The Immense Importance of Internet Culture

2021 is the year we finally realized that IRL and online are inseparable

Today would have been Digital Void’s Internet Culture Festival at Caveat in New York City — had it not been canceled due to the rapidly spreading variant plaguing the city. The festival would have been our third in a series of events we’ve produced this year, following two very fun “Meme in the Moment” festivals featuring some of the best internet culture journalists, writers, researchers and academics in the region.

The Internet Culture Festival was supposed to be a year in review, a look back on a spectacular year, where certainly, the line between IRL and digital had fully faded away. I was set to host this event and in an effort to preserve the moment, the following is the monologue I wrote for the event. Some edits have been made to adapt it to print.

Well, we made it to the end of 2021 mostly intact. 2021 was an absolutely insane year, one that was entirely shadowed by a pandemic, a vague realization our systems are coming apart at the threads, and revelations that social media companies (cough Facebook) know that their product is harmful to the public. This is to say nothing of the pixelated jpgs being exchanged for climate-destroying cryptocurrencies.