Tech Bros Laid the Foundation, But Women Built Social Media

Hey, you're listening to Into It from Vulture in New York magazine. This episode, The History of Social Media. So as soon as someone says a phrase like "The History of Social Media," I bet you start thinking about a certain type of dude, don't you? A young, privileged tech bro who dropped out of an elite university to create Facebook or Snapchat or any other number of social apps. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook. You might start thinking about all these young, great men having ideas that changed the world. But what if someone told you it wasn't those men who made social media as we know it? That is what Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz is doing in her new book. It's called Extremely Online, the Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. It has a very simple premise, basically every social media app we know and love, or even hate, the creators didn't make it great. The users did. Taylor will explain this theory in detail and also answer a question I ask a lot these days. Did social media as we know it make us better as a culture or worse? All that after the break. Saying how you feel out loud is terrifying, but that's what hinges new free audiobook "No Ordinary Love" is all about. It's a collection of real love stories, about five couples that met on hinge. The stories are written in red by Tempe Denton Hurst, Nikola Dynan, Curtis Garner, Raven Smith, and Ruthie Thorpe. I, Hunter Harris, wrote and read the forward. The audiobook's out now. Give it a listen. Hey, friends, Olivia from Oli, between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-back solutions that work with your life. That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with multis-made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the #1 gummy supplement brand. StockuponOli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, prevent any disease. So this book is called "Extremely Online," and there is one graph in the book that kind of just stopped me in my tracks and really summed up what the whole thing is about. And he wrote, quote, "While the mythology around Silicon Valley featured young men who could see the future better than everyone else, what the rise of social media thus far had proven was that nearly all of those young men had been wrong. They each built a platform with the confidence that it would do one thing better than anyone else, only to be redirected and rescued by a community of creative users." I love that. Explain that graph to our listeners. Yes, it really does sum up my book. It's basically, you know, social products are really unique. They're different than a lot of other types of technology products in that it's the users that make the product. Like, anybody and many people have, like, cloned Twitter or cloned Instagram and other platforms. But it's the users and it's the communities on these platforms and the people that use them, that create the actual value. And that entire side of the story has been completely left out and we mythologized these Silicon Valley men, but actually as my reporting shows, they constantly don't know what they're talking about and they don't know what they're doing and a lot of the breakthrough features on social media, by the way, were actually created by users. So, I mean, even just the hashtag. It's Twitter hashtag. Exactly. Yeah. All of these things. And also just like the way that we post online and the way this industry emerged, it's very user driven and specifically power users, content creators, you know, generate the most value on these platforms. Yeah. One of the clearest examples of this point that we're talking about right now where the young men making the thing are wrong and then they're rescued by creative users. My favorite example of this is YouTube because I didn't know until I read your book that YouTube actually began as a dating site. Yes. What? Please tell us all of this. I wish we had like an oral history of the maybe ten users that they had in 2005 that wanted to make video profiles for the game. Oh my God. It's so funny. But yeah, I mean, this was back in the mid the mid aughts, they started as a dating site. Then they quickly realized people just kind of wanted to upload videos to the site and the dating part didn't really matter and so they pivoted very quickly actually. The site's called YouTube.com and that's why OU. And it's just a place where you go, it's kind of like flicker for videos if you think of it like that because you're actually able to tag your videos. That's all the rage with flicker. Yeah. I think they handled it well. They responded to their users. And then when they saw people building channels and building real sort of like fame on the platform, they also rolled out monetization program for online creators, which is their partner program, which was introduced in 2007. Yeah. And that partner program, you write at length about how people watching YouTube do this didn't take it seriously. They're like, why are you helping these video creators make more and better videos? Why are you linking them up with the ways to monetize? Why are you just giving them money to make videos? But YouTube, once they figured out what the platform was really for, they kind of had a long game. And more than a lot of other social media platforms, they worked with users and trusted them sooner than other places did, particularly Twitter and Instagram. Why do you think YouTube was so keen to trust its users in ways that other platforms didn't for so long? Yeah. YouTube seemed to have, like, they just seemed to have more of a respect for the creativity on their platform. YouTube, this is Chad and Steve, we're the co-founders of the site, and we just want to say thank you. Today we have some exciting news for you. We've been acquired by Google. Yeah, thanks. Thanks to all everyone of you guys that have been contributing to YouTube and community. We wouldn't be anywhere close to where we are without the help of this community. They also, they weren't trying to make it about friends. They always understood that social media at its core is sort of entertainment with social functionality on top of it, which is actually exactly how TikTok positions itself today. If you get the time, they were really ahead of their time because you have to remember in the late odds, it was all about taking your, like, IRL social networks and manifesting them online. So people like Mark Zuckerberg and other tech founders of that era, they hated content creators. They thought that these people were scammy. Social media was supposed to be for, quote unquote, real friends only, and they really didn't consider online connections real friendship. And that's just such a boomer way of viewing things down to the boomers, but it's just such an antiquated sort of viewing things. Some listeners can recall, there was a moment on Facebook where you had to wait to get in. You only fronted people you knew in your circle on Facebook was so tight and so close that you would share your address and phone number on your Facebook profile. Absolutely. Isn't that wild? The amount of use to share on Facebook is terrifying. At what point in social media history, do we really kind of formally move from, all right, social networks are here for your actual friends to social networks are here for discovery and connection with strangers and celebrities and whoever. When did that happen? Because it's clearly happened, but when it started, when did it happen? Yeah, speaking of Facebook, I actually think Facebook weirdly played a role in kicking off this shift unintentionally, which is when they launched the newsfeed. Facebook launched the newsfeed in the late odds. And what it did is it taught everyone to kind of post for an audience. Previously, people weren't accustomed to this notion of like constantly sort of sharing for an audience of consumers. There were content makers and bloggers, and then most of the internet was consumers. The Facebook actually, the launch of that newsfeed taught people to post publicly. And then you really saw this idea kick off with the follow-based networks that emerged in the 2010s. So things like Instagram, Twitter really came into its own in the early 2010s. And this was this one-way model of social media. It's a broadcast based model where you follow people, but they don't necessarily have to follow you back. So it's breaking that notion of like friendship and more of a one-way consumption relationship. And before we move off of YouTube to other platforms, I want to point out to listeners my age and older, another new thing I learned reading your book, "Tay's On Day's Chocolate Rain." Yeah. Actually about systemic racism. Yes. I had no idea. Well, first I guess tell people who don't remember who Tay's On Day was and what Chocolate Rain was. Yes, so "Tay's On Day" is the internet moniker of this guy, Adam Banner. And he was a musician. He was living in the Midwest. He was kind of making his music, hauling his, you know, equipment to local shows in the middle of the snow. And he heard about YouTube. And he was like, you know, I'm going to start putting my work on YouTube. I think I can reach hundreds of people at a time, which at the time seemed massive compared to his shows, which maybe only reached a couple dozen. His big hit, his big viral hit, was The Song Chocolate Rain. When I typed out the lyrics in the book, they clearly, I mean, it's like, you're like, oh, yes, no, this is about racism. But the thing is, it's like, when at the time, and there were so many examples of sort like things like this at the time. Like the internet was this wholesome silly place. And people weren't really thinking of things like that. So I hate when people say, "Oh, you know, everything's gotten all political." No, things have always been political. It's just a matter of sort of like, you know, whether we're paying attention, but it blew up and became one of the first viral sort of songs that came out of YouTube. - Yeah, he also, fun fact, was a PhD student when he released that song. He's no slouch. Tays all day with those slouch. - He's a genius, honestly. - Yes, so the through line of this book is social media and social internet as we know it was actually forged by creators and users and less by these great titans of tech. You know, a big part of that conversation is women and mothers. You write a lot at the top of the book how a lot of what we know today as influencing the DNA of that came through the first wave of mommy bloggers many, many years ago. Explain. - Exactly. I mean, mommy bloggers were the first to kind of build personal brands on the internet around their lives and lifestyle content and then commodify that and monetize it and pioneer all of these new revenue models. I mean, a good example I talk about in the book is 2004 Heather Armstrong, one of the most pioneering mommy bloggers, her decision to launch ads on her blog and the vitriol that she received from people online, a lot of men and a lot of legacy traditional media too that just accused her of monetizing motherhood and all this stuff which is things today we don't even think twice about. You know, you're like, no, this content creation is real labor. You know, blogging about your life is real labor and by the way, a lot of these moms were actually really thoughtful. I mean, some of them overshared a little bit but a lot of them used pseudonyms and they weren't even posting pictures. It was all just text blogging and they changed the conversation of motherhood. They completely obliterated the notion of motherhood that was portrayed in the traditional print media. You know, they started talking about things like postpartum depression and hating your husband or, you know, struggling to breastfeed just all of this stuff that was considered really taboo at the time they broke barriers and normalized. - So much of what we cover on this show and so much of what Vulture covers is the TV movies and music we all consume. I want to hear your take on how the rise of social web has changed that. - Well, I will say the biggest change over the past 15 years especially is that the internet is not a secondary form of entertainment, which is how it was always seen sort of when it first started out. It was always like, okay, well, there's real Hollywood, right? And then there's sort of like secondary internet stuff and maybe there's some viral moments and we can use it for marketing but, you know, it's its own little thing. Now I would say the entertainment world is completely unmatched. I mean, music is a perfect example and I think it's interesting that actually, what kicked off a lot of the YouTube's early success was actually these viral music videos and music parody videos. Obviously Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube. ♪ So big of all of us ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ What can I turn on the radio ♪ - We are Shawn Mendes from Vine. ♪ I'll be a soldier ♪ ♪ From every second on the day ♪ ♪ And the dreams come ♪ - We have all the TikTok stuff. I think traditional Hollywood and the TV show world has also been disrupted but it's more just like also happening in parallel with the death of linear television and cable. So I think we have a lot more internet driven shows. It does make me sad because I think same thing with traditional media, like the amount of resources in the legacy media and entertainment ecosystem that you could dedicate towards project meant that you got a certain level of quality that I don't think has been easily replicated on the internet, whether it's like, you know, the Washington Post's huge investigative package on AR 15's last year or big time movies that there's just no way you're gonna spend, you know, 400 million on a YouTube video, right? Like there's just certain formats and business models that still, so I don't think, you know, but I will say Hollywood, especially being out in LA, I'm sure you realize this too, like they're with it. Like they recognize that they need to pay attention to the internet and I think you have this whole generation of workers in the industries, you know, screenwriters, TV writers, actors that are also very, you know, they're also big on Instagram, they're big on TikTok, they're doing their stuff there, you know, like it's not, there's not these separate worlds anymore. (upbeat music) - All right, going to a break now, more with Taylor Lorenz in a bit. (upbeat music) - The perfect lunch combo, that first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi, add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better, because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. (upbeat music) - Saying how you feel out loud is terrifying, but that's what hinges new free audiobook, "No Ordinary Love" is all about. The stories are written and read by Tempe Denton Hurst, Nikola Dynan, Curtis Garner, Raven Smith, and Ruby Thorpe. The audiobooks out now, give it a listen. - One of the things that I have been the most intrigued by, especially when it comes to TV and movies, and really TV, is a way that the rise of the social internet has made TV viewers different kinds of fans. - Uh-huh. - I remember years ago watching Scandal, and that was one of the first shows where the creators and actors and stars urged people to tweet along as they watched the show. - Redline Ready, Twitter Thumb Set. - Yes, yes, TGIT here. And it all felt really cool and fun, and this is a new way to watch TV. You flash forward a few years later, you have a creative, like, Israe making insecure, complaining about how obnoxious insecure fans could be online through Twitter, watching her show, and being mad about everything. You know, as beautiful as the social web has been for all of us, it has given everyone a certain sense of entitlement when it comes to the things that we see, especially. And I still don't know how I feel about that, Taylor, and I want you to help me figure that out. - Yeah, it's funny, you mentioned Scandal, because actually Alisa Lick, she's in my book, she was DKNY girl, PR girl on Twitter. A huge way they grew that brand was through live tweeting scandal. - Wow, and that's just like a random PR Twitter account for DKNY the fashion brand. They used tweeting scandal to boost the DKNY brand. And to become a brand in itself, DKNY PR girl became this phenomenon and led to this, like, the way that brands ended up using the internet and Twitter. I mean, she was such a pioneer. And yeah, it's just very funny. It's like one brand using another brand and a piece of culture. I mean, now you see this all the time. You see brands responding to kind of television moments, but it is crazy the way that fandom warps everything. Everyone has a voice. And I do think it affects the creative process. And I think it affects the way that the perception of creative work, like television, like I just wonder, like, what a lot of shows, like this Prano's would be like, I mean, everyone's rewatching it now, but had these things happen in real time. TV writers, they're on Twitter too, right? Like they're absorbing this like constant feedback. - And they're anticipating the critique as they write these shows. - Which I think is not good for art. I think that's not good. So I kind of appreciate the model where you kind of just like go away, you know, and you create something. - Don't make your thing. Yeah. - I love how much your book champions the users, champions the creators. And as you've said before, this book is full of examples of the big men of tech, not knowing what the hell to do and being saved by their users. Perhaps the biggest and best example of this, even though we've already talked about YouTube, it could be Instagram as well. Instagram more than most other social platforms we know and love today, totally dragged its feet on things that could really be good for their bottom line. Instagram fought advertising for a very long time. At one point, Instagram leadership railed against quote, self-promotion on the platform. But you write that this refusal to run ads for so long actually helped create and boost the influencer economy as we know it. Tell us that story. - Hey, exactly. I mean, so Instagram, Kevin's system was so against ads on Instagram early on. He did not want anything. He wanted this pure feed devoid of consumerism and just there for like, you know, artful photography. Of course, that's not what it became. I mean, I talk early about some of the earliest, you know, viral celebrity posts actually featured brands. And because there was no formal way to advertise on Instagram, the brands started to go directly to the creators themselves and circumvent any kind of ad networks. This was pre-Facebook acquisition before the Facebook's ad network was plugged into Instagram. And so it actually taught this whole generation of people to like accept sponsored content and mainstreamed this notion of sponsored content in people's feeds very early on because they refused to build a formal ad platform. - There was this one family you write about in that chapter and kind of pioneered it. What is their name? Tell us about them. They were very interesting. Yeah, Liz, I swore. I hope I'm pronouncing her name right, I've actually only written it, but she's amazing. She had at New York City, she still runs that handle. And she was a member of what was called the first family of Instagram. And this, everyone in this family, I mean, they deserved a reality show, honestly. They all had OG Instagram handles. So it was like at food, at real estate, I think, was one like, they basically had a bunch of these early, essentially, like URLs. It was like the pets.com of the Instagram era back then. And they created huge audiences based around these handles, Liz founded one of these early influencer marketing companies. Her self. Without Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. So now, in 2023, I have the folks making these new platforms. And I'm not sure what the newest next one will be. But do these executives at this point get it? Or are we still in a situation where the users will have to lead the way? They absolutely do not get it. I mean, look at it. They're making the same mistakes in the Silicon Valley hubris. I mean, it's so funny because all of the Silicon Valley, I mean, pretty much like, derided the influencer and content creator world for, you know, 15 years, trash talked it so bad. Suddenly, the pandemic comes. They're forced. And same thing with the traditional media. They're like forced to take the digital world seriously because it's kind of absorbed everything. I talk about the company reward style and how they really pioneered affiliate marketing and built this massive business based off a bit, allowing people to basically shop Instagram posts. I mean, I don't think Instagram shopping would have rolled out without platforms like reward style. Then in 2021, 2022, you've got some of the biggest VCs on the planet saying, oh, we're going to invest in companies that essentially are doing what reward style did over a decade ago. And it's a refusal to acknowledge the work of women founders. Because let's look at this influencer content creator industry. It was painted by women. It's women. If you listen to Andreessen Horowitz and all of the other, you know, Tweedle D and Tweedle Dumb VC capitalists, like they act like Mr. East invented it all, you know, and it's known. It was mothers. It was women. It was, it was marginalized people. A lot of LGBTQ people too. It was people that were shot out of traditional funding, traditional institutions. So. Well, I always say and RIP to Vine. Vine was the blackest little slice of social media model existed and then it was just snatched away from us and all the folks who made stuff on Vine, they lost it. They totally lost it. Yeah. Is that getting better? You know, I mean, a lot of this is about money and about who owns the stuff. You know, so we're in this economy now where a YouTube influencer or an Instagram influencer can make a lot of money with these brand deals and advertising and partnership. But they still don't own the content on these platforms and the content can be taken away if the platform goes away like God forbid it happens, but Instagram or even Facebook or TikTok could go the way of Vine still today, right? Yeah. I mean, or the, the algorithm more likely will change, right? Their color more suddenly you roll out Reels and now it's all about Reels and if you're a photo creator, you know, you can no longer succeed, these platforms, it's like building a business on QuickSand, it's incredibly difficult. And obviously any person from any marginalized group because the founders of these companies don't give a shit about harassment or abuse or anything like they're so subject to discrimination on the apps and they get their content taken down, you know, at higher rates and their police to higher rates. And then the brand deals, let's, I mean, it's a joke. I mean, in 2020 for like six months, it was like they were sort of briefly getting, you know, equality on brand deals and now it's flipped right back and in a lot of cases it's actually worse. I was talking to a content creator last week, you know, the black creators are constantly told that their content is in premium. That's the one thing that a lot of creators are talking about. And like, yeah, this girl got left out of the, she's a friend of mine, got left out of a huge brand deal and was asking why her beauty content doesn't fit. It's not, she's not premium. Wow. This is loud because every vine dance, every tick tock dance, it started with a teenage black girl. And this is a girl with millions of followers, too, like it's just wild. It's just crazy. It's, but the, but the subtext is like, oh, well, you're marketing to poor people or you're marketing to other, you know, people of color and we don't view them as premium. It's, anyway, the internet is a mirror for systemic inequalities and we have a lot of systemic inequalities. Yeah. Well, that's the thing I want to ask about, you know, we've had all of these platforms. Be, be rescued by users, particularly women users and users from marginalized backgrounds. They're still the backbone of these online institutions. And yet, we've already mentioned this. Those people still experience more frequent harassment online on these platforms. Is there ever a reality or a day in which hate for women and hate for marginalized people is not part of the infrastructure of the social web? There's a lot of systemic bigotry in this country and we live in an extremely misogynist racist, like homophobic, ableist, broken society in so many ways. And a lot of stuff needs to fix in society before it will ever be fixed on the internet. Once said, we know that these social platforms in their current form exacerbate these issues because these tech, the men that run these tech companies don't give a shit about fixing it or building safety features, for instance. And so I think there's a lot more they can do. And we've seen time and time again that they do respond to public pressure. So I think it's about keeping the public pressure on them and not just having outrage for like a couple of months, but like keeping sustained pressure on everyone in power to do better. Obviously the tech executives, but also like Congress and ever, you know, and anyone with institutional power, we need to force them to change. No one gives up power without a fight. That part, that part. Okay, time for one more quick break when we come back. I'll ask Taylor what it's like to become part of the story. Saying how you feel out loud is terrifying. But that's what hinges new free audiobook, "No Ordinary Love" is all about. The stories are written in red by Tember Denton Hurst, Nikola Dynan, Curtis Garner, Raven Smith, and Ruthie Thorpe. Hey, friends, Olivia from Allie, between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-back solutions that work with your life. That's where Allie comes in. Start your mornings off right with multismate to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams. Stock up on allie.com today. You seem like someone who still believes in the promise of social media, even as you've covered it so extensively and covered the dark side of it. I'm one of those people who's in this boat now where I'm like, "Did this just all really screw us up? Did it screw us up? It has my phone with all these apps where I got a post all the damn time. Has it made me truly crazy and has it made my consumption of culture less enjoyable? Then it would have been if I were still 12 watching Must See TV on Thursday night. You know a lot of people out there are going to hear this chat and say, "Oh, social media ruined us. It sucks. It's making everything worse. What do you say to those people?" Let me tell you, I agree. I agree. But what I want, but I want people to remember, social media is not the internet. This is what my book argues, too. We need to look at the rise of these platforms and how they've evolved and recognize that these platforms can come and they can go and we can tear them down. We can exert an influence. The internet is a tool for connection. It is built for, you know, to connect people. And the current tech landscape and the way that a lot of people think about connection is through the lens of social media. There are a lot of amazing, incredible ways to connect through the internet that are not social media. And I think that that's what we need to get back to or build these platforms that are less about corporate profit because the current tech landscape, yes, it is built to isolate you and make you miserable and make you outraged and incentivize us the worst things. And by the way, it's mining all of us for our data, right, for profit. This is like this hyper capitalist dystopian dark version of the internet. I don't think the problem is with the internet itself. I think the problem is that we've allowed a very few, a very small group of men in Silicon Valley to monopolize the internet and come and dominate the social web and make it so that in order to sort of communicate and connect with people, we have to go through these basically like three giant platforms. That's very corrosive in that. I'm very against that. But I am a tech optimist at heart. I do think that the world is better because of the internet and I do believe in the power of technology to build better worlds. And I think we have the opportunity to shape things. It's still early days. It's still early days, Sam. We barely had the internet 20 years ago. So there's time to fix it. Yeah. So much of this book is how the emergence of social web has allowed any kind of person given the right combination of factors to become a celebrity. priority on the internet, right? The gatekeepers are gone. You can do it too. And when I think about that, I also think about your experience with the internet as someone who covers the internet and social media, your book is called Extremely Online. You cover this stuff as a journalist and you've covered it for years, but you're also extremely online. And whether you've meant to be or not, you've often become a part of the stories you cover in a way that was specifically possible only with the rise of the social web. I mean, I don't have to go through the examples. Tucker Carlson trashed you on his show. You've been on the receiving end of waves of Twitter harassment. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. His list goes on, but because you are unearthly stories about people's online selves, a lot of people fill the impulse to dig into your life as well. How has that affected you and how you do your work? Yeah. Well, I would say I've always done my work in tandem with the internet. I am not a journalist. I started as a blogger. I never went to journalism school and I'm very against the traditional modes of journalism where it's like, you know, some person in an ivory tower up in their newspaper telling you what's news. I developed my stories and I report my stories in tandem with my audience and I rely on a lot of audience feedback. Unlike TV writers, like I am getting a lot of value by talking about the things that I'm covering and hearing from people because I want to hear from the communities I cover. I never want to be the person that's not sort of in the mud with everyone else because I think that you need empathy to cover stories well. And you know, if I was one of those people that never used the internet, I would never get the stories that I do. And I don't think I would have the empathy and understanding I do for sort of people that have experienced the worst of these platforms. But it's definitely changed my relationship to them. I mean, I am extremely careful because I've seen the downsides of social media and what they've done to people that I love. I, you know, I don't put myself in my work and I don't write personal things and I don't put my personal life on the internet and I have very, very, very strong boundaries around what I share and what parts of myself I expose. And, you know, that comes from sort of dealing with the downside. But that said, I still love the internet. I'm a weirdo. And I just, I don't know, like I still, I think about the world before and how difficult it was to challenge power. And I don't want to go back there. I like having a voice. I like when MSNBC does some vile segment on me. I want to be able to go on the internet and give my side of the story and tell it, you know, fight back. And I want people to hear my narrative. And yes, it turns, you know, the internet turns us all into these characters and it's terrible. It's really bad. Like the current social media landscape is so bad. But I'm grateful to have the platform that I do and the voice that I do. Have you ever been surprised when you got caught up in an internet cycle of outrage? Oh, God, yes. What was the most surprising where you're like, I didn't expect you all to go after me for this one. I guess when I ordered my avocado toast, are you familiar with my avocado? Wait, no, no, don't go over the avocado toast, or you're like, please Google Taylor Lorenz avocado toast and read some of the coverage. Let's go. Let me set the record straight here. I was very hung over one time at my apartment in Brooklyn. I ordered a $20 avocado toast delivered. It's the millennial right of passage. It's what we do. And it was very funny because I ordered from this restaurant. I would never put them on blast. They were actually one of my favorite. Oh, you should put them on blasts that they missed the toast with the avocado. See, you see the picture. You see what I'm doing. Literally, there's a piece of toast and the avocado on the side. It was like a half peeled avocado. They hadn't even bothered to smash it. And nothing else. It was supposed to come with the side salad and french fries and all this other stuff. It came with nothing. So I left. I kind of had to laugh. And I was like, you know what? I played myself honestly at the end of the day because I'm so lazy. I can't walk two blocks away. So I tweeted it. I laughed. And it blew up into a viral news cycle. Everyone was making fun of me. And still to this day, people tweet me pictures of their avocado toast order and mock me over mine. So stop. Yeah. Before the struggle plates of fire fest, there was Taylor and his avocado toast. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a version of your career where you cover the internet while being private on the internet? I would say that's currently. I mean, I'm private. I'm very opinionated. Yeah. I don't think I would have gotten the audience that I did very early. So I don't. It's hard to think of that because I, as you know, I started as an internet personality and a blogger. And I shared, I mean, oversharing doesn't even describe the level of sort of sharing that I was doing in that era of my life, especially as like a young woman in my 20s. Like I was, you know, I was like guts and all putting it on the internet. And I don't think that I would have cultivated the audience that I did and have the audience that I do today had I not sort of brought people into my life and made people feel like, you know, invested in my career enough to like, I mean, I owe my audience everything without my readers. I would never get the violence that I do. I would have never gotten hired at the places I got hired at. And a lot of those people started following me because I was telling graphic stories about my dating life when I was young on Tumblr or, you know, other stuff like that oversharing, I guess. I hate that word oversharing, but just, you know, I get it. Not having those boundaries at that time. Yeah. I want to leave our listeners with a little bit of homework because I'm hearing this chat and thinking about your book and realizing for many years, when I wanted to think of a piece of pop culture that sums up our era of modern social internet, I always tell folks, oh, it's the social network. Watch the social network. And that'll tell you everything you need to know about social media and internet and how it changed our lives fundamentally. But I read your book and I realize it's kind of about the wrong people. It's about the wrong people. All these platforms were really forged by the users knowing that what homework would you give to our listeners who want to get more into that? Is there a movie or a TV show that reflects that side of the history of social internet? I see. I will say by my book, until it becomes optioned as a movie or a TV show, has not happened yet. Yes. Yes. So by the book, but I mean, I don't know. I like, I'm trying to think like what sort of piece of pop culture like really, really describes this. I mean, this side has not been told through pop culture. It's told, or it's not been told through traditional television and movies. It's really been told through internet videos. And so maybe just go back and watch them. Listen to chocolate rain and listen a little more closely this time or like reason. I like that. The moral of this story is give Taze on day his flowers. Yes. He's chocolate rain on your Spotify playlist, kids. Okay. That's the moral of the story. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Taylor ends such a fan of your work and what you do. The book is out. Listeners go get it. It's called extremely online. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right. Into it is hosted by me, Sam Sanders. The show was produced by Janay West, Travis Larchuck, Gabi Grossman, Jalani Carter, and Takazan. Our fearless editor is Jordana Hoekman. Our engineer is Daniel Turek. Our music is composed by break master cylinder and the executive producer of audio at Vox Media is Neshat Kerwa. We're back on Friday with a brand new episode. Until then, be good to yourselves. Okay. Bye. I want to date with Rawls. Carty says. Rawls, Ruffa Ars. This is the love story of real hinged couple Carty and Rocker. Written and read by me, Nicola Dynan. Listen to the free audio book now. Endless summer escapes start here. Travel the worlds of Netflix, IRL. Inspired by fan favorites like Stranger Things and Squid Game. Brave the upside down. Face off with the frontman. Play leveled up arcade games. Shop exclusive merch. And enjoy themed food and drinks. Beat the heat. Play, eat, and shop on repeat at Netflix House at Galleria delis. Bring your crew and save. Get your tickets today at Netflix.com/house.