Don't Die

An interview series about

Hi, I'm David Wolinsky. I'm a former The Onion A.V. Club and NBC editor.

Don't Die is a repository of the hundreds of interviews I've conducted since 2014 trying to unravel tangled questions about:

  • Online culture wars
  • Labor issues in entertainment industries
  • Fandom
  • Why has the internet turned out the way it has?

Don't Die is about exploring other ways of thinking while also trying to better understand the cultural trajectory which has become impossible to ignore in America.

My work on this began in 2014, when Gamergate seemed to explode onto the mainstream, and follows the evolution of online hate and discourse through to today. This site came about as a result of soul searching as and after that harassment campaign. These interviews frequently explore what it's emblematic of in our lives online, offline, and at work - and also how it echoes the internet's earliest days.

But it is also about more than this one tragic failure of our communities and culture. It is an attempt to look holistically at the lives we live in and around games and the Internet. What was it like before we were paying attention. Where is it going? And what have been the costs to the people who get caught under the wheels?

This open-ended reporting is preserved by Stanford. The work is presented to feed curiosity, but also available as a resource for readers, researchers, journalists, etc. to learn about and perhaps even leverage for themselves this living oral history of our moment. If you have a collaboration in mind regarding this information or my experiences gathering it, please drop me a line.

You'll find both source material and other work I've done here, such as unpublished writing for ▒░░▒▓.

If this is work you would like to help further empower, please consider an ongoing Patreon or one-time PayPal donation.

Feel free to reach out if there is a particular topic you notice has not been explored, or a perspective not represented.

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