Internet Princess Rayne Fisher-Quann left TikTok in search of something beyond the algorithm
The Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, bordering Central Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was a flurry of activity. Staff lugged cases of wine upstairs and placed branded hand fans on the pews. Rayne Fisher-Quann, the 22-year-old Canadian TikTokker turned writer of Internet Princess, a Substack newsletter, stood at the back of the church surveying in a poofy red dress and black sling-back heels. She apologetically abandoned set-up to speak with me.
It's two hours before Fisher-Quann's first live show in New York City, organized for her paid subscribers in collaboration with Substack. The event conveniently brought together a roster of other Substack writers — Eliza McLamb, Mackenzie Thomas, Marlowe Granados, Terry Nguyen, and P.E. Moskowitz, as well as Dead Weight author Emmeline Cline — for a night of secrets, shame, and confession. Each writer, including Fisher-Quann, read another writer's essay revealing a secret aiming for anonymity, although attendees described the writer of each essay as "obvious." None of the essays were published before, or will ever be, ephemeral in a way that Fisher-Quann's online work isn't.
There's not much privacy in a church, and with all the private rooms already in use for the event, the church's point person offered us the organ pit. We walked up the stairs to a balcony overlooking the ornate gold apse and the dark wooden pews. She paused to photograph the view on her iPhone, and we sat down in two black folding chairs next to the large green organ.
Some internet personalities might have chosen a church as the setting of their live event because of its "aesthetic shock value." But for Fisher-Quann, the meaning lies in its relationship to the night's subject matter. "A church is a place where you can have these emotional, intimate moments that might seem unacceptable or cross a certain line in the outside world," she tells Mashable. "It felt really beautiful to take this space that has meant so much to me in positive ways and a space that has also been complicated for me and use it to celebrate shame and secrecy." Growing up Catholic, her relationship to shame and guilt has always been tied to religion, and her hope for the event was to reclaim it from the right wing and create a space of "leftism and pride" without shame.
A church, the physical locus for celebrations of the defining parts of birth, life, and death, is also a location fit for Fisher-Quann's aim: to seek something real in her amorphous and intangible internet fame.
Distancing herself from TikTok
Fisher-Quann first came to prominence on TikTok for her conversational, feminist takes. Her videos were part of a larger moment that established the social media platform as a potential home of Gen Z cultural criticism. But exhausted from the constraints of the algorithm and wanting to write long-form, Fisher-Quann left after cultivating an audience.
On TikTok, she felt that everything she and her peers tried to do was challenged by the platform's mechanisms. Her videos were constantly reported, and her account was taken down for "talking about feminism." TikTok would have permanently deleted her account if her manager hadn't stepped in.
"You'll get so many people saying the stupidest shit you've heard about the things you're saying."
"There was a point where I [realized] I am dedicating so much of my time to generating profit for this third party that doesn't care about me. I don't own any of my work," says Fisher-Quann.
It wasn't just the restrictions on her videos and financial implications that steered her away from the platform but also the algorithm. Rather than people opting into her content, the algorithm sent viewers to her page indiscriminatly, resulting in what she describes as a unique kind of "brain rot."
"You'll get so many people saying the stupidest shit you've heard about the things you're saying," she says. Moving over to Substack allowed her to write for an audience that engages with her work in good faith, empowering her to take more creative risks. Instead of being served on indiscriminate FYPs, her thoughts are delivered exclusively to paying subscribers.
Fisher-Quann hasn't been on TikTok in over a year. "It was making me a little dumber," she explains. Although she acknowledges that creators on TikTok introduced her to books, art, and even some of her closest friends, she thinks those are instances where people trumped the way TikTok was supposed to work. "Every time that I felt myself falling into what TikTok wanted me to do — the mindless scrolling — I felt my attention span getting smaller, I felt my world getting smaller," she adds.
Creators working against the grain of TikTok and making thoughtful, challenging content are trapped between social media's limitations and the harassment it enables. Many followed in Fisher-Quann's footsteps and left the platform. Yet, it may be young people who suffer the future consequences. At a lecture at McGill University last year, she was approached by two tenth-grade girls who were inspired to look up Karl Marx during her talk. Where will teenage girls learn about radical politics if people like her move behind paid events and subscriptions?
Now freed from TikTok's discourse of the day, Fisher-Quann spends most of her time on Instagram and X, preferring Reels to her TikTok FYP. "[Reels is] always giving me Southern Protestant women talking about how they need to serve their husbands," she says. "[TikTok's algorithm] had me so down, and I found it quite scary. Reels is less scary because they haven't quite nailed it yet. It's a comforting thing to have a bumbling overlord."
Becoming the Internet Princess
On her Substack, she was an early critic of how women are encouraged to brand themselves online into highly readable "eras." Since her essay, "standing on the shoulders of complex female characters," published in 2022, women defining themselves in this superficial way have exploded and have since evolved from eras into types of "girls."
"Women are pressured to brand themselves and to shape themselves in accordance to the desires of another from the day that we're born. That's something that's exacerbated online," she explains. "It is really easy, especially online, to tie up every facet of your worth with the way that people perceive you and to distill yourself down to this list of identity markers and consumable objects."
Often approaching her subjects as a participant rather than an observer, she first tackled the way women are encouraged to brand themselves online because she personally struggled with the pressure to define herself in that way but found it a dangerous venture.
Making her living as an internet personality in the years since the essay was published, Fisher-Quann grappled with her relationship between art and her presentation of self online. "For me, it comes down to thinking a lot about whether I love the things I love because of how they make me feel, or whether I love these things or promote my consumption of these things because of how I want people to perceive me, or because I love how I think I might be perceived for being seen with those things," she says, as Madonna's "Like A Prayer" blasts through the church's sound system in preparation for the night's event.
"This is so funny," she laughs.
Building an online-to-IRL audience
Ahead of her lecture at McGill, she was convinced no one would show up. Building her career online at the beginning of the pandemic made it challenging to grasp if her audience had an appetite for in-person events. "When people are just numbers on a screen, it's impossible to know who's going to show up. You can get a lot of likes or a lot of followers and have nobody want to show up to an event that you do," she says.
The Internet Princess Substack event only solidified her readers' hunger for in-person events. The church was at full capacity, with 400 to 500 people sitting in the pews. Fisher-Quann joined me on Zoom a week later to reflect on the evening. "I have a lot of trouble sometimes trying to hold onto concrete meaning on the internet because everything feels so ephemeral, but [it] also feels devoid of meaning, overly commercial, aesthetic, meaningless, and intangible. [The event] felt like something to hold on to, like a real thing," she adds.
By the end of our conversation at Holy Trinity, the church was bathed in pink light. Fisher-Quann left with one final thought: "I have to put on some chainmail."
I slipped out the side entrance 45 minutes before the doors opened, yet a crowd of diehard fans had already begun to form in front of the church's red doors. I saw on Instagram that the line later wrapped around two city blocks. The young women dressed in the uniform of daily posters: a black slip dress over a pink lace long sleeve, low-slung jeans and a tight white baby tee, and a blue-and-white dress with puff sleeves. They were there not just for a glimpse of an Internet Princess but for a piece of the real, tangible community she built.