Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

And today on the show, we're joined by writer Lorena O'Neill. Welcome, Lorena.

Thank you so much for having me.

Lorena is an investigative news journalist who also recently wrote a piece for Rolling Stone about the rise in celebrity go-fundies.

And that is what she is here to talk with us about today.

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with conversations there is to follow us. Who knows? If you leave a comment, it just might end up on the

show. But now that we have that out of the way, Lorena, I have to ask you the question that we ask

all first-time guests, which is what is your earliest internet memory? Wow, my earliest internet

memory would be printing aim conversations with my friends

or my crushes, highlighting them, writing notes on them, and then stapling them into my

composition notebook I had with my friends to pass notes in class. Isn't it wild that we all did that?

I haven't thought about that in so long, but yes, it was like, especially if it was a conversation with a crush or something, it's like, I need to take a closer look at this text. And like, yeah, you print it. You'd go over it with people. I know I would like try and save it because I think especially at that time the internet was like annoying that still is

but like it was newly annoyingly ephemeral and it was like how do I need to keep this how do I keep

this also it's like screenshots right like it's early versions of screenshot yeah the original

screenshots what types of things would you highlight like you know what my crush said to me like

what do we think about this what did he mean by this like oh right because you're passing it around so you're types of things would you highlight? Like, you know, what my crush said to me, like, do,

what do we think about this? What did he mean by this? Oh, like, oh, right, because you're passing it around. So you're like, this, I require your attention on this matter. Please look at this very important sentence that the boy meant nothing that I think he meant. One, when did you pass it around? Was it like through school? How organized was this system?

...