Influencers with Taylor Lorenz

This conversation has left me feeling like Morgan Freeman at the end of seven, where he's like, so-and-so said, the world is a good place and worth fighting for.

I believe the second part.

Welcome to Your Rung About, where we are celebrating the holidays by talking with Taylor Lorenz about the internet, the very thing you might be using to avoid your family right now.

Taylor Lorenz is the author of the new book Extremely Online.

She is Extremely Online.

She swung by to take me on a joyride through the last 20 years roughly of internet history.

and to talk about the world of influencers and how, whether we accept it or not, we're all probably living in it now and what we can do to make it a better place for all of us.

We've been having a really fun, very Christmassy month over here over on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions for our bonus content subscribers.

We have the beginning of my reading of the audiobook of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol.

I'm doing my best to emulate the great Gonzo and we're going to have the conclusion to the story up in the next couple weeks.

So stay tuned or else you'll have no way of knowing how that book ends.

I also want to thank so dearly everybody who came, everybody who tried to come, everybody who is there in spirit at a massive seance, a holiday spectacular for the living and the dead, the show that you're wrong about did in collaboration with American Hysteria, a great podcast, and The Little Lies, a great Fleetwood Mac tribute band, and with our friends Chelsea Weber Smith and Miranda Zickler.

We had an amazing time welcoming some ghosts into the Aladdin theater.

And if you didn't get a chance to see us this year and wanted to, we'll be doing another show next year.

Don't worry about it.

We'll be back.

We're going to try and add more dates this year.

We had a really amazing time and we want to make this a holiday tradition.

And that's enough from me.

Here's your episode.

I hope you enjoy it.

I hope you're doing self-care.

I hope you're doing whatever you need to do to find

some inner peace and tranquility

and find the joy and the quiet in this very strange time we are all sharing together.

Now let's go talk about the internet.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we are internet historians as well as historians on the internet.

And with me today is Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor, hello.

Hi, thank you for having me.

For people who don't know, and you can introduce yourself better than me, but I would say that you're one of the people who makes it possible to understand what's going on in culture today.

And you have a new book out, which is specifically about something that we deal with all day long, every day without necessarily having to be thoughtful about it, which is the internet.

Yes, yes.

It's kind of a internet history.

It's called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

And it's about the rise of social media and the kind of told through the lens of the content creator industry.

And like not to have a spoiler or anything, but I would say that I am a content creator.

And I wonder, do you identify as a content creator?

You know what's so funny?

I, for whatever reason, I wrote a story about inflation last week and the Republican Party Twitter account started tweeting about me and they were calling me, you know, content creator.

I was like, I'm a journalist.

And then I was like, why am I so mad about this?

I spent all day defending content creators.

But I, yeah, I mean, at this point, I think we're all content creators.

That's kind of what my book, one of the thesis of my book is, is like, we all live in this content ecosystem and produce content for platforms, whether intentionally or not.

So yeah, I'm a content creator.

And I mean, as I reported recently, it's kind of crazy, like the Bureau of Labor and Statistics that charts, you know, different types of workers, they literally chart how many canary trainers are working in the United States right now.

And yet they don't count any online content creation work.

Like no, you know, you could be a full-time YouTuber.

There's allegedly 50 million people around the world working as full-time content creators.

In the U.S., we don't capture any of that data.

So we actually have no idea how big the...

labor market is.

We just created this entirely new class of worker basically in the past 15 to 20 years with no labor protections, even in children working in this industry.

And we're not even tracking it.

So it's kind of crazy.

It really is.

And it feels like the kind of thing that can continue to exist as a labor rights sinkhole because we can convince people that it's frivolous, which goes to my ongoing concern about the treatment of reality TV performers who are also content creators of a sort.

But I mean, I would love to get just a sharper definition of this term so we can all start on on the same page, maybe starting with where do we start in internet history?

Because this is something that it's hard to even remember to me in day-to-day life was ever not with us.

And yet I can, you and I can both remember that time very well, in fact.

Yeah.

Well, as I argue in my book, I mean, the reason, I think a huge reason people have such negative associations with the words content creator or influencer is just straight up misogyny.

Like when you scratch the surface and you're like, well, why don't you, you know, like, and a lot of it ends up being, well, these are just women taking selfies and it's not real work.

And, you know, there's a lot of that tied up in it and a lot of misogyny tied up in the rise of this sort of industry.

The words content creator don't emerge until the 2010s, really, with YouTube coining the term creator for YouTubers really around 2011.

But prior to that, there wasn't really a good word.

These people were called often bloggers, you know, if they were blogging or celebrities.

Oh, boy.

Or E-lebs.

I love these words that you can see people trying out, and you're like, that's never going to take off.

And indeed, it doesn't.

It's not.

But it was kind of this way of talking about internet attention in the aughts.

And you really saw the concept of content creation emerge and the sort of beginnings of this industry around the turn of the millennium.

Between the years 1998 and 2003, there was this explosion in in blogging software.

So you had platforms like Blogger and WordPress and others kind of allowing people to self-publish and generate audiences.

And most of the earliest blogs were tech-related blogs for obvious reasons and political related blogs.

And it wasn't really until the early 2000s, like 2001 to 2003, that you saw the emergence of mommy bloggers.

And that was really, they were really the first kind of influencers, content creators, whatever you want to call this group of people, which I would argue is just like internet media.

Like what a content creator is, is essentially somebody that's running their own independent media company on the back of these platforms.

I would love to hear about what the internet was before this, because there's something to me very interesting about how it had to evolve into the ability to allow people to tell personal narratives commercially, right?

That that wasn't always possible.

Yeah, there was no money in the internet.

I mean, the internet was this sort of like fad.

There's that famous Katie Couric clip where she's asking, like, what can you do on the World Wide Web or whatever?

So the Internet prior to social media was just very disjointed.

I mean, it was also prior to search becoming a real thing.

Google, I mean, Google wasn't dominant.

In the 90s, you had all these sort of disparate message boards.

You had things like Netscape and these different browsers emerging.

And you had the beginning of blogging, but nobody could find the blog because there wasn't any real discovery mechanism.

And so you don't start to see the sort of social layer of the internet come until really like the years 2000 to 2003 and four, when you saw blogging.

Like blogging, I would say, is its own sort of social network essentially.

And a lot of these blogging platforms, often, remember, you could have like a blog role or like GeoCities.

You could have your little web ring.

All of the web rings.

Yes.

And then you saw like Friendster and MySpace starting.

Obviously, Facebook starts too in 2004.

So it was just like the beginning of social networking and there was no money in it.

The connotation was still that it was for like children, like maybe on AIM and like weird, weirdos in their mom's basement.

I'll tell you an early kind of sort of blogging internet experience I had, which was that when I was in high school, my friends and I naturally were obsessed with America's Next Top Model, which I think started airing in 2002, 2003-ish, something like that.

And in the first season, a lot of people are going to remember this, there was a contestant named Elise Sewell who was in a relationship with one of the shins.

She was dating a Shin,

and she was like the first runner-up after the lady that went on to be on My Fair Brady, Adrienne Curry.

I wish her well.

And Elise had this big career going going off in modeling, mostly in Asia, but she had this really great live journal about it that my friends and I read.

She, you know, it was like a personal live journal where she would upload photos.

It would be like her backstage, her getting her makeup done, her in her like model apartment in Stockholm or whatever.

And that was something that, I don't know, maybe raised her profile in some ways, but I really don't think so.

I think it was like for teenage girls mostly.

And I don't think there was any money in it, but it was something that that people did you know you would have

people sort of with a sizable audience on on live journal or on blog spot or something and maybe it would translate to them being able to tell you about a book they had that was coming out but like they're i it's so weird to have to explain that there were not ad dollars in it no and not only that during those years we're actually talking about the peak of print media i mean this is pre-recession.

This is when these media companies were rolling in money and especially because around the year 2000 was the dot-com bust.

There was a boom and a bust.

And so after the dot-com bubble crashed, everyone was like, oh, the internet's over.

It was a fad.

It's over.

Nobody's going to read things online.

Why would you do that?

The internet, it's like the Macarena.

It's just something we all thought was fun for a minute.

And then we came to our senses.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so back to the mommy bloggers, when do we start to hear this phrase, where do they come from?

Tell me of their ways.

People always associate the creator industry, influencer industry with Gen Z, but it was really like these older sort of Gen X women or somewhat young, I guess, you know, women in their 20s and 30s who had young children.

A lot of them had been working moms, but were now sort of shut out of the labor force because they had to be home with their kids or whatever.

And they turned to the internet for community because at the time, the women's media landscape, especially in the early 2000s, was so deeply misogynistic.

I mean, the women's media landscape in the 2000s generally was misogynistic, but the women's day, like these, all these, any kind of magazine that talked about like pregnancy and stuff, it was like everything is sort of a woman to deal with and just serve your husband and stuff that I went back for researching my book and I was like, I can't believe this was published in like 2003 because it reads like something from the 60s.

And so women turned to the internet to post about what motherhood was really like for them and sort of find community.

And so they started posting, frankly, very feminist stuff.

Like, I mean, it was a lot of destigmatizing things like struggling to breastfeed, postpartum depression, sometimes hating your husband, like all these things that were really taboo.

and considered not something that women should ever talk about publicly, much less read about in the media.

Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work with an editor, having to jump through one or many hoops to try and convince people above you that basically what you have to say is something that other people will respond to?

I mean, it's hard.

And I interned at a fashion magazine in the mid-aughts and I saw it firsthand of like, just there's a lot of corporate interests at play in corporate media.

And corporate media, and I say this is somebody that works in corporate media now.

It's never going to advocate for anything progressive because their business model is built on catering to big brands that don't want controversy.

They don't want women talking about messy things like, you know, having to wear diapers after you give birth or whatever.

Like they want a lot of like sort of sanitized content.

I mean, we see this struggle online now with women's media companies sort of struggling to, or brands not wanting to advertise near feminist content.

So it was very, you know, it was just, it was a weird media market.

And as a journalist, you couldn't, couldn't one i don't think that there was a lot of feminist journalists working in traditional media at that time because to rise the ranks of corporate media you it sort of filters out anybody that's too progressive or too outspoken because you're it's not how you're going to get ahead at whatever women's magazine and so it just created this environment where like most of the media was was very paternalistic and didn't recognize women's voices compared to the internet where they could be candid and there was no editors, as you mentioned, no oversight.

You could say whatever you wanted.

And it it felt so liberating to these women yeah a book that I keep recommending to people as just kind of a fun frothy read and also a great insight into the culture and the media culture of the late 1900s is Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries which is about taking over Vanity Fair as it was sinking and what it took to have an extremely successful kind of a Cinderella story for a magazine in the 80s.

And what it really stresses inevitably is that like you have one shot per month to get good circulation.

You need kind of an eye-popping cover.

You need a mix of material that in this case covers kind of the high and the low, but has to sort of all, it's like putting together an album or at least a mixtape every month.

Like there has to be some sort of coherency and connection between what you're doing and sort of the, you know, what space are you occupying as a publication?

Who's your, how are you imagining your consumer?

What's your view as a publication?

All of that.

And it's, it also, you know, it feels like a very consistent thing in American culture that motherhood is in fact this very complicated, often physically and emotionally gory experience for people.

And how in a sort of nice, snuggly please buy me in the Impulse Rock magazine, are you going to pick,

for example, an article about recurring unwanted thoughts of horrible things happening to your baby when you're a new mother and how that's like a known psychological phenomenon that doesn't mean you're a danger to your child right because that's something that people need information about as a for instance and that is not very pictable exactly and it's not something people wanted to buy in a glossy women's magazine the emphasis was on homemaking fashion a lot about weight loss, like get your pre-baby body back.

Like there was so much

pre-baby body.

That sounds like it's like some body you have to track down in the woods.

Go find the pre-baby body.

It makes sense that people were kind of rebelling against that.

And I think the reason these women got such ravid, large audiences so quickly is because

they were, you know, they were destigmatizing a lot of stuff.

They also talked a lot about stuff that was never written about really publicly in these magazines as well for obvious reasons, but about addiction struggles and mental health challenges and just tough things that were sort of never considered in the public sphere.

It was always, these are things that women should deal with privately or, oh, your family struggles or you want to divorce your husband, that's your private business.

That shouldn't be in the public sphere.

And blogs really took a lot of things that were previously in the private realm and made them into topics of public conversation, which was very positive at the time.

There wasn't very much coverage, so it was a lot of direct source material.

And I relied extremely heavily on the Internet Archive, which archived a lot of these blogs.

And there wasn't that much about the mothers, other than the really toxic media coverage at the time, which just like villainized these women.

And the subtext of every article is just like, how dare they talk about themselves and who made

that they were important?

You know,

the need to blame a woman for even things that she that seem fine, I guess, is always interesting.

I totally agree.

All of these social platforms that sort of prey on that like fundamental human desire for connection.

And that's what we get from the content creators that we really love is like connection and a feeling of connection or camaraderie or a community of people that are like-minded or interested in the same thing.

I think it's gone off the rails now because everything is so warped by profit and algorithms.

But especially back then i read a lot of live journals like i i spent a lot of time in in online chat rooms and stuff and i think it's just the internet has always been a tool for connecting people that's sort of the whole point of the internet and it's got the word net in it you know

yeah

It was so pure back then in a lot of ways, you know, because it wasn't all warped by profit because there wasn't money in it yet.

Yeah, which again is hard to imagine, but it helps to remember how slow it was.

And something I remember is one of my best friends and I, we would take disposable camera photos of each other.

Then we would take the cameras to Fred Meyer and have them developed, and then take the photos home and scan them in and upload them slowly onto live journals so people could like look at our live journals and wait for each photo to load for like one minute and then be like, look at that, it's an already shot of a girl looking overexposed by the flash.

Ooh, she's standing against a wall you know

yeah that's the same stuff that teenage girls are doing today but if they are good enough at doing it or just have the right kind of vibe for the marketplace then they could you know get a bunch of sponsorship deals and i guess what we're getting into this whole episode is talking about what that's all about.

And my only real concern is that I think it is often bad for the teenage girls.

Yeah, it is bad.

But the system before was bad too.

I'm very against the sort of solution of just being to log off and go back to this pre-internet world, because especially having spent so much time researching the media climate of the aughts and remembering, you know, I was a teenager in those years and those were sort of my like high school and college years.

So like a lot of millennials, like it, I think we tend to romanticize it.

Yeah.

It was isolating.

I I mean, I remember before I found Tumblr, like Tumblr was really like where I found my community like later on.

And I remember the first day that I was on Tumblr.

I was, I stayed on it until I literally couldn't keep my eyes open anymore.

And I just, I was like, oh my God, I feel so less alone.

Like I had felt so alone.

And, you know, it was like that experience of like finding other people that we didn't have.

Like before the internet, you were so defined by your physical reality and like the people around you, like physically determined and if you were cool or not or what you were interested in, it just, it was a lot, it was hard for people and especially kind of people that were maybe a little bit not as mainstream or, you know.

Yeah, I mean, we as a culture, I personally give the internet a lot of shit

and fairly, but, but right, like we also have to point out what does it offer.

And it does feel to me to some extent like the legislation that is meant to stop kids and adolescents from encountering images and ideas about queerness or about transness or about gender that are true or liberating for them.

Like in my optimistic moments, I like to think of that as a panicked response to a social wave that's only inevitably going to get bigger and bigger.

And it feels like technology and the internet have accelerated all of that.

I totally agree.

And I think it's scary because I think now another group that embraced the internet very early was the far right.

Yeah.

And we can really see that.

And I think it's scary because I think a lot of traditional media and traditional institutions now are just playing catch up.

And we're in this bad system also where we have this monopoly, really a duopoly of meta and Google controlling most of our.

social media environment and mediating most of our online relationships.

And I think we're in a bad spot now, but I don't think that I think we can eliminate the current platform landscape and change things.

But logging off was not that great.

Like it was fun.

Yeah, live journal.

I missed that era, but it was also very lonely.

I don't know.

The need to sort of make social connections facelessly.

I mean, I personally spend so much time thinking about how many toxic qualities it brings out in people to relate primarily to the idea of other people, you know, through stuff like Twitter or.

whatever we're doing now.

It does bring up so much negativity, but also it really does allow people in so many other ways to be more transparent and to sort of share the parts of themselves that they couldn't share before we had this capacity technologically.

And yeah, I appreciate this conversation is good.

I feel like the,

yeah, we need to give the internet some credit.

Well, I'm an eternal optimist, which people always disagree with me on, but I'm always like, it could get better.

We could make it better, just to be clear.

Like we're in a bad spot, but it could get better.

I don't know that it will, will, but it could.

We got to try.

Yeah.

So we have the mommy bloggers.

I wonder, is there maybe like a passage that you would be interested in reading to express sort of the vitriol that these women inspire?

Because I do think there's really, as we cover frequently on the show, something very timeless about whatever that is.

Yeah, let me find.

There was this moment in 2004 when Heather Armstrong is kind of one of the most famous mommy bloggers, put banner ads not even sponsored content just like a banner at the top of her blog because at this point it had become a full-time job for her blogging and she just needed a little bit of money because she was a mom and needed to support her family in 2004 Armstrong decided to run ads on deuce.com that was what her blog was called She explained to her readers that generating income from the site would help with her family's financial pressures quote I've considered taking a job outside the home she wrote but that would mean that I would probably have to give up this website I don't possess the juggling skills to raise a baby, work full-time, and maintain the amount of writing that I have done here.

Despite Armstrong's trepidation and candor, her post received a tidal wave of backlash, with comments so cruel she had to block them.

Fans were really pissed, she later told Vox.

They screamed, who do you think you are?

She said to the New York Times, What made you important enough to make money on your website?

Tech and media blogs were already running ads, of course, but when mothers started doing it, people became blind with rage.

Armstrong was up against age-old stereotypes about women's work, and it was gauched for women to bring up money into conversations about the labor they performed.

Mommy bloggers were to be, first and foremost, mothers.

Even though nearly every top mommy blogger worked on their blog full-time, they and their audience appeared to internalize negative stereotypes about the economic value of the work they were doing as women.

Maybe the idea that that isn't worth money, which is kind of palpably not not true, just from the perspective that we bring to any other kind of media, is really not about that and is just about the idea that women shouldn't say things.

Yeah.

And I think when women take control of their own stories or they define their own narratives about their lives, there's backlash to it.

I mean, even today.

I think it's funny to look back at mommy bloggers because I think we, when you talk about them today, people think of them in the context of these like family YouTube channels.

And it was so different.

Blogging was such a different medium.

Like you said, like many of these blogs didn't have pictures.

Most of them were pseudonymous.

And what was considered so radical and over-sharing, which I hate that word, but most of it was just like, damn it, I'm so sick of making breakfast for my kids sometimes.

And people were just like,

whoa,

what?

Yeah.

What is this woman saying?

She's really outspoken.

And it's like, what?

right reading it now you're like 20 years later it's just it seems quaint imagine if you could see what it's like to read any news article now right where like especially on a mobile device we're like you know when you're reading an article and like for every six inches you can scroll there's six inches of an ad and it's for the same thing and often it'll like start playing like a video at full volume without you asking it to, you know, so you're like trying to read, just like find out what happened happened in Congress.

And it's like, happy Honda Days.

If you purchase before, you know, and you're just like given this experience of extreme sensory overwhelm kind of unavoidably by trying to stay up to date on current events sometimes, or God forbid, get a recipe.

I don't blame the people who write the recipe blogs.

I know they have to make a really long preamble for SEO.

I blame the system.

It's not their fault, but it's still annoying.

That's the headline.

It's not their fault.

Still annoying.

I wonder if you would agree with the analysis, because this is what occurs to me: that like the candidness that was possible in the mommy blog era and the sort of the ability to be open and talk about the sort of grimier realities of parenthood is now because of you know the gradual incursion of ads onto more and more of the content that we see you know because then and this is kind of

on the decline in a way too but the family vlog era basically seems to have taken place in an environment where you by that point, couldn't admit to anything that was potentially unflattering to you because then, you know, you might lose your sponsorship from Tide or whoever.

Yeah, it eventually got very corporate really around the 2010s.

Like, you know, Instagram launched in 2010, Pinterest launched in 2011.

Some of the earliest YouTube channels like Shay Carl were for sort of family-oriented channels.

But it wasn't until that sort of like first half of the 2010s when we started to enter into this more aspirational period of social media.

And as you said, advertisers gained more control almost, or like veto control over like what people could share of their lives.

And it goes back to the problem that plagued magazines and plagues corporate media to this day, which is like these brand safety concerns.

You know, it's like, oh, we want to advertise on this great.

feminist website, but not too feminist there.

You know, we got to sell sell things.

Not feminist enough that it'll make people not buy the things that we need to convince them to buy.

Yeah.

And I talk also, you know, just about sort of like these women and how they navigated that.

And a lot of women just dropped out.

I mean, most of those women ended up going into like corporate careers or going back to work after their kids were older or just.

you know, gave up.

They didn't want to pivot to video and pivot to photos and stuff.

And then you have people like Rhee Drummond, you know, who pioneer woman who went all in and became big all over the internet and has a Netflix show and cooking line.

And, you know, so there are those women that are from that era that are still around today as massive lifestyle influencers.

God, it's almost like the godfather.

These poor women were really hung out to dry.

And despite it all, I think, you know, really transformed the media landscape.

When do we have the pivot to video era?

I'm going to guess this is.

Around 2010.

Yeah.

Well, the first content house was in 2009.

Oh, boy.

Called The Station, which is about, it was nine or ten YouTubers.

They had a big collab channel and house in Venice Beach, which is very funny, again, because people associate content houses with Gen Z.

And I think it's because Gen Z grew up with this culture, but the first content house was Gen X or YouTubers.

That's so lovely.

Well, and arguably the first content house was in the real world, you know, so it is a very, I would say, like a very Gen X thing.

And there's Andy Warhol's the factory.

I actually talked about Eric.

Yeah.

I talked about Eric Neese.

Eric Neese in the 90s was one of the most famous sort of real world cast members that ended up gaining a following.

But it was in the late 90s and it was too early.

There was no one, there was no way for him to capture attention.

I mean, this is, this is the fundamental shift is like.

people would get attention, but there was no follower.

There was nowhere you could like follow him or there was no way for him to kind of directly connect.

So it kind of went away.

Whereas, you know, as I write later in the book, like bachelors and bachelorettes, like when that reality franchise took off, like they became almost, that became like an influencer factory, you know, in a way that real world couldn't, I think, because real world was almost too early.

But, um, but yeah, around the turn of the, you know, the aughts to the 2010s is when you started to see the pivot towards first images and then video.

So

things were more photo-based.

Again, the rise of like Pinterest and Instagram, Facebook, people started, that that was Facebook did that big redesign.

I think it was 2010 when, or maybe it was 2009, they launched Facebook pages and they made your

Facebook profile very visual, very easy to kind of search for photos.

The whole internet became more visually oriented.

And then, or you saw the rise of YouTube and YouTube vloggers and then Vine, which I talk about a lot in my book.

I don't know.

I'm sure Vine was not utopian at all.

It was its own little sort of corporate concern that lived and died.

But Vine feels very special to me.

And

I can frequently be heard exclaiming to my friends, and they were roommates.

Every single time I get in the shower, I think shower time, Adderall, glass of whiskey, diesel jeans.

Do you know that Vine?

No, but that's so great.

That feels like...

That's perfect.

You have to watch that Vine.

It's one of my favorites.

And Vine never stops giving.

Yeah.

Vine ushered in the era of mobile video because before Vine, it's hard to remember.

Instagram did not have any video.

Twitter did not have video.

You know, YouTube was primarily desktop.

YouTube didn't even launch a mobile app until 2011.

And on that mobile app, you couldn't post anything.

It was only for watching videos.

So if you wanted to record and post a video,

there was like no easy way to do that really

until Vine kind of.

mainstreamed it.

And part of the reason it was six seconds is kind of random, but also because like people were like on 3G at the time.

So you couldn't really like record and edit.

You know, you couldn't have a TikTok and Cap Cut back then.

But

it kind of transformed.

And that was the beginning of the whole kind of video revolution.

And I agree.

I mean, look, some of the creators that came out of Vine are like the most obnoxious people on the internet.

But at the same time, I do think that they deserve payment.

And that was sort of the fundamental disagreement between the content creators and the platform was

they were like, why are we making this all for free?

This content is valuable.

And that was the first time that these creators had really gotten together and asserted the value of online content in that way.

Because

internet content was thought of as so secondary and silly.

And Vine was seen as this like frivolous app.

But those creators were like, we're generating a huge amount of engagement.

We need the dollars.

And, you know, it's easier to see it now, but it feels so transparently obvious.

We're like, if there's a social media platform and your creators are driving all of the traffic that's on your platform, like there would be no purpose to being on it if you couldn't see what they were doing.

Why do they not deserve compensation for that?

Exactly.

But the norms weren't there.

Right.

Most content creators back then were very platform-specific because they didn't realize that any of these platforms could go away.

Like none of the platforms had gone away.

So if you were like a big Instagram or you're just like, oh, I'm really big on Instagram or really big on Pinterest or really big on YouTube or whatever, there wasn't this notion of like cross-platform creators in the same way.

And so it wasn't until Vine died in 2016 that you started to see the birth and really 2015 too, because a lot of creators knew it was the writing was on the wall of these multi-platform content creators.

And that happened right as the marketers started to pour a ton of money into the industry in around 2015.

And so that's where the word influencer started to arise because creator at the time was still synonymous with YouTube.

So people wouldn't call themselves creators if they were on other platforms other than YouTube.

So they defined themselves by the platform.

So they would be viner, Instagrammer, you now or whatever, you know.

Once they started to be forced to become multi-platform, they kind of embraced the term influencer because it was platform agnostic.

And it was the preferred term of the marketing industry for content creators.

I mean, influencer marketing has been a thing for decades in the marketing industry.

And it essentially just means like giving money to sort of key opinion leaders in whatever.

realm that you're trying to sway people in, whatever influencers.

And I talk about this notion of connector moms, which is what they called like mom influencers, basically before the internet, before social media.

Influencer is a term that the marketing industry applied to content creators in the mid-2015s because there was no other platform agnostic word.

You started to see people call themselves influencers.

And especially with the rise of Instagram, when a lot of the sponsored content dollars in that era went to Instagram.

So

that's when people started to sort of understand this concept of the Instagram influencer.

And I think because it was a female-dominated industry and this entire content creator industry was built by mostly women, I think that's also why the word influencer has all these negative connotations.

Yeah.

Because people think of, you know, when you say the word influencer, people think of, oh, like narcissistic woman, a beautiful woman.

And it's like, well, what is that woman doing?

She's running her own media company.

Even if she's a lifestyle influencer, she's shooting, editing content, producing.

written contents, writing scripts, you know, negotiating ad deals.

Like she's running her own media company.

companies.

She's a content creator.

You know, within the concept of the influencer, and I think that it is true that like for so many people, like the mental image you get without even summoning it is like a marketably attractive young, probably white woman wearing a straw hat, like on a beach in Greece or something.

You know, that within that idea, there is so much to interrogate.

and talk about.

And one of them is like, well, why is it that our image is the marketably attractive young, thin white woman?

Like, that's by definition ableist and exclusionary.

And it is, but that's because what the marketplace is doing, you know, and this idea of, you know, the irritatingness of,

again, this, and there are so many examples of this, like this type of influencer or other influencers that we can all think of being like, anyone can do what I did.

Just like, you just got to hustle.

You just got to work hard.

And then you too can have this giant house in Utah.

Like, that's extremely toxic, but that's the prosperity gospel.

And that's the sort of model of capitalism that we exhibit as a nation.

You know, so I think that like we, the problems of our culture manifest in influencers, but this is not a category of job that invented these problems.

They're in the most hyper capitalist sort of like hellscape environment.

Like their entire lives are determined by like online metrics that they have to optimize and they can never stop and they can't take a they again have zero labor protections and zero stability and it's, it's a lot.

And yeah, the top people are rich, the 1%, but most content creators can barely make a living.

Hmm.

You know, there was this idea, I guess, by the late 90s, especially the turn of the millennium, that like the American dream had sort of like fallen.

People were sort of starting to realize that like not anyone can make it in America.

And like, there's actually a huge amount of inequality.

And this sort of like, you know, people started to realize this more and more over the past couple of decades, but that the internet has really kind of reinvigorated a lot of that same problematic belief belief structure where it's like, you know, these tech companies sell this idea of like, hustle hard enough.

Anybody can make it.

You know, you too can be an influencer.

Just keep posting.

And obviously it's, you know, that's not true.

But it was true for enough people

that you could believe that somehow.

Yeah.

Same thing with America.

It's like we have a bunch of billionaires, but that doesn't mean that most people are going to end up that way.

But these like few successes are used to prop up this like delusion basically of tech companies sell.

And I don't know, it's a very American career, I guess, to be a content creator.

Like it's very, obviously there's content creators all over the world.

But I think the reason a lot of the industry is skewed so American, one, is because we output our entertainment culture all over the world, but also because like there's not the same sort of hustle culture, I think, in a lot of other places.

Well, that sounds nice.

I don't know.

The Godfather has been sort of a vague motif in this show because I was sort of obsessed with it when we were making the first episodes.

And I watched it again recently.

And like, I really believe that the moral of The Godfather

is stay small, stick to the neighborhood, don't grow for the sake of growth

because then you're going to have to kill people.

And

that feels like something we know, even if we don't want to know it, that like staying at sort of a moderate size and not trying to, you know, grow at a pace where, you know, like what Spotify is doing, where it's like, now they're in books.

Now they're like, we've looked into it and now we're ruining books.

And you're like, oh, that's nice.

It's true.

Because there's always the pressure.

It's like we need more, more, more.

It's also interesting.

I wonder if you would be interested in talking about how Facebook kind of plays into all this because it seems like the story of Facebook is like a thread running through the whole story of the internet for the past 20 years.

Yeah.

And people don't associate Facebook as much with the influencer content creator industry at all.

And I think that's a mistake.

It did teach all of us to post for an audience.

And the shift to the news feed, which happened in the late aughts, when, you know, it used to just be you'd have to like manually go to all everyone's profiles to see what was new.

And suddenly this news feed launched that sort of aggregated people's activities.

And suddenly, like, you just began to inherently post for this audience and assume that what you're posting would be kind of distributed through this like feed environment, which at the time was very sort of new and radical.

Yeah, and I feel like Facebook, you know, while not supporting the rise of say, you know, beauty YouTubers or whatever, that Facebook was important in the rise of being like an alt-right content creator to some extent,

using that term loosely.

Eventually, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think like, eventually like Facebook video gave rise to a lot of people like Dan Bungino and stuff.

But initially, like the Facebook of the 2000s, it was a reaction against MySpace.

Like MySpace had this like fame-driven model of social media that actually is almost identical to TikTok.

Like the way that MySpace was positioning itself in their marketing documents is so similar to what TikTok became, which is really crazy.

But Facebook was this like gateway platform.

It was like, don't worry about getting thousands of friends.

Don't worry about promoting your band.

Like, come here.

We have a cap on how many friends you can have.

I forgot about the friend cap.

Was it like 600 or something like that?

It's been at 5,000 for a while, but I think it started much lower.

Yeah, I'm thinking of it because I never brushed up against it, but I remember being in college, and I might be totally wrong, but I feel like it could have been in the hundreds because they were like, How could you possibly know that many people?

And the notion, like the whole thing with Facebook, too, is that like the social norms were that you, you weren't supposed to add people that you didn't know.

Right.

IRL.

It was more about manifest, taking the offline connections and manifesting them in the online world rather than facilitating homegrown online connection.

And then there came a moment when you didn't have to be in school to be on it.

And I was like,

and I'm, this is so funny to me now.

It's so

So funny, I can't begin to even laugh about it that I was like, why are adults on Facebook?

They're above all this.

This is, this app is for kids.

And now I'm like, oh my God.

Because like Facebook now at this point is like, I, you know, I don't really go on it, but I think of it, you know, not entirely correctly.

But I, I think in many ways, this is what it represents culturally is like the app of paranoid boomers to post like both, you know, racist and also really poorly designed memes about immigration.

Yeah.

The minion memes.

Oh, such a, you can't, you can't use the minions for evil, you guys, ironically, to be fair.

You know, the selfie was also a big moment online where, you know, the first, the, the first backfacing camera, I think it actually was introduced in 2010, but it was still the beginning of the 2010s when you saw this rise of like just people putting themselves online increasingly for an audience, whether it was Facebook, YouTube, Vine, whatever.

More and more people were kind of like, let me put myself online and like post for an audience and see what happens.

There's like this, this video of like hot girls at a baseball game.

They look like college-age girls and they're like all taking selfies together.

There's like five of them.

And it naturally wrote about that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Talk about that.

Yeah.

Was that, yeah, these women were taking selfies at a baseball game and it's hard to explain to people, but that was actually a news cycle.

Like people were so angry at these women for like, you know, taking photos of themselves when they're supposed to be watching sports.

And

every time a celebrity took a selfie was a huge scandal.

Obama took a selfie and it was a huge scandal.

That's right.

It was like, how could he debase himself as president by taking a selfie?

And it's just so stupid.

This is like doing something weird to my brain because I truly had forgotten that this was ever not part of our lives.

Because now, especially the political selfie, everybody has to do that.

And what is it about the selfie that seemed radical to people?

Because it's like trying to get back to that moment.

You're like, well, it's just the camera pointing.

You just rotate something.

The camera is just pointing in a different direction.

Why is that something?

But it feels like it's about the, it's about something else.

It's about control of

an image.

And selfies were primarily normalized by teen girls.

I mean, it was a behavior that teen girls engaged in initially.

Psychology today declared selfies a sign of narcissism and psychopathy.

Honey!

They were blamed for, selfies were blamed for destroying the environment, ruining relationships.

They were called the downfall of society.

I think narcissist is one of the most interestingly misused and overused words of our century.

And

then it feels like we say someone is narcissistic, like if they are interested

in understanding themselves, thinking about themselves, seeing themselves, exploring their own experiences, you know, making themselves sort of a subject within their own art.

And as I'm saying this, again, it's like we don't have to treat this as a social enigma, right?

It feels pretty fucking obvious why that's the case.

And it's that if women are not

stigmatized and socially punished for

being interested in or caring about their own experience, then they might not notice how marginalized they are, you know?

But then it becomes quickly normalized.

And there's never any reckoning or anything, you know, for the people.

We never get revenge for the baseball girls.

Where is their day in court?

Amen.

Yeah.

You know, it was around that time when like these random people would start to blow up.

And it used to be this pathway where like you'd blow up online and then you'd go on Ellen, and that was like the peak of your virality.

And you'd have a moment, and you'd, everyone would clap for you.

And now it's like, I don't even know how you could even keep up.

And we have just, it's, we live in a viral soup, basically.

We do live in a viral soup.

And it feels like, I guess, everything we encounter, not everything, but 70% easily of what we encounter media-wise is people having their viral moment or sort of continuing a career that they have have built off of those moments.

Yeah.

I think a lot of it too came with TikTok, you know, like this sort of algorithmic version of social media where you're just constantly shoved new content.

Can you bring us kind of up to the current moment and sort of, because it feels like really with every passing year, things are changing fairly dramatically at this point.

Yeah.

Well, 2017 was actually a really pivotal year.

You know, Trump was sworn into office.

And that was when people started to really reckon with the internet and be like, wait a minute, maybe the internet's bad.

Maybe these tech conglomerates don't have our best interests at heart.

You know, Facebook was blamed for the rise of Donald Trump.

Logan Paul vlogged a dead body that year.

And it was suddenly people were like, that was also when all the prank, the prank era of YouTube was sort of ascendant and at its peak.

Tide pods were a panic.

And, you know, it's suddenly everyone was like, whoa, wait a minute, the internet is bad and toxic.

And we had a couple years of kind of reckoning with that.

And then the pandemic hit.

And then everyone was just forced kind of heavily online.

We were like, never mind.

I forget, forget all the bad things I said about you.

I, in the pandemic, every week on Sunday, my screen time report would appear.

And it would be like, you spent 11 hours and 29 minutes

on average on your phone last week.

Good job.

And I would just always feel like Julianne Morin Magnolia, just like, I have death.

I have death in my house.

And you call me lady.

I know.

I mean, I feel like all of our screen times went up so heavily and never went back down to baseline.

And also, just like

so much of the world, like, I think that was when everything flipped and the internet became the default reality.

We're like, now

the offline world is more like a stage.

Oh, no, it's true.

I don't like that.

I know, but it is.

It's just how it is.

And I do think that, I don't know,

I think TikTok is obviously the dominant platform now, too.

And TikTok is so centered around nonstop virality and discovery that it's just like, I feel like we're all on a treadmill.

Yeah.

It's it's a lot.

I mean, even Substack now, which was this newsletter platform as I wrote about recently, like pivoting to video and has video features.

And you can clip Substack videos for TikTok now.

And it's just, as a writer,

I hate it.

I hate it.

I hate that every podcast also has to be video.

And I'm so grateful that I don't have to be on camera right now because it's just, there's something.

You should never have to be on camera, Taylor.

It's a violation of your human rights to be forced.

I mean, I'm being dramatic, but I'm kind of serious, right?

That like we shouldn't have to have our faces surveilled for hours and hours to be socially relevant.

I totally agree.

And I also think it's really important for self-expression to have anonymity and to have privacy and to have, and there's so much when you express yourself through video that gets

people are perceiving your age and your gender.

And you're, you know, there's just a lot about you that sort of warps the way that people will listen to what you have to say or take you seriously or whatever.

I mean, I cannot.

get a single I cannot post a single TikTok without somebody commenting on my age.

It's crazy.

And it's, and I don't think men in their 30s get that, by the way.

I think men in their 30s, no one even gives a shit.

They're still considered young.

Whereas a woman in their 30s is like, why are you on the internet?

The one thing that the pandemic did is I do think it forced people to sort of take online labor more seriously and like take the online entertainment ecosystem more seriously and take like internet culture reporting more seriously.

And I don't know, really became a thing.

Yeah.

And I wonder what the future is because I think my ability to sense trends in tech stuff and internet stuff has never been good.

And I really thought Twitter would last forever and it's not looking that way.

It's going down.

Yeah.

But, you know, I used to spend every single night in my bedroom on Tumblr on desktop.

And, you know, I thought that I could never live without Tumblr.

My entire social circle in New York was based around Tumblr.

It was all Tumblr people.

And then it sort of went away.

And I think I just logged off and didn't log back on again.

And that's going to happen with Twitter because we're already seeing use cases of Twitter going elsewhere.

People are scattering elsewhere.

I don't think there's going to be a one-for-one replacement for Twitter, but this is just how tech evolves.

I mean, same thing with Facebook.

Remember when Facebook was so liver, life or death?

Yeah.

It was, you know, you would come on Facebook, you would put your status update, like you lost your phone, you would go on Facebook to say, like, hey, guys, everyone send me your number again or whatever.

God, yeah.

Well, and that was kind of what was great about Facebook in the beginning was that it was sort of like, like, true, a a very functional place where you could keep track of people you actually knew.

Yeah.

The nature of these social platforms is that they're, they're very ephemeral and a lot of them facilitate a type of connection that's relevant at that time and then quickly becomes stale or normalized.

And we move on to the next thing and we're living more and more in the internet world.

And I think that, you know, soon we're not going to have phones.

It's all going to be in our brains or we're going to wear it on our wrists.

We're going to have an Iron Man

desktop helmet or something.

What do you think we've been through?

What are we going through?

You know, zooming out, it feels like it's just hard when you're in the thick of it every day to recognize how much is happening.

And the thing you think of is just the way you communicate with people and learn what's going on.

So much of the internet is just shaped by

people.

And I think humans always have this sort of fundamental desire to connect with others.

And we think of the internet as being shaped by these tech giants.

And every single, almost every single book that's been written about the rise of social media has been told through corporate narratives.

It's the social network sort of version of social media where we have the YouTube book and the Instagram book and the MySpace book and the WeWork book and the whatever, you know, but it's like, that's the way we understand is through these like Silicon Valley men that invent these transformative technologies.

And writing the book made me realize that like these corporate narratives are all complete bullshit.

And these Silicon Valley men, time and time again, kind of never knew what they were doing or what they created.

And it was the users of the products and just people that just shaped culture and shaped history and really had a really outsized effect on these platforms.

And so I think when we think about the tech landscape, there's this tendency to think that we're very like helpless.

And of course, we are all somewhat at the mercy of these tech platforms.

But I think collectively we have a lot more power than we think as users.

And I hope people don't forget that and push for change and push for these platforms to do better.

And it ends up having a real impact and can really transform our online experience, you know, for better or worse.

Yeah, that all of these alleged geniuses have fundamentally misunderstood at the outset what people are going to use this technology for and then continue misunderstanding what people actually use it for, even when they have a lot of evidence in front of them.

Nobody knows how it's going to turn out.

Obviously, things can flip-flop and go so many ways, but it's something we're all creating together.

And I think people hear this a lot.

You know, you hear a lot with like social media of like, you are the product, right?

Like the people are the product.

But it's true in the most basic sort of monetization sense, but it's also true that like, exactly, we are the product.

So like we can shape it.

We, I mean, Silicon Valley is basically just sort of like channeling human connection and the desire for human connection.

And it's not like they've invented some radical new thing.

It's just like, here, let's channel this cultural like norm or like, let's lean into this, but it's really just about people.

And so I wanted to write this sort of like people's history of the internet and social media because I think

I wanted to myth best a lot of the Silicon Valley narratives and also just like give credit to a lot of these like transformational people, which were primarily women, gay people, and people of color, like almost universally who shaped.

so much of the internet and continue to shape so much of the internet and are never really given credit.

Yeah, and certainly not compensated enough on the whole.

You know, it seems like something that has developed that does in a way give me hope is that more and more people, just in order to make a living, have to sell some aspect of themselves and their lives.

Andy Warhol

was,

well, let's not give him too much credit.

The Andy Warhol quote is that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

And we actually passed that era.

And now we're in the future where everyone is famous for a living.

Yeah.

And I don't love that, by the way.

Like, I think a lot of times people conflate like

my coverage with like some endorsement of the current system or the current platform landscape.

And it's not.

I talk a lot in the book about like the downsides of all of this and like how exploitative it is and how dystopian it is and how we're all pressured to sort of commodify ourselves in increasingly invasive ways.

And that could be bad.

But I think there's a lot of good with the technological progress that we've made along with the bad.

And I hope that we can make it better without just throwing the baby out with the bathwater and all living a trad life, you know, where we log off.

You know, if you ask people about the future of social, a lot of them will say like, it's crypto or blockchain.

I don't think that's true.

But I do think that like people want more autonomy over their online experience.

There is a fatigue that people are getting.

The internet has given more people the chance to benefit directly from their labor than any other time in history.

And I really believe that to be true.

And yes, there's, you know, we've obliterated all a lot of the old gatekeepers.

And that's amazing.

I mean, people just, the barrier to entry for so much has been lowered because of the internet in a really positive way.

Of course, I think in a lot of ways, the tech companies are the new gatekeepers in the sense that they control distribution for a lot of people.

But I mean, look, you're seeing, I mean, one big trend especially that is happening is this notion of direct connection where you're seeing a a lot more people building audiences on Patreon and Substack and Discord groups and basically working outside the bounds of algorithms or they'll use algorithms for like maybe some discovery, but they'll funnel people into ways of directly connecting, you know, whether that's building an email list or building a related sort of mass text or mass message or audience.

Like it's direct connection, which is what everyone wants.

It's connection.

God, it is.

Yeah.

And the internet, I think, remains so powerful as a means of offering that.

This conversation has left me feeling like Morgan Freeman at the end of seven, where he's like, so-and-so said, the world is a good place and worth fighting for.

I believe the second part.

That was a terrible Morgan Freeman impression.

But,

you know, that like it is so tempting to like...

theatrically claim to like brush off your hands and be like, I'm done with the internet.

I don't care anymore.

The internet's over.

Leave me alone.

Like I say every day.

But the fact that it is such an unavoidable place for so many people means that we have to fight for it.

Exactly.

Let's collectively fight for it too, because collectively we all have a lot of power and say over the landscape, the internet world that we've all created and we're all sort of collectively creating every day together.

And let's not let it be run by these billionaires that just want to mine us all for profit.

You know, let's take back a little bit more control of our internet spaces and push for better internet.

And the sort of core value of the internet, I think, when a lot of us think back about the promise of the internet, like it is still there.

And we are still so early.

We're so early.

It's barely been two decades.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, we can't, we can't give up on it at this point.

Yeah.

You are Taylor Lorenz.

Your book is extremely online.

I

feel like you're doing exciting stuff all the time.

Is there anything else that that you're up to you want to share with people?

Okay, you can follow me anywhere online, but I'm on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram just at Taylor Lorenz.

I have a newsletter, taylorlorenz.substack.com.

Yeah, please follow me and reach out.

Thank you so much for being extremely online.

You know, we can complain about the internet, but it's the place where we go to find each other and I'm happy to find you there.

I know.

I found you through the internet.

Thank you, Internet.

Thank you for this conversation.

I know you helped.

Thank you.

And that is our episode.

Thank you so much to Taylor Lorenz.

Her book is Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the internet.

Buy it at your local bookseller, check it out from your local library, ask for it as a gift.

Thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and for producing.

Thank you to Carolyn.

Thank you to you for listening.

Keep an eye out for the exciting conclusion of a Christmas Carol on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions.

Take care of yourselves.

We love you.

We're so happy that we are getting through this year together.

We're doing a really great job, and we will see you in a couple of weeks.