I’ve wanted to talk to Rayne Fisher-Quann, writer of the Substack Internet Princess, for a while, because I feel our writing is in dialogue, even though I’m writing from the ancient perspective of a 34-year-old whose first computer was one of those ones with a black screen with green lines on it, and her from the perspective of an early-20-something who’s had an iPhone since she was ten. Despite the generational gap, we’ve come to similar conclusions about the internet and its effect on our mental wellbeing, namely that it’s probably bad for us to constantly witness what everyone in the world is thinking all the time!!! 

It was a pleasure to talk to her about “forced proximity,” feeling like Ted Kaczynski, and learning to find the good in online mental health communities even if they’re often bad.