Influencers with Taylor Lorenz

“The creatures outside looked from influencer to human, and from human to influencer, and from human to influencer again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online, takes Sarah on a horror- and nostalgia-filled ride through the last twenty years of internet history. Then we try to make sense of what our internet future will be. 

You can find Taylor online here.

This episode was produced by Carolyn Kendrick.

Support You're Wrong About:

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Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good
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Links:

https://www.taylorlorenz.com/
https://www.carolynkendrick.com/
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good

Transcript

Sarah: This conversation has left me feeling like Morgan Freeman at the end of Se7en, 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 You're Wrong 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 Christmas-y month over here over on Patreon and Apple+ 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 was 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 You're 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. 

Taylor: Hi. Thank you for having me. 

Sarah: 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.

Taylor: Yes, it's an 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 kind of told through the lens of the content creator industry. 

Sarah: And 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?

Taylor: It's so funny. 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 “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 yeah, at this point, I think we're all content creators. It's kind of what my book is. One of the thesis of my book is, we all live in this content ecosystem and produce content for platforms, whether intentionally or not. Yeah, I'm a content creator. 

And as I reported recently, it's crazy, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics that charts 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 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 crazy.

Sarah: 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 would love to get just a sharper definition of this term so we can all start 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 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. 

Taylor: As I argue in my book, 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 a lot of it ends up being just women taking selfies and it's not real work. And 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 2010’s 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”, if they were blogging, or “cewebrities”, or “e-lebs”. 

Sarah: 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. 

Taylor: It's not. But it was this way of talking about internet attention in the aughts. And you really saw the concept of content creation and the beginnings of this industry around the turn of the millennium. 

Between the years 1998 and 2003, there was this explosion in blogging software. So you had platforms like Blogger, and WordPress, and others 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 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, essentially, somebody that's running their own independent media company on the back of these. 

Sarah: 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 wasn't always possible. 

Taylor: Yeah, there was no money in the internet. The internet was this sort of fad. There's that famous Katie Couric clip where she's asking what can you do on the World Wide Web or whatever? So the internet prior to social media was just very disjointed.

It was also prior to search becoming a real thing. 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, 2003 and 2004, where you saw blogging. Blogging, I would say, is its own sort of social network, essentially. And a lot of these blogging platforms off, remember, you could have like a blog roll or GeoCities, you could have your little web ring. 

Sarah: I love the web rings. 

Taylor: Yes. And then you saw Friendster and MySpace starting. Obviously, Facebook starts too in 2004. So it was just the beginning of social networking and there was no money in it. The connotation was still that it was for children, like maybe I am, and like weird weirdos in their mom's basement. 

Sarah: I'll tell you an early kind 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. Elise 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, Adrianne Curry. I wish her well. 

And Elise had this big career going off and modeling. She had this really great live journal about it that my friends and I read. It was a personal live journal where she would upload photos. It would be like her backstage, her getting her makeup done, her and her 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 for teenage girls, mostly. And I don't think there was any money in it, but it was something that people did. 

You would have people with a sizable audience on LiveJournal or on Blogspot or something. And maybe it would translate to them being able to tell you about a book they had that was coming out, but it’s so weird to have to explain that there were not ad dollars in it. 

Taylor: And not only that, during those years, we're actually talking about the peak of print media. 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?

Sarah: Like 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. 

And so back to the mommy bloggers. When did we start to hear this phrase? Where do they come from? Tell me of their ways. 

Taylor: People always associate the creator industry, influencer industry with Gen Z, but it was really these older sort of Gen X women or somewhat young women in their twenties and thirties who had young children. A lot of them had been working moms but were now 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. The women's media landscape in the 2000s generally was misogynistic, but the Women's Day, any kind of magazine that talked about pregnancy and stuff, it was like everything is “a woman has to deal with it and just serve your husband” and stuff like that.

I went back for researching my book, and I was like, I can't believe this was published in 2003 because it reads like something from the 60s. And women turned to the internet to post about what motherhood was really like for them and find community. And so they started posting, frankly, very feminist stuff. It was a lot of de-stigmatizing things like struggling to breastfeed, postpartum depression, sometimes hating your husband, 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. 

Sarah: 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?

Taylor: It's hard. And I interned at a fashion magazine in the mid aughts, and I saw it firsthand of just there's a lot of corporate interests at play in corporate media. And corporate media, and I say this as 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 having to wear diapers after you give birth or whatever. They want a lot of sanitized content. We see this struggle online now with women's media companies or brands not wanting to advertise near feminist content.

So it was just a weird media market. And as a journalist, 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, it filters out anybody that's too progressive or too outspoken. Because it's not how you're going to get ahead at whatever women's magazine. And so we just created this environment where most of the media 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 felt so liberating to these women.

Sarah: Yeah. A book that I keep recommending to people as just 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 you have one shot per month to get good circulation. You need an eye-popping cover, you need a mix of material, that in this case covers kind of the high and the low, but it's like putting together an album or at least a mixtape every month. There has to be some sort of coherency and connection between what you're doing and what space are you occupying as a publication. How are you imagining your consumer? What's your view as a publication? All of that. 

And 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 rack magazine, are you going to pitch for an article about recurring unwanted thoughts of horrible things happening to your baby when you're a new mother, and how that's 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 picturable. 

Taylor: 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, get your pre-baby body back. There was so much about the pre baby body.

Sarah: That sounds like somebody you have to track down in the woods, go find the pre- baby body. 

Taylor: It makes sense that people were rebelling against that. And I think the reason these women got such rapid, large audiences so quickly is because they were de-stigmatizing 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. and just tough things that, that were never considered in the public sphere. It was always, these are things that women should deal with privately. Or, your family struggles, or you want to divorce your husband. That's your private business and 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 villainized these women. And the subtext of every article is just like, how dare they talk about themselves, and who decided that they were important. 

Sarah: The need to blame a woman for even things that seem fine, is always interesting.

Taylor: I totally agree. All of these social platforms that sort of prey on that 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.

And I think it's gone off the rails now because everything is so warped by profit and algorithms. Especially back then. I read a lot of live journals, I spent a lot of time in online chat rooms and stuff, and I think it's just the internet has always been a tool for connecting people. That's the whole point of the internet.

Sarah: It’s got the word ‘net’ in it. 

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

Sarah: 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 see. scan them in and upload them slowly onto LiveJournal so people could look at our LiveJournals and wait for each photo to load for one minute and then be like, look at that, it's an arty shot of a girl looking overexposed by the flash. Ooh, she's standing against a wall. 

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, 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. 

Taylor: Yeah, it is bad, but the system before was bad, too. I'm very against the sort of solution of what, like 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, I was a teenager in those years, and those were my high school and college years. A lot of millennials, I think we tend to romanticize it. 

It was isolating. I remember before I found Tumblr, Tumblr was really where I found my community later on. And I remember the first day that I was on Tumblr. I stayed on it until I literally couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. And I was like, oh my God, I feel so less alone. Like I had felt so alone. And it was that experience of finding other people that we didn't have before the internet. You were so defined by your physical reality, and the people around you physically determined if you were cool or not or what you're interested in. It was a lot, it was hard for people. And especially kind of people that were maybe a little bit not as mainstream.

Sarah: I mean, we as a culture, and I personally give the internet a lot of shit, and fairly. But we also have to point out, what does it offer? And it does feel to me to some extent, 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, 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.

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

Sarah: Yeah. And we can really see that. 

Taylor: 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 think we can eliminate the current platform landscape and change things. But logging off was not that great. Like it was fun. LiveJournal, I missed that era. But it was also very lonely.  

Sarah: I don't know. The need to make social connections facelessly. 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, 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 share the parts of themselves that they couldn't share before we had this capacity technologically. And yeah, I appreciate this, this conversation is good. I feel like yeah, we need to give the internet some credit. 

Taylor: 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, but it could.

Sarah: We gotta 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 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.

Taylor: Yeah, let me find. There was this moment in 2004 when Heather Armstrong is one of the most famous mommy bloggers. She put banner ads, not even sponsor 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 gauche 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. 

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

Taylor: 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. Even today, I think it's funny to look back at mommy bloggers because I think when you talk about them today, people think of them in the context of these family YouTube channels. And it was so different. 

Blogging was such a different medium. Like you said, many of these blogs didn't have pictures. Most of them were pseudonymous and what was considered so radical and oversharing. 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? What is this woman saying? She's really outspoken.” And reading it now, you're like 20 years later, it just seems quaint. 

Sarah: Imagine if you could see what it's like to read any news article now, right? We're like, especially on a mobile device, when you're reading an article and for every six inches you can scroll, there's six inches of ad, and it's for the same thing. And often it'll start playing like a video at full volume without you asking it to. So you're like trying to read, just find out what happened in Congress, and it's, “Happy Honda days! If you purchase before…” and you're just like, given this experience of extreme sensory overwhelm, 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 the gradual incursion of ads onto more and more of the content that we see, and this is 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 might lose your sponsorship from tide or whoever.

Taylor: Yeah, it eventually got very corporate really around the 2010s. Instagram launched in 2010, Pinterest launched in 2011. Some of the earliest YouTube channels like ShayCarl were sort of family-oriented channels, but it wasn't until that sort of 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 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 these brand safety concerns. It's, we want to advertise on this great feminist website, but not too feminist.

Sarah: They're, we got to sell things, not feminist enough. It'll make people not buy the things that we need to convince them to buy. 

Taylor: And I talk also just about these women and how they navigated that, and a lot of women just dropped out. Most of those women ended up going into corporate careers or going back to work after their kids were older, or just gave up. They didn't want to pivot to video and pivot to photos and stuff. 

And then you have people like Ree Drummond, Pioneer Woman, who went all in and became big all over the internet, and has a Netflix show and cooking line. And so there are those women that are from that era that are still around today as massive lifestyle influencers.

Sarah: God, it's almost like the Godfather. 

Taylor: These poor women were really hung out to dry. And despite it all, I think really transformed the media landscape. 

Sarah: When do we have the pivot to video era? I'm going to guess this is around 2010? 

Taylor: Yeah, the first content house was in 2009, called The Station, which was about nine or ten YouTubers. They had a big collab channel and housed 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. 

Sarah: So that's so lovely. And arguably the first content house was in the Real World, so it is a very, I would say 

Taylor: And there's Andy Warhol's The Factory. I actually talked about Eric Nies. Eric Nies 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 way for him to capture attention.

This is the fundamental shift is like people would get attention, but there was no follower. There was no way you could follow him or there was no way for him to directly connect. So it went away, whereas, as I write later in the book, like bachelors and bachelorettes, like when that reality franchise took off, they became almost, that became like an influencer factory, in a way that real world couldn't, I think, because real world was almost too early. But yeah, around the turn of 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 Pinterest and Instagram.

Facebook's people started when Facebook did that big redesign. I think it was 2010 or maybe it was 2009, they launched Facebook pages and they made your Facebook profile very visual and very easy to search for photos. The whole internet became more visually oriented and then you saw the rise of YouTube and YouTube vloggers, and then Vine, which I talk about a lot in my book. 

Sarah: I don't know if, 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!”

Taylor: Every single time I get in the shower, I think, “shower time, Adderall, glass of whiskey, diesel jeans.” Do you know that Vine? 

Sarah: No, but that's so great! That feels like, that’s perfect.

Taylor: You have to watch that Vine, it's one of my favorites. 

Sarah: And Vine never stops giving. 

Taylor: 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. 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 no easy way to do that, really. Until Vine kind of mainstream did. And part of the reason that was six seconds is it's random, but also because people were on 3G at the time. So you couldn't really record and edit, you couldn't have a TikTok and CapCut back then. But it transformed, and that was the beginning of the whole kind of video revolution.

And I agree. Look, some of the creators that came out of Vine are the most obnoxious people on the internet. But at the same time, I do think that they deserve payment. And that was 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 frivolous app. But those creators were like, we're generating a huge amount of engagement, we need the dollars.

Sarah: And 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, 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?

Taylor: Exactly. But the norms weren't there. Most content creators back then were very platform specific, because they didn't realize that any of these platforms could go away. None of the platforms had gone away. So if you were like a big Instagrammer, 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 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 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 around 2015. 

And so that's where the word ‘influencers’ 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 define themselves by the platform. So they would be Viner, Instagrammer, YouNower, whatever. Once they started to be forced to become multi-platform, they embraced the term ‘influencer’ because it was platform agnostic and it was the preferred term of the marketing industry for content creators. 

Influencer marketing has been a thing for decades in the marketing industry, and it essentially just means like giving money to 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 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. That's when people started to 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.

Because when you say the word ‘influencer’, people think of narcissistic woman, a beautiful woman. And 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 content, writing scripts, negotiating ad deals. She's running her own media company. She's a content creator. 

Sarah: Within the concept of the influencer, and I think that it is true that for so many people the mental image you get without even summoning it, is a marketably attractive,, young probably white woman wearing a straw hat 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, why is that our image is the marketably attractive, young, thin, white women that's by definition ableist and exclusionary? And it is but that's because what the marketplace is doing. 

And this idea of the irritating-ness of again, and there's 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, you just got to hustle, you just got to work hard, and then you too can have this giant house in Utah 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. 

So I think that the problems of our culture manifest in influencers, but this is not a category of job that invented these problems.

Taylor: They're in the most hyper capitalist hellscape environment, like their entire lives are determined by like online metrics that they have to optimize, and they can never stop. And they again, have zero labor protections and zero stability. And it's a lot. And yeah, the top people are rich, the 1%, but most content creators can barely make a living.

There was this idea by the late 90s, especially the turn of the millennium, that the American dream had sort of fallen. People were starting to realize that not anyone can make it in America, and there's actually a huge amount of inequality. And people started to realize this more and more over the past couple of decades, but that the internet has really reinvigorated a lot of that same problematic belief structure. Where these tech companies saw this idea of hustle hard enough, anybody can make it, you too can be an influencer, just keep posting. And obviously, that's not true.

Sarah: But it was true for enough people that you could believe that somehow. 

Taylor: 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 few successes are used to prop up this delusion, basically, of tech companies sell and I don't know, it's a very American career, I guess, to be a content creator. 

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 there's not the same sort of hustle culture, I think, in a lot of other places.

Sarah: That sounds nice. I don't know. The Godfather has been a vague motif in this show because I was obsessed with it when we were making the first episodes. And I watched it again recently, and 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 staying at a moderate size and not trying to grow at a pace where 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.

Taylor: It's true, because there's always the pressure. It's like we need more, more, more.

Sarah: It's also interesting. I wonder if you would be interested in talking about how Facebook 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.

Taylor: 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 newsfeed, which happened in the late aughts. When 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 newsfeed launch that sort of aggregated people's activities and suddenly you just began to inherently post for this audience and assume that what you're posting would be distributed through this feed environment, which at the time was very sort of new and radical.

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like Facebook, while not supporting the rise of say beauty YouTubers or whatever, that Facebook was important in the rise of being an alt right content creator to some extent, using that term loosely. 

Taylor: Eventually, yeah. I think eventually Facebook video gave rise to a lot of people like Dan Bongino and stuff. But initially, the Facebook of the 2000s was a reaction against MySpace. 

MySpace had this fame driven model of social media that actually is almost identical to TikTok. 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 gateway platform. It was like, don't worry about getting thousands of friends. Don't worry about promoting your band. Come here. We have a cap on how many friends you can have. 

Sarah: I forgot about the friend cap. Was it like 600 or something like that? 

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

Sarah: 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? 

Taylor: And the notion, like the whole thing with Facebook too, is that the social norms were that you weren't supposed to add people that you didn't know IRL. It was more about manifest, taking the offline connections and manifesting them in the. online world rather than facilitating homegrown online connection.

Sarah: 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 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 app is for kids. And now I'm like, oh, my God. Because Facebook now at this point is like - I don't really go on it - but I think of it not entirely correctly. But I think, in many ways, this is what it represents culturally is the app of paranoid boomers to post both racist and also really poorly designed memes about immigration.

Taylor: Yeah, the minion memes. 

Sarah: Oh, you can't use the minions for evil, you guys. Ironically, to be fair. 

Taylor: The selfie was also a big moment online where the first back facing camera, I think it actually was introduced in 2010, but it was still the beginning of the 2010s when you saw this rise of 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 post for an audience and see what happens. 

Sarah: There's this video of hot girls at a baseball game. They look like college age girls and they're all taking selfies together. There's five of them.

Taylor: I actually wrote about that.

Sarah: Okay. Yeah. Talk about that. 

Taylor: 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. People were angry at these women for 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. It was like, how could he debase himself as President by taking a selfie? And it's just so stupid. 

Sarah: This is 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 it's just the camera pointing. It's you just rotate something. The camera is just pointing in a different direction, why is that something? But it feels like it's about something else.

Taylor: It's about control of an image. And selfies were primarily normalized by teen girls. It was a behavior that teen girls engaged in initially. Psychology Today declared selfies a sign of narcissism and psychopathy, honey. Selfies were blamed for destroying the environment, ruining relationships, they were called the downfall of society.

Sarah: I think ‘narcissist’ is one of the most interestingly misused and overused words of our sanctuary. And then it feels like we say someone is narcissistic, if they're interested in understanding themselves, thinking about themselves, seeing themselves, exploring their own experiences, making themselves a subject within their own art.

And as I'm saying this, again, we don't have to treat this as a social enigma, right? It feels pretty fucking obvious why that's the case. And 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. 

Taylor: But then it becomes quickly normalized, and there's never any reckoning or anything, for the people.

Sarah: We never get revenge for the baseball girls. Where is their day in court? Amen. 

Taylor: Yeah. It was around that time when these random people would start to blow up. And it used to be this pathway where you'd blow up online and then you go on Ellen, and that was the peak of your virality. And you'd have a moment, and everyone would clap for you. And now it's, I don't even know how you could even keep up. And we live in a viral soup, basically. 

Sarah: We do live in a viral soup. And it feels like just everything we encounter, not everything, but 70% easily of what we encounter media wise, is people having their viral moment or continuing a career that they have built off of those moments.

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

Sarah: Can you bring us up to the current moment? Because it feels like really with every passing year, things are changing fairly dramatically at this point.

Taylor: Yeah. 2017 was actually a really pivotal year. 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. 

Facebook was blamed for the rise of Donald Trump. Logan Paul vlogged a dead body that year. And suddenly people were like, that was also when all the prank era of YouTube was ascendant and at its peak, and Tide pods were a panic. And suddenly everyone was like, whoa, wait a minute, the internet is bad and toxic. And we had a couple years of reckoning with that. And then the pandemic hit, and then everyone was just forced heavily online. 

Sarah: We were like, never mind, I forget all the bad things I said about you. 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 Moore in Magnolia. Just, I have death. I have death in my house, and you call me lady. 

Taylor: I know. I feel like all of our screen times went up so heavily and never went back down to baseline. And also, just so much of the world, I think. That was when everything flipped and the internet became the default reality, where now the offline world is more like a stage.

Sarah: Oh no, it's true. I don't like that. 

Taylor: 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 I feel like we're all on a treadmill. It's a lot. 

Even Substack now, which was this newsletter platform I wrote about recently, like pivoting to video and has video features. And you can clip Substack videos for TikTok now. And 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 there's just something that you should never have to be on camera.

Sarah: Taylor, that's a violation of your human rights to be forced. I'm being dramatic, but I'm serious, right? That we shouldn't have to have our faces surveilled for hours and hours to be socially relevant.

Taylor: I totally agree. And I also think it's really important for self-expression to have anonymity and to have privacy. And there's so much when you express yourself through video that gets, people are perceiving your age and your gender and your… 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 cannot post a single TikTok without somebody commenting on my age. It's crazy. And I don't think men in their thirties get that, by the way. I think men in their thirties, no one even gives a shit. They're still considered young. Whereas a woman in their thirties is like, why are you on the internet?

The one thing that the pandemic did is I do think it forced people to take online labor more seriously, and take the online entertainment ecosystem more seriously, and take internet culture reporting more seriously, and I don't know really became a thing. 

Sarah: 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. 

Taylor: It's going down. I used to spend every single night in my bedroom on Tumblr on desktop, and I thought that I could never live without Tumblr. My entire social circle in New York was based around Tumblr. It was all of Tumblr people and then it 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.

Same thing with Facebook. Remember when Facebook was so life or death? You would come on Facebook, you would put your status update, like you lost your phone. You would go on Facebook to say, “Hey guys, everyone send me your number again “or whatever. God. 

Sarah: Yeah. That was what was great about Facebook in the beginning was that it was a very functional place where you could keep track of people you actually knew.

Taylor: Yeah. The nature of these social platforms is that 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 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, or we're going to have an Iron Man desktop helmet or something.

Sarah: What do you think we've been through? What are we going through? 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.

Taylor: 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 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 whatever. And that's the way we understand is through these Silicon Valley men that invent these transformative technologies. And writing the book made me realize that these corporate narratives are all complete bullshit.

And these Silicon Valley men, time and time again, never knew what they were doing or what they created. And it was the users of the products and just people that shaped culture and shaped history and 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 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, for better or worse.

Sarah: 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. 

Taylor: 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 hear a lot with social media of you are the product, right? The people are the product. But it's true in the most basic sort of monetization sense, but it's also true that exactly, we are the product so like we can shape it. 

We, Silicon Valley is basically just channeling human connection and the desire for human connection. And it's not like they've invented some radical new thing. It's just, “Here, let's channel this cultural norm” or “Let's lean into this”. But it's really just about people. 

And so I wanted to write this sort of people's history of the internet and social media because I think I wanted to myth bust a lot of the Silicon Valley narratives. And also just give credit to a lot of these transformational people - which were primarily women, gay people, and people of color - almost universally who shaped so much of the internet and continue to shape so much of the internet and are never really given credit. 

Sarah: Yeah. And certainly not compensated enough on the whole. 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. 

Taylor: Yeah. And I don't love that, by the way. I think a lot of people conflate my coverage with some endorsement of the current system or the current platform landscape. And it’s not. I talk a lot in the book about the downsides of all of this and how exploitative it is and how dystopian it is, and how we're all pressured to commodify ourselves in increasingly invasive ways. And that can 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, where we log off. 

If you ask people about the future of social, a lot of them will say 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, we've obliterated, a lot of the old gatekeepers, and that's amazing. 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 look, you're seeing one big trend, especially, that is happening is this notion of direct connection. Where you're seeing 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 maybe some discovery, but they'll funnel people into ways of directly connecting. Whether that's building an email list or building a weighted sort of mass text or mass message your audience. It's direct connection, which is what everyone wants 

Sarah: 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 Se7en 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 it is so tempting to theatrically claim to 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. 

Taylor: Exactly. Let's collectively fight for it, too. Because collectively we all have a lot of power and say over the landscape of the internet world that we've all created, and we're all 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. 

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, it is still there, and we are still so early. We're so early. It's barely been two decades. 

Sarah: God, that's true. Yeah. 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 you're up to you want to share with people?

Taylor: 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. Please follow me and reach out. 

Sarah: Thank you so much for being extremely online. 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.

Taylor: I know. I found you through the internet. 

Sarah: Thank you internet, for this conversation. I know you helped. 

Taylor: Thank you.

Sarah: 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+ subscriptions. Take care of yourselves. We love you. We're so happy that we are getting through this year together. You're doing a really great job. And we will see you in a couple of weeks.