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

podcast about internet culture.

And today, we are joined by writer Lane Brown. Welcome, Lane.

Thank you very much for having me.

Lane is a features writer in New York Magazine and wrote the recent piece, The Feed is Fake.

We will get into what that ominous title means in a bit.

But for now, let's take it back to before we even knew what a social media feed was.

So I can ask, Lane, what is your earliest internet memory? I realize that's an assumption that

your first internet memory is probably pre-instagram, but you can correct me if I'm wrong.

You know, if I really, being honest here, this is going to make me sound a thousand years old,

which I am.

But I think I was probably 14 or 15, and I used a, you know, on my 486 computer,

hooked up to a local bulletin board with my 56 or 28K, might have even been 14.4 modem.

And I think I spent an entire weekend hogging my family's telephone line to download.

I was about to ask if that was the situation.

Yeah, to download a picture of Batman.

And it took that long back then. And then I don't think it even completed because I think we got a phone call. And like right before. Wait, okay. Yeah, so this is prehistoric internet. But technically that was the, you know, the internet. I might have still been DARPA net or something at that point. Yeah, so I've been at this a while. I need to know more about the Batman pick. So it sounds like we never got it because it was taking days to download. What do you think you would have done with it when you download? I think probably it would have made it my desktop wallpaper. If it were even big enough, I don't know. See, that's the thing. We've had New York Magazine, colleague of yours, Catherine Jesser Morton, about her friction piece about how we need to add more friction into our lives. And I'm just wondering what, like, the internet users of today would do if it was like, you can change your background on your phone. It is going to take two days. And no one can call you.

We should bring that back. It would be more intentional internet if everybody had to

connect through, you know, their telephone line and their modems. I think that would be so much

better. We have to go back. We've strayed from the path and now it's time to go back.

We have strayed so far from the path as your piece illustrates because now we are in an oversaturated,

under-regulated, turbocharge internet, which is changing the way people,

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