I’ve been calling Delia Cai one of the final bright lights on the internet, and our conversation this week only confirmed my priors. Born in 1993, Delia is among the last of the millennials and, as such, has found kinship and understanding not just with her peers but also with her Gen Z comrades-in-arms. Her newsletter, Deez Links, is the ultimate unmissable guide to all that is delightfully insane about the online world — and so my ultimate goal for our chat was for her to explain the internet to me without having me sound like the Steve Buscemi 30 Rock meme in human form.
“I kind of came of age on the internet, when the millennial blogging generation and the digital media of the 2010s really shaped everything,” Delia, who worked previously at BuzzFeed and Vanity Fair among other legacy brands before striking out on her own, tells me. “That’s what taught me how to be a person and how to think and what opinions to have.”
While Delia still considers herself a millennial (“I’m still embarrassed to put myself on the internet,” she says), she has keen insight into the next generation, including how the idea of “cancel culture” can impact even regular kids.
“I have a little brother who’s Gen Z, and I do think he grew up in a much more risk-averse way than I did,” she explains. “I almost feel like there’s just more of this sense of precarity, because at any point, your life could be ruined or things could be lost, or like you could be canceled. I think there’s really a fear of if you conduct yourself wrongly, in real life, you’re very, very aware of the consequences.”
Our conversation opened my eyes in so many ways — particularly Delia’s advice for the industry as it courts Gen Alpha. That group undoubtedly spurred A Minecraft Movie to become the year’s biggest hit at the North American box office, and it’s easy to imagine studio executives (wrongly) trying to manufacture their own “chicken jockey” moment to draw in those audiences again.
“It’s sort of like the politicians when they do internet stuff. Politicians should not be memeing themselves, but they should pay really close attention to who’s doing the memeing and recognize how powerful those people are,” she says, before offering a warning: “Go on Subway Takes, but don’t try to make your own Subway Takes.”
