxiety

42:11—Defending pseudonymity

50:46—The death of reading

55:52—Internet nihilism and violence

1:01:20—Embracing internet realism

Producer: Paul Alexander
Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post Did the Internet Break Our Sense of Reality? appeared first on Reason.com.