A show about our lives online.

 <a href="https://default.blog/s/the-computer-room?utm_medium=podcast">default.blog</a>

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. I’m an Internet ethnographer and reporter. This newsletter is filled with interviews, takes on current events, a sporadic advice column, Craigslist-style missed connections, Internet culture explainers, streams, a book club, predictions and forecasts… There’s a lot of stuff. I also spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet. Consider chipping in $2 for my efforts:Alright — I did NOT edit last night’s call-in show with <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/22078727-taylor-mcmahon">Taylor McMahon</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/554653-alex-dobrenko">Alex Dobrenko`</a>. I’m just biting the bullet and posting it for all to see, no paywall, rambling stories and all. I’ll get shows #5 and 6 out… at some point. This is part of why I had to wind down The Computer Room, I am so bad at staying on schedule with these things! As an aside, if anybody wants to help me edit clips for social, please drop me a line. Last night’s theme was GHOST IN THE MACHINE. I like to pick themes that are open-ended— could veer paranormal but also has some relation to current events. With the recent spate of Internet ideology-inflected violence, Ghost in the Machine felt fitting.You know what’s weird, too? Each episode, we have technical difficulties that align with our theme. Ghost in the machine indeed… Something I wanted to talk more about—but didn’t get the opportunity to—is a trio of books: D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless’s Phone Calls from the Dead, Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, and Laurent Kasprowicz’s Des coups de fil de l’au-delà?. Taken together, they trace a through-line in which each leap in communication technology—telegraph wires humming through Victorian séances, radio’s “etheric ocean” of unseen waves, telephones that supposedly ring after the caller has died, television snow, and early computer networks—is framed as a fresh conduit to “the other side.” Phone Calls and Des coups de fil gather eerie testimonies of phones ringing post-mortem and Haunted Media zooms out to show how every new medium inherits a moment of spectral possibility before its quotidian uses drains the magic away. Which is why today’s spate of think pieces about a digitally-induced “reenchantment”—or claims that AI uniquely revives the paranormal—feel less like a revolution than the latest verse in an old song: the hardware changes, but the instinct to hear more than static on the line endures. (Full disclosure here: this was a claim I myself was making, until I thought a little more about it.)iPad Kids? More Like iPhone Moms. Something that keeps unsettling me, again and again, is the sight of parents, grandparents, and nannies glued to their phones while the kids they’re supposed to be watching play. I’ll walk into a library or a park and see caregivers staring at screens; the children stay device-free, yet the adults can’t look away from theirs.Never mind the obvious safety risks. What really gets under my skin—sorry, I know I sound preachy—is the quiet assumption that a playground isn’t time with your kid at all, but rather the environment itself acts as a babysitter that frees the grown-ups up to text or watch TikTok in public. It also erases the chance to meet other parents. Everyone keeps telling me, “Go out and you’ll make mom friends!” But the only places I’ve truly connected are explicitly phone-free “mommy-and-me” groups, some of which ban devices for spiritual reasons.It’s not that I never dick around on my phone while I’m with my kid. I certainly do. I’m not always engaged. I’ll take long walks with my son while listening to Coast to Coast AM or an audiobook, sometimes I’ll even go on these walks for the sole purpose of listening to C2C. Still, it can be heartbreaking. Yesterday a boy who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten months old was crawling around the library and I had no idea whose child he was. I sat down with a board book and read to him and my son near the entrance until his mom finally wandered over. On a shallower note, it’s just an eyesore. A line of adults hunched over their phones looks grotesque. And I do mean grotesque. It f***s up your breathing, it gives you a double chin, a lot of people’s mouths are agape while they’re distracted and they probably don’t even know it. These days, I rarely see toddlers or young children tethered to devices—we know better, right?—but I do see whole oceans of checked-out moms and dads ignoring the world right in front of them.The Body as Counterculture. I read <a target="_blank" href="https://emmaecollins.substack.com/p/reading-in-meatspace">this excellent piece</a> by Emma Collins yesterday about embodiment returning as a sort of counterculture. I agree with her and there have been hints everywhere: in wellness culture, in the mainstreaming of bodybuilding, in certain TikTok trends, more tenuously, in <a target="_blank" href="https://default.blog/p/diy-medical-transition-and-eating?utm_source=publication-search">certain expressions</a> of <a target="_blank" href="https://default.blog/p/is-anorexia-is-the-nexus-of-all-online/comments">disordered eating</a> or self harm, and of course, everyone’s favorite, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/opinion/right-wing-masculinity-culture.html">right-wing vitalists</a>. Some other stuff: * Welcome new subscribers! I really appreciate you being here. This is an oddball blog and I do things a little differently than some of my peers in the space. It’s less a straight Internet culture newsletter, and more supposed to simulate the feeling of being in your computer room, late at night, jumping down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. It’s part scrapbook, part diary, part reporting. It’s a little of everything. I hope you stick around. * <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/238208-max-read">Max Read</a> mentioned my writing about efilism in his newsletter <a target="_blank" href="https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-age-of-radical-message-board">here</a>! We make the same argument — there’s something strange brewing in the world of utilitarianism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://default.blog/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">default.blog/subscribe</a>

The Computer Room

Call-In Show #7: Ghost in the Machine

This is a story I wrote in 2021? 2022? Published in <a target="_blank" href="https://2dcloud.com/products/compact-magazine-ed-stephen-z-hayes-raighne">Compact Mag</a> (not the political site). I’ve posted and re-posted it here several times. Here’s a radio drama version. As usual, I ask for your patience with audio quality.default.blog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.“Here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony. If you have one to the extreme, you will be very unscientific; if you have another to the extreme, you become a mechanical man and no longer a human being.”“When you want to move, you’re moving, and when you move, you’re determined to move. If I want to punch, I’m going to do it, man.” – Bruce LeeDmitriy loved Bruce Lee.“What a man,” he would say in awe, poring over YouTube clips of Way of the Dragon or Fist of Fury. “what a true slice of America.”This became Dmitriy's catchphrase. Over and over again, "What a man, Bruce Lee."When Dima, which was his wife's nickname for him, or Dimochka, which was his girlfriend's nickname for him, would walk to work from the BART each morning, he'd spend forty-five minutes stalking through San Francisco's Chinatown. Some part of him must have known he wouldn't find Bruce, but still, he hoped he'd see his ghost.But Dimochka wouldn't find Bruce Lee in the window of the Chinatown outpost of Tacorea, or through the gaudy windows of House of Nanking. Nor would he find him in his martial arts classes in Dogpatch, nor his open office plan in SoMa.When he was supposed to be building out the frontend of his company’s site—something he could do but wasn’t sure why he was being asked to do—he found himself re-watching and rewinding a video titled Amazing Superhuman Speed! Bruce Lee instead.When his wife lay in bed next to him, texting her friends, he held his phone close and studied The MOST BRUTAL Display of Bruce Lee’s Speed!“Dima, the blue light,” she’d complain, still texting, not looking at him. He would hide his phone in the nightstand drawer and turn off the overhead light, keeping his AirPods in. He would fall asleep to a soundscape of Wing Chun.And on Thursday nights, when he snuck out and waited for his girlfriend to return home from work, he would watch The Forgotten First Fight of Bruce Lee.Hearing “Dimochka!”, clumsy in her American accent, should have been his cue to put his phone away, though he wouldn’t.Each meeting, he’d nervously watch his Bruce Lee videos, before telling her, “I’m too nervous to do anything.”So, she would finally kiss him, and Dimochka would spend the rest of the night looking into her eyes and repeating, “You’re so cute, how are you so cute?”His girlfriend, who probably wasn’t really his girlfriend, would repeat the same back to him, mimicking his accent, until he’d say to her, “The first time you kissed me it was like a hundred 9/11s were happening inside me.”She wouldn’t repeat this one. She wouldn’t say anything back.But one night she asked him, “Do you mean fireworks?”And Dimochka said, “Fireworks… I felt so warm inside, it was like a hundred 9/11s were happening.”He would leave out that this was only because she said yes to him at all; that she could have been any number of pretty women he fixated on, and he would have still felt warmly.Around 10, he would spring out of bed, and leave, ready to spend another forty-five minutes in Chinatown.His girlfriend-who-wasn’t-really-his-girlfriend would whine, “Dimochka, do you have to go?”And he’d give her a kiss on the forehead and say solemnly, “Sorry, I have to get home. One day.”If he took an Uber, he could probably stay at her place in the Haight until 11:30 and get back home to Bayview by midnight, but he couldn’t jeopardize his walk through Chinatown.Why was it that Chinatown was so empty by 10? It wasn’t as though there weren’t bars, it wasn’t as though there wasn’t a pulse here.He walked along the sidewalk, looking at the buildings, shuttered storefront after shuttered storefront. He looked up and down the street, at the cars, Teslas and beat up Camrys.He imagined what it would feel like to punch someone in the face.He imagined punching his wife in the face, but felt too guilty, he couldn’t even think it.He imagined punching his boss, he imagined punching the founder.He imagined punching his mother.He imagined punching his father, but he couldn’t remember what he looked like.He imagined punching a homeless guy. And then he imagined punching Bruce Lee. More than just punching him though, he imagined using a guillotine on him—the move that Bruce Lee popularized in The Way of the Dragon...He imagined Bruce overtaking him, subduing him, and that final moment, in pain, but also deeply ashamed by the defeat. He was impotent, even in his own fantasy.When Dimochka reached the end of his tour through Chinatown, he requested an Uber.He watched the driver weave in-and-out of nonexistent traffic, taking inconceivable turns down one way streets. The wait time number ticked up from 5 minutes to 10, and then 5 again, and then jumped all the way up to 15.He studied the driver’s face. He guessed that Farhood was an immigrant, too.He imagined punching Farhood.He imagined choking Farhood.He imagined grabbing him by the back of the neck and bashing his head into the cement.He imagined illegal move after illegal move. He imagined winning.He considered, for a moment, that maybe he SHOULD punch Farhood.But when Farhood finally arrived, he apologized to Dmitriy profusely.“No, don’t worry,” Dmitriy offered getting in the back seat, “Really. No big deal.”Farhood, now faceless and driving, responded, “Good attitude... Be like water. Right?”Dmitriy took out his phone and watched the last 30 seconds of The Game of Death, over and over again until they arrived back in Bayview, where his wife would be lying in bed, not looking at him, texting her friends. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://default.blog/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">default.blog/subscribe</a>

Natural Instinct vs. Control

Today on The Computer Room, Katherine talks to Dr. Josie Zayner of the Los Angeles Project about <a target="_blank" href="https://building.life/">genetic engineering</a> and building the impossible. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://default.blog/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">default.blog/subscribe</a>

What Is the Cultural Script For Six-Armed Babies? ft. Dr. Josie Zayner

On today’s episode of The Computer Room, Katherine talks to Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, not just about Second Life, but about other synthetic lives. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://default.blog/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">default.blog/subscribe</a>

Katherine Dee

The Computer Room by Katherine Dee

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