Rayne Fisher-Quann Deconstructs the Weirdness of Online Womanhood (2024)

Back in January, when West Elm Caleb metastasized from a TikTok inside joke into an online urban legend, denizens of a certain corner of the platform turned to one voice in particular for the definitive take the latest contentious internet main character: Rayne Fisher-Quann, a 20-year-old Vancouver-based culture writer known across TikTok for her persona as @raynecorp and internet princess at large.

Such is the power of Fisher-Quann’s viral video essays—essentially TikTok monologues filmed pleasantly low-fi via front-facing iPhone—that when a controversy lands in the Gen Z/feminist/online happenings sliver of the 2022 Venn diagram, her followers (who call themselves her “employees”) expect a response. As a (relative) veteran of the internet by the way of her activist Twitter and celeb-adjacent Instagram days, Fisher-Quann has since cultivated a rep for bringing a critical lens to issues like leftist politics, mental health, feminism, and the online experience, especially as it relates to the narrow balance beam that is being a woman online—“girlsplaining” the issues alongside a heavy dose of your expected TikTok shenanigans.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the way Fisher-Quann’s work slips between the traditional conventions of the platform ecosystem: She’s an influencer intent on encouraging heavy suspicion of social media’s impact on surveillance, parasocialism, and the state of discourse; she’s also a Substack writer whose resulting essay analyzing West Elm Caleb and, more recently, being in your “Fleabag era,” have shaped conversations back across TikTok. Taylor Lorenz dubbed her as “one of the best cultural critics on the internet”; earlier this week, Vox crowned her as an internet it-girl. Fisher-Quann agrees that her work still tends to defy categorization. “Some people think I’m a genius, and some people think I’m a pseudo-intellectual hack,” she sighed on a recent Zoom interview. “Why can’t I be both?”

Over the course of our hour-long video call, Fisher-Quann—who’s sporting her instantly recognizable Myspace-meets-Cruella curls dyed in shocks of auburn and blonde—discussed her rise online, the ethics of posting, and her uneasy relationship with the very platforms she commands.

Vanity Fair: What is your earliest memory of making something for an audience online?

Rayne Fisher-Quann: My parents were pretty strict about the internet for a while, but I was allowed to have an Instagram account for my pet rats when I was 13. I was pretty unpopular in middle school, and I remember people were shocked that my rat account had a hundred followers.

And when did you start creating your own online persona?

Maybe when I was 14 or 15. That’s when I got a personal Instagram. My best friend got a big role on a Nickelodeon TV show, and I got a decent amount of followers through my association with that social circle. When I was 16, I started gaining a following on Twitter for talking about policies and local activism.

I felt a lot of anxiety about maintaining appearances on both of those accounts, because once I became like 17 or 18 and wanted to start posting like a teenager, it was really hard. I had to behave like a little adult! It was only until pretty recently that I got over that and kind of said “f*ck you” to respectability politics and made the conscious choice to ruin my reputation a little bit on all of those platforms. I’ve felt a lot better since I did that.

You had to figure out how to grow up on Twitter. Was there anyone you looked to as a template for how to do that?

I really looked up to people like Rachel Sennott and Annie Hamilton, and even the slightly different vibe of Naomi Elizabeth, who was a sort of obscure Tumblr girl who does really odd pseudo-performance-art meme stuff. I just thought they were so funny and cool and unafraid, and I really admired the way they sort of blurred the lines between performance and reality. There was this explicit honesty in the way they existed online that felt so counter to the background noise of the personal-brand girlboss era.

On the complete other hand, I also found people like Mariame Kaba and adrienne maree brown, amongst other Black feminist abolitionists, who were shaping my politics alongside all that. Reading their writing felt liberatory—like I physically felt freer for having read it. Following those people really instilled in me a desire to cultivate compassion and empathy and to kind of resist the ironic detachment complex that was becoming very cool at the time.

And then you joined TikTok in the summer of 2020, right?

My thought process was very literally, I need to have a platform where I don’t have a following, where I can be myself and be goofy. And then very quickly, I developed a large following. On Twitter and Instagram, most of the time you have to try to blow up. On TikTok, it’s super easy to be a random teenager talking about stupid sh*t and have people treat you as an authority.

But I was very lucky that I had some experience with the internet, because I was able to handle the slings and arrows a little better. There’s a well-documented meltdown process where people who are doing any kind of cultural criticism on TikTok will make a mistake, or they’ll say something off, and TikTok jumps on it. They’ll post like 20 videos in an evening crying and freaking out. It never goes in a good direction. You should never post while upset. I was good at avoiding that.

When I look at your TikToks, I feel like I can see the way your backgrounds in activism Twitter and celeb Instagram must have combined and informed your presence as @raynecorp. You’ve got the serious video essays, right, but also the fun lip-syncing and lifestyle-y, “here’s what my life’s like” vids.

Nothing that I do is really strategized. But something that I’ve struggled with is that everything you do on the internet becomes a brand. Even the things that I’ve done to actively try to resist the idea of building a brand have just become what people see as my brand. I called my account @raynecorp to directly satirize the way people turn themselves into corporations or commodifiable entities. Now my fans call themselves my employees. And they’re playing into the joke, but it’s also real at the same time.

When you shoot your video essays, is it all in one take, shooting from the hip? Or do you sketch out talking points first?

When I film, it really is just me saying what I’m thinking about. But I have rules about making content, because engaging with a following ethically is really important to me. TikTok is a platform that really rewards impulsiveness, and that causes a lot of people to say stuff that maybe isn’t the best. So one of my things is that I’m gonna make a video about a political issue, I’m going to think about it for two weeks before, so everything I talk about is something that’s been running in my head. So it’s like, I don’t write a script but maybe in my head I’ve almost written one.

So maybe @raynecorp isn’t something that’s strategized so much as generally intentional.

I do think a lot about what I post. I have the type of OCD where I get very very anxious about moral codes or meeting moral standards. There was a period when I was a teenager where I almost couldn’t leave my room because I was so worried that an action that I did would have an unethical response. I ran everything that I did through Kant’s imperative for a while. Kant was hardly a paragon of morality, but that’s still something that I think about a lot.

Do you have thoughts on the generational anxiety that platforms like TikTok provoke between Gen Z and millennials?

There’s definitely people trying to push this generation-wars thing. Now, even more so than before the internet, it is a tangible currency to know what’s cool and to know the right words and to know the right way to talk. I think people need to lay off of it a little bit. The internet is something that is really easy to feel ownership over.

But I am happy that we’re going back to indie sleaze! Because I could not handle the whole fetishism of being clean. That’s another thing that Gen Z has this resentment for millennials. The millennial era of the internet was very focused on having this aesthetic perfection—the monstera plant, the Glossier pink, being “that girl.”

Who have been your biggest influences in the field of cultural criticism?

I don’t have any formal training, but I was raised in a house that really valued critical thinking. That was my parents’ thing. It got pretty annoying; sometimes if I tried to tell my dad a fact, he would be like, “What’s your source?” I was on my school newspaper in high school, stuff like that.

In terms of inspiration, I love Joan Didion. Her writing wasn’t always nice, but she typically had a lot of care for the things she criticized. Didion was mean but it was never unlikable because you could always tell the emotions that were driving it. That’s something I really try to do. I can often be pretty bitchy especially when I’m trying to be funny [laughs]. So I try to mostly criticize things that I love and care about because I think that’s where the best criticism comes from.

Last fall, you started your newsletter, “Internet Princess,” and then at the end of last year, you published a trend report predicting that we’re likely to see TikTok actually die off in favor of a platform like Substack. Tell me about that.

That was maybe a little wishful thinking at the time [laughs]. Of course in the media bubble, Substacks have been a thing for a really long time. But in the last couple months, I’ve seen a lot of teenage girls and TikTok creators try to bring their audience to a blogging platform. People are starting to gravitate towards content that rewards an attention span instead of insults it. Three-hour video essays are getting huge.

And, personally, I don’t like how on TikTok, everything that I say is inevitably linked to my face and my voice and my body. I find that very exhausting. Something that I love about writing is that there aren’t a ton of barriers to entry. You need an internet connection, and then you can just write. And most of the time, it’s judged on the merit of the writing.

That’s definitely how I first came across your work—specifically via your viral essay in January, about West Elm Caleb and the feminist panopticon, which I can’t really imagine in like, three-minute video form.

If I tried to have that conversation on TikTok, I would have been torn to shreds. Every part of that essay was important to my point, and there’s no way you could pack a 2,500-word essay into TikTok. That was a perfect example where the medium 100% affected the legitimacy and the reaction to the message.

You’re someone with a large following on TikTok and other platforms, but it sounds like you have a conflicted relationship with these public online forums and the nature of the discourse. For example, last April you made this video about how TikTok will never actually be a revolutionary tool.

There really is this expectation that everybody gives their opinion all the time and says everything they think all the time. And that’s not good for the audience, and it’s especially not good for the creator because that’s how you say stupid sh*t.

Sometimes I think there’s a push from an older audience, and the older media world, to proscribe onto these younger communities this idea that these are revolutionary organizing tools, and they are not. No media company that is created by Mark Zuckerberg is going to be on our side in fighting the anti-capitalist war. Twitter isn’t on our side. TikTok isn’t on our side. We can try to use these platforms as best as we possibly can, but you are never going to be able to have truly transformative conversations on these apps that are designed to make us hate each other.

It sounds like there are two tensions that define your work and your persona. There’s the tension of participating in the platform ecosystem while remaining critical of it. And there’s also the tension of being a woman online. Both involve knowing the rules and figuring out what you gain from following them, and what you gain from subverting them.

It’s hard to nail this down exactly, because I’m never making the same video twice. But a video where I’m wearing makeup will get double the views of a video where I’m not. I made a video a while back sort of making fun of the fact. I was like, “Hi, guys, today I’m putting on a full face of makeup so I can talk to you about revolutionary feminism.” And people in my comments were like, does you pointing this out make it any better? Like, you being self-aware doesn’t change anything. And it’s true. Being self-aware doesn’t fix anything.

Everybody likes attention, and everybody is always going to do things that aren’t necessarily the most ethical choice in the room because it’s an attention economy. I would love to quit these platforms but I won’t because I’m addicted to the attention. And that’s something I think it’s important to be radically honest about. That’s a little facetious but yeah, I try to be very open with my audience about everything that’s wrong with me [laughs]. I do try to portray a version of public womanhood that is maybe a little, just a little different than what a lot of people in my position portray. And I’ve been told that that means something to people, which is cool.

The descriptor “influencer-essayist” has been thrown around a bunch when I’ve talked to people about what you do. Is that a title you identify with?

I don’t know if I love the word “influencer.” I struggle with the identification particularly as it pertains to womanhood. There’s a lot of pressure for women in my position to do this cool-girl persona. A very chic archetype at the moment is the “hot-girl intellectual.” Like it’s not enough to just be intelligent. You have to be intelligent and skinny and have an effective grasp of the waif aesthetic. Very New York scene, but it’s also everywhere. You want people to want to be you, and to think through reading your writing, they can become more like you.

I think if I could get a really good handle on that, I would be even more popular than I am now. But I realized early on that I don’t have the capacity for that. I’m too unwell. Or maybe I’m not unwell in the right way.

Is there a descriptor you like better?

You can call me an influencer-essayist. In this field, it’s difficult to avoid being unbearably pretentious. You know what I mean? I’m not gonna call myself a “public intellectual.” Do you think of other names around this stuff?

It’s tricky. My sense is that we still can’t separate the platform from the substance of the work. Like, if you say someone’s a “Twitter celebrity,” do you really mean they’re a comedian? Is an Instagram influencer essentially just doing the work of a spokesperson or a model?

My dream is to be defined in some entirely new way. And I think that there’s not a ton of language for this yet.

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