I've always been attracted to the trickster archetype, I guess it's just a part of my personality. Growing up online I would troll people a lot…I would get tons of death threats. It was so much fun.

SIERRA ARMOR: I started off in high school just being a voyeur online–I used to follow 7,500 people on Instagram, which I think is the maximum number of people you can follow. Instagram was always my favorite hobby. I would come home from school and obsess over cool people I found online and follow them. I didn't have a lot of friends, so my favorite thing was just curating a giant list of people that I liked.

TESS POLLOK: What instinct did you follow into those spaces?

ARMOR: I don't know. I didn't have good taste. I didn't start using the internet until I was 16, I grew up in a small conservative town. My parents weren't art people at all, very much the exact opposite–my parents are really religious and they ran a church and it was very corrupt, basically a cult. When I did get online I went through the process of becoming more myself, finding music and art and things that were more niche and unavailable to me before I had the internet.

POLLOK: I had a similar trajectory–I was a gamer–but it wasn't social. I didn't game with my friends, just spent hours alone.

ARMOR: For me computers have always been really addictive. I love going down rabbit holes. I was obsessed with chains of influence. I would go through everyone's follow list and check everything, it was weird, very stalker-ish of me, but it was a huge rush.

POLLOK: I think more broadly it's just about you seeking your own access points to culture, wanting to know more and experience more than your environment allows.

ARMOR: The first thing I did on the internet that went viral was write WattPad fan fiction just to troll people, back when I was 15. My parents never let me read Harry Potter or anything like that, so I had no sense of what fanfiction was relative to actual popular culture, I just had the innate instinct to troll people. I've always been attracted to the trickster archetype, I guess it's just a part of my personality. People on WattPad would send me tons of death threats. It was so much fun.

POLLOK: What do you think about e-girls lacking virtue?

ARMOR: I wrote about that. I think an e-girl has to pretend to exist in a real space to generate FOMO, but it's not actually possible to be online. The internet isn't a real space. It's an in-between, like purgatory or a mail room, and that's what makes e-girls so ethereal. Because no matter how much information they put about themselves online there's so many essential details that are absent, like, you'll never know how she smells or how it feels to hold her hand. So the essential quality of the e-girl is her inaccessibility.

POLLOK: It makes me think of tropes, or how on a basic language level verbs modify nouns. Anne Carson talks about this in Autobiography of Red: “Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top,' 'added,' 'appended,' 'imported,' 'foreign.' These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.” She talks about how adjectives inflected the evolution of literature and tropes, and it made me think about the e-girl, because it's an inflection of a real life person into a character.

It's interesting to think about the performance art lineage behind the e-girl. Her defining trait is that she isn't there, she's an anti-presence rather than just a lack of presence.

ARMOR: I was thinking about Anne Carson and the idea of the vibe shift, vibes being pre-verbal. I thought it was a positive thing that phrases and ideas like these are becoming more mainstream because it just proves the influence of internet on culture. Being online is actually a powerful position to operate because you don't know where things are coming from.

SOPHIA VANDERBILT: There's an arrested development to the e-girl. In my experience it was a means to an end, but then you get, like, 31-year-old women posting online like they're 15 and it gets weird. I feel like it's really influenced by the culture of early 2010s feminism, Rookie Mag and that type of thing, this weird phenomena of adult women stuck online performing girlhood and never maturing into womanhood.

POLLOK: And “adulting,” people in their 30s and 40s describing things as “adulting.” In terms of people like Neekolul, I think arrested development is a totally accurate description.

VANDERBILT: E-girlism and e-girlhood have a long history; the current iteration is just in the same vein of online performance art. I think any attempt at examining it becomes too much of a blanket statement, you can't really picture an e-girl in your mind because the experience of it is such a spectrum.

POLLOK: Being yourself online is interesting, it's really a specific skill that only a few people have.

VANDERBILT: I agree. I treat everyone I meet online like they're a real person because they are. And for all intents and purposes, especially during the pandemic, I did only exist online.

POLLOK: It's interesting to think about the performance art lineage behind the e-girl–it's interesting to look at the genealogy of these archetypes, since the defining trait of the e-girl is that she isn't there, she's an anti-presence rather than just a lack of presence.

VANDERBILT: Any performance version of yourself is going to have exaggerated features. It's easy to tell when someone is being themselves online but you can run into situations where people aren't the same as whatever elaborate persona they've built out and can't really function in the real world.

POLLOK: I think with online culture, we're really talking about a micro-timeline, private and depoliticized, but there's a feeling of taking something from a political scale and applying it to the personal–for example, using online infrastructure to turn a personal event that happened to you and your friends locally into an international meme.

VANDERBILT: Yeah, I understand that. You know when people say that every time you remember something you're just remembering the last time you remembered it? The more you talk about something the more you ruin your own relationship to it. So I try not to rehash things.

POLLOK: Another thing I read recently that reminds me of this phenomenon in the online was the Matthew Harris manifesto, did you hear about him? The UCLA math professor who threatened to bring a gun to campus and start hunting women?

VANDERBILT: Oh my god, I read that. It was so good.

POLLOK: It was really incredible, I was kind of blown away. He was regurgitating such a crazy amount of ideology. I loved the chapter “Infinite Fun Reality Tunnels” where he discusses what ideology is, talking about all these different reality tunnels that people travel down. I thought it was such a beautiful and incidental way of describing reality. He got there in the scariest way.

For me, Twitter was like my diary, but there was a voyeuristic aspect to it because I knew I was being watched. It's very John Berger's Ways of Seeing: women watch themselves being watched by others.

VANDERBILT: I didn't get to that part of it, but I love that. That's how I feel about my relationship to theory because I don't read theory but, being online so long, my thinking is always changing–sometimes I'll post something and people will be, like, “Here's a Baudrillard quote about that,” and I'll be, like, “Oh, cool!” It's just the nature of things that we arrive at the same conclusions because there's nothing new under the sun. It's fun when you arrive at conclusions yourself without the influence of a certain book or a certain philosopher, I think we need more of that in the world.

POLLOK: Why do you think you ended up online?

VANDERBILT: It was a convergence of different factors. I left high school after my junior year and I didn't have any friends so I was on Twitter in the summer of 2019 being a normal girl, having a little barista job, whatever. I wasn't really hanging out with anyone in real life and my relationships in high school were pretty retarded and cyclical to being with, so I was just, like, “Okay, this is my intense period of isolation.” Then there was the pandemic and I was already so isolated and that pushed me further into isolation. The pandemic definitely hyper-accelerated my transition into being extremely online, I was doing a lot of psychedelics in my bedroom at night alone and posting through it all. I grew up without the internet and was honestly pretty shelled, I didn't get my first phone until I was 13 and I wasn't allowed to have Snapchat or Instagram of anything. My first gateway into the internet was Tumblr, secretly. But I was nerdy and into dorky shit, so it's funny in retrospect because it was all so pro-and, all these aesthetics sort of passed me by. But I'm grateful for it now, too, because girls who are too cool at 13 just become so slutty and provocative over time. I'm glad that wasn't me.

POLLOK: Having a slutty moment can be fun and interesting. I like the weirdness to being a young girl online–when I was 13 I had a copy of The Virgin Suicides that I would doodle in during class, I would draw all this cutesy girly Lolita shit in it, and I remember even as I was making it I was thinking to myself, “This is such an artifact of my girlhood that I'm making right now.”

VANDERBILT: It's such a universal thing to be, like, “Imagine if someone was reading my diary right now.” You can't let yourself fall into it because it all becomes a performance even if you're alone. That's how I felt about Twitter, for me it was like my diary, but there was a voyeuristic aspect to it because I knew I was being watched. It's so John Berger's Ways of Seeing: women watch themselves being watched by others.

POLLOK: Sometimes it feels boring to investigate that.

VANDERBILT: Yeah, and talking about alt-lit 2.0 and autofiction, people just get the idea that if they're writing about this fantasized version of themselves it's automatically good and a crucial part of the literary moment, but some people are not even interesting enough to sound interesting in their own banality.

POLLOK: It's think clinging Saran Wrap around your own life and being, like, “Look at me, I can reproduce my experience 1:1!” is kind of sad and tragic for the craft. Also, voyeurism abounds– watching yourself, the voyeurism of being online, the voyeurism of being an artist– the voyeurism of being an artist online. What do you think about everyone identifying as an artist?

VANDERBILT: I identify as an artist. I do believe an artist is something you just are, not something you have to prove. I would get into this with my parents when I told them and artist and they were like, “Well, what do you make?” It's less about what you create than your mind and other things you can't quantify.

POLLOK: Sierra talked a little it about how she went online because she didn't have a fulfilling real life, do you feel like it was that way for you?

VANDERBILT: Yeah. I had these cyclical relationship with other girls and women that would always end, and when they ended it was a mixture of feeling so alienated and wanting to mature so badly. I left high school because my two best friends dropped out. That was when I really got online. I was a Tumblr girl and I migrated to Twitter– the energy of Tumblr is also just really isolating, like, girls coming from all across the world to repost the same cool aesthetic images, but it's really quiet on there, kind of like reading in the library together. I was basically in a fugue state from ages seven to 17 and getting on Twitter really spawned me into existence. I felt really self-aware throughout my life that I was just going through the motions everywhere I went. That's how I felt about becoming an e-girl, too, I think I was susceptible to falling into that because I always felt that everywhere I went that I was just playing a role because it was fun and I had to do it.

POLLOK: I think what comes into focus with both your interview and Sierra's is how much the online presents an opportunity to go beyond the boundaries of your lived experience and what's going on around you. I think the e-girl commentary on girlhood and womanhood can be kind of one-note, though.

VANDERBILT: I know. When you realize you're an intelligent woman– when you realize, “Here's what I can do to be successful,” in whatever way that means to you, it always becomes about making a choice to play whatever character. That's why I love Petra Cortright. She was one of the first net artists making webcam videos and now she's been forced into making these Buzzfeed listicles of selfie art and she hates it. I talked with her for three hours the other day. But, yeah, you have to have a lot of willpower to create something outside the current cultural narratives.

Baudrillard and Berger and FaceApp have all converged to a point where there's nothing intrinsically feminine about being a woman. You're never striving towards femininity, only a performance of it.

POLLOK: Also, speaking to what you said about e-girlhood just being what's available and incidental, Sierra brought up that she lived somewhere where she had no exposure to art or culture. So the motivating force behind it doesn't actually directly relate to girlhood or womanhood.

VANDERBILT: I think girlhood is a distinctive factor. People love to say this is semantics, girlhood vs. womanhood. But I agree with Sierra– I grew up in a suburb of DC and I wasn't around a lot of art or culture, but it was always something I was interested in. I don't know how to explain everything that's happened to me. There's a lot I don't know and haven't experienced. I just understand the intuitive truths about my life. The world today is just so alienating, just because of capitalism and advertising, I hate to sound like Alex Jones but I feel like society is destroying the family. And it's hard to live in a culture with no distinct concept of womanhood anymore, to not feel yourself maturing into a woman. It's the yassification of femininity, this sex positive bastardization has totally removed femininity from the equation. Baudrillard and John Berger and FaceApp have all converged to a point where there's nothing intrinsically feminine about women. You're never striving towards femininity, only a performance of it.

POLLOK: Striving for a performance really encapsulates it. I feel like it relates to what we were talking about with toxic nostalgia and not wanting to revisit memories. It's very subtle to track when our culture stopped being inspired by virtue and started being inspired by virtue signaling.

VANDERBILT: That's exactly how I feel. I feel like the current cultural obsession with it shows how people are yearning for something real and true and virtuous and you can't have that when your life is dictated by GrubHub, DoorDash, and Tinder.

POLLOK: Interesting. Any final words?

VANDERBILT: Everything is real. It's pretty simple. It's a good answer for any question.