Extremely Online ft. Taylor Lorenz: The History of Creators, Influence & The Social Internet

An Exclusive Q&A with Taylor Lorenz, Author of "Extremely Online"

This fall technology columnist Taylor Lorenz releases her debut book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet:

“By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline.

These social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.”

As a fan and friend, I invited Taylor (TL) onto ZINE for a chat about Extremely Online.

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MK: Extremely Online can be considered the definitive history of the power and role of internet creators as we currently know them. We learn that individuals shaped platforms as much as the platforms shaped them.

But this story can also be considered an “alternative history.” Traditionally, the stories of MySpace to TikTok are told by the executives or investors in the platforms themselves – those already in power. In this work, we learn how creators, many of whom are women and people of color, came to pave the way. It's a social story about social spaces.

How’d this work come about? Was it a tough sell?

TL: Yeah, it was a tough sell. My publisher didn't want me to write an internet history book, and I was like, oh yeah, I won't, and then I did. It was just a harder thing to describe than when I was pitching.

Initially I thought about doing a book just on Vine. I started to think about these corporate books. There’s so many. I think because we live in this hyper capitalist society, the narratives that we consume about tech are all through the lens of specific companies. I think I read three WeWork books.

But I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to tell the user side of social media. I wanted to tell the story through the power users of the internet and rise of this half a trillion dollar content creator industry.

Since 2017, there’s been this revisionist history: “Mr. Beast invented the creator economy.”

Um. No.

That's not how it happened and also the people involved were not the people who have gotten the credit. I just wanted to tell the stories of those who the Silicon Valley people weren't going to tell.

MK: Reality really is just the stories available. There’s this refreshing vindication of these often forgotten figures who had an outsized impact.

From “Annoying Orange,” Fred Figglehorn and FarmVille, to Keyboard and Grumpy Cat, Chewbacca Mom, and Adam Nyerere Bahner (AKA Tay Zonday AKA Chocolate Rain Guy). But in hindsight, there’s this undeniable presence of irreverence. Oddity was paramount.

I see a tensions here, though.

It’s as if once advertisers came in to support these names, the platforms took themselves seriously. As a result, the frivolous and nonsensical became extinct. Fun wasn’t the incentive. It was money. Suddenly, performance eclipsed lolz.

Sure, the silly is still available today, but it by no means feels as omnipresent as it once was 15 years ago.

Do you think the professional intent of creators and advertisers shadowed play for play’s sake? Or put another way:

Did capitalism kill the internet?

TL: Yes. [Laughs.]

Once the money came into the space, you started to see a lot more warped incentives. And I think it did eclipse a lot of the things that made the internet so great – that positivity. When you have an entire internet landscape dominated by engagement, things become very dark and unfulfilling.

In the early internet when it was more about creativity and the money wasn't involved, in some ways it was really bad because people were creating for free and there wasn't economic opportunities, many of which have been incredibly liberatory, but it did allow for less pressure.

The stakes were just so much lower so you could just have a little bit more fun.

MK: I miss it.

Can we ever return to this innocence? Are we too far gone?

TL: I don't think we're too far gone. You see these little peeks of it.

We just need to remember what we loved about the internet and what we should use it for. I don't think that we should just look at everything as a place to extract profit.

Now, the reason that people do that is because there’s so much economic uncertainty. It's not really on the people themselves, it's not on the users, it's not on the creators, it's on the system that we've built where there's absolutely no economic stability in this country. We have zero social safety net.

And so people feel pressured to commodify themselves and lives, and become entrepreneurs, and build their own little life raft — basically through the internet. It’s just sad. It makes me sad that that's the system we're living under.

I wish that we could sort of collectively advocate for things like universal health care or affordable housing and things like that. I think that would actually improve the internet. I know nobody thinks of these things as related, but I think that we have this crazy hyper-capitalist, competitive, sort of dystopian internet, because that's the world that we're living in. I think if we had a better, healthier offline world where we had a social safety net, stability, time off, friendships and family, we would just have a better internet.

You wouldn't have everybody trying to turn their side hustle into a second career.

Basically all of us Millennials are working two full time jobs because we have to have our main job and then we have the side hustle or content job that's just in case the main job falls through, or to make yourself more competitive.

It's the system that's the problem.

It's not the internet necessarily.

MK: I couldn’t agree with you more.

Unfortunately so many people still struggle to see the interplay. We still have people differentiating online vs. “in real life.” There is no divide.

The fallacy remains so hard to “click” for many people.

TL: It’s not even that it doesn't click. People are openly hostile to it.

I'll never forget a few months ago I posted a tweet in response to this piece by a columnist at a legacy institution basically saying the reason everyone is depressed these days is because of their phones. Phones are the thing that are causing depression.

Now, I tweeted, that's not true. Phones can be a lifeline. Phones are just a tool. It's about how you use your phone and how your life is set up.

Like what does the phone mean to you? Like why are you on it so much? Are you on it so much because you're an Uber driver?

You have to consider these broader economic and political questions.

Everybody wants to make tech the enemy and everybody wants to make the internet the problem and phones the issue, and I just don't. These are things that are reflective of our values and our systems

I think people are angry about the symptom of the problem, not the root causes.

MK: I’ve gone a long time without thinking about Lonelygirl15.

For anyone unfamiliar: Lonelygirl15 was a YouTube vlog in 2006, where a teenage girl named Bree, shared stories about her family and friends.

As it gained traction becoming the most subscribed channel on YouTube at the time, someone traced the IP of Bree’s MySpace to CAA, where a writer worked. It was uncovered that this entire character and story was entirely scripted. This was purely fiction manufactured by a cadre of writers and lawyers.

But despite the reveal, views continued to grow. People didn’t mind.

It’s as if Bree’s literal acting on the onset of people making for the internet, ushered in the expectation that we are to perform, posture or deceive online.

I wonder if it’s possible to untether creator from the act?

TL: People always ask me about performance on the internet, and I think we all posture in different areas of our lives, right? We perform different identities all over the place.

We're a different person with certain groups of friends or with family or at work. And I think we need room for this on the internet.

We should be able to express our multiple personalities, but right now we have one personal brand, which follows you across platforms.

It’s really restrictive and not how human identity and expression works.

MK: There’s this frought relationship hinted throughout the book between creators and their platforms. On one hand you have Vine stars upset that their platform wasn’t doing enough for them and that they too could be as big as YouTube stars. Soon after, they lose their platform and professions overnight without much empathy or explanation. Then on the other hand, you have BuzzFeed celebrating the success of “The Dress” with a champagne toast, a piece of content which they did not produce.

From your vantage point, what’s required for a fairer relationship between platforms and those who make for them? Is it purely financial? What makes a trustworthy bond?

Is it even possible from what we’ve seen?

TL: Well, it's always going to be uneven.

It's sort of like the relationship between an employer and an employee. It's sort of inherently lopsided towards the employer, the tech companies. And so I think it's rare for creators to get a level of power.

I don't know.

I don't think that there's ever going to be a super symbiotic relationship, but I do think certain platforms have done a better job than others. YouTube for all of its faults, and it has major ones, has sort of standardized a monetization system that they have been able to scale effectively.

Now, as Hank Green and other kind of brilliant people in the industry have pointed out, you can't monetize short form content the way you can long form content and the rise of TikTok has upended a lot of revenue models that creators had sort of long relied on. There's not a clear path to monetization for short form content yet.

You have some creator funds, you have some ad splits, and the subscription platforms like Patreon, which I think most users are pretty happy with.

MK: Going full circle and back to performance, you can’t monetize short form content yet, but you can monetize a personality – a brand. As a result, we further entrench ourselves in that system. You can’t afford to place a bet on riskier, creative content pushing your identity or interests. You jeopardize the brand.

As you know, these dynamics fascinate me.

Despite the countless stories and characters, this book could truly go on forever.

TL: I wrote 158,000 words when I finally finished a draft, and I had not even written the final three chapters. The book was supposed to be between 60- and 80,000. It ended up closer to 90,000 in the end.

MK: When are we going to get the unedited, director’s cut?

TL: Ughh God. No one wants to read that. Even my mother couldn’t finish it.

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