You're one post away from becoming the internet's main character

Taylor, do you ever think about Bean Dad? Oh my god, yes. Now I do. I forgot about that. I haven't heard that name in years. What was your sort of final take on Bean Dad when it all kicked off? Do you remember? I can't remember why he was cancelled. It wasn't for putting the fake shrimp in his cereal, was it? We'll get to it. uh bean dad justine sacco that woman who had fun sitting in the backyard with her husband once on twitter these are people we would call the main characters of the internet everyone wants to know what their deal is everyone gets really mad about it their whole lives typically get ruined today we're going to be talking about how that keeps happening and why it's a little different now than it used to be. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. With me is my personal bean dad, Grant Irving, my producer, and our fantastic guest returning to the show today is Taylor Lorenz. Taylor, how are you? Good, good. So psyched to be here. You've been the main character of the internet a few times, I feel like. Once or twice. What does that feel like when it's happening? I have dabbled in that world myself, but I feel like you have a bit more experience than I do when the internet comes calling. Yeah, I think it's overwhelming at first, but I think it's sort of changed over time, too, kind of like what it means to be the main character. I don't care about it anymore. Now I'm like, let's bring it on. You know, who cares? But it used to be traumatizing the first few times it happened. I feel like a lot of the panic around it when it would happen was like society hadn't really caught up to how silly a lot of this stuff is. So like the first time it ever happened to me, I had a boss say they were going to fire me over it. But it was because my family had been doxxed by 4chan and my editor basically didn't like the fact that we were getting that attention and was like, I'll fire you if you tweet about this or if you say anything about it. And like now that seems ridiculous. but this was 2012 probably. What did you do to make 4chan mad? I wrote about a fake campaign they put together called Cutting for Bieber. Oh, yeah, I wrote about that. They were pretending to be teenage girls who were self-harming because Justin Bieber was photographed smoking weed. That's pretty funny. Yeah, nowadays I feel like if you become the main character of the internet, it probably stays more on the internet than it used to also, I would say. You know, it's so funny. I get calls because I'm a very well-known woman that's dealt with harassment online. And anytime someone's like in the midst of, you know, some sort of horrific campaign, I feel like I get a phone call. And I was talking to this one woman in media also the other day, and she's like in my they're tweeting out my address. They're putting this. And I was like, girl, they're not going to do a thing. Trust me. They're not going to do a thing like people don't even swat anyone anymore. You know, they're not they're not nothing happens like they don't even send a pizza, you know. So I think there was this moment maybe in the 2010s where like the worst thing that could happen is you get swatted. And let me tell you, as somebody that's had my family swatted, the first time my parents were like, what is going on? And it's like, you know, somewhat traumatic, I guess. But then after that, they're like, OK, yeah, you tell the police department. Now there's articles about it. No one gives a shit. Oh, they sent the police to your house. And it's horrible. Like somebody can, you know, people have been shot and died. But I just think there's so much awareness of it now. And because it's a federal crime, people don't do it anymore. So that was always like the one thing that they had that was scary. Right. Like, you know, for instance, if you got doxxed in the 4chan, people were coming at you like swatting was this like one thing that they had. Yeah. They don't really have that anymore. So now it's just like, what are you going to do? Yeah. You're going to fly to L.A. and what? Yell at me? No, you're not. You don't leave your house. I remember in 2019, someone tried to like call in a bomb threat to my apartment. I guess they were going to call the police and say that there was a bomb there or something. Yeah. But they got the wrong address, and they did it to a French restaurant down the street. I've always felt very bad about that. Did you tell them? The French restaurant? Yeah. No. Did you give them extra business? No. The pandemic had started, and I think – so this was in 2020, and I think I figured no one was there because of lockdown. So I was like, yeah, that's fine. Sure. The thing is people also understand the concept of prank phone calls. Yes. And I think like – I mean I've had them try to do things like this to me before or like call the – and people are like this is a prank call. Right. Like show me some evidence that you're serious or get out of here. Yeah. I think the fact that these sort of tactics have bubbled their way all the way up to like the highest levels of government and this behavior means that like everyone kind of writes it off as being silly and wacky. Like, I mean, and I don't want to like, you know, diminish this sort of thing when it happens to the average person, which is sort of what we're talking about today, the main character effect, which I want to get to this in just a second. But like, yeah, the whole world has sort of gotten used to it to a degree. But to start to start properly, can you define what you sort of think of it meaning when you say like someone has become today's main character? To me, when we talk about like the main character of the Internet one day or of a platform, even it's kind of like the person that discourse is centralized on. It's the person that everyone is talking about, that everything that day kind of has to be related to the person everybody's joking about. It's just kind of like the central figure of, you know, in the discussion taking place on XYZ platform. That's right. I have to credit Maple Cocaine, the Twitter user in 2019 who coined the phrase in a post that reads, Each day on Twitter, there's one main character. The goal is to never be it. But I want to start in reverse chronological order today, actually. And I want to talk about a woman who has been the main character of the Internet several times, but most recently in March, Chapel Rhone. Are you familiar with Ms. Chapel Rhone? Yes, I am. Of course. And so I am, of course, talking about the incident in Brazil, where on March 21st, 2026, Brazilian soccer player Jorginho Frello makes an angry Instagram story about Chaperone saying that her security guard intimidated his stepdaughter at a concert in Sao Paulo. And from Cosmo at the time, Frello's post reads, during breakfast, the artists walk past their table. My daughter, like any child, recognized her, got excited and just wanted to make sure it was really her. And the worst part is she didn't even approach her. She simply walked past the singer's table, looked to confirm it was her, smiled and went back to sit with her mom. She didn't say anything, didn't ask for anything. And then the security guard came over and was very aggressive. And then basically Chaperone had to sort of say, like, I don't know what you're talking about. And I guess like the reason I wanted to start here was why do you think Chaperone is so often sort of dragged into these like multi-week scandals? I think we need to distinguish some nuance here because while anybody can theoretically become a main character, we also have coordinated harassment smear campaigns against women. And I think making a woman a main character is a way to enact those smear campaigns. That's why I've been the main character so much. It's often because some bad faith actor is intent on smearing me for an article I wrote or something I did or whatever. They don't like me for whatever reason, Tucker Carlson, who knows. So I think with Chapel Roan, like she triggers a decent amount of people who very frequently manufacture main characters. And that is the right wing Internet and the like centrist liberal Internet. Both of those like factions online, I feel like our main character drivers and she's a lesbian woman. Right. And she's also sorry, a third group that often manufactures main characters are like, I don't know if it's like Stan accounts, but like this, like hyper online kind of like groups of community, like hyper online groups of young people, I guess you could say that really like to participate in discourse. Yeah, I think that's actually the least talked about dimension to this, which is that it is not just that there are fans of pop stars or actors or whatever. There are also anti-fans or people who believe that their fandom has to come at the expense of someone they deem a rival. So like if an Olivia Rodrigo stan sees that Chaparron is being called out by a Brazilian soccer player, they're going to jump on it because they see it as a victory for the Olivia Rodrigo fandom. This is sort of the dynamics that are tearing apart the fandom for the show The Pit right now. Because all the different actors have different fans and they believe that like their screen time is based on like, you know, whether or not that person is a good person in real life or whatever. Wait, it's so crazy you bring that up because I had to mute The Pit on Twitter. Like I felt like crazy. Speaking of sort of anti-fandom, I see this. I do think that Chapel Rhone also not only is she's a pop star, but she's a political pop star. And she very famously came out in support of, you know, Palestine. She said that she wouldn't necessarily endorse Kamala Harris, even though she eventually voted for her. So you have blue MAGA people. Oh, yeah. And the right. And let me tell you, as somebody that like, you know, that engages with those people a lot, like they are also hype. They are just as online as like a Sabrina Carpenter Stan account. And so you have, I just think like all these groups kind of poised to jump, you know, when there's anything that's the matter, you know, that comes out that's seemingly negative about her. Do you think Chappell becoming a main character today is different than like the history of the main character? I put chapel in the realm of the like Blake Lively, Amber Heard, Meghan Markle, like kind of like burn the witch type. Yes. Campaigns. It's like celebrities are getting roped up into these like Internet campaigns. I kind of think of it as like they have figured out how to weaponize what happens to normal people to celebrities. I think there's like two directions where it's like a random woman is now being held the same media standards as someone like Chopperon if they go viral or even if like someone just finds their video and makes it go viral. But then also like the things that a female celebrity can be canceled for or made a main character for have degraded to the level that we're like using to go after a woman who has like, you know, an argument on an airplane. Yeah. It's weaponized both ways. Yeah, it's flattened like everything else. And just to put a bow on this, Jorginho eventually said that this whole thing was a misunderstanding. Of course, he waited like two months to say that. But we now know that none of this really mattered or happened. But it is, I think, an important story to start with because as we go further back, the pattern that you talked about where it's almost always women that find themselves at the center of this is overwhelmingly true. For every one bean dad, there are dozens and dozens of chapel roan. So a couple of years before our most recent chapel roan incident, we get in June 2024, a YouTuber is interviewing people on the street in Nashville. And a woman named Haley, who spells it the wrong way, tells the YouTuber that she wants to spit on that thing. Some people love it. Some people think it's ironically great. This is when Max Reed coins the term Zinternet to sort of describe the subterranean America 2 spaces online that we can now see more clearly. But I would argue that she becomes a main character of the internet. She gets her own crypto coin. I mean, did you ever eat Lunchly and watch Talk Tua? I did watch a live taping of Talk Tua. How was it? Did you like it? You know, it's made for a certain community, I think. Maybe not. I don't know who. Yeah. Yeah, I would say that's right. There's also, I think, by the time we get to 2024, the post-pandemic era, we get people who want to become the main character, realize that there's monetizable opportunities here. A really good example we found was the TikToker Maddie Hart, who had a epic TikTok story I'm going to share with you right here. My dad abandoned my family when I was five years old. That is a wife and four kids. He abandoned us and then pursued amateur breakdancing. This guy wouldn't pay my medical bills. Yes, of course. She goes viral. Right wing media obviously becomes obsessed with her. she's like still posting kind of about her dad but would i mean would you would you say it's correct to say that like users now can kind of gamify the right-wing attention and go like oh like if i piss them off like i can go i can become famous so i think that there's like a certain type of person and career that you can have where all attention is good attention i mean only fans i I think of somebody like Natalie Reynolds or Ava Louise who just makes like Rage Bait. Like, you know, they would love to be the main character because every time they're the main character, they get OnlyFans subscribers. So like they're able to monetize it outside of OnlyFans stars. I think it's mostly negative to become the main character because you don't I think people think you can capitalize on it a lot more than you ultimately can capitalize on it. And look at someone like Hawk Tua. Like that's a perfect example of somebody that like she followed the playbook. She tried to do it all. And like, I don't know that she's doing super well now. One of the Pauls, I think it was Jake Paul, who was like, I'm going to work with Hakitua and like grow her into a brand. And like they've become very interested in like trying to figure out if you can do that to people who randomly go viral, which is we already did that. Like the and we'll, you know, we'll get to like the Alex from Target era. But like this has already been a thing. And it's like after 2020, it becomes a thing again. But now they're trying it in different ways with the crypto coin and the podcast and the brand deals and all that. I think like the difference between like since like I think since the pandemic started, it's been this thing where there's just more awareness from people about the value of virality. But it's just like, oh, well, attention is good. I know Logan Paul is big. Attention is big. He has attention. Therefore, it's big. And it's like if you actually know about the economies of the Internet, you know that that's actually really rare and difficult. And the reason he has money is not because he went viral once in 2014 on Vine. It's because he's developed this like long, consistent sort of media career. I think it's become harder to explain that to people because so much of our media has moved online. So like if you see someone's face on the Internet all day, you just assume that they're making a lot of money from it. Yes. And it has and it comes with it like an incredible amount of baggage. The same year, 2024, Dr. Ali Lukes completes her Ph.D. on the politics of smell. You remember this? Can you can you sort of describe what happened here? She I guess, you know, she was getting a Ph.D. in the politics of smell. People I believe it was conservatives like got outraged that this even existed as something to study. To me, it's very silly because like we have people getting Ph.D.s in the most like niche, random. That's right. Smelling like, you know, studying lizard yawns or something. I don't know. That's how scientific discoveries. I agree. All Ph.D.s are silly. I agree with you. with Ali's like you know I think also she like leaned into it she was responding online and she became this sort of like viral uh figure because of that yeah almost all of these are triggered by like a young woman expressing themselves openly and earnestly and then the entire world losing their fucking minds over it that's basically it yes they they can be a very big figure like you know, a chaparron or a hawk to it, but they can also just be like random people who express an interest. Uh, this one we, we have here is from 2023. This next one, Bailey Jesseret is the user or Ben heard. And, uh, they wrote, sorry, if this is rude or whatever, but I really hate people who refuse to endure even the tiniest bits of small talk. Can't tell you how many times I've walked up to a table at work and said, how are you doing? Only met with complete silence and a blank stare 8 000 reposts and people having complete meltdowns over it uh i even wrote about at the time where it's it was one of those like regular kind of main character effects where it's like a person who's like we should all like exist in society and everyone being like hi i will fucking murder you if you tell me that i had anything that touches on progressive like values. I think like it's sort of like bait for this. Yeah. Like should people tip? Yes. Most people should tip. Should people? I don't know. I mean, like it is. Oh, you're cool with the tipping screens at Starbucks. Wow. No, I know. I know. It's all crazy. It's all crazy. I will tell you, I'm a veteran of that type of discourse because I'm vegan. And some of my earliest Internet experiences were I unfortunately was on the wrong side of these things where I would be like, oh, so you think it's OK to mass murder? You know, like what if somebody murdered every single one of your family members and strung them up? You know, like maybe that should happen. Like everyone just takes it to the extreme. You're assuming that we all have perfect family lives and we don't mind if they're murdered. Exactly, exactly. It's like, I mean, listen, a lot of this discourse is driven by children or people that I would say have sort of a maturity level of a 11 year old and algorithmic feeds, you know, and amplify it and feed it And I think it gotten exacerbated by Twitter algorithm specifically since Elon takeover Yeah And I also think that with a lot of these things like the reason they kick off like even going all the way to Chapel Rhone or Hawk to like all the way up and down the spectrum here there has to be kind of like a nugget of I don really know how to articulate this but sort of a like a shared shame at like the breakdown of modern society And the example that I would point to here is one from 2023 as well, which is when Tiffany Gomez has a meltdown on a plane and claims that a passenger is not real. But I am telling you right now that back there is not real. And is videotaped on the plane. And my mom's a flight attendant. So for years, I've always told her, like, if the phones come out, like hide in the bathroom. I know you have a duty to protect the passengers, but, like, you don't want to be the flight attendant that's, like, pulling down the dead dog from, like, you know, wherever someone stashed it or whatever. Like, and I do think that, like. Oh, you don't think we should help dogs, Ryan? No, I think we, like, we don't need them. I think, I think, well, I just saw, like, a whole fucking meltdown about dogs at restaurants. Like, so, yes, I mean, there's no. Okay, I know. That is a problem. What, dogs at restaurants? I live in LA where everything's like indoor outdoor and listen if you have a dog in an outdoor restaurant I think that's totally fine but then the dog goes inside then the dog's peeing on the floor inside have you watched the dog pee on the floor inside a restaurant in LA before I saw a dog pee inside LaMille and Silver Lake and yeah which they were not supposed to be in there I don't really think I don't really think LA counts as like an actual society or city I don't think the The dog owner was very apologetic. The dog owner was very apologetic. But I think like, you know, it's funny because I think, like you said, we live in society. Right. And like, you know, ever since 2020, like we've had a lot of societal breakdown and we have a lot of individualism. And as as like our economy declines and the world falls apart, like, you know, people want these little moments of like being able to kind of fight online and express their own kind of boundaries or thoughts or opinions. I don't know. Yeah, I mean like you have the debate over whether a chaperone should be nice to a kid that likes her in a restaurant. You have the debate over whether a woman should express sexual thoughts or feelings in public, whether women should be – oh, actually. So just to put a bow on this one, Gomez did explain that she was not having a hallucination, which I actually think makes the story more interesting. so um obviously she gave this quote to the barstool sports podcast um another win for this internet she said i think it will probably be a good two years before it truly goes away and i will be a meme for the rest of my life i get it and at this point it is funny it is funny it's not funny what the passengers had to go through at all but me and the outlandish shit i said is absolutely funny and she explained that she was basically having an argument with someone who is not on in the frame like she was screaming at someone on the other side of the frame so she was having a meltdown but she was like she wasn't hallucinating got it okay but i don't think any of the videos that go viral of people having meltdowns at airports or airplanes or whatever would go viral if it didn't sort of touch on something we all kind of feel which is like any of us could have had that meltdown on a plane or an airport because traveling sucks ass like all of these things have to have this like i don't want to say relatable but perhaps that is the best word like dimension to them where it's like they're tapping into something that like we're all already fighting about yes and i yes and i think post covid that has there's more things that we're all fighting about because everything's i think that's actually i think that since covid started that I think COVID exacerbated that. A hundred percent. If you think back, like, and I do feel the need as an immunocompromised person to constantly remind people, we are still very much dealing with COVID. No, no, no, it ended in 2021. It was like, no, it just magically disappeared. It's done. No, but I mean, I think like, I mean, I think of this a lot now because I'm immunocompromised, right? And like, so it's really dangerous for me to do certain things. Would I, you know, like I try to encourage people to mask, whatever. But I think when you think back to kind of like early 2020, we had this like brief, maybe like 48 hours when people were like, oh, kumbaya, whatever. And then very quickly, we started to see these like the Karen main characters, right? Or the main character of like, I refuse to wear my mask in the Starbucks or whatever. Like, I think like that sort of energy, like very much got its initial traction in the earliest days of the pandemic. and we're still experiencing the pandemic, but we're also still experiencing the craziness of this like internet enabled world that like, honestly, I think we've only barreled like further and further into. Like, I know we're all like technically less online theoretically than like April, 2020, but we're almost like the internet is almost more embedded in our lives now. Yeah, it sort of feels like our eyeballs are pointing in two different directions and one of them is outside and one of them is online and we're constantly living like that. And it's like very disorienting. And like the rise of the personality type you're describing, Grant and I did a whole bonus episode about the movie Eddington, which I think is like the best depiction I've seen yet of sort of the psychology of that moment. And after the break and a word from our sponsors, we're going to talk about sort of the initial, I'm using this term to mean that post the existence of COVID. So the initial post-COVID era of- What are you talking about? Why don't you just say what you're talking about, the dates that you're talking about. Are you talking about 2020? No, I'm doing a transition. We're going to be talking about the immediate main characters of the post-COVID era. Okay, okay. Go to a break. Go to a break. Okay. Here's a word from our sponsors, PETA. One thing that always strikes me when we talk about this stuff is how we're constantly using systems that we don't really understand and can't really see the full picture of. Algorithms decide what we consume. Platforms decide what gets amplified. And somewhere in the background, there are countless companies tracking us, watching our behaviors, analyzing our moods and interests. 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Basically, every screen that you use to access the Internet, Surfshark works perfectly on. If you want to make your online life a little less exposed, go to Surfshark.com slash panic, P-A-N-I-C, and use the code word panic, P-A-N-I-C. You'll get four extra months of Surfshark VPN. Again, that's Surfshark.com slash panic. It also comes with a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee. And the link and the code are in our show description. Now, let's get back to the story because, as we all know, there's so much more weird stuff to talk about online. Hey, it's Grant, the other one. Question for you, who I assume is around my age cohort. You ever think this might be the best things get? Seems to be a conversation infecting everyone. But do you know what is worthwhile to feel positive about? Mint Mobile! Stop overpaying for wireless just because that's how it's always been. Mint exists purely to fix that. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you with premium wireless plans starting at $15 a month. 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As you were saying, there was a moment where like this stuff had actually kind of calmed down and then it comes back with a vengeance. You know, it's interesting because like when you say like post-COVID, I think people began to stop acknowledging the ongoing pandemic at different rates. And when I've done interviews about this, like people will say, well, you know, in June 2020 post-COVID or in, you know, 2024 post-COVID. And it's like, well, what are you? It basically just means for whoever, whatever person is saying it, it just means that's when they kind of decided to not acknowledge it anymore. And I think that that's not as much of a helpful framing as it is to talk about kind of like the very real, like cultural and political things that were happening during certain years, like 2022 XYZ or 2020 when Biden was elected or whatever. I personally am a COVID never happened truther. But I typically use it to mean March. Anything after March 2020 is basically sort of this new world that we're in. And I think the world fundamentally changed. Yes. I think that we're in a pandemic, a pandemic panic world, a pandemic or like I was like, it sounds like the name of your podcast. Much like the name of this show. Exactly. I mean, you see so many memes about this online, right? People will be like, it doesn't feel the same since March 2020. Like we entered a time warp in March 2020. And it's like, yes, I would argue that's not only because of the ongoing like pandemic and health issues and decline of America, but also because we sort of like all pushed ourselves like five or six years into the future with like the Internet. Like I think we just accelerated so many shifts that were happening on the Internet by all getting online and almost never getting offline. A hundred percent. And this like immediate new world. So like, let's go March 2020 to like sometime around the end of 2022 is a really interesting moment because TikTok is sort of at its peak. Elon Musk is sniffing around Twitter. He will eventually buy it in October of 2022. And one of the interesting edge cases of like pre and post Elon Twitter is the little plant mommy discourse. Do you remember this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So for those who don't remember, basically, this woman named Daisy Miller posts on Twitter when it's still like the last days of when it was still Twitter, that she enjoys having coffee in the garden with her husband. And the entire Internet decides that they're going to murder her and that she's a classist and that she should go to jail. This is a sampling of what people were saying to her. This is cute and all, but did you think of all the people who wake up to work grueling hours, wake up on the streets alone with chronic pain before posting this? You should be mindful next time before bragging about your picture-perfect life. You might upset someone. Someone else said, I wake up every day with chronic pain and wash my OCD medication down with an iced oat milk latte. But whatever, potato, potato, am I right? And it's just a lot of people being like, how dare you? Here's the thing that was interesting to me about that moment. that so quickly. So it's like there were a few people that initially said exactly like the stuff that you're saying, right? Like, how dare you? You know, you're lucky that you even have a house. Like most of us don't have houses, whatever, whatever. But then I think because there's enough sort of cultural awareness of this type of backlash, you had all of these right wingers and these trolls posting content that was mimicking, that was mocking the real content that only a few people had posted, but they were like leaning into it. And then you had other people getting outraged at that joke content. And some of those people, Ryan, were shilling crypto coins. Oh, 100%. Because this was also like during the crypto sort of boom. And I just thought this is such a perfect encapsulation of like literally everything wrong, right? Like you have the bad people, you have the bad faith people, then you have the bad faith exploiting the bad faith people, then you have the bad faith people exploiting the media and writing the most extreme, like, how dare you throw out my, you know, I am OCD, whatever. And it's like, you click on that person's profile and they're, they just want to get cited so they can pump their shit coin, you know? So it's like, everything was so bad. Okay. So, yes. So this person has actually changed their account since they wrote the one about iced oat milk. This is Ryan Radia, who is an economics, charts, tech policy, urbanism, regulation, housing, transit person, yeah, is verified in like a basically a right wing troll, basically. And like, yeah, so that it is, it is a mixture of trolls and real people, which is interesting to me, because it's like, I think there's this awareness of this phenomenon, and it's an attempt to exploit this phenomenon for profit, which is really just meme coins. So I can, I can explain this one, actually, I'm just searching this other one just to be curious. Oh, yeah. So the other person that we read from there is an engineer at Vercel, which is an AI company. So, yeah, the majority of these people are like understanding how to game this system at this moment. The meme coin thing is really interesting because I was covering crypto basically right after lockdown was lifted. That was like my first sort of like post-COVID beat for a while. going to these conventions and I was sitting in all these rooms with all these different crypto people. And this big thing that they were obsessed with was scanning the internet every day for anything that could be a meme and in their words, sort of like a trend, a meme, a main character, and immediately making shit coins out of it to make it look like that person had created a shit coin because they wanted to basically financialize internet trends. And that was like a concerted effort from the Web3 community to do that. And they're still doing it to this day but now when someone like haktua goes viral there will be like a large chunk of that like of those kinds of people who will be comfortable just making their own to get in on it that's that's the picture that i think the jake paul's of the world are making to them yeah it's like basically like make your shit coin now because you're you've got the attention right right or launch your only fans now because you've got the attention right i guess which that this like early 2020s main character style is like very different from the one we're in now because it is a lot more about like infighting and it's and and so the next example we had is in 2022 and a mardall argues that it's ableist for people to read books was this the person that was working for lockheed martin yeah yeah yeah incredible awesome yeah it's awesome incredible we find that out weirdly. Couldn't have made this in a lab. Well, so here's what's really interesting. Mardal is doxed by Kiwi Farms and that's how we find out that they were... Which, by the way, wait, was this the post that started it all off? Wait, that one that you just had on? Because I can't remember what she said to start it all off. The whole thing starts with the discourse around whether or not it's ablest to say that writers should read books. There's a thread going around mocking writers who don't read very much. And I'm not trying to haul out my soapbox, but this is ableist. Not everyone can read for pleasure. We're talking about writers here. Yeah. Or indeed at all. Some of those people are writers. What? I agree. Yeah. No, I agree with that. Anyway, so keep, I mean, you hate reading. Yeah, I can't read. Let me just tell you, I think this is so funny. I'm severely dyslexic. Whatever. This person posts this take. I understand why there was a reaction. So, yeah, what? That was crazy. It's screenshot and passed around is sort of an example of the loony left. It's picked up by Kiwi Farms who doxes Mardal and then finds out they work for Lockheed Martin. And then Mardal has to post a thread explaining that they're a legacy hire. I'll read it here. It's really good. I've been made aware that someone is trying to dox me and everyone I know in the process. So I might as well address some things here. I'm sorry I have to do this. And I should point out, like, Kiwi Farms is awful. And, you know. We hate Kiwi Farms. We hate Kiwi Farms. No one should. Yeah. But then they. But guys, we're talking about a weapons manufacturer. Yeah. Yeah. So the ultra woke warrior Anna Mardal then writes, I work at a large corporation, which I will not name. I work in software licensing, procuring text editors and code compilers for others. This is why I know so much about Creative Commons. For those that enjoyed that thread, I do not produce code for anything. I got this particular job because my family works for the same corporation. so they are saying that they are a nepo baby hire at lockheed martin and i can't get over this i can't get over this yes there's a couple of really great comments this was one of those days on the internet ryan where like i was like glued to the like i just was like are you kidding me yeah it's awesome um it's yeah so this is one comment on on the scandal at the time it reads as a twitter personality who organizes mobs to attack small accounts oh right that was another dimension of this is that anna mardall was like very often being a woke warrior in other people's replies and sort of like tone policing and virtue signaling them and like sending harassment at them so this person writes as a twitter personality who organizes mobs to attack small accounts i no stranger to bomb defenseless that why this summer i partnering with lockheed martin um so yeah like i think this is like very indicative of this moment where the professionalization of this hadn't really hit yet and so it is like largely like a person gets like the attention of an online mob and then things spiral out of control and and it is very based on sort of like early COVID era, like what you should be doing, shouldn't be doing stuff? Yeah. So here's one thing that I think that we, that we started to see like really arise. And listen, it happened prior to 2020, because I don't know if you remember, Ryan, when I said we should ban air conditioning, I remember I was being hyperbolic. Okay, guys, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. But I did, you know, I was working in an office that had too much air conditioning and I was, you know, decided to post that. So I'm not saying that there wasn't sort of discourse about this, but I think since, you know, really it was actually 2021 because Biden came into office immediately sort of started to tell people that COVID was over, that it magically disappeared, whatever. But like you started to see the rise of a lot of hate towards disabled people and ableism, which is very real and horrible. And like, do you know what I'm talking about? Like, I just think that there's like a reason that a lot of the mocking of social justice warriors centers on ableism because i think since 2020 and the racial justice reckoning and all this other stuff joking about leftist policies or like over policing sort of some of that other stuff started to be seen as like less i mean people make fun of race too but like do you know what i'm talking about like there's ableism is sort of constantly like leveraged as an example of like this person's gone too woke yeah i mean the ultimate expression of it is the return of the R word, which like I, I find, I find loathsome and have no patience for. I don't care what your politics are. Like, I don't respect you as a human being anymore. Yeah. Even if you're on my side or whatever. But I think you're right. I think there is something about like COVID happens and a lot of the sort of let's for simplification called the main characters or sort of like, you know, discourse cycles that we see immediately after are clearly reflecting an uncomfortableness about that. And, and so you, and, and, and a sort of, um, it's like people don't know how to talk about it, so they can't talk, but they talk about everything else, but it in a way. And I think that that has only gotten worse because like, it is still a part of our lives. It is still a thing that, you know, people get, and it's still, it's going to be part of our lives until we ever deal with it. And I think people don't really want to face that. And so you have these little proxy battles around it. And as the world has become more reactionary, more right wing and, you know, leading up to the second Trump administration, some of that is still around. But I think it is interesting that it starts to become almost solely focused on like whatever a young woman is doing, we're going to burn the world down. The Gen Z boss and a mini, you know, that whole thing. it is always now just a young woman on tiktok or somewhere else is doing something and we're gonna kill her because we we hate looking at it the gen z boss and a mini thing too it was so wild because that was correct wasn't that an australian skincare company it wasn't even in america it was is an Australian skincare company called TBH. And yeah, if you can believe it, that only happened in 2024. That's crazy that we've lived like 20 lives since then. Yeah. And of course, like as Trump is doing the tariffs last spring, you have all these accounts on X being like, this is the video that brought us here because like they want women out of the workforce because of the TikTok video. I mean, that's why we need to invade Australia. We need to put them ahead of Canada and just invade Australia. No, Grant, we have to lose access to the Strait of Hormuz because an Australian skincare company made a TikTok two years ago. That's what has to happen. I see. Yeah. Call up Anna Mardal. We need some bombs. Exactly. And so, yeah, like in this early 2020s era, it's different. It's like it's much more about kind of like mob rule in a way. And so this leads us to, as you said at the top, the shrimp tails in the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Yes. So the Cinnamon Toast Crunch fiasco was started by comedian Jensen Karp, who wrote, Why are there shrimp tails in my cereal? This is not a bit. There's a response from Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which reads, After further investigation with our team that closely examined the image, it appears to be an accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients are not thoroughly blended. We assure you that there's no possibility of cross-contamination with shrimp. and then we get a really dark turn into that do you remember what happens next in this story taylor no so uh the daily beast writes a headline titled he went viral over claims of shrimp in his cereal then things got dark fast and uh basically former girlfriends accused carp of manipulation and abusive behavior and then there's other allegations that are circulating that he ripped off black writers ideas and screamed at his coworkers and was just an all around bad dude. And so, yeah, basically everyone kind of waited for this viral moment to be like, fuck this guy. This guy's a really bad guy. Yeah. OK, I'm sorry. There is a lot of bad people in the world. But this also feel what year did this happen, Ryan? Was this 2021? This incident is actually when I timestamp the beginning of this accepted wisdom that if you have a viral post, You are now a celebrity and you are now beholden to all of the responsibilities of a celebrity. Because at this point, and I think I think COVID had like lockdown had to happen because you had to get enough people online to go like, oh, OK, so the Internet's like the thing now. Yes. And then you have like this viral post in the spring of 2021. And everyone's like, yeah, let's meet to this guy. Like and I'm not saying that he's a good guy or this shouldn't happen. But like we're talking about a man who had like a viral post about cereal. Yeah. Complaining about cereal. I kind of feel like he put those shrimp tails in the cereal. Oh, yeah, probably. I mean, I'm looking at it right now. I could see that being cinnamon, though. There's one that looks like a shrimp tail, but the other one looks like cinnamon. I don't know. I could see it. But I could see it. This is my one harmless conspiracy. That he put the shrimp tails in there? Yeah. He shot first. The shrimp tails were put there first. Yeah, that's true. And then we're going to finish out this section before we go to another break with, of course, Bean Dad, which happened on January 2nd, 2021, and was the biggest story in the country right up until the capital stormed. And yeah, what's crazy is like this sort of ruined his entire life and career. Really? Yeah, he had a podcast. He was co-hosting with Ken Jennings. Yeah. He did – his band did the theme song from the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me. He was sort of like a guy, but he's also apparently been a notorious asshole also. Well, then here you go. Yeah. Look at this long thread. Jesus. Yeah, it's so long. Yeah, and he was – yeah, look at that. That's ridiculous. It's an extremely long thread of him not telling his daughter how to work a can opener, And he's he instead of showing her he's just describing in painstaking detail her having to problem solve it because he's teaching her like independence or something. Yeah, I mean, he's doing that like performative lib thing of like, I'm going to make this like really boring story into a multi post thread that like sucks and I suck. And he later claimed that he had he received a visit from Child Protective Services. and he talks about all this in a 2023 podcast episode hosted by amanda knox uh of course and so yeah he had a history of like edgy dumb awful posts where you know he's writing things like to his friend i'm gonna rape you next time i see you or he's got a racist one where it's like maybe half maybe the white half of you he's saying this to a mixed race person maybe the white half of you that went to law school can get the black half out of jail on some boohoo technicality like he's clearly just like an idiot and who's always been awful yeah i don't know again this is a guy that randomly went viral like not to hold him to you know yeah there's a lot of people out there that are just kind of dumb random asshole type people you know what i mean like he's not committing crimes here i remember being like the reason i always come back to the story is i remember feeling like something something had shifted and something like something felt very disturbing to me about this where i was like the sort of nature of i accidentally went viral shifts a lot and it felt like you know we all go into lockdown we and then the world starts to come way more online and a lot of the old kind of rules around how we would treat this sort of thing went out the window So Eternal September would be the term for this sort of thing. And I remember looking at this and just being like, I shouldn't know about this guy. Like, I shouldn't be aware of this man. Like, I don't really care. But it was so intense. Like, it was a really – and then, you know, obviously it's ethered from the culture immediately after by something more important. Bean Dad and Shrimp Guy were trying to go viral. Couch Guy and West Elm Caleb weren't trying to go viral. they were just you know in a place with a camera and then you have women who were just kind of like posting like as if like they could just be like hey i accomplished something or like hey i want to like chat with people about kind of stories about our fucked up families and like that was weaponized like i see these era shifts of intent and like what makes a main character at those different eras you know it's interesting to kind of consider intent of the main character i wouldn't say that like bean dad and shrimp dad wanted to go viral certainly not in the ways that they ended up going viral i think like 90 of main characters happen probably 99 of people have been like main characterization happens without consent and and i think it's like i mean did did people want to share something funny? Like, sure. You know, West Elm Caleb and Couch Guy and these other figures. And for people that don't know, West Elm Caleb was basically a guy who dated a bunch of women that used TikTok, who decided that he was shitty. Now, West Elm Caleb himself was not even on the Internet. He exists as this like nebulous guy, although he did allegedly, I think, get fired for his job because of the sort of like cancellation that he endured. He worked at West Elm. And then the couch guy was just this guy who like was in a viral video and like didn't greet his girlfriend nicely enough in the video. And so people just sort of like parasocially decided they should break up to me. Like the point is more I feel like when we talk about main character, we're talking more about like the reaction and like how the like Internet writ large, like treats individual figures that are thrust into our feeds for whatever reason. And like they're thrust into our feeds for different reasons. Sometimes they're just a woman that did something, you know, controversial. Sometimes they're a guy that thought that he found shrimp. Sometimes it's a guy that appears in a video that didn't, you know, whatever. But like it's more about like the evolution of like how do we treat this person? Yeah. And in terms of the gender thing, like men don't live well and they don't have good emotions. And the Internet allows them to see that women can express themselves more earnestly and it fills them with murderous rage. So if a woman feels comfortable being like, I looked pretty today or I graduated from college or I enjoy being in the backyard with my husband, there are a lot of men that become violently angry about that. But more and more, and there are like all kinds of trends sort of towards like more reactionary, right wing, conservative gender essentialism in America. It's also like a lot of young women who overlap with pop music stands as well who get angry about this stuff. And so you were sort of returning to an environment that was very prevalent in the 2000s, which was if you put your face on the Internet, you have asked to become victimized by other people. This was the psychology behind 4chan and something awful. And so we have moved back to that. And a thing that I've been cooking on for a little bit is I believe that that is actually a recession indicator. I was looking at research. Okay. I've been looking at research about the rise of the first troll armies. And so Japan is a really good one to look at. So the Neto Oyoku basically appear after an economic collapse in Japan. And I'm trying to find more data about this because I believe that like angry, sort of like faceless, anonymous trolling and sort of anger and resentment is actually an economic feature and not something that is attached to like a social media platform or a type of posting. But I'm doing more research on that because I think it's really interesting. Wait, I love that. You have to dig into that. I'm so interested in that. Because it comes around every time like there's like a lot of economic disparity and it sort of thrives on resentment. And so you get like people being like, how dare you have a good life? Yes. An editor of mine years ago had this great line that I'm going to butcher that was something like, we will look back and realize that the invention of Instagram came immediately before the invention of the guillotine of the future. Once we can see the inside of people's homes, there will be an uprising and anger because they can see what they don't have. And something I think about a lot. Yeah. It's your theory of why the billionaires have all gone insane because now they're being hated individually. They don't realize it's because of sharing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, don't worry, guys. We're not going to be able to share anything soon. We're going to get mass censorship and surveillance and AI is going to, you know. Yeah, I'm all for it. I think it's great. One thing that I'm curious your thoughts on, too, is like the summer of 2020 when it was like receipts culture. Let's dig it. Like it was a cancellation. Like everybody was getting canceled for, you know, some very legitimate reasons. Some I would say not very legitimate reasons. But it was like I feel like everybody started just digging everything up like this receipts. Maybe Me Too was like a precursor to that, but it was like more around men. But like 2020, it was more like I just think of like this era. And I think of people that I know that were briefly main character or whatever that like they were going back. They were pulling the post. They were talking to the ex-girlfriends. They were talking to I think of all even like reply all right. And that cancellation or like I don't know, like it feels you're friends with problematic people. No, but it just feels well, yes, I guess I am friends with almost like we're all problematic. It's almost like we're all problematic. I've definitely said some dumb shit. I want to outlaw air conditioning and murder people for that. But it's so easy to just pull up this entire list of receipts online in a way that, I don't know, like something since March 2020 or since really summer 2020, like it just feels like that is more normalized now. Like think of the Internet like a physical space, like so like a big room. And there's a bunch of people who've been in there since the early 90s. And you get a bunch more people who come in towards the end of the 2000s. And then the whole world shows up in 2020. And so you have a lot of people who are sort of used to the mechanics of it, understand it. And you have a bunch of people who have only heard about it or sort of seen it from a distance. And I think it's half the people who are already there going after the new people. And it's the new people who do not know what they're doing going after everybody and sort of aping the language of what they've seen before, especially with young kids. All the Zoom school kids who have nothing to do all day but, like, sort of obsess over pop stars and fight with each other. Like, the sort of Tumblr culture run rampant. All of that hits like a neutron bomb in 2020. Yes. I think that's a good way to put it. And we're going to find out if the pre-COVID era was any different. But first, a word from our sponsor. Okay. What's an air conditioning company? Oh, God. I'll never live that down. People bring it up all the time. They're like, she says she cares about disabled people. Let's not forget she wanted everyone to die. Hey, it's Grant, the one who's not Ryan. Just wanted to take a second and remind you, you can listen and watch on Spotify now. And if you have Spotify premium, you can watch and listen without any ads, ad free panic world, Spotify video. And so what's really interesting, like in the pre-COVID era is like there are obviously a ton of main characters during the Trump administration, but they're not super notable. It's almost sort of like during the first Trump administration, like every journalist had a target on their backs. But you don't get a lot of the like random person tweet something stupid. You get like I mean, there's the vagina plane incident. I remember if you remember that with U.S. Airways where they accidentally tweeted porn. Yeah it was a really good day in my newsroom That was a good day It opened up the post and just screamed And my editor at the time was like what are you screaming about And I was like ah Yeah it was a good day And there was like lots of stuff like that, you know, brands behaving badly, Trump figures saying something stupid. But it kind of takes a break. And this is what I talked about earlier, where like we had this, you know, five-year moratorium kind of on a lot of this stuff. One of the last main characters of the Internet before Trump enters office is Candace Payne, who uploads a Facebook Live video of her using a Chewbacca mask. Yes. She goes on the Ellen show two days later. I think someone wrote an argument that Ellen DeGeneres was the apex predator that pruned the ecosystem of these things. That was such a good post. I think that was a tweet. But yes, they were like she – that was always sort of the natural endpoint of celebrity. And now that she's gone, we're stuck with these people. I had a version of it that I used to use called the Harambe Cycle, which is that if a meme couldn't be monetized and thus killed, it would exist forever and become uglier and uglier over time. So like Charlie Kirk is Harambe-ing right now because you can't have Kellogg's be like, I'm Kirk-ing on it. It doesn't work. and Epstein. Like, I mean, you could. Should we launch our own serial? Should we? Is that the next product? Yeah, like there are these parts of culture now that go viral but can't be monetized or commodified, so they just sort of become uglier and weirder over time. Dan Daniel is in this period of time, 2016. They go on the Ellen show as well. But then you have two incidents across 2013 and 2014 that fundamentally changed the Internet forever, Which 2013 you have, Justine Sacco. That was 2013? 2013, yeah. Well, that's shocking. If you asked me when that happened, I would have said 2018. What? I mean, not if I think about it for more than a minute, but like emotionally, spiritually, it feels like it happened more recently. That was so long ago. I feel like it happened way earlier. To me, it feels like it happened in 2009 or 10 or something. Well, because it was so long ago. I guess, you know, you're right, because by I mean, I don't think of it as I think of it pre-Trump. It was it was because it was the different pre-Trump Internet. 2014, you also get the start of Gamergate and the attack on Zoe Quinn. So once again, these are women who are using the Internet in two vastly different ways. So Justine Sacco, for those who don't remember, is a PR executive. She's about to board a plane to go to what? I didn't want to get canceled for not having the right country in Africa, Taylor. South Africa. And she tweets going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white. She then boards a plane without Wi-Fi. And basically the entire world decides that, like, you know, she is a bad person. She has like government officials in South Africa talking about it. It's a mess. She lands and she says, words cannot express how sorry I am and how necessary it is for me to apologize to the people of South Africa who I've offended due to a needless and careless tweet. She then talks about she shouldn't joke about the AIDS crisis. She becomes enemy of the world. 2014, we have an indie game developer, Zoe Quinn, who makes a video game called Depression Quest. Her ex-boyfriend makes a blog post claiming that she was trading sexual favors for positive reviews in the game. It's all fucking garbage bullshit and it basically ruins politics around the world forever. But I do think that these two stories are useful because it kind of creates the two ways you can become a main character from that point forward. Does that sound right? Yes, yes, yes. I think it's sort of the bloop that becomes the blueprint. Justine Sack was also the first ever, what we can find, recorded firing for a post. Really? For being a main character. Well, I mean, I guess the thing is, is the Internet was so nascent before then. You know what I mean? Like there wasn't people weren't even posting very much. It was mostly like I mean, the Internet was like, yeah, it was like recent grad millennials. Were you the one that was organizing the like, do you use Twitter meetups at IHOP? No, that was Tim Herrera. OK, yeah, I went to one of those. Yeah. But yeah, but that's it was small. It was so small. It was so small. I do remember shortly after I graduated, I went to a BuzzFeed meetup and it was like fans of BuzzFeed. It was like Matt Stepera organizing it. I want to say like 2009 or 10. It was like really like early days. But so I think like I mean, Instagram only launched in 2010. There weren't that many places for sort of like public posts. And Twitter was the only platform that allowed for public discovery of posts in that way as well. Because Facebook was your friends. Facebook was still dominant. That was the platform that most people were using. That was really just your friends. It wasn't getting travel. People weren't getting outraged in the same way. Yeah, it felt like Twitter was the open water in a way. Yes. Yeah. What's really interesting is if you go back before Justine Sacco, before Gamergate, the stuff that were making people the main characters we would now probably just call memes okay the closest thing we could find to like someone like a main character was actually from your book um which was uh liz eswin oh yeah who had an instagram account basically she was posting the new york city instagram account at the time basically right but before that you know in the 2000s uh you you you had like star wars kid you had antoine dodson you had these people who be came internet figures, but like it wasn't the same thing. They were basically memes. Yeah, you're right. Like it was like internet figures that were the main character because they were all viral, like the double rainbow guy or something. And it wasn't negative in the same way. No, I mean, some of them have like Star Wars kid, I guess he was pretty mad about it. There's like weird, weird ethics around auto tuning Antoine Dodson, basically talking about like a man breaking into people's homes and raping them. And there's a whole other thread here of like in the 2000s, posting like viral clips of like particularly black people on local news was like a whole thing. And you get the start of WorldStar Hip Hop becoming kind of big in the early 2010s and that kind of goes in one direction. And then you have the separation of like the viral thing and the meme like happens around like 2009 and like 2013 basically. Like it separates probably because of places like Gawker and BuzzFeed. I mean, I think places like Gawker manufactured some early like sort of main characters in the sense of like media. Like I think of I mean, also in my book, somebody like Julia Allison, who was famous primarily from endless Gawker. I mean, Gawker just like blogged about her constantly because they just kind of hated her for wearing like a condom dress to a party. and she became this like fixation where they would just write about everything she did to the point that she did launch an influencer career off of it because people were just like i guess you're famous now they were calling her a celebrity that's funny but it was like okay this person is blogged about a lot and i think of actually early fashion girls like you know there were these like yeah people that were like sort of like street style icons that were like sort of um was that guy nick nick wooster oh yeah he's just like an early street like i feel like not necessarily main character, but like Nick was just like extremely stylish and fashion photographers were just like photographing him all the time on fashion blogs because blogs were a thing. And so like, again, is that really the same as main character? But I feel like it started to be the thing of like attention sort of like coalescing around someone. I guess it's also though in those cases, it's not so much that they were posting. It was that people were posting about them. Yeah, there is something there about that. There's something to that in a way. And I do think a lot of the internet is returning to that where it's like you are doing – like Timothy Chalamet's entire Oscar campaign was to do things that other people would post about. Clavicular's whole deal is like being clipped by other people, right? Like it is coming back into fashion. There is one blog here that actually would be – like is very useful to talk about because I hadn't really put it together until just now that it is absolutely a proto like main character factory. Hipster runoff. Yes. Yes. Yes. The sort of line from Hipster Runoff to Gawker is like so clear where like, you know, you had this like basically like a harassment campaign against What's-Her-Face from Best Coast for like several years. And Carl's or Charles or whatever from Hipster Runoff was very, very aggressive at women in particular. Like going after how young women were using MySpace and playing music and sort of doing that thing that is now I think becoming more fashionable again as well, which is like. I saw someone phrase this perfectly the other day and I forget who said it and I'm really sorry, but it was something like basically people are replacing the word bourgeoisie on the internet with women. Like everything that a woman does is inherently considered capitalistic and thus should be ridiculed. And Carl's was very early being like all of these women who are trying to make music, like putting like a Best Coast song in a car commercial or whatever should actually die. Yeah. And I'm going to write about them all day long because of it. Yes. Yes. But it's like social media wasn't there yet. But that's literally what that was. And you already have this like very like post 9-11 misogyny culture that's sort of like in its it's it's mutating and morphing. And so you get this moment between like, yeah, 2009, 2013. We're like, we're just going to like go after anyone on the Internet that we think is annoying. and it's fine because they're on the internet and they choose, they chose to put themselves out there. I mean, so many early women dealt with that. This was also amidst, I think it was 2010 when iPhone, the iPhone added the front facing camera. But you saw the moral panic about selfies and it would be like, like, look at this evil, you know, child, this 13 year old took a selfie at Auschwitz. Remember that girl? Oh yeah. There was tons of those. Yeah. And it was like this evil woman takes a selfie at this place. And it was like some teenage girl or young woman or something. And there would be like manufactured outrage. But like you said, Ryan, it was like this idea of like, well, you docky, you put your you know, you took a selfie and posted it like you, you know, you're you're sort of like ripe for the taking, which feels that way about Twitter, too. It's like you posted that you had coffee in your garden. Right. It's come back around. And it's you know, I'd have to look more closely at a timeline of these things. But I do wonder if – I don't know why this comes to mind, but I sort of wonder if like Miley Cyrus twerking sort of like broke that entire – like that thing – it sort of stops being enough. Like you can't really say like, oh, like you took a selfie with like the dog filter from Snapchat on. You're a slut because like the world had kind of moved on. And so you get different kinds of main characters. but then you get this massive cultural reset like in 2020 and we're like dealing with all of this again which is sort of breaking my brain a bit yeah i feel like i used to have to like explain these things and i mean i also just don't know if it's just not my job anymore and i thankfully don't work at like the new york times where i have to like do a write-up about the latest online you know blah blah blah it just feels pointless i also think that the internet has fractured a lot I mean, especially in the past year, people are spending time in sort of different spaces. And even on the same platforms, it's like so algorithm centric. I think of this because like I am constantly the main character on threads, Instagram threads. Like my name has been trending on threads like probably 10 times this year. Well, the four human users of threads, you know, don't have a lot to talk about. That's exactly my point, Ryan, is that there's almost no one on that social. It's like people that don't really post or engage in discourse are on that social network. And so like if a journalist comes in and like post something that they're mad at or whatever, like or, you know, like Blue Sky will have its own main character, like these niche, you know, corners of TikTok. I think that the Internet is very fractured now. We have main characters like within sort of sub communities. Like there are these like points of discourse or there are all these sort of like niche personalities that everybody knows. But like, I don't know, like it seems like less and less we're getting the like the type of posts that we saw like 2020 to 2024, maybe. The fact that we are not getting like new women that X users are going after that they found on TikTok to me is a signal that both TikTok and X are kind of losing their edge a bit in a way. Like I sort of use this as a watermark. It's like, oh, you get the Gen Z boss in a mini video in 2024. They're still talking about it a year later. They haven't found a new woman to sort of like prop up. And the question I have is like, does that mean that TikTok has lost its juice? Does that mean that X has lost its juice? Does it mean that both may be losing their juice? That's sort of where my mind goes. Well, TikTok is losing its juice. I think it's kind of over. Yeah, I agree with you. You know, it's interesting. Did you see that tweet from Twitter's head of product, Nikita Beer, saying that they were going to help, you know, they were seeking to attract new communities such as women? his his whole like you know journey of just recreating 2013 twitter from first principles is so funny to watch like it's just i mean one thing we didn't really talk about in the first section of today's episode and we're sort of landing the plane here listener i swear is like all of these different apps tried to become tiktok you know around 2022 2023 you get the rise of Instagram reels, Facebook reels, X4U page. Everything is a short form video app. And now they're all sort of tied to that. The world is clearly shifting. The culture is clearly shifting. Things are changing. And so all of them are kind of in a similar death spiral at the moment. So you're just not getting like new stuff really. And so you're not getting new main characters also because algorithmic feeds don't really surface like a goofy post from a random person as well as like a bunch of like super online weirdos might find like a person to go after like it's it's different the mechanics are different i think the mechanics are different and i think we're so aware of the cycle and to go back to like you know the crypto people that tried to exploit it and stuff like i feel like we went through the whole cycle of all this and now it's like okay i think even the nft crypto people have realized that There's no immediate benefit. They can't necessarily capture it. Exes continues to sort of change and evolve their monetization schemes. Like you said, TikTok has lost its juice. Social media has lost its juice. I mean, like there's that stat showing that time spent on social media had declined. It's declining across apps. I think also we're about to see it decline even further. We're seeing people actively becoming aware of how angry time on some of these apps makes them. Yeah. And so I think they're seeking to engage when they see these cycles of discourse, like they sort of recognize it maybe a little bit more instead of getting triggered. But it feels like we're moving towards a different Internet and that era of the Internet feels dated, you know? Yeah. And that's something that like really can't be like fixed or ignored. Like it just there's a moment where we all go like, I'm not checking in on Foursquare again. yeah and you don't ever do it again like it obviously instagram like creates a check-in feature that you can use and you're like cool i'll check it over here and then you're like no i'm actually kind of done checking it yeah and it's like we can do our tiktok it's like cool i'll go and do my tiktok over there and then one day you're like i'm just not checking any of them same with i think like here's my twitter clone it's like cool i can move my twitter followers over you know what i actually just don't miss it that much and it happens it happens every generation. It happened with the MySpace to Facebook transition. It happened with the Snapchat to Instagram transition. It's happening again. And yeah, I think you're right. But you know what? You know, I do think we will find new and probably more horrific ways to terrorize each other using technology, as always. And Taylor, I want to thank you for coming on the show. And we'll have you back once we figure out what the new version of that looks like. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? If people want to follow you and make you the main character somewhere, where can they do that? Come on over. Come out to Los Angeles. I live at just – no, I'm on YouTube, so please subscribe to my YouTube channel. And I have a podcast called Power User and a newsletter at usermag.co. So check it out. Thank you so much. Thank you again. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fjellstedt is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and national managing director and executive producer, Kevin Dreyfuss. R.C. 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