Because The Internet: A Conversation with Taylor Lorenz
Something is deeply wrong on the internet. I talked to Taylor Lorenz about her new book Extremely Online to see what we can do about it.
The following is an edited hour-long conversation/interview, often para- or re-phrased for readability, between me and Taylor Lorenz, in which we talk about online harassment; what to do about the problems of the internet, monopoly capitalism, Elon Musk, the brutality of the mainstream media, and the early days of the burgeoning Internet as a “scene.” There will be an audio version of this edited podcast-style available hopefully sometime soon. Lucky for you it already reads like a conversation, so you should be able to at least imagine it for now.
Taylor Lorenz is a reporter for the Washington Post and has previously been a tech reporter for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider, among others. She’s largely known for covering Internet culture, and is relatedly also a very funny meme page admin. Her new and first book, Extremely Online: The Untold History of Fame, Power, and Influence on the Internet is out tomorrow, October 3rd through Simon & Schuster. As two meme page admins that met via being Extremely Online, I thought it would be fun to pick her brain about this terminal condition so many of us seem to share. I was right.
The following picks up after some inane opening chatter which you may be lucky enough to hear one day. For now, enjoy.
Me: So, when did your relationship with being very online begin?
Taylor: Well, like a lot of millennials I graduated directly into the great recession, the great financial crisis. So, I graduated and the economy fell apart. I didn't have any real employment prospects. I had done all these weird fashion internships but I didn't really want to work in fashion, so I didn't know what to do. And I was working all these shitty temp jobs; I was working retail food service; I was working at a call center. And then one of the girls at my temp jobs introduced me to Tumblr. This is 2009.
Me: Right.
Taylor: And it just changed my life. At this one temp job that I had we had two people in a cubicle, like me and this girl Kelly, we're sharing one cubicle directly next to each other. And it was so weird. She's also a writer, and she was just like on Tumblr all day, because we had a lot of downtime, because we were just basically just scheduling people's lunch orders and doing expense reports. So, she was like “oh hey Tumblr is cool, you should go on here.”
And growing up I, like a lot of people, had AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). And you know, I would read like GeoCities or whatever, and obviously I had Facebook in college. But I wasn't really on the broader internet. I talk about this in my book, but there was this era of social media where Facebook was still very much about your IRL (In Real Life) friends, like about finding people in your dorm. And so it wasn't until Tumblr that I got exposed to this broader internet.
I was addicted to Tumblr immediately. I remember setting up an account and being on it for like 16 hours a day, every single day. I was obsessed with Tumblr.
Because at the time The New York Times and all these other places were writing just the dumbest shit alive about the internet. And I was like “okay, I'm gonna write about the internet from the perspective of somebody that actually uses the internet.”
And I had so many Tumblrs. There was this era of what were called single servings Tumblrs, and they were basically like theme accounts. Like if you saw something funny, you would just make a Tumblr about it. It would be like, “girls on the L train” or like “fuckyeahcupcakes,” that was a famous one. I just got obsessed with making them and quickly realized I was good at getting followers, so I just sort of became this Tumblr person.
And then I started to get invited to all these Tumblr parties. This was a time when blogging was really ascendant. So, I became a blogger that people knew, media people started following me and I started to get attention on the internet. And I started to have people following me. And I was like ‘Oh, I should write about this.” Because at the time The New York Times and all these other places were writing just the dumbest shit alive about the internet. And I was like “okay, I'm gonna write about the internet from the perspective of somebody that actually uses the internet.”
And so that's when I started in 2009 as a blogger, I wrote for a ton of small blogs. Then I started to write for digital media companies, and from there I worked for bigger and bigger more mainstream places. And now I work in mainstream media, which is so funny because for like seven years of my career I was just shitting on mainstream media every day, and now I work in it.
Me: I think there's probably room to do both, right?
Taylor: Totally. I still don't love mainstream media. But it's, you know, there's not a whole lot of “middle-ground” media outlets left. When I was coming up there was all of this venture capital money pouring into digital media. You had the mass expansion of sites like BuzzFeed and Mashable and Vox. Or the site that I wrote for a lot, Mic.com, which was the site that was supposed to be like “for millennials by millennials,” covering stuff that millennials ostensibly cared about.
But all of those places were the only places that would let me write about things like Jake Paul, Vine, Vine Star stuff, etc. For instance, I broke all this news about 1600 Vine and just like internet stuff and “content,” the content creator world, which at the time was very associated with millennials. Now it's really weird, I think that because of TikTok, people associate that “content creator” world with Gen Z, but it wasn’t that way for most of my time that I've been writing about it.
Me: And to clarify this was in 2009 after you had graduated college?
Taylor: Yeah, college.
Me: And was this in LA?
Taylor: No, so I graduated, I went to University of Colorado for most of college, but then I ended up transferring to Hobart and William Smith in upstate New York. I graduated and I moved directly to New York City. I graduated on a Sunday, and I moved to New York City on Monday morning.
Me: Oh, wow, Jesus.
Taylor: Yeah, I was very much like “get me to New York.” And I was literally living in a walk-in closet. My friends and I got a one-bedroom apartment, but it had a really big walk-in closet. There were three of us living in the one-bedroom. You know, that's how you do it in New York. I wanted to move like a lot of young people, and I just wanted to be in New York City. I'm actually from New York City originally, my whole family's there.
Me: Ahh okay.
Taylor: Yeah, I was born there and I always wanted to move back. I lived in New York City when I was little. And then we moved to Connecticut, which I thought was so lame, because of course it wasn’t New York. But so I mostly grew up in old Greenwich, Connecticut, which is about an hour outside the city.
Me: Right okay. I want to ask more about getting invited to these IRL parties once you started gaining more followers on Tumblr.
Taylor: Yeah. And I talk about this in my book, too. In 2008, I think it was Mayor Bloomberg at the time who declared Internet Week, which was this whole thing. It's so funny looking back on that era. But there started to be all these like Internet IRL events. There was Raffle Con, famously at Harvard. But Internet Week was this thing where basically the city had paid all this money to have these events related to the Internet and highlight cool people doing cool things on the Internet. Tumblr had a really unique position back then because it was like where all the media people were. This is before the media people were really on Twitter because Twitter was still very new. And I mean, journalists were sort of on Twitter, but Tumblr is where like every major outlet—like the Daily Beast, NPR—was, like everyone had Tumblr. All the media brands and all the media people were on Tumblr. So very quickly all these bloggers became very adjacent to the media. So, I just started to get invited to these Tumblr creator things, this was at the same time that Buzzfeed was just starting to get big.
I was sort of good friends with a lot of really early BuzzFeed people. And they would have these blog parties. Gawker had big parties. And it was just this thing where bloggers would like to hang out and collaborate and do things together. There was also Tumblr itself, the people at Tumblr would invite me to things like their “Social Media Week” events in New York. I talked at social media week. And of course I was doing stuff for brands to make money, which is because no place would let me write about the Internet full time. So, I was running social accounts to make money and selling Instagram accounts and doing other things like that.
Me: This is really interesting because this world of massive brands and companies throwing “creator” events for people with a few thousand Tumblr followers feels like such a different world compared to now. I suppose they still do, but you’ve got to be pretty high profile, like it’s relegated to the influencer-elite.
Taylor: Yeah, it's so different now because now it's like for people with millions of followers whereas back then, it was like “oh, my God, this girl has like 40,000 followers on Tumblr, she’s the biggest thing ever.” The bar was so low for virality because the Internet was so small. You could do some little stunts online and it would be this Big Thing, like people would talk about it. There was also this thing I wrote about in my book called the “Webutante Ball," which was this big party at Marquee, the club, and they would declare the “King and Queen of the Internet.” This was essentially an afterparty for Internet week. And it was just this time where the city itself was trying to spur investment in the world of the internet, they were even trying to make this thing called Silicon Alley happen.
Me: Oh my god.
Taylor: It was a lot of New York tech companies like Next New Networks, Tumblr, BuzzFeed, etc. This was basically the beginnings of the content creator industry. A lot of my friends and people I knew from that era became like, big YouTubers, or they started running media companies themselves. My friend Elliott who was also big on Tumblr, he founded Fuck Jerry. Neetzan, who I used to work with, he had the Daily What which he sold to Cheeseburger Enterprises, the I Haz Cheeseburger people. Or there was Josh Marshall, who's in my book, he built Talking Points memo, which is still political news. Ezra Klein was also obviously really successful, he founded Vox, etc. So, a lot of people from that era ended up building these companies that sold for tons of money or went on to do big things in media. And I became a writer. It’s weird, It was a really unique time.
It wasn't this like clout economy that we have now, you know what I mean? It just felt more collaborative and creative. It was more about ideas and creating things, it was just very different.
Me: This is really interesting in the sense that it seems to follow a trajectory and narrative that we’re increasingly familiar with. It's particularly wild for me to hear this from my perspective, as someone moved to New York, started a meme page, and then also started getting invited to IRL parties full of internet people. But it seems like a very different scene. It seems much more like the only people actually putting money into these parties are, in some instances, horrible people like Peter Thiel.
Taylor: Yeah.
Me: Which is an actual thing, it’s unfortunately an actual party I've been to. But when people like Thiel aren’t funding them, it does feel a bit more organic. Like these are people using these platforms in a certain way but totally divorced from, or in opposition to, the actual platform companies themselves.
Taylor: Yeah.
Me: This is something that I've also been trying to make up my mind about, how I feel about it. The way you described kind of the explosion of the Internet scene just now and all these people went on to like different prominence. To me, that follows the kind of traditional trajectory of a scene. A music scene, for example. What I've been trying to grapple with is actually not the question of authenticity so much, but more how much people are in it essentially for clout or social capital. Especially given how easy it can be to acquire a lot of that really quickly via social media. I guess what I’m asking is how you learned to navigate, or demarcate, the online versus real life. Who is your actual friend versus something like “oh, we're here for a networking event and these people want to go so that we can be seen with the Right People and get more followers.”
Taylor: Honestly, I'm just so glad that I’m the age that I am, being a millennial in my 30’s or whatever. That early, beginning era, there was no money in it. Like you couldn't make money. Even my friends that became really huge YouTubers were mostly YouTubers in the early 2010’s when there really wasn't this huge financial upside to it. And it wasn't considered cool really. It was “cool” in a way, but it wasn't like mainstream cool. It was this sort of more underground thing. And like yeah there were these big companies and the city itself pouring money into these events and stuff. But also, it was like there was this earnestness and lack of celebrity. Even Tumblr itself didn't have public follower counts, you knew who was big on Tumblr because they would get a lot of notes or reblogs or they would be featured on other prominent blogs. It wasn't this like clout economy that we have now, you know what I mean? It just felt more collaborative and creative. It was more about ideas and creating things, it was just very different.
If you were a blogger, it was like, “well, what are you writing? Is it interesting?” It was just different energy. Everything has been so warped by metrics now, I do think people are more cognizant of that. Obviously, people are always cognizant of social status, but it’s more baked-in now.
At the time these people were also my entire friend network. I moved to Williamsburg around that time when Williamsburg was going through its huge gentrification era. So Williamsburg was like cool, like 285 KENT was the cool place to see Grimes and stuff, and it started to be cool to do those things and also be like Somebody on Tumblr or the internet. It was fully the Hipster era as well.
I never felt like it was like a clout thing. I don't think any of us felt that way. I think it was more just like “here's a lot of other people that are interested in the same things and creating things.”
All of that is to say that pretty much all my close friends from New York are from Tumblr and the Internet. I never felt like it was like a clout thing. I don't think any of us felt that way. I think it was more just like “here's a lot of other people that are interested in the same things and creating things.” We really just did fun or funny things together; we would have weird art shows, people would do a lot of Internet stunts and projects together, it was cool. But I never felt like “oh, people are just using me for clout,” because I think that there wasn't the money there is now. Also, again, it was so much smaller, people didn’t have millions of followers.
Me: This is fascinating because it's like a precursor to an iteration of a scene which I did not expect to be talking about with you. It’s also—for better or worse—kind of one of my pet interests that I've written about before and am now at least adjacent to. So I appreciate your perspective on what came before.
Regarding what you said about it being more collaborative, not feeling like people were in it for clout because it wasn't big enough yet, it was still underground, etc. How do you feel about that now? Because I feel like there's two strains of thought in engaging with being Very Online. One is that it becomes your whole life and pretty much all of your social circles and your friends are Very Online and it's like What You Do. Alternatively, you have like your Very Online social circle and then you have your real-life friends, and those are a separate thing.
Taylor: Yeah.
Me: And it sounds like for you those are the same thing. I’m curious now, a decade on, how have you seen that change? What does that look like? How do you navigate that now?
Taylor: Yeah, I would say that I like a big mix of people. I love finding and meeting new people online, I love that about the Internet. And that's kind of what drew me to the Internet in the first place, finding these other people that were into the same things that I was into or like had the same sense of humor or whatever. I love meeting people on the Internet and I make new friends online all the time, but a lot of my friends are offline.
I think any time anybody lives and dies by one social scene you're sort of allowing one group of people to potentially dictate how you feel about yourself or others. I think it's good to get out of your world and expose yourself to different worlds.
I mean, a lot of my friends I met online originally, but many have since become offline. Maybe they burned out, maybe they became parents, maybe they founded a company and sold it and now they can retire, or maybe they're just working in other industries and they quit the Internet. Who knows. Of course, I also have friends I grew up with who are just totally random too. So, it's a mix. I think one reason I became a journalist is that I really don't like to be doing only one thing. I like to be in lots of different groups and have lots of like different friends and kind of be around a lot of different types of people. I don't have this group of like the same eight people that I hang out with all the time, but I definitely have really close friends.
I think it's also that I live in L.A. now, which is nice because it's a surprisingly chill city. It's really weird because people always make these posts—and I think it's probably true if you're young and living in West Hollywood or something—but they’re like “oh there's all these people clout chasing” or whatever. I actually feel like L.A. is so much chiller. I feel like people don't care about Internet clout as much. I don't know, maybe it’s because everyone's famous. There are actual famous people, actual celebrities, so certainly no one cares about like random journalists.
I think any time anybody lives and dies by one social scene you're sort of allowing one group of people to potentially dictate how you feel about yourself or others. I think it's good to get out of your world and expose yourself to different worlds.
Me: No, of course. I’m curious about this phenomenon you’re describing. Because on the one hand it follows the “traditional” trajectory of a scene while also having everything to do with political economy. And again, I’m interested in the question of how to strike a balance, or what exactly we can do to counteract the negative impacts of the internet, because I think we’re kind of simultaneously in both places at once. On the one hand you have this popular idea that I think a lot of people are grappling with now where they're like “social media is rotting everyone's brains, we need to just become the Unabomber and go live in a cabin.” On the other there’s an awareness that it’s not so much these individual platforms themselves, but the mold of the system they’re increasingly forcing everything into. Personally, I kind of come down on the idea that it's more of a tool that reflects our current political economy.
Taylor: Right.
Me: And you look at the trajectory of the Internet, which I'm sure you touch on in your book, you see where it's kind of like the commons getting enclosed.
Taylor: Right.
Me: And everything kind of gets privatized and chunked off and sold. There's lots of companies that profit off the negative feelings this fosters, that alienation and isolation, dating apps, for example.
Taylor: Yeah.
Me: As a reporter who’s studied this and charted a history of being Online, where do you come down on this question? Is social media this evil thing, or is it more caught up in some bigger machinations? Do you think of it as inherently one thing or another? Is it too far gone within the belly of the capitalist system?
I think we need to recognize the problem, which is that these hyper-capitalist multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates have a chokehold on everyone because they've orchestrated a monopoly.
Taylor: No, I don't think it's too far gone. But I'm a delusional optimist about tech stuff. But I really don't think it's too far gone because it's barely around. My book is basically a history of the social Internet, which is just barely 20 years old. Social media itself has only meaningfully been around for about 10 to 15 years, but I also totally agree with you on these problems. Almost all of it got taken out of my book in the end though because I didn't want to make it just a total rant against capitalism. But I do think all these platforms have gone off the rails and we are living in this totally broken system right now. Even the online creator industry, it's not about creativity and empowerment anymore. It's about this weird app-based work where we're basically like gig workers for YouTube and Instagram now, but with absolutely no benefits or stability. All of this is of course toxic and bad.
But I also totally agree with you in thinking of the Internet as a tool. I think it's not really just good or bad, I think these platforms that we have right now are bad and we should build better platforms, definitely. But I think that the Internet's ability to connect people at scale is a good thing. And I think we need to recognize the problem, which is that these hyper-capitalist multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates have a chokehold on everyone because they've orchestrated a monopoly.
Me: Exactly.
Taylor: I think back to those earlier times on the Internet, and I do think there's a way to kind to get back to some of it. I mean, some of it you're never going to return to because the Internet hadn't been weaponized in the same way that it is now. Part of the reason for the Internet's weaponization, and people having such negative experiences on it, is partially because of the current platform landscape. And this is just the current landscape, it can change. We can change it. I think it's actually starting to change because people are feeling burned out and exhausted. A lot of people recognize that something's wrong with the Internet right now, but they’ve maybe diagnosed it as a problem with the whole system, rather than it's these five platforms that control everything.
Me: That is the question that I think at least a lot of people on the left always kind of have a hard time with, because it does demand a systems analysis, but on the flip side, it can feel paralyzing in the sense of like, “how do we change anything while this system remains in place without just, doing a revolution or something?”*
*The authors are down with the revolution, but this is getting at the idea of what we can do in the meantime.
Taylor: Yeah.
Me: Which gets at one of my main questions: what do you see as the major problems with the Internet and social media right now? And what do you think some of the solutions could be?
Taylor: Well, I think that we need platforms that are less profit-driven and platforms that don't prioritize engagement as their main goal. I do think building online spaces and online communities and social tech products that don't facilitate the same bad stuff that we currently have is good. But it's really hard to monetize any of that. So, I think if you go into it, you have to just be like, “OK, I'm going to build this thing.” It's probably not going to make a lot of money, you know, or it might not be the next Facebook or Google. But building spaces online where people can connect and communicate and collaborate that are outside the current systems that we have, that’s one direction.
I mean, I would love to see an entire anti-capitalist revolution on the Internet, but I don't think it's going to happen because I think there's too many people invested in the current system unfortunately. However, that doesn't mean that we can't sort of shift it and change it. I do think actually that content creators, especially big ones, do have a lot of power on the Internet. In many ways they're at the mercy of these platforms, in so many ways they’re at the mercy of these platforms, but increasingly less so, as these other direct monetization platforms come up like Substack or Patreon where you don't have to rely on algorithmic distribution. I think that creators do have the power to make changes, even if it's just pushing platforms for different things. There are countless examples of users successfully pressuring platforms into change, so I do think that we as users of technology should exercise our collective power and push these platforms for change. I definitely don’t love Community Guidelines and the way they’re deployed, but if you think about it a lot of online tools that companies have implemented are only because of community pushback, or because people are like, “look, this experience at this point is so negative that I'm not spending time on your app.” Some of that stuff is a good thing.
Look at what's happening right now with Twitter. Elon Musk is literally hell-bent on alienating every power user, a lot of power users have left, and the company is worth 30 percent of what he paid for it. I mean that's kind of a self-inflicted wound, it's not like users overthrew Twitter, but I do think it shows that when people leave en masse or when users decide they want change, you can affect the value of these companies.
I think we need these platforms to fail, we need this current crop of platforms kind of sunset off and for new platforms to rise.
Me: That raises some interesting questions. One being—not to be a reductive Marxist about it—a capital versus labor question.
Taylor: Yeah.
Me: There's been a lot of discourse online about whether, for example, users are “workers,” because when you're a user of these platforms, you are essentially producing value for this company. There are people that sometimes do get paid directly, in the case of the content creator, in which case you're obviously a worker. But it gets messy when you have these companies kind of scraping ephemeral-yet-real value off your desire to socialize, it forces you to consider your role in it. The Twitter example is interesting though, because in a way people have shown their dissatisfaction, but Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, he doesn't have to really listen. It strikes me as the Howard Schultz model of dealing with Starbucks workers when they started unionizing. Where he's just been like “I'm going to run this shit into the ground, I'm going to start closing every store that unionizes.” There isn't actually incentive for him to listen to these people.
We still do have a real problem on our hands, Facebook and Google control everything right now. They have a sort of dual monopoly. TikTok was a blessing in many ways to Facebook because it got the government to stop pursuing antitrust action. There was always this argument of like “oh, well, Facebook has no competition” and now they can point to TikTok and “reasonably” argue that they do have competition.
Taylor: But let’s let it close! Like let it fail, let's let the platform fail. Unlike Starbucks, if Twitter fails, yes, it might be bad for some people for sure, but not “millions of jobs” bad. I also think that of all platforms, almost no one is monetizing on Twitter outside of those like meme accounts and spammers at this point. So, I think we need these platforms to fail, we need this current crop of platforms kind of sunset off and for new platforms to rise. I think that happens naturally, like every 10 years these platforms atrophy. Facebook is a really good example, right? Facebook is definitely this shadow of what it was. Yes, it's still making money because it's an advertising behemoth, but the relevance of it is fading entirely.
We still do have a real problem on our hands, Facebook and Google control everything right now. They have a sort of dual monopoly. TikTok was a blessing in many ways to Facebook because it got the government to stop pursuing antitrust action. There was always this argument of like “oh, well, Facebook has no competition” and now they can point to TikTok and “reasonably” argue that they do have competition. But again, that's still only three companies now, they’re still these powerful tech conglomerates that control everything, one more so than the rest. On this front there's so much that we need to do from a regulatory standpoint in my mind about the tech industry.
But again, I think that as users, we should build other online spaces. I would love to see more of an indie web comeback, of people building their own spaces and kind of cultivating their own online environments and building platforms that—even if they don't scale—lead to interesting things, you know?
Speaking of Peter Thiel, the biggest impediment to independent journalism is these billionaires that sue people out of existence…The reality is there's all these billionaires that will sue independent journalists until they're broke, I think that's the true threat to free speech in this country.
Me: Yeah, I completely agree. I'm curious if something like Patreon is really one of the main ways forward, in the following sense. Everything we're talking about can also be applied to journalism, right? And no shade to you, but you work for a paper owned by the other richest man in the world who still puts a lot of articles behind paywalls. So, the problems we’re describing are also prevalent in journalism, they’re problems of the political economy of media and information in today’s landscape. It’s the same political economy where misinformation and poor information is highly profitable, and everything is concentrated increasingly into the hands of a very small number of people. Then the problem always presents itself as “okay, yes, we should set up these independent alternatives. but we also all have to go to work.” So those interested in change are volunteering our time as opposed to getting paid high salaries to do it, in the case of the people running things. How can we go up against something like that? How can we find the time to do that?
Obviously, it's still a platform, and I don't know the inner workings of Patreon or what cut they take, but this is where I'm curious if you see more redistributive models like Patreon as a powerful tool here. Despite being a platform, it's still a model that removes some of the power out of the hands of these like monopolies. And if enough people collectively decide that they want to pay for something, whether it's a journal or a podcast or whatever, then they can have it, which provides creators a way through which they can make a potential living without relying on said monopolies.
Taylor: But here's the issue. Speaking of Peter Thiel, the biggest impediment to independent journalism is these billionaires that sue people out of existence. And that's the problem. Theoretically Substack has this like legal fund, but it's never really been tested. The reality is there's all these billionaires that will sue independent journalists until they're broke, I think that's the true threat to free speech in this country. There are so many people that want to do independent journalism. I talk to journalists all the time, myself included as well. We want to be independent, but being independent comes with this huge liability that literally any billionaire that doesn't like your article can tie you up in defamation lawsuits forever. There goes your ability to report. So, I think the journalism question is sort of uniquely challenging. I would say that it’s of course the more investigative journalism, the real journalism that challenges power, that faces this threat. There's a lot of amazing journalism that still happens on Substack or is funded through Patreon, regardless. I totally agree that that's a better model. I really, truly believe in independent media. I don't want to live in a media ecosystem dominated by corporate media. I think that we need a lot more independent journalism.
Me: Right. Thank you. I don't blame you if you don't have an answer to this question, but you're entirely right that they can sue people into non-existence, so frankly what do we do about that?
Taylor: I mean, I think first of all that we need more awareness of exactly how anti-free speech a lot of these people on the far right are. You have these big billionaires like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, they use their billions to silence dissent. I think that we need to institute stronger protections around speech and free speech. I mean the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial was a horrifying look at what— whatever side you're on—kind of awful precedent it set for free speech. I think that we need to protect speech and build a legal system that protects it. And I think people that work in the legal system are much smarter than me and probably have much better ideas than that. There's a lot of free speech lawyers that work in and around media, because obviously we rely on that every day to do our jobs.
Me: So that leads me into two related questions. On free speech, I worry that can be kind of a fraught framing because it has been so captured by the right, at least in America.
We need to protect the rights of people to speak truth to power, that's what's getting systematically dismantled in this country.
Taylor: Right. They say a lot about free speech, but then they turn around and are the most anti free speech group of people out there. It's like Elon Musk being out there saying “I'm supporting free speech the most” while just banning every journalist that he doesn't like on Twitter. It's like, what?
Me: Right. So, you think it's still worth kind of reclaiming that language and fighting for that, and demonstrating that this is a red herring for the right?
Taylor: Yes. It's a complete red herring. It's complete bullshit. And we need to reclaim that language, along with everything else, and also educate people on the value of free expression.
I'm not a person that feels like, “oh, you should be able to say and do anything on every social platform.” Obviously, you need to draw some sort of line, like you obviously can't have child porn, you can’t have this kind of maximalist version of it. However, we need to protect the rights of people to speak truth to power, that's what's getting systematically dismantled in this country. It's a real problem that I don't think a lot of people are aware of because they’re not working in the media or on any of these kind of frontlines. It doesn't affect their lives day to day, or they more understand speech through the lens of community guidelines, which I actually think is maybe helpful for people. When they get hit from some community guidelines violation, it's like “what the hell?” It's like, “yeah, it's frustrating when you can't say what you want.” Again, I don't think every single thing should be allowed on every platform, but we need spaces to have free expression and journalism. And a lot of what journalism does, too, is challenge power, challenge the government, so it’s vitally important. There's so many nuances and it's hard, but overall, I think that we don't have enough free expression online. That's just my personal belief.
Me: No, I think that's great. I mean, I don't think it's great that there's not enough free expression online. It's obviously horrible that it seems like “allowed” speech is increasingly tilted today toward the right. (Which the right of course thinks the opposite is true, which is a whole other problem.) Speaking of Elon Musk and challenging power I want to go back to something a little more personal if that’s okay, kind of in how you deal with these things.
I do think like you said, people realize something is wrong with the Internet. People have terrible phone addictions or social media addictions, or their lives have been adversely affected by social media in some way, we both know people online can be pretty vicious.
In the face of everything, something I’ve always noticed and admired about you is your optimism. I just mean that I, like many people, discovered you through the whole Libs of TikTok debacle and remember the immense amount of fallout you received from it, please stop me if anything's too personal by the way. You've just been through an enormous amount of online harassment, to levels that I'm sure none of us can really even fathom. Which is usually when people cut the cord, they bail because the cost has far outweighed the benefit, to put it lightly. Yet you keep doing this, and obviously it’s your job, but there’s an optimism to you and an eagerness to engage that I don’t see in many people who have been through something like that. So really my question is, how do you manage that? What keeps you going in this way?
I also ask this because while very few people have been through exactly what you have, I think people suffering real-life fallout due to social media harassment is unfortunately increasingly common, especially among younger people. This is something a lot of people have been through and are going through to varying degrees. So, when I still see you being so active online, I wonder if you have any advice for others or whether you could just share any insight you might have.
Taylor: Well, I will say my tolerance is very high. I write about YouTubers and content creators and Internet stuff for a living. So even before Libs of TikTok, I had like the Jake Paul fans doxx me, way before anyone on the right did. I had PewDiePie make a video about me one time because of my reporting on Mr. Beast. I write about people with huge audiences and as their power on the Internet grew, attention on my work also grew because it was suddenly sort of more and more relevant. And then, of course, it became incredibly relevant to our political system. I covered the 2016 election; I'm also sort of known for covering Charlottesville. If you ever saw the movie BlacKkKlansman, it ends on my footage.
Me: Oh my god, I’ve seen that movie.
Taylor: Yeah, that's all my footage.
Me: Oh wow. That's actually incredible.
Taylor: It's crazy. I mean, that was crazy. I went right from there to covering Milo Yiannopoulos “Free Speech Week” at Berkeley. I write about this in my book, but 2017 was this crazy year because it was like it was nonstop. It was Trump's inauguration, there were these protests, then a lot of that Internet right-wing extremism started to make its way IRL. I was thinking of this event that I was at during Trump's inauguration weekend, they had this party called the “Deploraball,” as in deplorable. It was probably the most cursed room I've ever been in. It was just like every far-right wacko influencer was at this party. I had this realization that was so stark, of going “wow, these people that most of the mainstream media ignores have amassed clearly so much political power.” And again, this is why I write about things like people like Libs of TikTok right? I think this whole online attention economy has completely warped our political system. Obviously, that's led to a lot of harassment. The online stuff doesn't bother me as much really as the offline.
I just have such a thick skin at this point. The offline stuff was what was really hard to deal with, especially the stuff that they did to my family members. And where I have a big problem with those who defend these people.
Oh, my God, that reminds me, the biggest regret of my life was—okay maybe not a regret because I learned how fucked the mainstream media is—when I was at The New York Times, they booked me on this MSNBC segment. They, by the way, booked me with my friend who’s non-binary and they misgendered them throughout the whole segment. The segment was on women and harassment. My friend had also just passed away. I'd lost three friends in a period of like three months, unfortunately. It was horrible, this was like the end of 2020. So, it’s already very rough. Anyway, this journalist is having me read these like graphic rape threats and having me talk about all the shit that my family went through. And then I fucking cry for an instant, I just broke for one second. This is at the end of a three-and-a-half-hour interview. And I was like, “OK, please don't use that.” They're like “whatever.” Of course, it's a two-minute TV segment. That's the part they clip. That's the part that goes viral. That's the part that's endlessly played on Fox News. And I was like, fuck the media.
The harassment is bad, but the media, the way that the media will lie and take these stories—especially cable news—and just use you for attention, is awful. It's given me a huge amount of empathy for the people that I cover. It's changed the way that I think about even just how I interview people, like the way that I treat subjects, because having been on the other side of it is such a mind fuck. It really made me question whether I even want to be in journalism after I went through that, because I had this moment where I was like “this is why people hate journalists, I totally understand now.” I used to really not get that.
In regard to your question, the long story short is don't know. I'm just sort of an optimistic person. Things can change so much quicker than people realize. Every time things are really bad it’s like yeah it could get worse, but I think it could get better. I mean, in the past couple of years there's all these young people that are doing really cool stuff and are really smart and creative and interesting. And I really love that. I think a lot of them are thinking critically about these issues. And so I don't know, I just think things could get better.
Me: No, I mean, that's amazing to hear, especially after what you just detailed. That's really interesting. I did not expect to hear “the harassment is bad, but the media is worse.” It makes a lot of sense though, because honestly, they have more of an incentive, right? They have a bottom line, whereas individuals invested in harassing other people online just kind of have their own issues.
Taylor: The thing to remember is that it’s like mostly children. It's like children. It's so funny, I was responding to all these comments on this page, one of these pages posted a promotion for my book and I was like “oh, I have to get the comments going.” Like I need to stir the pot a little bit because I want this post to reach people, it's promoting my book. And I’m just like replying to random people, and this one person is of course, loudly defending Chaya (Raichik), they’re a Libs of TikTok Stan or whatever. And I realized this is an actual teenager. I clicked on their profile, and they definitely live at home with their parents, they’re a child. I think a lot of people forget too, so much of the Internet is run by children and people whose brains have not fully developed.
Also, I don't want to tap out. I want to push things to be different. I think it's very easy to retreat. I mean, I would have to get a new job because my job requires me to be very online, but still. Even if I got a new job, I think that would be giving up, you know? And I don't want to cede space to these people that I disagree with, like I want to be out there saying my side.
Me: I completely get that. And like, that is something I have…I feel like a lot of people have been through when they're going through the ringer. But I agree. I think if you have a strong politics and strong ideals, that's generally where you end up. And I've been through that as well.
Taylor: It's also kind of a liberating experience.
Me: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: You’re just like “oh, you've done everything to me.” Almost. I guess you haven't physically murdered me, but like how many times are you going to doxx me? The conspiracies that people make up too are so funny. At one point Elon said that like, my uncle controls the Internet Archive and that's why there's not more information about me? It's like, no, I'm just a boring suburban girl, there's nothing to uncover. They've doxxed me so many times that they have to make up conspiracies now for new material. It's like. “OK, you've done the worst and I'm literally thriving and fine. So, whatever.”
Me: I mean, I would love to ask you about Elon Musk all day, because the fact that you take up so much space in the brain of literally the richest man in the world must be a fucking unbelievably insane feeling.
But I want to ask one more question where we can actually kind of talk about your book for a second. So, it's a social history, right? We've talked a lot about some origins, how things have changed. I'm curious what stood out to you, if there were any like repeated themes or patterns that jumped out during your research and writing? I was talking to a friend who’s reviewing your book for a magazine, and he mentioned that it was more of just a solid history, as opposed to much analysis.
I know it’s not the role of the historian to do the analysis which is why I’m asking you this now. What didn't make it into your book in terms of analysis, in terms of trends, in terms of things that became obvious to you while putting together this history? And where do you see things going from here based on paying so much attention to the last few decades of this?
Taylor: So first of all, I wrote 158,000 words in the first draft of my book, it was supposed to be between 60 and 80 thousand. I think it ended up at 87,000. So, the book was more than cut in half. I think a lot of what a lot of that was Vine, I could have written a whole book on Vine. But it was also a lot of my pontificating on things. At the end of writing it I actually thought I maybe should have left more analysis in, but I don't like to do that in my work generally. Maybe it's reporter brain, but I like to tell people how things are and then I like to see how people interpret it.
I kind of just wanted to put it out there. And I wanted to write an Internet history book, mostly to set the record straight on a lot of the history. I didn't necessarily have this thesis. I mean, I have my own political ideas and I have my own sort of things that I want for the Internet, and I do sort of reflect a little bit towards the end. As we talked about earlier, we need to build a better Internet. But the main goal of the book is to set the record straight on where all of this came from, because there's a lot of corporate narratives and there's a lot of like books about specific platforms. Most books about the Internet are about specific platforms. It's the YouTube book. It's the Instagram book. And don’t get me wrong I love all those books, I literally read all of them. However, they are telling the story of the Internet through the lens of a corporation. I wanted to write a book that was more of a social history from the perspective of the actual users. I wanted to talk about the beginnings of the Internet and just be like “here's how all this actually happened,” especially because Silicon Valley continues to lie about it and continues to misrepresent how this Internet emerged, which is what triggered me into writing the book in the first place. So yeah, it's not it's not my political manifesto, but maybe that will be my next book.
Me: Yeah. I mean, I'd be interested in reading your political manifesto.
Taylor: My employer wouldn’t.
Me: Yeah, that's fair. I think we touched on some of that earlier, regarding what specifically you want to see or what should be done. But looking at the past few decades of the history of the Internet, to get to the second part of the question, where do you see things headed currently?
Taylor: Well, right now we're just in this runaway capitalism. I think things need to change; I think there's deep structural problems. I think things are going to crack at some point. They've already cracked, actually, a million times over. But I do think they’re going to further crack, I don't think the system that we have now is sustainable. Not just from a political landscape, but on the Internet, people are very miserable, people are very unhappy. Right now it's like this awful quest for followers and attention. And I do think that there is a correction to that that's emerging.
You see this with the sort of atrophying of these big broadcast based social platforms. I think that most people today don't want to sign up for a new service where every single post is by default public and permanent forever, where the new post goes to the entire world. That's not what most people want. Most people actually just want to reach interest groups, people that are interested in the same things as them, or maybe a small community that they're part of or can join. I think you're seeing a move towards that, even in apps like TikTok. TikTok is still a broadcast based social platform, but the algorithm sort of niches you into different communities on there and sorts you into interest groups. It's not like Twitter where you post publicly and it goes to the entire world, where you also have to be out there hustling for subscribers. All of that is just exhausting.
I think, or hope, that there won't be as much of a burden on the users themselves in terms of everybody having to clout chase to get followers. I think algorithms will just deliver content for better or worse.
I think things could go in a lot of ways, but I hope that it goes in a way where we push back on the power of these tech companies and remember that social platforms get their power from their user base. It's very different than other forms of technology in that way. Social platforms are unique in that the users actually have a huge amount of sway over the product because they're social products. I say this in the intro of my book, but Silicon Valley didn’t invent much in this way, it's more them sort of channeling this social behavior than it is them inventing something. I think that puts users in a unique position where we’re able to collectively exert pressure, we know that these platforms respond to public outrage. That is the one thing that they do respond to, media attention and public pressure. So really, we should exert all kinds of pressure on these tech platforms and on our political system to rein in big tech.
Me: Right. That was an excellent answer. I completely agree. I think that's a good place to end it. I am going to stop the recording now. But thank you so much.