Who built the internet? And who will save it?

24:33It was very accessible fashion. She would push affiliate codes and she was, yeah, she was destroyed by the mainstream media and by men in tech. You know, she was trying to be sort of like a tech commentator and journalists and sort of like an influencer, you know, like a figure. And anyway, I just think, yeah, throughout the 2010s, people, it was women that were pushing these boundaries and women that created this industry. and you know when you saw ceos in silicon valley talking about like the creator economy they're completely written they're not talking about heather armstrong they're not talking about julie allison they're talking about david dobrik and these men that came onto the scene like a decade later and that's because many of those women have left the majority of women from that era have completely quit the internet completely not like they just deprecated their blog like they don't use the internet anymore because it was so vicious and then you contrast that with like Jake Paul, who you also write about in your book, not that many years later, releasing an entire song that he, that is literally just like buy my merch over and over and over.

25:31He literally spells out the URL to his merch shop in the song. And, and nobody has any problem with this. This is like, this is fine. And he's just called a self promoter. Whereas women were called fame whores like that. That sort of language was deeply misogynistic language was used against all these women. Yeah, obviously have very strong feelings as a woman on the Internet about sort of like online misogyny. But it's just crazy because it makes you want to scream. You read what they're saying and they're like 100 percent right. And if those women were able to get the venture capital funding that all these other idiots got, I just, you know.

26:06Let's talk about that for a minute. So Jake Paul is really interesting, right? He was a YouTuber. You wrote about him a lot when he was a YouTuber. We wrote about him a lot. He he was the vanguard of one class of YouTubers. it feels like that era of YouTube is over, right? For better or worse, that era of YouTube is done. It feels like view counts on YouTube generally are sort of declining because everyone's on TikTok or shorts or reels or whatever. Like that's all changing. And that class of gigantic YouTubers, as you mentioned, has all pivoted to, man, it is really expensive to buy ads on our shows.

26:38What if we just made the products and used our shows as ad for the products? That's the real money. Is it over? Is that just a feeling I get watching all these people try to sell Prime and Feastables and whatever else that that era of YouTube is over because the money is somewhere else? I had a Feastables yesterday for the first time ever. By the way, it was really exciting. Was it good? Was it in preparation for this interview? It literally was. I bought it at Target. It was a little thing. It was called Crunch. Did you fix the display? Did you fix the display? My wife thought it was so stupid that I was buying this.

27:08She was like, that's just a Crunch bar for more money. And I was like, no, it's Mr. Beast. and I like explained this whole thing to her in line at Target and the woman behind us in line looks at my wife and goes I've been married 40 years it's like this forever so yeah feasible we're me best friends but sorry Taylor go ahead I love it no I mean I talk about this in my book of just sort of like how that daily vlogging schedule and that prank era of YouTube and that sort of era of excess on YouTube I think led to mass burnout and depression and And then of course the pandemic hit soon after that and TikTok launched.

27:43And I think it just like, it disrupted so much about that. Those sort of like glory days of the YouTube views culture that it's really hard to recapture. And I think YouTube's in this really weird space now because they're not the number one anymore. I mean, they're still great. They're the gold standard for monetization. If you're doing, you know, ad share and it's a stable platform, but the discovery on it is so bad. The creative tools on it, as you mentioned, there's still, it's crazy to me that they don't have their own video editor. You know, even I think that that like the bottom has fallen out and a lot of YouTubers are having an identity crisis now because it's very hard.

28:15And I mean, Hank Green made a video about this a while ago that that was really smart about sort of how YouTube shorts competes with its own product almost and how it's been hard for creators to navigate and monetize. Well, and that views culture thing you're talking about is one of the sort of structural things that I found really interesting throughout the book is like we have sort of ratcheted up this thing where it is just assumed among creators that you have to post constantly all the time or else you'll essentially be forgotten. Right. And there's like you have a bunch of people with this like existential fear that if I take one day off, the algorithm will ignore me forever and my career is over.

28:50And I can you can see how that would like destroy you emotionally pretty fast. And part of what is wild to me is that what it seems like has happened is like we've gotten to the point where a lot of stuff is easier to post, both like technically because TikTok makes it easy and culturally because there's been this big pushback to just like be authentic, just like prop your phone up and take a video. And it's actually like a lot of work to look really authentic. But at any rate is like the polish is getting a little easier. But we're still in this place where you have to post all the time, constantly, every minute in order to be anywhere.

29:25And it feels like there ought to be a platform that is like we can do something better. But then I think about it and I'm like, I don't even actually know what better looks like. Better is just like Netflix where they give you a lot more money to make less stuff. And I don't know if that works either. I totally agree. I don't know. I would be interested on Neil Iassas this too just like running a media company like I I don't know because I feel that pressure even in journalism it's like you have to keep posting or people I get I've even it's so hard for me my editor last week I want to file something and he was like just finish the stories that you're supposed to be working on but that's a good editor right there I have gotten that speech many times I got that in a macro for David David's like Neil I and I'm like I just hit FS and it says finish the stories you're supposed to be working on but it's like this pressure.

30:09I think anybody that sort of creates things online and you want to hold attention online, it's very hard to hold attention on the internet because of the competition. And I don't know that any platform is better. I mean, obviously subscription platforms are maybe better for that, but I don't know. I mean, Casey Newton was saying that he sort of atrophies, like subscribers go down sometimes if you don't post enough on Substack apparently. And so you just got to keep feeding the beast, I guess. Yeah. Well, there's a part of it that I think is It's just being in service to your audience. So whether you're making journalism or entertainment or whatever, like you need to be there because the audience is waiting.

30:42But then there's the flip side of it, which is major artists go away and they use that to their advantage. Right. They disappear. Taylor Swift disappears between albums and tours. And then she comes back with a vengeance. Beyonce disappears between albums and she's barely present when she's on tour. Like that is a very managed persona. And I feel like that hasn't permeated yet into online culture. And you can see that more Hollywood style of media, like they've mastered taking it away and like building demand and then filling the demand with something great or something expensive, at least. Online, no one has figured out how to do this.

31:23And I think that is actually crushing. And I think it sometimes makes us make worse work. I think the question I would have for you, Taylor, is I suspect the algorithmic platforms make that a thousand times worse, right? Like you have a big platform at a big newspaper. You can take a break and you come back and your bosses at the newspaper are like, we're going to publish your stories again and promote them. We have our own website. We can just like put whatever we want on it and hopefully people read it. But it's ours. Whereas I feel like every YouTuber and TikToker I know is like, if I stop for one second, this robot will forget about me and I will never return.

31:58And that pressure seems very different. it's totally different and you're so right and this is what i think is really hard with the whole creator world it's very hard i think that some creators have tried to make sort of like um you know they try to have a schedule that they can stick to like okay my weekly videos drop every friday and i'm going to take next week off and being transparent with your audience but no i totally agree with you it's just that that sort of culture of building and anticipation has not been brought to the internet and i think that's why you have mr beast and all these other people posting a million times, right?

32:30It's like, it's, you have to keep feeding the algorithm. Is there any reckoning inside of the platforms? I feel like a few years ago, burnout for YouTubers was a big topic and YouTube itself was like, we're going to build you tools so you can take a break. And that never appears to have come to anything across these platforms. Yeah, no, they didn't. They built shorts, which makes it, you should post even more. Yeah. Yeah, no, the platforms are never going to do that because it's not in their interest. and they have absolutely no, they don't, they don't want users to take time away from the platforms.

32:59That is the opposite of sort of their business interests. And so I don't think, and I don't think that the upside of it would equal out where it would be that much of a benefit. I think culturally we sort of have to change. I totally agree. There was this moment, 2018, 2019, where like burnout was this like big conversation. And I talk about that in my book, sort of how it like entered in this cultural conversation, but now it's just gone again. And it sometimes comes up in now and then, but I think that we still, you know, I want videos for my favorite content creators, right? But yeah, we haven't entered into that era where it's sort of like the audiences are forgiving and the algorithms are forgiving.

33:33Well, it seems like the audience thing, I think is genuinely like really tricky and like potentially unsolvable, right? Where you've like, you train a group of people to care deeply about everything that you do and then you stop giving them that. Like that's gonna, I can see why that's a challenge. It seems like algorithmically, like if YouTube wanted to change the incentives, it could, right? Like YouTube, and you chronicle this in the book, and we've talked about this a lot on the show, like YouTube gave people reasons to make longer videos. So they made longer videos. And YouTube gave people data on what kinds of thumbnails work.

34:04So everybody started using those thumbnails, right? Like it's all just incentives. And if YouTube were to say, you know, we think there's an overwhelming likelihood that if you make two things a week that most of your subscribers watch instead of 15 a week that only a small percentage of them watch, suddenly you might have fewer better things on the internet. And like TikTok, even which is like all about discovery could be like, well, we're so good at showing you new stuff that actually the pressure to keep posting stuff can go down because we can keep people occupied. But it just doesn't seem like anybody is actually interested in figuring out how to solve that algorithmically at all.

34:39I totally agree. I don't think they will. But I wish that they would incentivize that that sort of like slow down. Right. Like don't don't upload so much content. But that's not what they they want you to upload as much as possible. Well, I always think about the equation I had in media, right? Like we make news posts on a 20-minute cycle and we make long features on a two-year cycle and we get to pick and choose. And on YouTube – and you can be either kind of reporter and you can be successful as either kind of reporter. On YouTube, if you spend two years making one video, you have failed. Yeah.

35:14Right? Like just flat out you have failed. You will not be a successful YouTuber. You will be poor and die penniless and alone. If you make a video every 20 minutes, you will be massively rich. And if you can just keep that pace up, you're going to be fine. And you see AI flooding into the zone where there's already these weird headless channels or faceless channels, I think they call them, of just AI reading podcast transcripts. We have boots of this podcast. It's just AI reading transcripts of this podcast. And it is nuts. And you can see why they're doing it. It's because volume will win. At some point, that has to eat YouTube, right?

35:48Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think at some point there should be a reckoning where like YouTube should be like, OK, we need higher quality content. That does happen, right, with certain platforms where they're like, OK, this is too much spam. Like I was just thinking of Spotify. I was reading Ashley Carmen's piece about sort of like how they're trying to downrank some of the like white noise podcasts and stuff. This is our favorite thing to talk about right now. To say I have a$38 million problem because I have not appropriately monetized white noise is like you. Everyone should just take a hard look at themselves in that meeting room and be like, we are talking about monetizing literally white noise on our platform that is meant to promote art.

36:23Like, what have we done? But it's such a good metaphor for like what these platforms incentivize, which is just like content at all costs and like meaning. I love white noise, but like, you know, ultimately it's not artistic necessarily. How much white noise do we really need is the question. I don't know. I don't know. But I do think that as everyone is becoming a content creator and everyone is creating, and like you said, with the rise of AI where it's easier and easier and easier to create content, I think that they'll have to start prioritizing quality content. And we'll see if our attention spans are long enough to watch a longer video or not.

36:59Has thinking about all of this strategically and analytically, you're a person who is on all of these platforms. you're just on threads like every 15 minutes telling people to subscribe to your youtube channel yeah you're the most online person on this podcast yeah and i like i wonder after like years of reporting on this but also being like sort of this deep in the weeds of like what these platforms reward a is it any fun being on any of these platforms anymore and b like do you find yourself just like ruthlessly defeating the rules of every platform like when when threads came out at first, you very clearly were like, this is my moment.

37:34I'm going to post 400 ,000 times on threads because the algorithm will promote me because there's not that many people here. I'm going to get a billion followers. And I think it actually worked super well. But like, do you just have to live this life now? Like, you know, you know, too well how the sausage is made and like, this is your life now. Oh my God. I'm doomed. I love the internet. I don't know if you can tell from my book, but I'm very much a tech optimist and I really, really love the internet and technology. And even though the Silicon Valley people drive me crazy, like I, I do have a lot of fun online and I do have fun every day on the internet.

38:08I feel like it's, it is really fun, but I am kind of a nihilist about, you know, the content creator world and kind of getting followers or things like that, because it's like, it is what it is. And I know how it goes. And I know how, you know, when you want to, I mean, this is why I have the following that I do on TikTok. Cause I did the same thing. I'm like, okay, well, TikTok is going to reward me. It's, I know this platform is going to be really big. I just want to get to half a million. I'm going to keep posting until I get to half a million and I'm going to do that and whatever, you know, because I want that following.

38:35I want, I want an audience for my work. That thing is like, it reminds me of what everybody did. And you were the one who wrote about this with the, the Johnny Depp and we're heard trial, right? Where there was this moment where it was, it was basically it was like content arbitrage, right? Everybody's like, there's so much interested in all the video game channels were pivoting to it. Yeah. There's like, there's so much interest in this. Every major news event now is an opportunity for audience growth, which has always been that way for news companies, but now it's that way for influencers too.

38:59And that's why you see yeah same with the war in ukraine you had like you know slime channels talking about it i was crazy yeah but i wonder like do you for literally for you personally you you're like okay this is a game to be won and i'm going to play it like a game to be won yeah but then what like is that and i genuinely i like this this might sound like i'm being sort of like backhanded insulting i'm not i'm genuinely curious i think you're very good at this but i wonder like it's some do you look at the half a million things on tiktok and you're like okay and now I can do what I want to do?

39:33Or is it just like a forever a game to keep winning at? I think it's always a fun game to play, but the goal is to do stories. And my experience, especially covering internet culture, is that audience growth, one, I work in media, incredibly unstable industry. So my audience is a valuable asset to me in the media landscape. So I want to maintain that and maintain my relevance in the media world. But also in terms of what I cover, which is internet culture, one, I have to be a heavy user to write about it in the way that I write about it because my whole thing is like writing about things as users and like as somebody that gets it.

40:09So I have to spend a lot of time. And also it's good for sourcing. It's good for, it's what I want, this is what I want to do. And so, yeah, I got to keep being on here to do it. But I think because I cover it and because I'm so aware of the downsides, I do have a strong sort of like mental barrier. And I don't, I've like gotten better mentally at sort of like dealing with having to be on 50 platforms every day and cross posting and stuff. And I don't take it that seriously. I should take it more seriously. I was meeting, I was at this event last night and they were like, and you haven't got, you need to do this.

40:38And why aren't you live streaming this? And I was like, Oh, I just, I do what's fun. I usually, sometimes I try to make certain numbers. Like I'll be like, Oh, I want to get to a hundred K on X, Y, Z. And well, so let me ask you the flip side and it's worth noting that david and i have known you since you were literally a social media manager i think at mashable yeah like we we've all known each other for a very long time and so for me i just know you as taylor a lot of the internet i assume some portion of our audience knows you as a perpetual main character like fox news can put your name in a headline to get clicks and they do yeah they don't even have to name who you are just taylor lorenz yeah they don't do that shit to me i think they try to do it to david once and everyone was like who's this clown but they do that to you all the time right yeah what is that experience like crazy it seems like that mental barrier you're talking about is very important if you want to continue living through that and produce at the rate that you do like i don't think i could take it to be clear no you it you know it's like everything it gets old and you're like oh okay that's just how it is i don't know i i think like i mean it's also like i feel like um whatever that metaphor is of like the boiling frog, you know, like I, I write about people with huge, I write about online attention and the online attention economy.

41:52And so you're, you're often covering people with huge platforms way before Tucker Carlson or any of these, you know, right-wing influencers had drama with me. Like I had Jake Pollard's, I had PewDiePie make a video about me in 2017, you know, when he was like the biggest YouTuber on the planet. Like my work has always gotten attention. It's just that that never crossed into the mainstream until 2020. And I think COVID shoved everyone online and sort of forced everyone to take this internet world seriously in a way. And it got hyper-politicized. And suddenly, I think, like, other media people started to notice it.

42:22Like, when you have a CNN media reporter platforming the leader of, one of the leaders of Comicsgate, you know, being like, oh, here's what, you know, this person thinks of Taylor Lorenz, this YouTuber. It's like, whoa, where did, normally that stayed on YouTube, you know? I'm like, uh-oh, this is, like, in the real world now. So I think, like, you know, it's led to a lot. And obviously Fox News, for many reasons, I think has chosen me as a target. And that's because it drives views. I mean, I think Tucker Carlson has YouTuber energy where like he recognizes like, I'm going to make these characters.

42:51I'm going to build this online world. I'm going to have this cast of characters. And some I'm pointing as villains and some are my heroes. And that's just, that's the internet. It's very lucrative, but it's very bizarre to lose control of the narrative of your life. Like I have to say when it first started in 2020, like I would go around and like try and correct people. Like, I'd be like, well, that's not true. My uncle doesn't run the Internet Archive or whatever Elon was saying recently. I was like, what? But now I don't do that anymore. I just kind of it's a losing battle. And also, like, I don't I don't really care.

43:21It's just like a video game. Also, Tucker Carlson, I think, is exclusively on X now. So that's cool. Look, that's where the ladies are, dog. You're in the market with that lucrative teen girl audience. I'm dying because, like, I want to see that man compete on YouTube. Like, we all know the views on X are bullshit. But let's see him operate on a real platform and see how much of that cable audience he can actually bring on the internet. I'm skeptical, honestly. I think he has – I mean, in some ways, he's so good at the internet. And his persona is very good at generating outrage. But he's flopped hard on X.

43:55Yeah, the numbers are going down. I just don't think he has the juice. And also, he could make the classic YouTuber juice the views video, which is to say that YouTube is demonetizing him or suppressing him. Nothing plays more than that. Oh, 100%. Yeah. All right. So two more things. And then we're going to let you go. One is about the book and one is about the future. The last one about the book is I want to know why live streaming didn't quite work. Like it sort of comes and goes throughout the book. And there's this there's this moment where like you now is going to be a thing. And then you now just sort of like disappears.

44:28You never like you now never dies in the book. It just sort of disappears into the ether. And then like Twitch is rising. But like we all kind of know what Twitch is like. It's it's doing fine. But it's kind of in its own lane. Why didn't live streaming become the thing alongside some of this other stuff? I think we still haven't cracked live streaming. Like I think mobile, I, do you guys remember hype Russ's app before HQ turned into HQ? That was my favorite live streaming app on the planet. No app will ever come. I actually think like the future of live streaming will look something much more like hype where it was so interactive and so creative and mobile first.

45:05Twitch is really hard, as you said, like all these, most of these, and you now, most of those live streaming apps were built for desktop. Facebook live just tried to make everyone live stream on Facebook, which no one, that was such a weird sort of like, no one wanted that content on Facebook. And so I don't think that we've had a sort of breakout live streaming product. One, because of the technology wasn't there for most of the twenties. I mean, I think only recently we have this sort of like data capacities and stuff. And also I don't think there's been a product that truly like, I think it's more of a feature than a product.

45:37And maybe one day we'll have this product, but I think it'll have to be immersive and interactive and different, like something new. Again, something that sort of like comes after. I don't think it's going to come from Twitch. But you think it could happen? Like one of the debates that we've had a bunch is like, is live streaming waiting on like better tools and technology? Or is it just a fact that most people are boring most of the time and that it turns out that actually what I want is like a nicely edited 10 minute video of your life, if not your whole actual life. This is why I don't think things like Twitch are ever going to be like, I totally agree with you.

46:09However, there is this, you know how we're all taught to post, like for instance, I think we first on text posts, right? Like, oh, you see something crazy. You're going to tweet about it, right? Now it's like, oh my God, I saw something crazy. I'm going to take a video and put it on TikTok and that's going to reach everyone. I do think that the average person goes live as a certain part of like, as another sort of form of posting, whether, you know, maybe it's just for interesting things or whatever. Like, I do think that that will happen. I just don't think it'll happen in any of the current platforms that we have now.

46:38I'm fascinated by the media ecosystem around the Taylor Swift Eras tour. It is wild, right? There's a camera arms race going on there. Teen girls have brought back point and shoot cameras as a trend because of this tour. And I'm watching all of these young women say their Canon G7Xs are the best cameras they've ever owned, which is just like if you're in it, like that's wild, right? And then the other piece of it is they're all live streaming the concerts. And Taylor has to know this is happening. And she's built the thing to reward that behavior. And that is a feedback loop that is taking place.

47:13And the expectation that the concert will be live streamed and millions of people will do this thing has created a culture of live streaming unto itself, which is wild. And it seems like those kinds of moments are more the future of live streaming than the sort of like I'm going to like I watch a lot of short order cooks make omelets when I when I shave in the morning. Like that's what just shows up on my TikTok feed is like a thing that I will like have in the background. And that seems like one style. But then this like massive cultural live stream opportunity seems like another style. And both of them, there are like reasons you are doing it as opposed to just I'm going to make a thing.

47:52I totally agree. I don't think the future of live streaming is just the people in their bedrooms. Although, I mean, that is a genre of content. But yeah, TikTok Live has been so interesting, too. Just like that platform in general. If you can get your way onto the short order cook TikTok live, it is just some of the most relaxing shit in the entire world. That's actually a good example of the interactivity stuff you're talking about, Taylor. My favorite live streams are the ones where the people are asleep and you can send them gifts to do weird stuff to them in their room while they're sleeping.

48:23That's very different than the relaxing short order cook. It's much worse, but it is much more like the future of live streaming. Yeah, which is what I saw Pinky Doll last night, actually. uh the npc streamer but i think that that's the same thing it's like that it's that interactivity totally um all right last thing so nila and i are obsessed with um activity pub and the fediverse and this idea of like open social web being the next thing and i think we're in this moment of like platform decline and chaos across the board everything feels like it's up in the air for the first time in a really long time you are a person who's on all these platforms are you like bullish on Mastodon and the threads and the Fediverse and all this stuff?

49:05Like, what do you make of all of that coming? Yes. My colleague Will Aramis is like the expert on all of this. And I always sort of look to his opinions and he's very bullish on it too. I love it. I mean, I'm on Mastodon every day posting like I am on every app. But I know I think it's really interesting. I don't think Mastodon itself is very user-friendly and it's not going to scale, But yeah, the activity, but the interoperability stuff is definitely a theme. It just seems like it marries a lot of the stuff you're talking about. Like even just go all the way back to MySpace. It was like this thing where it was you had some control and some ownership and some freedom.

49:41And then Facebook comes along and is like, we're going to make it really simple and we're going to centralize it and we're going to put it in front of everybody. It's like if we do this next phase right, you can have the best of like the blogging era and the MySpace era and the Facebook era kind of all in one mushy thing. I assume we will get this wrong in a bunch of unknowable ways, but it feels like we're like maybe headed back towards the right part of this. Like Neil, I always like to say it's 2003 on the Internet again. And I think in a lot of ways it's really true. No, totally. And I love it.

50:10I mean, I love I'm rooting for that future because I want all of those things. Everybody wants more control. Everybody wants more freedom to post. It's horrible to be locked into these social platforms. You want to reach a wide around of people and you want more sort of flexibility in, you know, different platforms. And I'm rooting for it. I'm rooting for it. I'm still on Mastodon. I'm definitely not like giving up on any of it. And it'll be interesting to see kind of like how it all shaped. Is Tumblr still the platform that holds your heart? I can tell like reading this whole book, it was just like, like clearly the two platforms you love the most are Tumblr and Vine.

50:43And we could spend a lot of time on those two platforms. But like if I remember you from way back. David, you knew me when I was a Tumblr girl. I know. This is what I'm saying. You're still a Tumblr girl. Like at heart, you are still a Tumblr girl, right? It's true. Okay. Just making sure. Yes. I mean, Tumblr gave me everything. I started that. That's, I was working shitty temp jobs when I discovered Tumblr. It gave me my audience on Tumblr. That's the reason I am where I am now. Everything. I have people that have followed me from Tumblr years. And I loved Vine. And I could have written a whole book on Vine.

51:14Somebody needs to do something on Vine. I mean, also, like, everyone will talk because there's no stakes in that, that the company is gone and Twitter is gone. So, like, there was so much stuff I wish I could have included. I literally wrote 60 ,000 words on Vine. And it was like, OK, this is just. Release that book. That's just a, you should just publish that as one endless X thread. It's just like, that's how it goes down forever is, like, the server capacity of your 60 ,000 page book on Vine. It's just like a one, the longest thread ever published. Finally takes X down. That would be such a great legacy to leave.

51:51We got to ask that question. What do you think happens with that one? Do you think it survives? X? No, absolutely not. Are you kidding me? That app is so fucked. I mean, Elon doesn't know what he's doing. I don't know that that means it necessarily like goes out of business because Elon has endless money. But I mean, it's a joke. It's it's he's literally speed running like every mistake that these, you know, arrogant Silicon Valley men make, which is. Did you send him a copy of your book? I replied to him when he was tweeting about me calling me a stalker ex-girlfriend for posting about Twitter on threads.

52:21And I was like, you know, if you want to know more about Silicon Valley and the mistakes they make on social products, please appear to my book. And he didn't respond. Well, we're going to mail him to the Twitter headquarters. Mail him a copy. Yeah. All right, Taylor, thank you so much. This was awesome. Congrats on the book. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, super fun. Please, please pre-order it. Order it. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about the Internet Archive and why it's suddenly in crisis. We'll be right back.

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55:10Welcome back. So over the last three or so years, this organization called the Internet Archive has been caught up in some pretty big deal controversies. They seem important because I think the Internet Archive is important, and there are a lot of organizations out there that are very mad at the Internet Archive. And if I'm being totally honest, I don't really understand why. It seems odd to me that publishers and the music industry and others would have a bone to pick with this organization that's just out here caching webpages so you can find them when they change. Luckily, The Verge's Addie Robertson does understand what's going on here and also why it's important and where it might go.

55:47So I figured I'd have her come on and explain. Hi, Addie. Hey. I thought I understood what was going on with the Internet Archive and what the Internet Archive was. And then I started reading about it and it turns out none of this makes any sense to me. So I want to talk about this both because it's very important and because it seems to hit on kind of like all of the complicated stories of the Internet right now. But let's let's like truly start at the very beginning here. I know the Internet Archive as the way back machine. It's the place you go and you type in a URL and you can see old versions of the URL.

56:19The Internet Archive, as I understand it, is actually much more than that. Like, what is this thing trying to do? What is its job on the Internet? The Internet Archive is both an archive of the Internet and an archive on the Internet. So, yeah, the thing that I think most people spend most of their time engaging with is the Wayback Machine, which is just an archive of webpages. It just copies webpages, preserves them. It's incredibly important. It also does a lot of traditional preservation, though. It tends to be organized into projects. One thing that's gotten a lot of attention is that it does a lot of video game preservation.

56:53So if you want to play an old Atari game or an Apple II game or something from the 80s, then that's a thing you can just go and do. And they emulate them, and it's really interesting. You can go and find old copies of bodybuilder magazines from the 20s. There's just this huge grab bag of things on it. Okay. But then they also run a few really specific projects. One of the ones we're probably going to talk about a lot is the Open Library, which is this very large book digitization program. And it works a little bit, I mean, like a library. You can go and you look up books and you can check them out for very limited periods of time and you get the scan of the book and you can view it and then click and turn it back in.

57:40Okay. So this seems like the sort of thing that to a normal person who doesn't want to think about this too much, aka yours truly, this seems like a universally good thing, right? It's preserving things. The internet is notoriously bad at preserving things. It is good to preserve things. This seems like a good idea. Like there's a lot of controversy happening right now. And I want to talk about that. But if you rewind five years ago, this is this is a thing has been around for a long time. Has this been a controversial idea this whole time that this is a thing that exists and is doing the work it's doing?

58:14The Internet Archive in general, I mean, people, it does a lot of things that are incredibly valuable that I think most people really don't have a huge issue with. I think the Wayback Machine people largely understand, like, this is like a load varying part of the Internet at this point. Yeah, like you could argue the Internet would be a demonstrably less good place without the Wayback Machine. But things like the Open Library are actually part of this very long struggle with publishers that goes back decades and decades at this point. That's really that publishers, I want to say increasingly, but it's been this way for a long time, just really don't want anyone doing anything with a book that they did not authorize explicitly and make money on every copy of.

58:55Like that sounds mean, but that's also just that that's what the profit motive is like. Like, that's just what they're doing. Yeah. A thing that I've learned in the prep for this is that a lot of publishers have picked big fights with libraries over the years, which is like, again, like you're saying, on the one hand, it's a thing they didn't make money from. It's a way people access books. It strikes me as the kind of thing that is sort of insane to pick a fight with. Like, I'm mad at the library is just a bonkers battle to pick, even if it's a thing that you feel. But this has been happening intermittently forever.

59:25So I guess it's not totally shocking that people would be mad at the Internet Archive, too. The thing that's really a wrinkle here is that this all happened right around the pandemic. And the way this suit was filed is the Open Library has been around for a really long time. It's built around this theory called controlled digital lending, where the idea is there's a physical book somewhere. And that physical book, once a person like the Internet Archive buys it, they can do what they want with it. And that includes, in this theory, scanning it, making it available in the same like one to one copy ratio that they have as a physical edition.

1:00:02And the idea is kind of like very metaphorically, you're like pointing a camera at your book and letting someone else see the book. Sure. Well, because the physical law on this, if I understand it correctly, is pretty settled, right? Like if I buy a book, I then have absolute right to do whatever I want with it. I can sell it again. I can give it to you. I can rip it into tiny pieces and throw them all in the air. Like once I own the book, I can do essentially whatever I want with the book. And that is relatively non-controversial in the actual world. Right. And like what that means digitally seems to be a very different question.

1:00:40Yeah. So this theory has been around and then the pandemic brings this all to like this whole other level. The Internet Archive opens up what they call the National Emergency Library, which is the open library, the sort of thing that takes the theory you're describing. And then the National Emergency Library removes the brakes, basically, that they used to have these sort of limits where you would say, OK, well, if somebody else has checked this book out, then someone is metaphorically using this hard copy of the book. You can't look at this other person can't look at it. The National Emergency Library was based on the idea like physical libraries are all closing because of the pandemic.

1:01:17And so we're going to just let whoever as many people check out books as they want. And then publishers sued and publishers sued not only over the emergency library, but over the entire concept of controlled digital lending, which is much bigger than the Internet Archive. And I think one of the reasons why they did this partly goes back to picking fights over libraries, which is that library e-books have become this incredibly lucrative field, especially over the pandemic, because that was the only way you could engage with libraries. And the way that libraries can lend and buy e-books is completely different from the way that they use just normal books.

1:01:57Oh, how so? So the way that stereotypically you think about a library working is, oh, they buy a bunch of copies of books and then they lend the books out and they can control that. Right. This is not the way that e-books work. ebooks basically the libraries never own the ebooks and the ebooks are sold like are basically lent for the libraries to lend to patrons with restrictions that over the years have varied and have often been pretty restrictive. Like you get a very limited number of times that you can rent them out or that you can lend them out. So they expire very quickly. They can be very expensive.

1:02:32So you get the situation where publishers have got just huge amounts more control over what libraries can do with e-books than over physical books. And there's been this explosion since the pandemic of the popularity of e-books in libraries. And so then I think this puts added pressure on publishers to say, look, the Internet Archive is operating this thing that could really eat into our profits, especially if there are libraries that decide they want to do their own version of this, that what they want to do is scan a book and lend it out. So that's kind of really what I'm wondering, because I think, if I understand it correctly, a big part of the Internet Archive's defense has been like, really, you're going to pick on the Internet Archive for this tiny thing with relatively unknown titles?

1:03:20Like, why are you picking this fight? But then it seems like what publishers are saying, to your point, is like, well, if anybody can do this, we're hosed and we're sort of worried you're going to set a precedent that is going to just let anyone lend anything to anybody. And then Libby is going to become the most popular thing on Earth and we're totally screwed. Oh, no, this is this is just to be clear, Libby is the thing they want. Libby is the thing at Overdrive. This is like these very, very tightly controlled systems of lending where libraries get very little say over what you can actually do there.

1:03:48So this is why Libby has become so popular is because they're the one that the publishers will actually work with. And I want to be clear that I'm not even sure in a world where you can do the thing the Internet Archive is doing, Libby wouldn't exist. Because if you've actually used the library like the Internet Archive's library, it's often pretty rough. Like you're just looking at scanned PDFs of these books. Yeah, it's super rough. Yeah. Like there are a bunch of people who are going to just say, we don't want to have to go through scanning all the books in our archive. We would really like the added convenience of this thing that publishers are offering and it's right they're offering it.

1:04:20Yeah, totally. So the publishers sue. This becomes a whole big thing. And the publishers, as far as I can tell, one, like extremely convincingly made this argument and just kind of walked away with the verdict about like what the Internet Archive is doing is not allowed. No one should be allowed to do it. This is all over. Was it was it as sweeping as it seems like it was to me? The Internet Archive is appealing and the Internet Archive argues, obviously, you know, this this did not turn out the right way. It was pretty sweeping. It was very it was pretty condemnatory to the Internet Archive. And a lot of what it was based on was the idea that there's a clear market for e-books and therefore the Internet Archive isn't doing something that is completely transformative.

1:05:05And it is doing something that will take away this profit line for the publishers. Right. And that was really just the crux of the argument. So then almost immediately after, the music industry turned around and picked, as far as I can tell, basically the same fight. About an even more like arcane set of things. In this case, what was it? 78 recordings from like 100 years ago. But the music industry turned around and said, well, we're being infringed upon the same way, right? Yeah. Well, in some ways, the music lawsuit is a little bit less complicated because the system here is, yeah, there's this program called the Great 78.

1:05:44which is they digitize recordings that are from like the late 19th century to the roughly 1950s. And they just make them available. And they're very scratchy. They're like even less, in many ways, a clear substitute. But the argument here is just they're making this thing available. They shouldn't make this thing available. This is piracy. It's bad. They're arguing specifically that there is something called the Music Modernization Act that sort of changed the way that sound recordings were covered under copyright. And so a lot of the cases may be going to hinge on part of that. But yeah, fundamentally, like philosophically, it is still the Internet Archive is offering this archival service that is much rougher than the commercial options that you can get, but is in some way providing a substitute for a commercial thing that could be a profit line.

1:06:36so this is why this whole thing is so fascinating to me because i think there's a version of the description of what's going on here that basically seems like a slam dunk obviously the internet archive should not be allowed to do this that basically it's like napster but says nicer things about itself that it's like it's just it's a piracy engine with like a higher purpose or whatever and i can see where the publishers and the music industry is coming from on this there's another side of this where like the alternative, I think, in a very real way for a lot of these 78 recordings is just that they would die.

1:07:10And it's not like anyone else out there is making a lot of effort to preserve them. And so maybe these things still need to exist. And I don't know, I end up caught in this totally intractable thing about like the Internet Archive is both like very much the good guy and very much the bad guy, kind of all at the same time. Yeah, I was reading this post on tumblr of all places where the they said something like piracy has always been the nexus of art preservation oh uh it was referring to like people who went to plays in shakespearean eras and would transcribe the dialogue so they can pirate the play um but yeah i think the tumblr post i love it the part of the problem for me is that a bunch of the copyright debate plays out like there is this sort of natural right to own a thing you make, that the way in which the Internet Archive seems wrong is if you look at this and you look at like a book you've written like land.

1:08:04And well, obviously, someone shouldn't be able to steal your land. So you have this book. And I think that this is in a lot of ways a really unproductive way to look at things, though. When we were doing our best tech books, one of the books that we had on the top 10 was Common as Air, a book that's sort of arguing that the way to look at copyright is that it's a way to balance the, like, promoting people's, like, desire to make creative things and letting them profit off those creative things with the fact that all culture is this thing that people build on. And that if you treat these things that people make creatively just like land, then you're going to inevitably lose out on just huge amounts of culture.

1:08:47You're going to just, you're going to, first of all, lose the ability to comment on it. You're going to lose the ability to make things based on things other people made. And then just, yeah, very, very practically, you're going to lose just all of the culture that no one thinks is valuable enough monetarily to preserve. I mean, I think the natural sort of counter argument to the first part of that is just that that's all true. But if you don't incentivize people to make things, they won't, right, that you should be rewarded for your creative work. And I have, I have lots of feelings about that argument.

1:09:20I think like one thing the internet has proven is that you actually don't really have to compensate people and they will just go do and make lots of really cool and creative things. But I also like am paid to make things on the internet all day. So I don't know. I, I, I get why that's complicated, but I think the question of when does something fall into the category of like, this thing needs to be archived, right? Like nobody's mad at the library of Congress for having an archive of all of our tweets, right? I don't know. Maybe people are. I'm not. Elon may well be very angry that someone is profiting off being able to see tweets.

1:09:51Would not be shocked. But I think that that is something that is less controversial. But the idea of then what the Internet Archive is doing is saying, not only are we taking this, we're building some kind of UI around it through which you can access it. Is that where you trip over the line of like, this is no longer preservation. This is something else. But then what is the point of preservation if you're not going to give people access to it. Like this is the part where I I just kind of don't net out at knowing what the right answer is supposed to be here. Well, yeah, I have been to the Library of Congress to check a thing out once.

1:10:23It's really hard. It requires being in Washington, D.C. and jumping through some pretty serious hoops. It is a very difficult research option. And I think that the idea that it's OK if there's one copy of a thing that exists somewhere like that's not hugely satisfying. I mean, I think that the answer that people have hit on for a really long time is very pertinent in the record case, which is that almost everyone who made all that music, they are all dead. They cannot ever be incentivized to create a thing again. Yeah, no, it's fair. There is a clear incentive to provide for your family, and there is a clear incentive it would be really great if your children and your grandchildren could be supported by this thing you made.

1:11:05But I think that's also there's eventually a balancing act. And I think I've become much less sympathetic to the idea that you are really meaningfully incentivizing creating things when the people who are protecting it are like the estate of Frank Sinatra. Yeah, that's fair. Well, and not for nothing, it's like go-betweens. It's the labels, right? Like often the people picking this fight are the publishing houses and the record labels who stand to gain from continuing to be the arbiter of access to all of this stuff rather than building new systems of distribution and creativity. Yeah. And when publishers and authors, a lot of authors were really split on the Internet Archive.

1:11:44There were people who were supporting the suit that they also believe like there are these very contemporary novels that are getting scanned and that people are clearly reading them instead of buying my books. It's already really hard to get people to buy my books, et cetera. And there are a lot of authors who disagree and a lot of authors who really do want to see their work more widely disseminated. Yeah. Yeah. It always makes me think of the one of the tips I got as a young reporter and now give to lots of reporters is that anytime you come across like an academic paper that's in some journal that's really expensive that you can't buy, just email the author and they will always be so, so, so thrilled to send it to you for free.

1:12:21Because what they want is people to read it. They want their stuff to be out in the world. They want it to be accessed. And the idea that it's behind this gigantic paywall that somebody else profits from actually infuriates them. It's just how the system works. And I will say, I have tried this many times over the years, just emailing and being like, hey, somebody's trying to charge me like$5 ,000 to read this. Will you just send it to me? And they're always so excited to do so. Every time. It makes me so happy. The Open Library is also kind of great for the large swath of books that have not really been digitized and are not really available as e-books and are also mostly out of print.

1:12:53Which means anything I do is going to be me buying a used copy off Amazon. And thanks to the first sale doctrine, no one involved in publishing that is going to see a cent. Yeah, that's that's real. So the kind of biggest picture end of all of this is, I think, what you're talking about with these questions about kind of who makes money from digital goods. It's like, this is the reckoning we're having with the Internet as a whole right now. Right. Especially as we talk about open AI and AI training data. And this question of like, I have a Web page and the content of that Web page is is valuable in like newly measurable ways.

1:13:27And I would think that if I'm the Internet Archive at this moment, the idea of all of these pages that I have been archiving and sort of lovingly caring for and chronicling over the years are going to be walled off by the companies that want to make money from the content of them suddenly starts to become like this existential threat to the whole idea of preserving the Internet over time. Are we headed towards that? Am I catastrophizing like what companies are doing to open AI's web crawler? Or is this like a real possibility of where we're going? I have an email draft open right now that is just me asking the Internet Archive, hey, is it going to be a problem that places are starting to block common crawl?

1:14:10Yes. Yes. So, yeah, I don't actually know the answer yet. But it sure seems like it could be, right? Because I think, like, we've been talking about robots.txt, the file that lives on tons of websites that are basically, like, it governs sort of which crawlers can and can't access which parts of the site. And this is the kind of thing that, like, if you run a relatively unsophisticated web operation, you've just never thought about. You're just like, anybody who wants to crawl my website, come crawl my website. And now it's like the folks who run the web in ways big and small are going to start to be much more thoughtful about who they let in and out because there's real stuff to be gained and lost from who you let in and out.

1:14:50And yeah, I just I wonder now if the Internet Archive is going to have to go like hat in hand to every website on the Internet and be like, please allow us to preserve your website. And it's going to become a really different kind of conversation. This is, I think, another piece of the puzzle that I really, really struggle with, which is that I think the impulse that I really subscribe to and feel to enable free access to a lot of things turned out to then have been taken advantage of by people who have made a huge amount of money off it. Like one of the foundational cases that is says you can scan books is the Google lawsuit.

1:15:27Right. Sure. The Google Book suit. And Google, in a lot of ways, it's really great that that case happened. It's really great that we said you can scan books so that you can analyze them and create these really interesting other like cataloging systems for them. But then at the same time, I think there are a lot of people who feel like, OK, we went through all of this trouble to make sure that places like the Internet Archive, places whose deal is that they want to open up access to things for free, that they want to do this largely just on a nonprofit basis. They want this purely for, I mean, publishers will say that Internet Archive is not altruistic.

1:16:03That is like its own can of forums for reasons that I think we can all agree are not hugely profit driven for them. Yeah. And then this just the upshot of this is that Facebook and Google and OpenAI all got rich off it. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I I think that question of in the Internet Archive's motives are going to start to get really interesting because I think it seems less likely to me that everyone is going to sort of show up and immediately turn on the Internet Archive as a thing. I think most people, maybe not most people, I think many people would see the Internet Archive as a net good despite some issues that it has.

1:16:35I certainly see it that way. But I think the issue is that's not how the law works. Well, sure. I think the issue is that someone's going to go to court and say, well, the problem is that these companies made money off this thing. And clearly, therefore, anyone who is using these things in this particular way is depriving these people of money. And then that gets applied to the Internet Archive. And there are one thing that has happened is like there was a Supreme Court case that differentiates pretty strongly between profit driven like profit and nonprofit fair use works. And that very heavily favored the idea that if you release something like if you make something for profit, it is less deserving of fair use protections.

1:17:14So that could factor in. But yeah, you're right. I think this is all really weird and complicated. So it seems like then maybe I had it backwards that actually this kind of broader shift on the Internet is a problem, but it's maybe scarier for the Internet Archive that one of these extremely huge lawsuits. I think I was looking at the number and it was like the estimated payout for the book settlement was like$19 million, which is half of the Internet Archive's budget, which is a huge number. And that the record industry, if it completely won, was looking for something like$400 million, which would, I assume, essentially end the Internet Archive as an ongoing concern.

1:17:51So maybe that's the bigger risk is that eventually it gets caught up in this bigger question with these bigger companies and that becomes like the real existential threat, not this sort of sea change in the norms of the Internet. I am. Yes, I'm very worried that at some point someone's going to sue the Internet Archive in a way that is explicitly vindictive. Publishers, it seems like so far they've largely avoided the worst case scenario by just striking this at least temporary deal while the Internet Archive appeals that just says, OK, we're going to lock down the open library. I think because publishers realize how incredibly ugly they would look if they said, not only are we going to shut down this program, we're going to bankrupt this entire load-bearing element of the Internet.

1:18:34It's a bad look, for sure. OK, so the appeal we think is probably coming pretty soon in the book case, right? This is all kind of happening in real time here. I'm not sure exactly when it is. They have been saying just, yeah, we're appealing soon, but I don't think there's been an actual case that's hit yet. Okay. And the record industry thing is still in pretty early stages, right? So there's more to come, but we don't know exactly how that's going to shake out yet. Yeah, it was filed in mid-August. And so I think the first meeting at this point is something like October. And so I don't know that we're going to know anything about it immediately.

1:19:07Do you have an early read on the music case? Is it likely to go the same way the publisher's case did because it sort of deals with similar things? I'm not necessarily sure because I think that copyright and fair use is really complicated. Like the thing with fair use is that it's all case by case. But I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if this goes badly for them. I think that courts often tend to be very deferential to copyright holders. Yeah. Are you as sort of broadly worried about the ongoing existence of this thing as I am? I've really come around to thinking, to your point, that it is a load-bearing part of the internet.

1:19:42The internet needs something like this. And maybe there are other versions of it out there that I just don't know about. Like maybe somebody at AWS is just like lovingly chronicling the internet for all of us and everything will be fine. But this seems like we should be rooting for the Internet Archive to continue to exist, right? I think that the Wayback Machine at this point is a vital journalistic resource and a vital historical resource. And every time I see something like CNET just deleting huge parts of what amounts to one of the only repositories of early internet journalism and saying, well, it's okay because it's on the Wayback Machine.

1:20:20I just look at that with just the most terrified large eyes. Yeah, I agree. And this will not be the last time things like that happen. And I mean, I was reading something that said like the average web page only exists in its sort of initial form for like 90 days. Like, I think we underrate the speed with which the Internet changes, not just grows, but changes. And I think the more I've learned about the Internet Archive, the more I've come to realize like that function alone to understand how things move over time is really important. And it's really one of the reasons why all these cases are so important is because our culture is moving to things where there is no hard copy, that this just is the record of human culture for the last couple decades.

1:21:05This is where people who would have been publishing zines or small print books or writing letters to each other, this is where a lot of that stuff is going. And if we lose that, that's a huge gap. That's just like a cultural blackout. Yeah, I agree. Well, Adi, thank you. I feel much better. I know things now. This all didn't make sense to me a half hour ago. And now I feel like I'm getting there. So thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. No, I think this is going to be really interesting cases to watch. For sure. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and do the hotline.

1:21:35Addy, thanks. See you.

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1:24:22All right, we're back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As a reminder, the hotline number is 866-VERGE-11. Call and ask us all of your biggest, weirdest, wonkiest tech questions. You can also email us vergecastatheverge.com if you don't want to call. But if you can call, call. I think it's really fun when people call. We're actually going to play two messages that we got like within 24 hours of each other that I just thought were a very funny combination. Let's just hear them both. Let's play the first one. Hi, my name is Kate. I have worked in video production and media production for like almost a decade now.

1:24:56So one of the things that I deal with a lot is file transfer and moving big amounts of gigabytes and gigabytes of video footage from one place to another. And my question is, since I've tried a lot of systems and them suck, is why does Google Drive suck specifically? I know that the files that we're generating are becoming larger than we can probably move them at a quick speed. But Google Drive has issues that I don't notice with other things like SharePoint and OneDrive. Like when you try and download a large amount of files, it feels like it spends so much time zipping them together that it doesn't actually like it would be faster for you to just download them one by one.

1:25:36And I've tried it and it is. So I'm like, what is Google doing wrong? Because Google is Google, right? They're like, God, so they should be better at this by now. I guess that's my question. Why does Google Drive suck? And what do you guys think is the best opportunity if I'm in one place and I need to move huge gigabytes of files to another pretty fast? Also, love the show. Okay, this is an extremely good question. And I love it very much. And I love it especially because here is the other voicemail we got in the same 24-hour period as that one. Hey, David and the rest of the Verge casters, or maybe I should call you the Verge castanets.

1:26:10This is Jack, co-founder, CEO and CTO of a small pharmaceutical company based here in Hillsborough, California. And the path to least resistance for us has been the Windows 11, Microsoft 365 platform. And one of the biggest issues is their OneDrive sync tool, which is the equivalent of what Dropbox has, is horrendously bad, horrendously slow. It is insane, the kind of trouble it causes, I think, the entire world. And we know that Dropbox can do this instantly and really great. And so we know that there isn't a technological problem. It's just a choice on their part. I am trying to mount the campaign of the world's greatest minds and influencers of which you guys are included to pressure Microsoft to fix this, make this work really, really, really well so that it doesn't cause problems, but actually causes joy or sparks joy, I guess, the way we should put it these days.

1:27:05You guys know the right people. You have a big megaphone voice. Let's do this. Okay, two thoughts on this. One, Verge cast the nets. Absolutely not. Thought number two, I can say with great confidence that Dropbox is not better. I have used Dropbox many times. Dropbox is not better. And Viren Pavic is here with his hand raised, which I assume means he has lots of feelings. Hi, Viren. Hello. Thanks for having me. I can't wait to talk about cloud storage. Everybody's favorite subject. I spend too much money on cloud storage and physical storage. I just spent$2 ,000 on a SAN. This is why you're here.

1:27:42You're our supervising video producer. You move files all the time. It's all I do. I want to know both your process in general, like if you have a giant thing to move from place to place, how you do it, and then B, why most of these solutions are so terrible and if there is a better way. So start with your workflow, like get as nerdy as you possibly can. You shoot a thing, it's enormous. What do you do? Yeah, so we are a little bit lucky as to say that we don't use, you know, Google Drives and Dropbox and everything, because we have a portal into our network storage, into our NAS or SAN actually, which is located in New York, but we have a portal that we use on the browser that we can connect to.

1:28:28And it works pretty well. As to say, it works as well as, you know, it really depends on like your connection and everything like that. But, you know, like if you put a computer to sleep and you turn it back on, it'll continue doing its thing. Like that itself, it's like amazing. Isn't it wild that that's like a 25-year-old solution to this problem and we have not invented anything better? Yeah, like it's still not perfect. Most times it'll continue to transfer. And most times if I start uploading the same folder, it will know, oh, you already have, you know, 12 of these files in there. I will skip and I'll continue just uploading whatever I need to finish uploading.

1:29:05So in that regard, it works pretty well. Is it faster or anything like that? No, but it's more stable and it's kind of all you need. The frustration with like Google Drive is that, you know, if you select two or more files, it'll start zipping the thing. And that zipping process usually gets to like 75%. And then you're trying to see that like circular progress bar to see if it's moving. And more often than not, you're like, OK, I think it's probably stuck. So someone mentioned downloading individual files. That is a solution. It is a terribly painful solution that also requires you to just like know which file.

1:29:42It just takes a while. All of these platforms, Dropbox, Google Drive, guessing OneDrive, I haven't used OneDrive, I'll be honest. They do have a desktop client that you can download onto your machine. And I know some people don't love them. It takes a little bit more just like file management and organizational skills. but it works so much better because you can again let the thing upload and not have to worry about it there's usually like an icon next to it that tells you if it's downloaded onto your local drive or if it's in the cloud when the upload is finished that works i think icloud can do better in that regard actually but that's well i think for like day-to-day sort of ongoing use that works pretty well like i i mostly use google drive and i have the same thing i have the desktop app and what i did was just set up a couple of like watched folders so that if i put anything into those folders, it automatically uploads to Google Drive.

1:30:33And that works. It's not fast. It's also there's also no sort of obvious way that I have discovered to say, like, upload this first. It just it's kind of a janky system. But in terms of like, having a thing that just kind of happens in the background and makes all your stuff available everywhere. I agree that is a substantially better solution than like, drag and dropping everything into the Google Drive web app. Yeah, I mean, I mean, files are also getting larger. I'm like surprised that they're like, they're not better just like cloud manager interfaces like not even just google drive and dropbox and everything else but like you know like gopro has a cloud subscription and a cloud like storage for all your gopro footage and it's like painfully bad at like file management or knowing like what is being uploaded and things like that so there's like a lot of work on the software side that needs to be done to like make all that better before i lose this train of thought did you say icloud is better that might be the first time I've ever heard anyone say iCloud is better than anything.

1:31:32Is iCloud an answer here? Oh, no. iCloud should be better. Oh, iCloud should be better. Yes. There's like a lot of times when I'm like not entirely sure like what's happening in iCloud. It's just like this magical thing that happens in the background. And the icons are like sometimes work and right clicking and download now sometimes work. It's a whole mess. I'm like, I don't know. Like, have you been to iCloud.com? No. Why would anyone do that to themselves? Right. Like you can access your files that way. It's basically like, you know, the files app on your iPad or on your iPhone. But like the lack of feedback, like you just have to kind of trust that it's doing its thing.

1:32:13And oftentimes it's not. Like I export all of my photos and edits directly onto the iCloud because I just want to be able to access them on any device that I have that is an iOS or iPadOS device. And for the longest time, that workflow was great. Like I never had to like check it. In like last six months, like most files don't get uploaded and I just don't know why. And it's painful that I can't really find out why that is. So does the tool we use, does it have a name? Is it like a thing people can go sign up for and use? I'm not entirely sure if there's like a business license to it or if you can like use it just like by logging it.

1:32:51It is called Media Shuttle and it does have like a companion app that's basically just like extension or utility. Oh, yeah. I've had to use this before. It's just like a 2002 web app that it's just like put file here and you put file here and it uploads. But that's all you need. That's all you need is like a tiny little window that it's like this big onto your browser. that just shows you like your file hierarchy, your structure, and it just works. Signiant is just this like companion app that you have to like have downloaded, which I'm guessing that's what helps to, you know, continue the upload when you're away or close the computer or just like figure out which files you already have and which files you don't need.

1:33:31And yeah, that one works pretty well. There are like solutions that like production companies and like event teams use that we just can't use as like, you know, everyday users. Sure. Cloud storage is kind of, it is tough, I guess. Like Google Drive is like not the safest option out there. Like a lot of companies don't want to use Google Drive for that reason. So they will revert back to just like the Signians and the media shuttles of this world. Like very niche specific like softwares that you probably need a corporate license for. So yeah, that's fair. Okay. So I will say to answer the why are these tools so bad question, I don't know.

1:34:08I don't know. But we're going to find out because it is true that Google and Microsoft have the infrastructure to be better at this. And I have a bunch of guesses as to why it would not be interested in giving you like blistering fast downloads and make it really easy to keep a whole file in one place so that you can pull it. But we should actually investigate that. Now I'm curious. We're going to go find out. But it seems like the best tip we can give you as a regular person is like use Dropbox, which is not where I thought we were going to be at the beginning of this. But is it the best of all the bad options?

1:34:39Honestly, I've had like most luck with it and the desktop client. It just sort of works. It like works pretty well. It's less aggressive. We're trying to like compress your files or like zip them into anything. The problem is that like, I mean, personally, like I pay for four terabytes on iCloud, two terabytes on Dropbox, and I think two terabytes on Google Drive. And it's like, I know it's like, it's way too much. And I use them all like Dropbox is personal. Google Drive, half of it is from a company and half of it is mine. And then iCloud, if you pay for, here's a tip, you can pay for iCloud storage, but if you also add Apple One, is that what it's called?

1:35:21Yep. It actually gives you more storage onto your iCloud drive. So a lot of people think that the maximum is two terabytes. You can actually double that with Apple One or add a terabyte. I forgot exactly which way it is. So you can get more out of your iCloud. But yeah, getting the desktop client from Dropbox, it is the way to do it. And I think just like organizing files through it, it's a little bit easier. If your company uses Google Drive and want you to use Google Drive, then you'll have to use the Google Drive desktop and spend like 10 minutes learning how to actually use it well. So selective sync, picking your folders, deleting the stuff that you don't need.

1:36:03There's like a lot more management that goes into it, but it works better than just like a web interface. Yeah. You can eventually kind of set it and forget it, which is a good thing. All right. Viren, thank you very much to all our callers. Thank you as always for calling. I hope that helped. All right. That is it for the VergeCast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show. And as always, thank you for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at TheVerge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes. You should pre-order Taylor's book, but also, you know, read TheVerge.com.

1:36:30We think it's a good website. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or suggestions for how to overcomplicate my coffee-making strategy, again, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or keep calling the hotline. 866-VERGE-11. It's so fun hearing all of your questions. Send me everything. All your thoughts, questions, feelings, ideas, everything. We're going to do a hotline question on every episode, so please keep them coming. And again, if you have questions about The Verge or The Vergecast, please send them in. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio.

1:37:02The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Meelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about banana surgery, the Googleverse, and all of the other news of the week. It might be late August, but there's still a lot going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:37:26And Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching? us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.