The Joy, Misery, and Fame Of An Extremely Online Life — With Taylor Lorenz

0:00A new book examines the highs and lows of being extremely online. And we're going to talk about it with its author right after this. LinkedIn presents.

0:14Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Taylor Lorenz, a tech columnist at The Washington Post. But more importantly, she's the author of Extremely Online, the untold story of fame, influence, and power on the Internet. It comes out this week. So now available in stores. We're going to talk all about it. Taylor, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for being here. So fun fact that our listeners probably do not know is that you and I came up in the same industry right around the same time.

0:45I remember spending time with you at the community manager meetups in New York, maybe 2010, 2011, when we were all trying to figure out what social media was. And we were both in marketing at the time. We knew something was going on, but it's been quite a journey since then, wouldn't you say? Yeah, it's actually kind of crazy. Writing this book made me like, it was a lot of trips down memory lane. And it's crazy that that was like almost 15 years ago. Right. And yeah, I mean, the social web back in the day, it was went from being this curiosity that people gathered in these meetups were like struggling to explain the return on investment to their management.

1:24And now it's a de facto, as you put it in your book, it is media now. Very crazy transformation. Yeah. Yeah. Let's start with the title of your book, Extremely Online. Is it good or bad to be extremely online? I think it can be good or bad. I think there's a lot of bads and we tend to focus on the bads, but there's a lot of good as well. I would say that comes along with it. It's like most technology, it's too much. You don't want to go too far, but I think that the world is better because of the internet. Yeah. And why is that? Because I think we're in a more connected world. We have more access to information.

2:06There's been, you know, it's been a really liberatory force in a lot of ways. Obviously, again, there's a lot of downside. I think we're in a weird kind of, like, we're in like flux right now. It's still really early in the internet world. I mean, it's hard to, like, it seems like a long time ago when you talk about this stuff 10, 15 years ago, but I think in the grand scope of things and how technology will evolve, we're still at the beginning. And yeah, I mean, I definitely look back at the 90s and that media landscape, and I would never go back to that. So with all the problems that this new media landscape has, I think it's superior.

2:40Okay. So then for the sake of the debate, let me make the argument that it's worse. A lot of people do. So, I mean, I think that what this, what being extremely online does. It sort of sucks people in into this really strange relationship where they give so much of themselves and the platforms and the audience takes a lot, but they just don't get the return that you would otherwise. It sort of feels like it messes people up. The more online they are, the more messed up they get. Yeah, but here's the thing. But right, but I think what you're doing is what a lot of people do, which is they conflate the internet with social media.

3:19And they kind of, when you talk about being extremely online, the thought is, oh, well, then that means I'm spending all day on Facebook and Twitter. That's not what I'm talking about. I think these platforms have been corrosive, manipulative, bad. I agree. If you spend too much time on certain platforms, it can be really negative. Although I do think that there are positives. I don't think it's like a net negative for the world. But I think that actually the power of the internet is to connect people. And I do think that connection at scale is valuable. And so I think, I mean, and I argue this in sort of the end of my book, but I think that we don't want to live in a less online or less connected world.

3:54We just don't need these specific sort of like mix of tech platforms that I think have been really kind of exploitative and predatory and yeah, prioritize, you know, shareholder value and engagement above the mental health of their own users. Yeah. Look, I think that it's great for the audiences, right? And, you know, especially people who are like following Instagram influencers or TikTok influencers, they're entertained. I mean, we'll talk later about the value of the entertainment that's being produced. But I mean, OK, so so, you know, on one hand, there is the platform that drives people there.

4:28But the other side of it is that the influencers decide themselves that they want to be online. I mean, it is a choice they're making. So how do you square that with like the blame that you put on the platforms? I mean, ultimately, like in some way, this that the people who decide that they want to be extremely online, they they end up being a product. Their struggles end up being a product in some way of their decisions. And that's something that seemed like it was highlighted throughout throughout the whole book as well. Yeah. I mean, I think these platforms are exploiting their creators, but I wouldn't blame the creators for that.

4:58I would blame the platforms. I mean, the creators are just operating in the landscape. Like, you know, they're operating under capitalism or whatever, like everyone else, right? Like they're operating in this, um, this monopolistic tech landscape where if you are not leveraging the main platforms, you don't have access to an audience at scale. Um, I think a little bit of that is changing actually. I think since, I mean, my book kind of ends in like the sort of beginning of the pandemic, which is like when everyone got super online. But I think like in the past year, especially like you've seen more of a fracturing, but, But yeah, I mean, you have to be on these major platforms if you want to reach audiences at scale.

5:35And I think that we, these platforms, we need to hold the platforms accountable. We can't blame the users for using platforms that spend millions of dollars, you know, on lobbying and to like ensure that no other platform has a chance against them. Like, I think that's a problem with the tech landscape, that there's not more choice. But isn't that sort of taking away some of the agency that these, at the people who decide to because it ultimately is a choice for instance to become an influencer well sure but um consider the fact that the majority not the majority i don't actually know that but a significant portion of the content creator ecosystem is people that have been shut out of traditional traditional employment whether it's mothers um you know a lot of lgbtq people a lot of people that like want wanted a space in the media the traditional media and were shut out of those spaces or they need a flexible income or they were laid off and so they started to you know, make content at home and that's become a lifeline for them.

6:28So I don't know that you should blame the content creators for their own working conditions. I think we should hold these platforms responsible. Same thing. Yes. Is it a choice to become an Uber driver or work for Instacart? Yeah, that's a choice. But like, often it's a choice that you make almost not under duress, but because you think it'll give, you know, it's a job like anything else. That doesn't mean that the job shouldn't guarantee you certain protections and treat you in a certain way, right that's true for all of us is it a choice to work in media sure does that mean that we don't deserve strong labor protections no right right no i mean i i think that like there's there's an okay so let's just go back to like one of like the first characters in your book i mean julia allison that's that's her name right like she decided that she wanted to be like the kardashian of the online world to be someone who would be like a kim kardashian or a paris hilton but just without she wanted to be like yeah sorry go ahead she went to be like tom wolf that was who she was inspired by so she saw she talked about seeing tom wolf the author um and how successful he was and the insight that she got because kim kardashian wasn't even famous back then this is when kim kardashian was still working for paris hilton actually she was definitely not a celebrity but um so and paris hilton was just sort of coming up as a reality star during this exact same time so So those two people were not really in the culture yet.

7:48I mean, they were in the culture, but she wasn't aware of them very much. So she went to see Tom Wolfe speak. She noticed he always has this very strong brand. He always wears this sort of white suit. And she just thought, wow, personal branding is really strong. And I think that the internet is going to be a vehicle to build a personal brand. So I want to be a media figure and get my sort of writing out. She was a journalist and a writer. but I'm going to build a brand through the internet. And she actually saw correctly that that would be the way that the media would go. So she started blogging.

8:22She started making videos on YouTube and Vimeo and other things. And she became one of the first multi-platform content creators. I think there's maybe less sympathy for folks in this world because there's a sort of look at me quality, like where, you know, I mean, let's be honest, like media isn't the only job people can go into. And so, no, but I think it's one that's accessible to a lot of people that don't have alternative media. And I think also it's, it's, it's been a lot of people that haven't had a voice in traditional media that I think it's really important for them to have a voice. You know, there are a lot of them are speaking truth to power.

8:55And, you know, I talk about the beauty vloggers a little bit, but I think the beauty vloggers, I wish that I could have fit more in the book because it's a perfect example of this massive industry. You know, there's all these women of color, women with hooded eyes, you know, Asian women, that's how Michelle Phan blew up with her eye, like I drew. Basically, like the entire beauty industry was not meeting the needs of a lot of women, a lot of types of women, a lot of, you know, basically anybody that wasn't sort of like a young, beautiful white woman, right? And so you saw these beauty vloggers blow up and cultivate communities and launch beauty brands to ultimately serve the needs of this market that was an underserved market.

9:32That's valuable, in my opinion. Like, I don't think it's about fame. I think a lot of people misunderstand the industry and they think it's a fame industry, but it's not. It's entrepreneurialism, right? It's about like building a brand or building like a business. And sometimes that business is focused on yourself. Sometimes it's focused on most, most of the time it's not focused around yourself as like a lifestyle criteria. It's focused around a specific area. Like for instance, you focusing on technology and you're a tech journalist and you have an independent company. There's a lot of other people like Marquez brownie right like he's tech essentially like sure could he work in tech media sure but he's built his own sort of media business around technology so you see a lot of people doing stuff like that and especially meeting the needs of people that have not been served by traditional media yeah but there is there is you know it can't really be unpacked from like the the fame end of it like is it a business yes but is there also you could say the same thing about journalism well no i i don't think that that is really part of it i really don't i think it is part of it for certain, sure, entertainment adjacent content creators, the content creators that want to eventually get into maybe more Hollywood and entertainment.

10:37Sure. But that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the content creator system. And you could say the same thing for journalism. Do people get into journalism for fame? Sure. I'm sure there are definitely. I'm sure some TV journalists, especially. Right. But I would say most journalists don't get into it for that. Yeah. I mean, I think journalism is the absolute worst form of influencing. you get the all the downsides and almost none of the upsides of money or anything like that one of the things that's interesting is so many of the characters in your book fade in and out and that's because their personal form of entertainment or their mastery of a certain format you know eventually gets stale or goes away but with with people in the news you have the news always that keeps you relevant so actually like this shelf life of a news influencer ends up lasting much longer than your typical like entertainment or you know vine influencer yeah i mean i think that's true for most content creators like most content creators it's and people again it's like people are obsessed with the fame aspect they can't see the rest of they don't actually understand the industry because the only lens that they can understand it through is fame which is now a commodity and i would say everyone has fit like the internet just makes fame more of a commodity rather than like a thing that some people have and some people don't.

11:56I mean, most people, it's like the YouTuber, for instance, that fixes mountain bikes all day and has a YouTube channel focused on mountain bikes and does a bunch of deals and maybe starts his own brand of mountain bikes, right? Like that is most of the creator economy. It's not Vine stars with millions of followers at all. Or it's like these independent media businesses, a huge amount of women. I mean, the industry was built and runs on women's labor. it's a lot of you know I start with the mommy bloggers but it's people building alternative media and that's what it really is it's media businesses that people are building you know using the internet basically to build and podcasts and all this stuff you know but it's not like most of those people aren't famous I think the top one percent yes they're legitimate celebrities in their own right but most of the workers in the creative world are not nor do they really care I mean, a lot of them don't even show their faces, you know?

12:46It seems like the longer folks stay in this, like the bigger the psychological cost is to them. You want to unpack that a little bit? Yeah, I think it's just it's an incredibly difficult career to maintain because it's a public facing job in the sense that you have to you are so beholden to your audience and not being reactive to your audience. It's just a hard thing. You're building a media business. Media businesses are so difficult to run and monetize. it's kind of crazy. It makes a lot more sense, which is what you see a lot of content creators doing now to launch a specific product. They basically build this audience and then launch a product because that's one of the main ways to monetize now.

13:25You can't rely on ad deals. And just psychologically, like you said, it's hard. It's hard to spend so much time on these platforms. You cannot take a week off. You have zero protections. You often don't have healthcare. People are deriding you as like a attention whore or whatever people like. I mean, I talked to so many women in this book that just like they have zero respect. And so people don't acknowledge the labor that comes along with this job because people think it's easy. You know, we all think, oh, I'll just take some selfies and put myself on the internet. I could do that. It's like, no, it's so much harder than you think.

13:57Yeah. So let's talk about like the first word of extremely online. Like, is it possible to just be like a bit online versus extremely? Because it is interesting how it sucks people in to be so extremely online versus just like a little bit like it can go with every one of these influencers that we're talking about and that's kind of going back to again like for me and you'll forgive me for belaboring the point but that's why i think people are like these folks seek attention is because you can decide to be a little bit online or you can decide or moderately online or you can decide to be extremely online right and the extremely online sort of speaks to this actually that not so much people's personal internet use but more like the internet mediated world that we all live in whether or not you personally use the internet very much, it doesn't matter.

14:42It's ultimately irrelevant because the internet and online attention is the primary currency in today's world. That is what... You are living in a world that is completely reshaped and upended by the internet every day. And whether or not you want to think that you participate in that or not, you inherently do because you're in this world. And also, by the way, we all have an increasingly big online footprint, whether we're putting out content about ourselves or all of these companies are collecting massive amounts of data and we have profiles about ourselves built online, basically, you know, without our sort of without us putting ourselves online, I guess.

15:14Hold on. But there's a there's a degree to which you can choose to engage. I mean, that's like the question. Sorry. Well, yeah. And I just want to say another thing. Again, it is this misconception, this completely false narrative that these people are seeking fame. What they with a number one reason you're talking about why kids want to be YouTubers. Do you know why that is? That's not because they're seeking fame. And that's how the media constantly frames it when and I did I've done so many stories like this where I've interviewed so many people it is not what they want is stability that is the number one thing that they talk about when you interview kids why do you want to be a youtuber it's stability they do not trust the economic system correctly today they know that there's no stable career path that you can just go into and you can like work in for 40 years that world does not exist they view entrepreneurialism and sort of like building their own basically life raft of followers, attention, whatever, that is a sense of security.

16:07For instance, they say, I've talked to young kids that say, well, if my mom, we're gonna lose our house. And I know that if I have to do a GoFundMe or something, or if we get in trouble, my followers will help me. My followers will keep me safe. My followers will pay my medical bills. If I get in a car accident, my followers will help me get a job. If I get laid off, that is why people want an online following because they view it as a proxy for power. and influence and sort of they're correct because you are in a better place in our economy and our world if you have a million followers versus none.

16:38And we have a country that has zero social safety net. That's why I think influencer culture is so pervasive here in America and not as pervasive in these countries where people don't need to do all of that. They don't need to get millions of followers to make sure that they can get their basic needs met. Yeah. I mean, I have to say the concept of stability as a driver for me certainly resonates when people ask like why I left BuzzFeed to start big technology like how could you leave BuzzFeed stable job and I'm like no it was actually riskier to stay in that job than it was to start my own media company and then lo and behold the company shut down BuzzFeed News a few exactly but also like but let's go back to this question of degree because it does matter and I think we'll never agree on the fame thing but the question of how online people want to be.

17:26Yeah, I'm not saying fame is not a part of it, but it's really not the core of it. And that is the only narrative through which the media seems to pay attention to this industry. And I think it's when you only see the industry through that lens, you miss the actual impact of it. And they watch the fame, the media watches the fame. It watches the money for sure. And then it also looks at the entertainment value. Which I don't think is as good as a lot of traditional media. Like you can put the best Mr. Beast video up against like a mediocre HBO show and HBO will probably win. Yeah. Well, to be fair, Mr.

18:01Beast is for like four year olds and five year olds. Yeah. But by the way, full disclosure, I'm watching Mr. Beast. Every every video that comes out, I'm watching the full video. Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. I mean, he's he's such an expert. I would say that there I mean, I do think that there is entertainment on the Internet that rivals traditional television, but it's a completely different format. It's more of a like. What what mindset are you in? And do you want to watch this like two hour deep dive into some crypto investigation? Sure. Do you want to watch? It's never going to rival the Sopranos, but it's its own sort of form of entertainment.

18:31So yes, let's get back to this degree question because, you know, we've danced around it a couple of times, but don't people have a choice about how online they actually want to be like you? It seems like everybody just goes all in all like there's a here. There's a line from your epilogue that I found interesting. You said we're all pressed to commodify ourselves, our lives and our relationship in increasingly invasive ways. Well, can't we just can modify our lives and or whatever it is like and not go all in? Like, is there a requirement? You suffer because of that. You suffer because of that, especially the younger you are, the more the younger you are, the more you're operating in a heavily online mediated world, Internet mediated world.

19:13Right. Like, so if you want to get a job, if you want to, you exist on the internet. Again, you don't have to be posting a lot, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you post because your entire life has been documented on the internet. It's all crowdsourced. Like, I mean, you talk about these kids growing up today. They have had their lives documented on the internet from the time they were babies, through their parents posting, through their schools posting, through the sports teams posting about them, through the massive amount of data about them that is out there. You know, I'm writing this story now on these SEO sites that just are increasingly making SEO articles for random people.

19:48They're doing that to fill this need because people, there's just, there's increasingly a larger and larger amount of content about all of us on the internet. And we are all one second away from going viral from often without our own consent, increasingly without our own consent, right? Somebody else films a video of you and you're in it and now you're, you know, the subway girl or whatever. You know, like people... sort of like know you. And, um, so the, and, and it doesn't matter again, it doesn't matter if you personally participate or you personally post on the internet, the world is driven by the internet, politics, business, culture, pop culture, especially this is, these are all shaped by the internet.

20:26So maybe you don't personally participate in and you don't personally post, which I'm totally a fan of, by the way, I don't post about my personal life on the internet. It doesn't matter because the entire system that we live in is shaped by online attention and by the internet and by this new media landscape. And so that's what I mean. There's no opting out of that. Yeah. Or you could, you can only try to opt out so far and the younger you are, the less able you are to opt out. Right. And how about your own, I mean, you don't post your personal life, but you're definitely out there on every platform.

20:56Every time I open Tik TOK, I see you. Do you worry about like what being so online will do to you over time or is doing to you currently? Yeah, I have such strong boundaries around the internet. And I have such strong boundaries, like I'm very careful about it. And I love being on the internet and sharing my opinions and talking about things. And like, I'm a debater. So like, I love like, you know, engaging with ideas online. But I personally don't, you know, I don't put that sort of like, that other side of it where I feel like it really affects my sense of self, you know. Um, like I have a very strong sort of like understanding of like, especially since 2020, when I really started to get a lot of like hate and I saw my work very politicized.

21:42And I think I like a lot of people have sort of turned me into like a character on the internet that stands for something, whether good or bad. Um, it's just made me even more disconnected where I'm like, okay, whatever. This is so, this is so like different than my actual life that it's just very easy to like emotionally separate. But of course, I worry about like my attention span. And, you know, again, I think the Internet isn't inherently bad and the Internet can be an amazing tool for connection. I think our current platform landscape is really broken and I don't love what it does to anybody.

22:16Well, yeah, let's talk about that on the other side. Taylor Lorenz is with us. She's a tech columnist, The Washington Post, author of Extremely Online, the untold story of fame, influence and power on the Internet. On the other side of this break, we'll talk about the ideas that Taylor has to make the internet better. And also, maybe we can talk a little bit about why the internet isn't fun anymore. At least that's the sense that a lot of people get. We'll do that and more right after the break. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles.

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25:00And we're back here with Taylor Lorenz, the author of Extremely Online, the untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet. By the way, before the break, you mentioned that you've become a character for good or in some ways good, some ways bad. that people, that is somewhat different from the person you are. Can you like talk about what that is? Yeah, I mean, I think in 2020 when my work started to get very politicized and I think it was increasingly, I mean, increasingly the things I write about online attention. So I've always had a lot of attention on the internet and I've always had YouTubers making videos responding to me.

25:34And I write about people with millions of followers and I should acknowledge like fame is literally in the title of my book. So I'm not trying to say that fame is like not a thing. I should have just read the subtitle to you as a rebuttal to all your points. No, I'm kidding. No, no, no. I just like, I just like, I just like have a tip on my shoulder because I'm like, it's so much more than that though, you know? Right. But it is that partially. Okay. It is part of it. Especially, especially Alex, when you're talking about the top 1%, which is, I think what most people, like when most people think of content creators, they are thinking of that top 1%.