Introducing: Stuck with Damon Young

May 5, 2022·43 min·3 clips

Damon Young drank five shots of Hennessy before his first speaking panel because his internet persona felt terrifying in real life.

Emmanuel starts with a handoff. Reply All is still working on its next episode, so he gives listeners a taste of Stuck with Damon Young, a Spotify original from Gimlet and Crooked Media. The setup is loose and friendly. He describes Damon as an award-winning writer and author, and the show as a place for honest, funny conversations about hard subjects. Then the internet walks in and makes everything more complicated. The featured episode asks what public life online does to a person's sense of self, especially for a Black public figure. Jemele Hill comes up early in a segment about so-called blue-check Black Twitter. Joel Anderson and Janae Desmond Harris are named too, as the conversation moves into what it means to defend yourself and the people you love in public. The excerpt keeps circling persona. One speaker talks about choosing which version of himself shows up online: super woke, hustling, available to be seen. That sounds like control, at least for a second. But the conversation keeps poking at the harder part: if the online self is chosen, does that make it fake, or just another real version of the same person? Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram each have their own pull, their own pace, their own kind of performance. The jokes help. A bit about taking cups from the middle of a stack becomes a tiny shared signal. The microwave bit does the same thing. People laugh at the little habits, but the bigger question stays in the room: how much of yourself becomes visible when the internet is watching? Damon does not wrap it up neatly. The online self is real because it was chosen. It is also real because opting out does not seem fully available.

As heard by us

A sharp, funny feed drop on how internet identity pressures the self, especially for Black public figures.

Reply All hands its feed to Stuck with Damon Young for a conversation about what the internet does to identity, especially when the person online is a Black public figure.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a smart, funny look at what it means to be a Black public figure online.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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