"The struggles of fame are the struggles of everyone thanks to social media"
A conversation with the one and only Taylor Lorenz, author of EXTREMELY ONLINE
I can remember when I first lied about my age to get on Facebook so I could play Farmville and Restaurant City. There was a time when Instagram and YouTube were laughable as platforms for whole careers. It wasn’t that long ago.
Yet that all feels so far away now, and it’s hard to fathom how we got here—that’s what made me so excited for Taylor Lorenz’s book, Extremely Online, which is a social history of how social media and the Internet revolutionized both our society and our economy. The creator economy is not just individual, often beautiful, people waking up and posting; it has spawned an entire ecosystem of brand deals and management, changed who we trust to receive information from, reshaped how and what we pay attention to, and trickled the problems of celebrities down to the average user. I found it particularly thrilling to read about early YouTube and what went down at Vine.
Taylor Lorenz is a Washington Post technology reporter known for her excellent reporting on the Internet and the creator economy. I found her on Twitter sometime in 2020 and I haven’t stopped following her since because she is so prescient and smart about the Internet. It was so surreal getting to talk to her about her book! I also highly recommend her meme account.
You should definitely check out Taylor’s book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, which came out in October!
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
AT: Is there anything that you hope your average reader of Extremely Online takes away in terms of their mindset or how they use social media going forward?
TL: I want them to appreciate the Internet for the good and the bad. There are a few things. I mean, one, I wanted to write this alternative history of the rise of social media that included women and people of color, and people, not just these Silicon Valley Tech executives, which is the main version of the story of the rise of social media. It's solely been told through the lens of these founders in The Social Network version of history. And I just am really against that.
There's so much misogyny and vitriol towards the content creator world. And it makes me sad, because there’s this really incredible new media landscape that's full of so much good actually, and so much interesting stuff. Tons of bad, obviously. But it's not all bad. And I think I talk about this in the book, but this narrative flip that happened in 2017, where people went from the tech boosterism of, “wow, Facebook is so great. Oh my God it got Obama elected. It's so amazing!” to the Trump election and a lot of journalists being like, “oh, there's disinformation online it's bad.” And it's like, the platforms are bad. They’re so exploitative, our current landscape is really toxic. And I would never defend Facebook, but there is so much creativity and good on the Internet.
I'm very against the notion that the solution is logging off, which seems to be everyone's solution to like, Facebook's and Google's monopolies. “Well, everyone just needs to log off more.” No, actually, we should have a more networked, interconnected world. But we just need better platforms. I think this media landscape is better than what we had previously. But we need to push the tech companies to be better.
AT: I read your Marie Claire essay about how the haters don’t even know who you are, they hate this idea they’ve built up of you and you aren’t obligated to try to correct them. I really liked it because it felt like one of those things where intellectually most people would be in agreement. But then emotionally, it’s really hard to internalize that. I’m curious, what do you think would happen if everyone could actually live like that, how you live on social media being like, “They don’t need to know who I am. They’re just talking to an idea of me.” Do you think that would really change how social media works?
TL: I think people would be a lot happier if they could recognize the dynamics of the Internet and emotionally separate themselves from it. It's really hard. I say this at the end of the piece: even though I can emotionally separate myself from the horrible things people say about me online, that doesn't mean that those horrible things don't materially matter.
You can't totally not acknowledge it and live in a fantasy land. But, what I was trying to communicate with that essay is that there's this transition from private life to public life that we all go through now actually. We kind of lose control of the narrative about ourselves on the Internet, because this sort of crowdsourced reputation that emerges on social media and I just think it's really important to have a strong sense of self, and not let your identity be dictated by the Internet, or people's content about you on the Internet.
I think about this kid that I interviewed years ago for a story about kids and the first time they Googled themselves. And this one kid was talking about how they had signed up for social media and they realized that there was a hashtag of their name. And they clicked on the hashtag on Instagram and their whole family, for years throughout this child's life, had been documenting the child growing up with the hashtag of their name, and they were kind of like, “Well, wait a minute. This isn't me, this picture online.” It's very easy to see so much content about you online from friends, family, or just strangers and conflate that with yourself, you know?
AT: Also when you become a creator, people expect that you’re going to continue producing a certain type of content. I think it’s so interesting because I feel like a lot of people who succeed on the Internet, they do have a very strong sense of self, which is what’s able to be monetized and become a brand, but that almost backfires where they get locked into that sense of self. And I feel like everyone, whether or not they’re a professional content creator, can get stuck in a similar way.
TL: A lot of young people–I mean, I'm in my 30s. And I'm very much a millennial–but younger people seem to prefer a level of ephemerality of content, which I think is really healthy, like keeping a short Instagram grid or not posting everything publicly forever, not having this long, permanent trail of content, you know, and being okay with deleting an old profile or whatever, which I think people around my age, for whatever reason, seem very hesitant to do. Like, it's just weird. Sometimes I see people I grew up with, and they have their whole Instagram account public, everything they've ever posted, and it just seems weird to me. Why do you have all that?
AT: Another theme that came through in your book was that a lot of times what helped people become significant influencers is that either they're very authentic and they're really open and honest in ways that people weren't used to like the mommy bloggers. Or now it's become more about taste of like, can you curate content really well? Can you curate an aesthetic?
It's interesting, because then you point out in the Marie Claire essay that because everyone thinks they have to be authentic that everything feels really personal. And I think it's getting to the point where everyone wants to share their roundup and their recommendations. And everyone is like so into “being real” to a point of disingenuity. So I'm curious how you think about how it's shifted over time?
TL: I think we’re in peak commentary recommendation era. Every single person has to have commentary on everything. Every single person has to have their opinions, their song recommendations, their Spotify Wrapped that year. It's too much honestly. But I think it's influencer culture that's driven that and pressured all of us to make these brands. I actually think that you can be authentic without being personal. And I think I've definitely made that shift. I used to post a lot of highly personal stuff back when I was a blogger. And now I think I'm very opinionated and outspoken without sharing as much. That's a way to be authentic without being personal about my life, like that Marie Claire essay is the most personal thing I've ever written.
AT: But yeah there are no specifics in it.
TL: I’m just a very private person, but I think the pressure is to not be because like you said, there’s so much reward in not being private. A lot of it is adjacent to clout, people want to position themselves adjacent to something with more cultural capital to try to get influence from that. I think that those pressures can be very toxic so it’s better to be outspoken on the Internet and be yourself but don’t feel you have to reveal everything about your personal life or be super personal. You can keep things private off the Internet and still have a “relatable, authentic brand.”
That goes back to this desire to correct the record. I used to want to correct the record on everything and now it's like, that's fine. And one thing that isn’t really related to what you asked but one thing that I think is really stressful and weird is how people try to map social networks like on these Reddit threads of influencers. They'll be like, “oh, you know, so and so was with her she hasn't posted with her in a while are they still friends”and it's this expectation that friendships are all public content. All of that is really bad. So I'm a big proponent of just not putting my friendships online. The struggles of fame are the struggles of everyone thanks to social media.
AT: I know Kyle Chayka has a book called Filterworld coming out in January about algorithms and the creator economy and how it’s flattened our culture. The algorithm played less of a role in your book than I expected, I’m curious how you were thinking about that.
TL: For most of my book, there weren’t algorithms. People forget, Vine wasn’t algorithmic. They might have tried at the very end, but the reason content creators had so much power was because it wasn’t an algorithmic platform. Most of these platforms didn’t launch algorithmic feeds until 2015 or 2016. It’s funny, I was thinking that when I wrote the book – my book kind of ends 2021ish, 2022. It’s crazy we’ve only really had these algorithmically driven environments meaningfully for like 5 years and mostly it’s with TikTok, and the impact of TikTok has been to make all these platforms more algorithmically driven.
I love Kyle’s book and I think it’s a really interesting lens to look at culture through. Content creators obviously have a really difficult relationship with the algorithm. The big trend recently is to build audiences on platforms that are not algorithmically driven so you grow your audience on YouTube or Instagram and then you funnel people to your Patreon or your Substack or something else that gets you a direct line.
AT: You write a lot about how all the platforms fumble because they don’t listen to the power users, and that they’re made great by the users, which is a great point. If you could make your own ideal social media, what would it look like from the user perspective?
TL: Oh my god - no public metrics. Something like Tumblr. What I liked about Tumblr was that it was very based on written content but you could have video. I think the short-form video content is so exhausting and I wouldn’t want to make a short-form video platform. I’d want to make something that makes it a little bit harder to post but lets people post anonymously which I think is really important for the Internet. It would basically be Tumblr with some bells and whistles.
not the usual content but I found this recipe organizing app called Mela from Haley Nahman’s newsletter (which I highly recommend in general) and so far it’s working well - I’ve put links in and it reads the text well. also appreciate that their premium is a one-time $5 payment instead of a subscription.
self-promotion corner:
for joysauce, i wrote about my multitude of neuroses related to the thought of “going back” to china! have gotten a couple really nice messages from people about it and glad it’s been resonating - i am wary of personal writing for many reasons but so much writing has helped me to reassess and better understand my own life in context and it means a lot when i feel like i can even begin to accomplish that
also two things i wrote that are very thematically related to the above conversation: contentification and about bestdressed
books i enjoyed recently:
chemistry by weike wang
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by gabrielle zevin
articles:
delia cai’s interview with taylor lorenz for vanity fair
on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs
i want a semi-adversarial taylor swift interview (in good faith)