Culture / Digital Culture

Anna Kai believes in self-gaslighting. On TikTok, as @itsmaybeboth, she markets beauty products for Garnier, Nivea, and Nexxus Hair Care while dispensing relationship advice to her 1.3 million followers. “If you can gaslight yourself into…

That’s fair.When you think about building stories from multiple audiences, not just audiences of color, but also queer audiences, disabled audiences, female audiences, I mean, we're seeing so much evidence at the box office lately…

When a new episode of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire aired the Sunday before last, a particular sort of fuse was lit in online conversations around the show. The fifth installment of the second season, “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the…

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of…

At the moment we’re having this conversation, how many people have Cara accounts?Now we’re at nearly 900,000 users. But it’s been stressful. Yesterday or the day before—I’m losing track of time now—I saw a bill from a service provider and…

“People are coming at it from different entry points,” says Buxton. “Some people are coming in from the gaming world, some are coming just for the action storytelling, some like to unpack lore.” She describes these unusual fan works as…

In what way?If memes are intended to circulate across boundaries and through different publics and intimacies, lynching postcards were among the first memes. Lynching postcards traveled across state lines. They literally were a form of…

Have you ever thought you’d be good at hawking digital meatballs or helping someone pick out the perfect Lack? Do you find yourself frequently lost in the haunted furniture store of the Roblox game 3008? If you live in the UK and are 18 or…

Accountability, as ReSpec has found, is a hard road to walk alone. “We've had so many of these conversations: These people want to change but just don't know if that's possible or how,” says Lin. “It really seemed like they were missing…

What makes an AI pageant different, Friedman asserts, is that Fanvue’s contestants are products of their creators. “They’re drawing on all these stereotypes that we have about what a ‘beautiful woman’ is,” she says, “and people who tend to…