Another person I ended up I.M-ing daily was one of Gawker's most frequent targets, a blogger named Julia Allison, who, within a year, parlayed a magazine dating column into a six-figure TV talking-head job and into a reality show, all while updating her blog several times a day. She wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in a high-profile ways—her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship's ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia's naked attention-whoring—"Attention is my drug," she often confessed. In thousands of photos on her Flickr feed she posed, caked in makeup, like a celebrity on the red carpet, always thrusting out her breasts and favoring her good side. But in the midst of this artifice she was disarmingly straightforward about how much she craved the attention that Internet exposure gave her—even though it came at the expense of constant, intensely vitriolic mockery.

In October, New York magazine published a cover story about Gawker's business model and cultural relevance. I took the magazine from my therapist's waiting room into her office and read aloud from the article because, I figured, why waste any of my 45 minutes by struggling to summarize it? The article painted Gawker as a clearinghouse for vitriol and me as a semisympathetic naïf who half-loved and half-loathed what her job was forcing her to become. That week, when I walked around at parties, trying to elicit funny quotes from whatever quasi-famous people were there, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was Gawker. How could I sleep at night? someone wondered.