“I’ve been unusually weepy lately WHICH IS PERFECT,” Annie texted me, elated, about a week before we’ve decided to have a call on the subject. “I can’t stress enough, everything is fine,” she told me, through laughter, when the time came to chat, “but I’ve been crying so much more than I usually do!”.
A writer and creator, Annie Rauwerda is concerned with honesty and facts, and puts a lot of thought into the way she communicates with others. It’s been the pursuit of facts that has led her to her widely-beloved project, “the Depths of Wikipedia,” in which she acts a steward and diligent documentarian of an online jungle, singular in its field, positioned at the forefront of the online fun-facts community. Annie’s work is expansive: a true anthropologist of our current cultural moment, she’s excavated every corner of the internet to create an archive for some of humankind’s most inscrutable and adorable online pursuits of truth. The page began as her quarantine project during her sophomore year of college and has grown into a digital landmark that scratches the itch to understand.
For example:
The page has catapulted her into cult-classic status (provided the “cult” has over a million followers), and landed her features in New York Times, Forbes, Vice, AV Club and more. For her part, Annie possesses a rockstar combination of thoughtfulness and intelligence, as well as an infectious surplus of joy and curiosity. Her work is infused with these qualities of hers, and the product is an index of online behavior which rings as incidentally optimistic. Of Wikipedia itself, Annie told the New York Times, “it’s what the internet was supposed to be. It has this hacker ethos of working together and making something”. The tone of her work can be directly attributed to her sincere, deep appreciation, not just for the people who cobble this information together, but for the data itself: “I’ve been saying this a lot,” she tells me, “I love info”. Here, all of online humanity are like information beavers, gathering our twigs of fact and opinion to build a structure that will stand between us and the flood of unknowns, damming us with information. Having been thrust in the deep end of the digital age, we’re inundated with information, regardless of if we seek it out or not. Annie’s work of curating a feed which highlights the most fascinating and ridiculous corners of the internet not only makes the vastness of online appear to be smaller, it also creates an environment that feels more personal and generally sillier. She has a talent for personalizing the internet. I’d recommend the “LOL (lots of links”) section on her website for finds like these stamps, this thorough investigation, this interview from the ‘80’s, this career path for birds, this uncanny thing, and more and more and more. When it comes to the event of Being Online, Annie has, I believe, the best seat in the house: she watches the internet with delight and detachment. It’s a silly place full of fingerprints from people spanning distance and time. It is not reality, but it is a feature of it.
Her interest in it began in 2009, when her dad went viral on youtube for building “really cool snow forts,” her first foray into internet stardom.
Since then, her experience of the internet has been pretty exclusively positive: it’s Annie’s belief that people are rarely logging on with malice in their hearts. Most people, she says, are just trying to improve their own lives and the lives of those around them. This perspective is a boon in her work: it is her tendency to assume the best intentions in others that cultivates the optimistic gaze Annie’s pages encourage.
As Annie and I pivoted to discuss her relationship to tears, her love of info prevailed. Ever a thoughtful observer of human behavior, Annie’s post-cry ritual consists of journaling until she feels clear of why she has been crying to begin with, though she says this practice “can feel like pin the tail on the donkey”. While it can be tempting to post-produce an emotional experience, for a truth-seeker like Annie, it doesn’t satisfy. The things that make her cry most, lately, are change, feeling overwhelmed, or when, in spite of her best efforts at honesty and clarity, she’s misunderstood. She tells me that as a kid, she was quiet, interested in school and books and her own inner-world, and greatly concerned with doing the right thing. Her parents are both educators who instilled in her and her brothers a sense of curiosity and joy for learning. She described her childhood as “idyllic,” speaking of her life, both then and now, with a fondness that is infectious. A deeply curious person, her voracity for knowledge often sweeps her away. Crying, she says, is a good signal to slow down and sit in your emotions. And when she does cry, honoring her inner child, she turns to her mom: “she’s an empathetic crier, which makes me feel really seen. It validates whatever the issue is, and shows me that she’s really listening and taking it on”.
Recently, Annie’s life has changed a lot: she’s living in a new place, in a new relationship and navigating a new arena for her career. These changes, though positive, have been the frequent source of her tears recently. However, when I asked her to tell me about something that will make her cry without fail, a couple things came to mind: any meeting ever with any academic advisor at any point in college where she was made to admit to feeling lost (hugely relatable), feeling the weight of others’ expectations, being cried to by someone she feels the desire to protect (which would be anyone who trusts her enough to cry to her). Most powerfully, though, was one piece of media from years ago represented a still-fresh emotional gash: an episode from the Daily from 2020 titled “The Year in Good News”. As soon as she thinks of it, Annie is welling up. The episode is comprised of audio messages from Daily listeners around the world, calling in to share the good news from a historically brutal year. People call in to share bright spots in their years spanning from learning trombone to encountering and befriending a family of squirrels living in their porch. It is consistent with what Annie has demonstrated her online taste to be: the urge to share online! The episode lingers on one story that is particularly moving: a mother had become estranged from her daughter many years prior through a series of mistakes. When COVID hit, the daughter “just randomly called her,” Annie tells me, eyes full of tears. It became a part of a routine for the two of them that they’d FaceTime and cook dinner every night. “Sometimes,” we’re both crying now, “they wouldn’t even talk”. Ow!!!!!!!! This story did not hit a familiar nerve with Annie– no part of that story was relatable to her, but it was such a potent display of humanity that she couldn’t help herself but to cry and cry and cry.
What manages to move Annie about the story highlights the necessary emotional relationship she has to her curations. Much of what she’s culled together is funny; much of it is adorable; all of it has touched her in some way.
As I spoke to her, she embodied her own thesis: the effect of seeing someone be moved on/by something on the internet is moving in itself, even if you think it has nothing to do with you. Recounting the podcast, and the rest of the improbable wonder of human connection, Annie wiped tears from her face.
I can’t recommend Annie’s work enough. It provides a sincerely awesome time online. AND in person!!! Keep an eye out for her show, “the Depths of Wikipedia Live,” when it comes to your town.
Such a great interview!!
yes!!