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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

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Hello, Endless Thread friends.

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Got something special for you. Last

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week we told you about NPC

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streamers, people who are making bank

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on TikTok and elsewhere by acting

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like non-playable characters from video games,

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which is to say doing

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the same things over and over and over

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again. And that's what

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Endless Thread is all about. Not

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doing the same thing over and over

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and over again, but looking at the

0:38

experience of the internet. What

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people are making and how we're all interacting

0:43

with them. Because that's

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what makes the internet interesting, right?

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It's us, the users, not the

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billionaires in Silicon Valley who get

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all the credit for building this

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technology. Although lately they've had some

0:55

interesting drama too, but that's another

0:57

episode. That idea that

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the story of the world online is

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as significant, maybe more significant when you

1:04

tell it from the lens of the

1:06

users and creators rather than the CEOs,

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is at the crux of a

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new book by Taylor Lorenz, Extremely

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Online, the untold story of fame,

1:16

influence, and power on the internet.

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Taylor is a tech columnist for the Washington Post, as you

1:21

heard in our last episode. And after

1:23

we talked with her about how

1:25

NPC talk fits into the cultural

1:27

fabric of the internet, we

1:29

also had a conversation about her new book

1:32

and who holds the power when it comes

1:34

to social media. So

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here's a bonus conversation with

1:38

Taylor Lorenz. Enjoy. Taylor

1:52

Lorenz, thank you so much for talking with us.

1:55

Thank you so much for having me. So you're

1:57

definitely not the first person to write

1:59

a book. book about social media giants

2:01

and how they came to be. But your

2:03

book is different because you're calling this a

2:05

social history of the internet. What were you

2:08

hoping to capture? Well, I really

2:10

wanted to tell this sort of other side of

2:12

social media history because I think it's so underwritten.

2:14

And for the majority of the rise

2:17

of social media, there weren't reporters covering

2:19

it. It's kind of crazy to describe

2:21

how small this beat remains. At

2:23

least in 2020, there were more reporters covering

2:25

Facebook alone as a company than all of

2:28

internet culture. Yeah, I feel like you've been

2:30

fighting for the legitimacy of this story for

2:32

a really long time. It's

2:35

like pushing the boulder up the hill over and over

2:37

again. And, you know, it takes a while. And, you

2:39

know, I think, again, it's like there's just newspapers,

2:42

traditional media have been notoriously

2:44

blind to these shifts and refused to adapt to

2:46

them. So I really wanted to take a look

2:48

back and be like, wait, let's

2:50

look at some major moments and let's look at

2:52

how this industry emerged truly, because

2:54

I think it's so different than this

2:56

narrative that Silicon Valley continues to try

2:58

to shove down people's throats.

3:01

Most people think of the rise of social

3:03

media as dominated by these like Silicon Valley

3:06

men that really saw the future before anyone

3:08

else. And geniuses. Yeah,

3:10

totally. Brilliant.

3:12

Yeah. That's not true, actually, as

3:14

my book shows, many times they

3:16

had absolutely no idea what they

3:18

were doing or they were sort

3:20

of resentful of, you know, rolling

3:23

out features that ended up saving them or

3:25

they were sort of saved by specific communities

3:27

that adopted their products. Social

3:29

products aren't like other tech products in the sense

3:32

that like the user base is the product. So

3:34

the users have a massive amount

3:36

of effect over the success of a product because

3:39

the product at the end of the day is ultimately the

3:41

social network that a platform itself

3:43

cultivates. If the platform is free, you are

3:46

the product. Yeah. But also like

3:48

what is the value of Facebook or

3:50

Instagram or Twitter? It's the people on

3:52

it. I mean, there's a million Twitter

3:54

clones as we've seen now, but because

3:56

they haven't replicated that network of people

3:58

on it, there's no value. weird

6:00

stuff that happens now, like, none of

6:02

it was like, financialized, I guess. Which

6:05

ultimately ended up leading to that downfall,

6:07

but it was just sort

6:09

of pure creative expression, and I

6:12

think the six-second restraint just allowed people

6:14

to create this funny, bite-sized

6:16

content in a way that just doesn't exist

6:18

now. Can you give me some favorites? Okay,

6:21

my favorite vine that I am not kidding

6:23

I think about every single day, is

6:26

every single time I step into the shower,

6:28

I think of the vine

6:30

that's shower time, Adderall, glass of whiskey, diesel

6:32

jeans. Shower

6:35

time, Adderall, a glass of

6:38

whiskey, and diesel jeans.

6:40

I think about it every day. The

6:43

one that I think about

6:46

relatively frequently is the shopping

6:48

cart full of ducks. Oh

6:50

yeah. You remember that one? Oh my God,

6:52

yes. And

6:54

then also, I mean, Batman dad is

6:56

like pretty good, but there's

6:58

another one that I remember of like, it's

7:01

like just a raccoon stealing dog food,

7:03

I think. And it's like,

7:05

you've been hit by, you've been struck by,

7:07

the smooth criminals. Just

7:11

like the combination of music and video. And

7:14

I think interestingly to me, TikTok seems like

7:16

the most connected to Vine of any new

7:18

platform. Do you feel like that? Yes,

7:21

TikTok is very much the spiritual successor to

7:23

Vine. And I actually talk about in my

7:26

book, after Vine shut down, where the

7:28

different talent from the platform went. First

7:30

they went to Facebook video actually, and

7:32

then they were sort of

7:34

wooed over to YouTube. But a lot of the

7:37

young people that were Vine users, and maybe not

7:39

like, you know, the Logan Pauls, biggest content creators

7:41

of the world, they went to

7:43

Musically. And they adapted Musically, and started using

7:45

Musically for mobile video editing. A lot of

7:48

those like young teen, especially

7:50

teen female audience. In the

7:52

book you put social media into two camps, right?

7:54

Entertainment model and Facebook model. Can you talk a

7:56

little bit more about that, and how those camps

7:59

have evolved over time? Yes. In

8:01

the beginning, there was this entertainment-driven model

8:03

of social media, which was people using

8:05

it for fame and attention and to

8:07

build audiences. This was very much the

8:10

MySpace model. Think of people like Tila

8:12

Tequila, who was a big content creator

8:14

back then. Oh my God. I forgot

8:16

about Tila Tequila. Yes. Okay.

8:19

She went off the rails, unfortunately. Yeah,

8:21

that story in some ways. Yeah. But also

8:23

bands and models got attention

8:25

through MySpace. But it was

8:27

really too early for that. I mean, I talk about

8:29

in the book this Facebook model of social media, which

8:31

is all about a walled garden. Facebook

8:33

caps your friends list at 5,000 people, because

8:37

they didn't want people using it

8:39

for fame. It was more about

8:41

manifesting your IRL connections on the

8:43

Internet through this highly curated experience.

8:45

The Facebook model went out temporarily

8:47

because there needed to be this

8:49

bridge almost that got everybody online.

8:52

But ultimately, the entertainment model of social

8:54

media, I would argue, has one where

8:56

we have these private spaces for group

8:58

chats and direct messaging and maybe Snapchat

9:00

and things like that. And then you

9:02

have the public facing side of things,

9:04

which is TikTok, basically. And if you

9:06

go back and read MySpace's marketing materials

9:08

and compare it to how TikTok markets

9:10

itself today, they're shockingly similar. I

9:12

wonder how you view the overall

9:15

evolution of these two models and

9:21

how you would grade them. How

9:24

is each model doing? Well, I

9:26

do think that both have problems. The Facebook

9:29

model really didn't allow for discovery. So it's

9:31

like once you add all the people you

9:33

know, IRL, probably not

9:35

going to add that many more people. So

9:38

I think that's why we see Facebook use

9:40

kind of atrophying, especially in the US.

9:43

Because people now accept the Internet as kind of

9:45

the default reality. And I think a lot of

9:47

people want to discover interesting people online and connect

9:49

with people online, even if they're not someone that's

9:52

in their sort of immediate area. The

9:54

entertainment model of social media, I would say, struggles

9:57

because I think without those tighter

9:59

social bodies. It's hard to like

10:01

keep people coming back. It can't just be

10:03

like a Portable Netflix

10:05

you need to have some sort of parasocial

10:07

relationship with the people that you are

10:09

following and connecting with I think that's why

10:12

tiktok has sort of recently been pushing like friend connections

10:14

pushing you to add people in your contact We

10:16

want you to have those deeper connections Speaking

10:25

of coming back we'll have more time

10:27

with Taylor including how mommy bloggers invented

10:29

the influencer As

10:44

you lay it out in the book where

10:46

does the creator economy really start? Yeah,

10:49

the creator economy that we know today did

10:52

not start with mr. Beast it

10:54

actually started It

10:58

started a couple decades ago and I talked

11:01

about it this in the book It really

11:03

started with the rise of mommy bloggers in

11:05

the early aughts and this was this generation

11:07

of moms primarily Gen X bombs that Really

11:10

felt like women's media was not resonating with

11:12

them in the late 90s and early aughts

11:15

And so they started to set up blogs and

11:17

six ways to make your husband happy

11:19

wasn't working for them. Yeah, you know

11:21

Shocking I went back for this book

11:24

and read a lot of women's media at the time.

11:26

It's actually crazy It sounds like stuff that was from

11:28

I would imagine the 1960s and it's

11:30

like, you know 2002

11:32

it's like a lot about like

11:34

getting your pre-baby body back Oh my god,

11:37

and pretty much nothing about you know, the

11:39

hard parts of pregnancy And so what these

11:41

mothers really did is break down barriers and

11:43

start talking about things like Postpartum

11:46

depression or struggling to breastfeed or

11:48

not always loving your husband so they

11:51

were able to just generate massive

11:53

amounts of engagement on the internet and They

11:56

were the first to kind of build personal brands

11:58

on the internet and then much monetize those

12:00

brands at scale. How do you

12:02

think we could build a more

12:04

equitable and sort of powerful creator

12:06

economy and tech industry, one that

12:08

centers creators over platform builders? Yeah.

12:11

Well, the first thing is, I think,

12:13

to sort of take this content creator

12:15

industry seriously and recognize it as labor

12:18

and cover it as a labor

12:20

story, which I think it hasn't

12:22

been traditionally because this work is

12:24

still so dismissed. People still think

12:26

influencing is mostly just like women

12:28

taking selfies online. It's

12:30

this trivialization of women's work

12:32

and of a very

12:35

female-dominated industry. I mean, women built

12:37

the creator economy. They're never credited

12:39

with it. They never get the

12:41

respect they deserve. If you look at

12:43

the most highly-paged content creators, it's almost

12:45

all men. And not

12:47

only is it all men, it's mostly white

12:49

men. It's almost no people of color. LGBTQ

12:52

people also are sort of... They

12:55

pioneered this industry and have largely

12:57

been pushed out of certain areas of it.

13:00

So... They're kept out,

13:02

yeah. Yeah. Or they're demonetized. They

13:04

have their channels demonetized. It's harder for them to grow. These

13:07

creators struggle a lot. We need to take

13:09

their work seriously in order to cover it

13:11

critically and to push back on these platforms.

13:14

And obviously, the platforms need 10 times

13:16

more accountability for what they do. It's

13:20

ridiculous the amount of power that they

13:22

have. Are there platforms that you feel like

13:24

do have, I don't know, flashes of the

13:26

kind of world that you would like to

13:28

see or that we should want to see

13:30

when it comes to creators and creating online?

13:32

Unfortunately, our social tech landscape right

13:34

now is dominated by Facebook, really,

13:38

Meta, Google, and now TikTok. And

13:40

I think it's pretty notable that

13:42

the only company that could even

13:45

remotely compete with Meta and Google

13:48

is this multi-billion dollar Chinese

13:50

tech company, ByteDance. TikTok. They

13:53

could spend a billion dollars in 2019 alone

13:56

for their app to break into the market. There's

13:58

no way for these smaller... apps that

14:01

are more responsible to compete and to

14:03

grow audiences at the scale that meta

14:05

and Google have because they have such

14:07

intense lobbying and they squash

14:09

the competition so effectively. I

14:12

think something like Snapchat has always

14:14

been really interesting and more responsive

14:16

and really listened to users and actually ended

14:18

up helping at least content creators monetize but they're

14:20

never able to scale because Facebook cut them off

14:23

at the knees. Well, it's interesting too,

14:25

the examples that you give in

14:27

some ways are not state-sponsored necessarily

14:29

but state-supported both in the US

14:31

and in China. I think it's

14:33

arguable that all of those big

14:35

companies have in

14:37

the past received a lot of support

14:39

from the states that they were

14:42

founded in or exist in. Well,

14:45

I mean, musically was founded in

14:47

America but yes, absolutely. I think

14:49

Facebook and Google are so tightly tied

14:52

in Congress, so many people in Congress

14:54

quite literally have stock and they

14:56

want these companies to succeed and they

14:58

refuse to oversight. I mean, it's very

15:01

anti-competitive and yeah, now of course, look

15:03

at them freak out about TikTok not

15:05

because there's any inherent problem with TikTok

15:08

really. They pretend that it's about the

15:10

Chinese ownership. Really it's about

15:12

questioning Facebook and Google's supremacy in

15:14

this country. How do you think about some

15:17

of the ways in which

15:19

people have questioned how TikTok

15:21

treats LGBTQ creators, for instance?

15:25

The same as YouTube. I mean,

15:27

look at YouTube notoriously deep platformed

15:29

LGBTQ creators restricts their reach, says

15:32

that their content isn't

15:34

family-friendly, community-friendly enough. That's

15:36

the same thing. The people that are dealing with

15:38

these issues are dealing with them across platforms. It's

15:41

not like TikTok is uniquely censoring LGBTQ people.

15:43

I mean, same thing with Twitch and all

15:45

these platforms. It's very hard for people because

15:48

they get hate campaigns. Same thing for women,

15:50

same thing for people of color. All

15:52

of these marginalized groups struggle on these social

15:55

platforms because their content is deemed not

15:57

brand safe. They get mass reported. Nobody

16:00

cares about their struggles on YouTube or

16:02

Instagram, seemingly. They care about making TikTok

16:04

the villain because it's easier to make

16:07

TikTok the villain than deal with the

16:09

systemic issues inherent in our tech landscape.

16:11

When we talk about content creation, there's

16:14

this idea of democratized access to the

16:16

internet and opening up ways to build

16:18

a career. But there's also the idea

16:20

of like self obsession of what, you

16:22

know, effect personal branding has had on

16:25

Gen Zers and younger. How

16:27

do you think we as people are

16:29

changing as a result of that? Yeah,

16:32

I talk about this in the book, but

16:35

I think that this whole social internet has

16:37

pressured all of us to commodify ourselves and

16:39

our lives in sort of increasingly invasive ways.

16:42

And I think that that ultimately can

16:44

be very negative because you start to view

16:47

yourself as a brand. It's sort of

16:50

like the natural end point of capitalism

16:52

is sort of like commodification. Wave stage

16:54

capitalism is, yeah, sorry. Yeah, it's

16:56

just like commodifying every single aspect of your

16:58

life and personality. And it's,

17:01

it's dark, but a lot of people sort of

17:03

turn to the internet because there is no stability.

17:05

We have absolutely no social safety

17:07

net in this country. People don't trust

17:09

our economic system. They know very well

17:11

that it doesn't pay to

17:13

be loyal to any kind of company. They're going to lay

17:15

you off tomorrow. You know, the system that

17:18

we live under is ruthless. And so I think

17:20

people think, well, if I have a lot

17:22

of followers, I mean, I would talk to a lot of kids about

17:24

why they want to become influencers. And

17:26

it's stability. It's not fame. It's stability.

17:29

They feel like basically if

17:31

they have a level of fame because of

17:33

the way America treats fame, that they'll somehow

17:35

be okay in life. You know, if they

17:37

get sick or their family needs help, they'll

17:39

have thousands of fans to back their GoFundMe

17:42

or help them out. Or, you know,

17:44

if something happens to them, like they get

17:46

abused by the police, like they will have

17:48

an audience and so they will inherently be

17:51

treated differently. That's very dark. It's like people

17:53

trying to build a life raft basically in

17:55

this like late capitalist hellscape. You know, it's

17:59

depressing. And that

18:01

doesn't mean that it's not also liberatory

18:03

in really amazing ways. A lot of

18:05

people have built these incredible independent media

18:07

businesses that are wonderful and serve a

18:09

real need, but a lot

18:12

of it's really... I don't know.

18:16

It's hard to stick the landing on something that... It's

18:19

mostly dark and dystopian. Let's

18:22

be real. As you're talking about this

18:25

part of it, I'm remembering this sort

18:27

of joke that everybody was making of

18:29

corporations or people too after the

18:32

Supreme Court ruling. And now you're describing

18:34

the other side of the coin, which

18:36

is people or corporations too. Exactly.

18:39

Which is really interesting. It's

18:43

really just all of America's

18:45

becoming just three corporations in a trench coat

18:47

or all of the internet, I guess. Perfect.

18:50

Great job, everyone. We can all go

18:52

home now. Perfect. Well done.

18:54

Taylor, Lorenz, thank you so much for talking with us and

18:57

good luck with the book club. Thank you so

18:59

much. Thank you so much for having me. All

19:06

right. This bonus Endless Thread conversation

19:08

was produced by Grace Hatter and

19:10

Dean Russell. We will be

19:13

back on Friday, baby.