Very Online (Part 4)
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This is the final installment of the Very Online series, a four-parter about the surrealism of having been implicated in a global online conspiracy theory (by way of a viral YouTube video). Catch up on the series in full here—thank you so much for having followed along.
In 2006 I sent a completely unsolicited, one-line email to the Style editor at The Washington Post, the “one line” of which was the URL to my recently launched blog. The following week it was featured in the print edition, and I cannot tell you how valuable a lesson this was to receive so early in my creative career: If you want people to know what you're doing, you simply have to tell them (though preferably include a subject line). For the next 14 years—until April 2020, exactly—visibility was something I asked for, both politely and unashamedly, and I received it back in much the same manner. To have this ultimately pay off in death threats was so shocking that I still do not have words for it, but that's mainly because I refuse to call it irony.
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The video implied, through tenuous online connections and other imaginary “evidence," that I was a cult leader tied to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. With close to a million views in the four days before YouTube removed it, it was unsettling to consider that (a) there were people who actually believed this, and (b) it would take only one of them to irrevocably f-ck up my life forever. I was certain I'd wake up in the middle of the night to someone standing over my bed with a gun, and I imagined having to talk them down from whatever ~patriotic savior~ fantasy they were there to play out. I didn't have a lot of faith in my ability to deescalate; I was incapable of even pretending their belief system was worthy of discussion.
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This all set in motion immediate and sweeping changes to my online presence, meaning I was forced to obliterate a decade-and-a-half's worth of writing, photography, and curatorial work in a matter of days. My blog, my online magazine and newsletter, my social accounts—these had been the building blocks of my creative career, where my personal projects had become proof of concept. They'd put me in the incredible position of being seen by people who understood my talent and skillset, and I'd worked my way from part-time blogger to the very official title of “Global Brand Director." This was an only-in-the-aughts career arc, and one that would not have occurred without the internet.
Having just been laid off (see: Covid), I was terrified by what the loss of these channels might mean for future freelance work. The alternative was to keep them active, which would have given the conspiracy theorists more to pore over, and open lines of communication through which they could continue to tell me to kill myself. I don't want to admit how difficult a decision it was to shut it all down, and because of this my grief was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of shame.
It was April, May, June, 2020; September, October, November. The world was in crisis, and it was hard to take myself seriously for mourning the dual losses of audience and platform. People were very literally dying; who was I to be upset about not having a f-cking Instagram account? “White Woman Needs Attention; Lacks Perspective,” the headline would read, “Groundbreaking.”
I see it (somewhat) differently now. For close to 15 years I'd poured blood, sweat, tears, love, friendship, resources, time, ideas, and energy into being one small but exceptionally visible part of the city's creative fabric, and I had been rewarded in kind. To remain this person—a successful collaborator with no small amount of hard-earned social currency; to carry on with any sense of normalcy after being doxxed—was an impossibility. I was an artist, and yes, art requires an audience, but that is only part of what was taken away. What I was grieving was a complete loss of identity.
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I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of the healing and crying, crying and healing, but I spent the next several years doing pretty much that. I moved out of Washington, DC. I took a long sabbatical. I figured out who I was without the millennial-coded trophy case of panel appearances, magazine features, and a six-figure Instagram following. By the end of 2024 the fear had faded into something more manageable, and if it sounds like I'm glossing over some things, I am. It was ugly, hard, snot-spewing, red-faced work that I freely admit had less to do with the actual video and way more to do with every feeling of inadequacy I'd repressed since, like, birth; the conspiracy theorists love to tout that “everything is related,” and while I hate to give it to 'em, I regret to inform you they are correct.
In this time I was also able to find a measure of understanding—though very little empathy—for people who got sucked into the QAnon orbit. I've reduced their impetus down to a simple, desperate need to be the hero of someone else's story (and you know what? If you're that powerless, I can see how buying a Punisher t-shirt and screaming “Won't someone please think of the children” via IG comment might feel like you're getting something done). It's almost satire that the people fanning the flames had zero issue using kids to incite panic and recruit new believers, and from there it was an alt-right battle for the soul of the country. That's the extent of the logic I'm willing to apply to this situation, or at least to the how. If I start thinking about the larger why—to say nothing of why this happened to me—logic fails entirely (but for the record, the answer to the latter is pure, dumb, online chance).
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This month marks six years since the video, and May 2026 will be exactly 20 years since I first started publishing my work online. In some ways it feels shocking—or at least counterintuitive—that Low Swank exists at all. Did I learn nothing, or did the constant calculation of risk just get exhausting? Am I delusional or impassioned in thinking the internet might still be able to function as a communal windowsill upon which we can place our work? The answer is likely “yes” to all, but more importantly, writing this newsletter has been a reclamation. I know that's a heavy statement to apply to a project that traffics in levity, but I am a person who makes things and shares them; when I cannot do that, I am not myself. It also feels important to acknowledge art and joy and creativity as refutations of the fear and flattening this country is very currently insisting upon, but that is another essay entirely, and this particular story is reaching its end.
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I've learned a thousand times over the last two decades that visibility is vulnerability, and vulnerability is a discipline. There is no small amount of fear involved in sharing something you've created, and to push past it is to declare your curiosity worthy of examination. It is in my interest and yours to ascribe power to the deeply personal alongside the eternally universal, and to commit to keeping love in our hearts as we scream the depth and frivolity of the human experience from the very top of our lungs. May all our art have an audience, and may we never lose the sense of wild, impassioned optimism that allows us to assume it's all going to work out for the best.
“Very Online (Part 4)” emailed out 4.28.2026. Subscribe for free here.