The Internet Is Dead
On prankhotline.com, Josh Ovalle, Teamspeak, and more
The Internet Is Dead Podcast (@theinternetisdeadpod) knows what we’ve lost. Back in their day (2014?), Internet discovery was fun. It was a land of forums and YouTube rabbitholes, before the brainrot and algorithm slop. The best friend podcasting duo of Brittany and Sameera are some of the most poignant armchair historians of our day. Week by week, they are joined by artists they grew up following, uncovering cultural touchstones and tracing our shared Internet lineage to the present day. Elegiac by definition, The Internet Is Dead Pod still finds a way to be a deeply hopeful haven for cultural commentary and collective reminiscence.
We’re excited to have Brittany and Sameera on Silk, and even more excited to hear about what they’ve been curating.
Why do you curate?
When we first met, we bonded over the shared goal of befriending the two funniest guys in our Computer Science class. Then we did it again with a big friend group of Drain Gang apologists and their mystical modded Minecraft Discord server. We did this a lot with people back then— collecting them the same way that we've collected culture online through fandoms and communities.
A lot of what we're really attached to online feels just like that— a clinging and a remembering of our lives, the way we've done with specific people and words and instances. We started The Internet Is Dead Podcast to mull over and archive the things/people that were important from when we were ages 11-16. We think that most people who collect things (or curate) function similarly in this way. Both physically and virtually, we all love others intensely and look at each other through the pieces of things that we claim as ours, even if they're not.
prankhotline.com
Technology could solve climate change and cure cancer but instead we are using it to make our ex boyfriends and the girls they’ve fucked call each other. And we love every second of it. How it works is: you enter two people that you want to mess with phone numbers into the website. Person A thinks Person B is calling them while Person B thinks Person A is calling them. They’re confused. It’s funny. We get to listen to the first 60 seconds of the conversation. It's illegal because it's considered wiretapping (PA is an "all-party consent" state). We bought $20 worth of tokens.
Kicked out of high school (2018), ft. Josh Ovalle
The influence this podcast episode has on us is un-ending. It taught us media literacy. It inspired us to create art of our own. It showed us that media could be new and challenging and a critic of what already existed online and wasn't good. It was hard to comprehend that Josh Ovalle was only 19 when it was filmed because he seemed like the smartest person on the internet. He was way ahead of analyzing online media and creators in the way we've finally started to today. He was reading Infinite Jest before it was cool or funny to do so.
Martyrs (2008), dir. Pascal Laugier
Our friend Mitch showed us this movie without giving us a trigger warning during our sophomore year of college in 2021. We got really mad at him for it and then he did it two more times after that, to different girls. It's known to be one of the most traumatizing movies out there, with a 45 minute torture scene where they eventually cut off the girl’s skin. This movie is kinda fire though. The concept of testing human limits makes your brain really scared but it’s also something you can't look away from. It holds a weird, nostalgic place among other movies we watched in a college apartment when we first became friends. And it's a movie we'll talk about forever.
I’m Tired & I Hate This Song (Don’t Go) - (2014), Cyberbully Mom Club
This song is sitting in your childhood bedroom staring at the walls, silent crying, scouring tumblr and eating disorder forums, wondering if your parents are going to get divorced. Sameera used to listen to it and wish she was a Dote girl but instead she was in the PA suburbs and had homework due tomorrow she hadn’t started. Cyberbully Mom Club sounds like she is on the verge of crying the whole song and it is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things ever. This song is a podcast on Spotify because it isn't released but it's also on SoundCloud.
Teamspeak v. 3; 2011
Pre-Discord chatroom for a lot of Minecraft servers where we'd stay up all night with internet friends. We'd run into a lot of older Australian guys, especially on the MCSG servers. There was one call where our friend Maddy was laughing really loudly and the older guy said she sounded like she was having an orgasm. As a kid, that was how Brittany found out what an orgasm was. The light-headed feeling you'd get from laughing a lot on there was probably better though. Connecting so deeply with people through Teamspeak, Skype, etc. all remind me of what I look for now in my adult life through friendship.
Fifth Harmony Ustream (March 16, 2013)
Used to rush home from the swim club in elementary school to catch Fifth Harmony, Ariana Grande, and 1D's old Twitcams and Ustreams, the really old live-stream platforms from early Twitter. There will never be anything as exciting to your body than when one of the girls read your tweet out loud or said your username. There's this one viral clip from one of them of Camila and Lauren that was quintessential for Camren shippers’ gif packs on tumblr. Camren is real. Camren is our bi-curious gender inspo.
Cliche (2023), 2hollis
This was one of the first songs in a while to make us both really happy, along with 2hollis' overall discography. Brittany is saving this song for her wedding or when she meets her husband so she can't play it more than once a week right now. Everyone has been loving him and I think it's because we all miss what Justin Bieber used to be to us. Our friend Gavin described his music as "dark Justin Bieber" and to us that perfectly encapsulates why 2hollis is cool right now.
Who else would you want to see on on WW?
Josh Ovalle, David Foster Wallace, bestdressed
→ Find The Internet Is Dead on Silk, Instagram, and YouTube.
→ Silk is our new blogging platform for curated media.