Most weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Foster Kamer, the editor-in-chief of Futurism, an advisor at FOUND, and the author of this new profile of The Dare in The New York Times. This summer he has also been publishing “summer Friday” editions of his newsletter, FOSTERTALK; he will publish the last installment of this series today, the final summer Friday of 2024. Foster started a Tumblr in 2007, once sock-puppeted David Carr, and says we should all want good things for Hailey Welch. —Nick
Subscribe to Embedded. If you get summer Fridays, you can definitely expense it.
“We gotta start putting smarter people in charge of the media business.”
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
FOSTER KAMER: Extremely specific humor usually does it for me. For example, legendary coke rapper Pusha T endorsing a tweet about Lego hiring a “brick specialist.” Same for this interaction between the Gallagher brothers of Oasis that I’m pretty sure didn’t happen, but clocks as funny because it’s absolutely plausible.
EMBEDDED: What shows up on your TikTok For You page?
FOSTER KAMER: I deleted TikTok sometime late-2020, a few months after I downloaded it (like all the other latecomers, during the pandemic). I fell down some weird holes—for someone reason, I got served a lot of TikToks about how to survive in jail, which ... isn’t really a thing I ever think about? And then I started thinking about it, and that gave me anxiety, so I binned it. This was around the time everyone was getting served videos about the narco cartels—CartelTok, remember that? Great times.
I’ve since re-downloaded it, but try to keep my usage limited to professional work—I know this is a boring answer, but straight-up: If I really chase the dragon on TikTok, I am just straight fucked. TikTok’s one of those things where you party with it for a few minutes on the couch, and suddenly, you look up and it’s 4 a.m. and you need pliers to open your jaw. And I’ve just got too many books and newsletters to read, albums and NTS episodes to listen to, movies I haven’t watched, etc. I know there are plenty of wonderful things happening there, so no judgment to anyone doing it, but I’m definitely better off.
If I’m working on a story, it’s whatever I’ve been researching—mostly, looking at dialogue on a given subject. For example: I just cracked it open and got served eight videos by (or about) The Dare and Charli XCX. But (and I’m sure this is, like, a very Millennial-coded opinion) these days, it feels like everyone making things on TikTok are cross-posting to Instagram Reels? Given that I don’t actually need either of them, and that I’ve already got a bunch of folders on Instagram, I just stick with Instagram
EMBEDDED: Do you make TikToks? What format works best for you?
FOSTER KAMER: I don’t. But the dances look fun. Hard to be mad at a thing that gets everyone dancing. If, indeed, CHI-NUH is going to take America down with this thing, I get a kick out of the idea that someone somewhere deep within the PRC spy apparatus has to suffer countless Americans forcing their chinchillas to do the “Apple” dance as the Great Chinese Trojan Horse.
EMBEDDED: Do you still tweet? Why?
FOSTER KAMER: Kind of? But also, not really? I deleted Twitter from my phone in 2018 and when I’ve used it on mobile since, it’s been through the browser. My life got immeasurably better the second I stopped giving randos on Twitter consistent access to my brain. It’s held universally true that the further I’ve gotten from Twitter, the better my quality of life’s been. These days, deeply mixed feelings on Twitter.
On the one hand, Elon Musk has definitely broken it, it’s now a masterpiece of enshittification. And I don’t even see the Nazis, or all that dark weird hatemongering stuff. There’s definitely a lot more thirst-trapping on Twitter than there’s ever been, which is extremely weird? But also, it doing so killed 2010-2021 internet—really, peak call-out culture, where humor and fun and joy and nuance went to be smothered by dummies of all stripes. Old Twitter was a perfect machine of increasingly bad scorching hot takes and mob mentalities let loose, fully incentivized to the hilt. And—hot take here—for that reason alone, I’m glad Old Twitter’s dead. There are a bunch of people I no longer have to log in and hear from.
These days, yeah, it’s a bit of wild ride, but I see a lot of people just having unrestrained fun on it, just being absolute freaks. I think there’s something weirdly validating about seeing how few views my and other people’s tweets get? But it is a bummer I can’t scroll people’s Faves anymore—that was fun. Anyway, these days, I mostly tweet to promote Futurism’s work or my own work.
EMBEDDED: Have you tried any alternatives to Twitter?
FOSTER KAMER: Yeah, and they all suck. For whatever reason, I was just reminded of the Jenny Holzer line: PEOPLE WHO DON’T WORK WITH THEIR HANDS ARE PARASITES. I think about it often.
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
FOSTER KAMER: Keeping up with friends, mostly, but my Reels feed has gotten pretty decent, too. Honestly, I love posting stories. A few years ago, I started having some real fun with travelogs—almost no video, just text on images—and it ended up being a great creative outlet and a way to keep in touch with friends. I know that’s painfully earnest, but: There it is. I don’t post nearly as much as I once did, just not enough time. But as for that Reels feed, a lot of really great music in there, a ton of F1 content/memes, cute dog content, basically, *jazz hands* my internet.
Most important, however: My LOL folder. There’s that cat whose owner once called her Islamaphobic to said cat becoming Sister Minnie. The Nanalan memes get me every time. It’s a Tweet, but it’s in my IG folder, and I think about it every full-moon. There’s this drunk bird. And then this woman feeding her — really, serving—her guinea pigs vegetables. Finally, there’s whatever this is. And there’s bounce rapper Tarzana and friends, all three screaming about their summer plans—seven seconds of complete joy and absolute chaos.
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
FOSTER KAMER: Music, music, music. There was this moment when MTV really finally stopped playing music videos and people were briefly convinced that the era of televised music was over. Now, we’ve got so much incredible music in video online, from Boiler Room to Tiny Desk Concerts, The Lot Radio, Tape Notes, Hör Berlin, etc, etc. Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but god, we’re so incredibly lucky to live in this moment, with all this available to us. It makes MTV feel like the stone age.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
FOSTER KAMER: Futurism Dot Com, for starters. We tear through a lot of news there in the mornings. Jon Christian, our executive editor, is an absolute hound for good stories. Also, NPR’s “Up First,” every morning, followed by the BBC World News Service and Morning Edition from various radio stations around the world. Beyond that: The New York Times app, The Wall Street Journal homepage, and god, do I love Drudge Report. More than ever, lately, Drudge is camp.
EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?
FOSTER KAMER: Honestly, and this is not a joke: I try not to. Someone once told me that to care about eight different things a day—as bloggers once had to—is a probable sign of mental illness.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?
FOSTER KAMER: It was probably kept to myself, though I recently went on a tear about noncompete agreements (the work of the devil) and a fatwa against a certain awful music neologism (“ind*e slea*e”).
EMBEDDED: Where do you usually discover or learn about online trends?
FOSTER KAMER: If not Noor (see above) then Twitter, or whatever hits my Substack.
EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?
FOSTER KAMER: Some combination of Twitter, Substack, Instagram—less Reels than the people I follow—and a couple of email newsletters.
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
FOSTER KAMER: Zoomers are just so phenomenally, incredibly talented and quick on the draw in ways I’m legitimately jealous of, bending the parameters of creativity in ways that constantly delight and usually surprise me. They also don’t project as much—or make everything on the internet about them—as Boomers, Gen X, or Millenials. And thank god for that.
FOSTER KAMER: Oh, god, do I ever, but too many to put here. Broadly, I think empowering writers is a good thing, and we should’ve given ourselves the “make money” button a long time ago.
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
FOSTER KAMER: Positive media trend: Independent operators on Substack. Plurality! We love to see it. Negative media trend: Independent operators on Substack. Cults of personality freak me out.
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
FOSTER KAMER: Whenever I can, Planet Money, but mostly because Mary Childs is the actual best. Throwing Fits, I subscribe to, as they keep becoming better and better interviewers, and they’re just fun. I listened to their Adam Pally interview on the drive upstate this morning to a friend’s place. For F1: The Ringer F1 Show or P1 With Matt and Tommy, which I’ll listen to on walks around the city. Finally, on weekend mornings, The Very Best of Car Talk and on weekend walks, StoryCorps, for warmth and humanity, and Song Exploder, because it’s Song Exploder.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
FOSTER KAMER: I have, it happened a few times on Twitter, and by the end of it, you’re like: Uh, it was a good point, but was it that good of a point? I keep this as my pinned Tweet partially as a reminder of the inanity of the viral post.
EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?
FOSTER KAMER: This question is a TRAP! On Instagram, it’s my friends, obviously.
Questlove once followed me on Twitter—that was huge, he’s been someone I’ve looked up to for a long time, someone I put in a league with Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin in terms of having an impact on American music. But that reminds me: The best follow I ever got was since-passed David Carr, the NYT’s media columnist. When the first iPads were about to come out, Carr was one of, like, seven reporters around the world who got to test one. I was a baby media reporter at the Village Voice, and sock-puppeted him—pretended to be re-tweeting something he definitely didn’t Tweet, about him dropping and shattering his iPad on Twitter—back when you could do this, and get away with it, and nobody could do anything. He lost his shit, and then, started playing along, and ended up becoming a mentor figure to me.
EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?
FOSTER KAMER: Me, on Substack. Beyond that: I’m doing the one thing you should never do in media (give any encouragement to your colleagues Tweeting), but a writer I work with at Futurism, Noor Al-Sibai, is one of the most consistently funny people I know—even reading her Twitter bio makes me cackle—and she deservingly did numbers on this one (explanation for the uninitiated here). And it’s hard not to be really impressed with what Kareem Rahma has built.
EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?
FOSTER KAMER: Oh, any boomer celebrity, for sure. I’m a sucker for a great bit, absolutely loved the way Tom Hanks signed off every Tweet ever with “Hanx.”
EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?
FOSTER KAMER: I had to work on a Snapchat news program at one point as an occasional sub-in for a colleague—to this day, we both agree, it is the dumbest, worst job either of us have ever had. Snapchat is the dumbest.
EMBEDDED: When was the last time you browsed Pinterest? What for?
FOSTER KAMER: Oh, yeah, never.
EMBEDDED: How would you describe Tumblr’s legacy?
FOSTER KAMER: You’re talking to it! No, really: I started a Tumblr in 2007. It’s how I got the attention of the people who’d eventually get me writing jobs. So many prominent writers got their start on it, and this feels like a slightly forgotten fact, but it’s true. It was a small, tight community, and a great blogging platform. Tumblr skipped so Substack could walk. Plenty of people younger than me had a far different experience with it—when it became much bigger than the thing I started blogging on—so I’m sure they have a different view on it, but it really did change the standard for shaping your voice, as an individual, outside of magazines and corporate media, but within the context of a group of people all interacting with each other’s work. It’s why so many of the complaints about the flattening of Substack content and the johnny-come-latelys feel a little pat: That happened to Tumblr, too. It happens to every online community, every community, every band and restaurant and bar you went to first, and the people who believe themselves to be there first (they almost never actually weren’t) start to get territorial. *james murphy voice* The kids...are coming up from behind. Case in point: Again, Substack is just nu-Tumblr with a “take money” button.
EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, Slack, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?
FOSTER KAMER: I’m not, I’ve got enough to keep up with as is.
EMBEDDED: Do you use Slack or another chat tool for work? What’s the best thing about Slacking with your co-workers? What’s the worst thing?
FOSTER KAMER: Slack, and the best thing is that it makes us not complete strangers to one another, as we’re fully remote. Beyond that: When I have a problem to solve, my Slack is “let’s jump on a call,” and—as often as I can — I’ll put on some shoes and go for a walk and talk it out on the phone. I try to Slack as little as possible over the course of the workday; like text messaging, it’s inefficient, requires the energy of divining and conveying meaning through tone, and is broadly just the absolute worst way to get anything halfway important accomplished. But if we’re keeping it light, yeah, we can have fun.
EMBEDDED: Do you typically start searches on Google, Reddit, TikTok, or another source? Have you found Google’s “generative AI” summaries helpful?
FOSTER KAMER: Google, always, but with “+Reddit” modifiers in there more often these days. As for the generative AI summaries—eh, some of them, kind of, but usually I end up searching past them anyway.
EMBEDDED: What most excites you about AI chatbots and text and art generators? What most concerns you?
FOSTER KAMER: Concerns me: The theft of intellectual property, and the fate of the newsmedia, writ-large. Can we talk about all these media companies signing deals with OpenAI for a second? Let’s remember: These are often the same companies who leveraged their whole asses over to Facebook and Twitter and Google, built entire strategies around them. On so many of these deals, media companies got told what to do to make money (longform video, shortform video, Snapchat, etc), chased the money, got screwed over by the platforms when they ended those business initiatives for other, newer business initiatives, and the media companies then chased those instead (after, invariably, firing a bunch of people in the process). OpenAI—like Amazon, Meta, Twitter, etc, etc—they’re just a platform company. And these publishers, they’re chasing the shiny new thing again. If media gets shanghaied by Sam Altman and Co, let’s be clear, it will have been due to the consenting of a small group of people who have made many, many bad decisions in the past, and will probably continue to. We gotta start putting smarter people in charge of the media business, or at least different ones.
Excites me: Language translation. Specific, I know. But the speed and strength of the language translation programs that exist and are continuing to develop—I don’t know, I’m an idealist, maybe, but I believe that a world better at speaking across itself has the potential to cultivate more compassion and empathy across it.
EMBEDDED: Are you currently playing any console, computer, or phone games?
FOSTER KAMER: Nah. I’ll play about one video game every few years, though I still watch Jeopardy pretty regularly.
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
FOSTER KAMER: 🤗: It’s just a simple, dumb expression of joy.
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
FOSTER KAMER: All the time. Love them, love getting them. Easier than texting. I spend all day at a keyboard! Also, most people are bad writers/texters. Also, I’ve got friends around the world, and sometimes, it’s easier than trying to talk to them—one friend, in Australia, we’ve been trading 10 minute voice notes every few weeks for the last six years.
EMBEDDED: What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?
EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? When was the last time you bought a music download or vinyl record, CD, or tape?
FOSTER KAMER: Spotify, Apple Music, and I’m a paying supporter of NTS Radio. As for the last time I bought music, sadly: Couldn’t tell you.
EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? In general, do you prefer to get ads or pay more for ad-free tiers?
FOSTER KAMER: HBO/Max. Because: It’s not TV, it’s HBO. Also, between Deadwood, Larry Sanders, Six Feet Under, and the first four seasons of The West Wing, you’ve got four of my Top Five TV shows sitting there. And, duh, Industry.
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
FOSTER KAMER: NTS Radio. Seriously, it’s so good.
EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?
FOSTER KAMER: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?
FOSTER KAMER: Most of it involves searches about music. For example: I’ve never been able to find a vintage shirt from The Blue Nile. Or there’s a clip I have saved in my phone of a remix of the Eurythmics “Here Comes The Rain Again” that I saw a DJ named Solomun play; I’ve probably listened to 30 remixes of that song, and I still haven’t found it. But there’s a bigger point to be made here about elusive things being proportionally great.
EMBEDDED: Is there a site you like for product recommendations? How do you decide, for example, which air filter to buy?
FOSTER KAMER: Strategist for form, Wirecutter for function.
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
FOSTER KAMER: Recently? Eh. I just think, all the time, about the first few pages of Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, about how all content creation is intrinsically immoral because it takes us away from nature and other human beings.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?
FOSTER KAMER: Oh my god, the last thing? So, so much of it brings me joy.
I wanted to write about this in the newsletter, but never found the right occasion, so I’m seizing the opportunity here: Hailey Welch, she of Hawk Tuah fame, bar none, summerlegend. Consider: For the better part of a month this summer, it felt like the entirety of America was cackling over this sweet-looking mannered young woman, asked an ostensibly racy question, who then (immediately and without missing a singlebeat) fires back in a moonshine country twang one of the most gonzo, ratchet, down-home dirtyass things she possibly could’ve said at that moment. There’s another Jenny Holzer line: “A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS.”
It’s all just so great. It’s the wind-up: “You gotta give ‘em that...” It’s the reaction time, so quick it’s hard to tell if she’s waited for her entire life to use that line or hadn’t thought about it longer than the half-second she took for answering. It’s the way her friend laughs, which is exactly the way we all laughed. It’s the “—you get me?” and her giggle after, fully cognizant that what she just said—all of it—was plainly fucking funny. Yeah, it’s pretty Zynternet-coded, but—and this is why I’m still laughing at it—this joke’s vast cultural reach says something about the whole of America, which is: We love a great dick joke. Especially this dirty onomatopoeia-driven extremely chaotic quick-fire retort about spitting on a dick. World-healing work, here, as is the follow up: What is good for the hole ain’t always good for the soul. Jenny Holzer could never. I think we should all want good things for Hailey Welch, who seems, for the most part, to be trying to do good things with all this.
But I have a few things I go back to—my only little cabinet of online joys—and I hit them whenever I’m feeling existentially down. That clip of Stevie Nicks singing “Wild Heart,” that’s one of them. Just a window into something extraordinarily special, that could’ve been lost, that we’d otherwise never have, that’s, I gotta imagine, changed a lot of lives. I’ve got so many of those things. There’s just so much great stuff out there, really.
