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

Remember Chewbacca Mom, Damn Daniel, BeanDad, or most recently, Chappell Roan? These are just some examples of people who have become the “main character” on the internet — for better, or mostly (maybe always) worse. Today we’re talking about the old adage that “each day on [Twitter] there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.”How has the internet warped our perception of celebrity (or “cewebrity”)? What does it mean to be swatted or doxxed now, versus a decade ago? Taylor Lorenz, someone who has been the main character on the internet several times, joins us to discuss. Our guest Taylor Lorenz is a journalist. She hosts the podcast Power User, and writes about tech and online culture for her Substack, User Mag at https://www.usermag.co/. You can also follow her YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/taylorlorenz and everywhere else @taylorlorenz. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. SponsorsMint Mobile: Shop plans at https://mintmobile.com/courier for three months of coverage at $45. Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/panic or use code PANIC at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Ryan Broderick?

  Taylor, do you ever think about Bean Dad?

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Yes. Now I do. I forgot about that. Haven't heard that name in years.

• 0:38Ryan Broderick?

  What was your sort of final take on Bean Dad when it all kicked off? Do you remember?

• 0:44Speaker 02

  I can't remember why he was canceled. It wasn't for putting the fake shrimp in his cereal, was it?

• 0:51Ryan Broderick?

  We'll get to it.

• 1:09Ryan Broderick?

  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?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Good, good. So psyched to be here.

• 1:48Ryan Broderick?

  You've been the main character of the internet a few times, I feel like.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Once or twice.

• 1:52Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think it's overwhelming at first.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  But I think it's sort of changed over time to 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?

• 2:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  But it used to be traumatizing the first few times it happened.

• 2:22Ryan Broderick?

  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 gonna 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, 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.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  What'd you do to make 4chan mad?

• 2:58Ryan Broderick?

  I wrote about a fake campaign they put together called Cutting for Bieber.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I wrote about that.

• 3:05Ryan Broderick?

  They were pretending to be teenage girls who were self harming because Justin Bieber was photographed smoking weed.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  That's pretty funny.

• 3:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, nowadays, I feel like if you become the main character of the internet, like, it probably stays more on the internet than it used to also, I would say.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  You know, it's so funny, I get calls because I'm like a very well-known woman that's dealt with harassment online. 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 gonna do a thing. Like, people don't even swat anyone anymore. You know, they're not gonna, 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,

• 4:00Speaker 02

  you know, somewhat traumatic, I guess. But then after that, they're like, okay.

• 4:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  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, that 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 and the 4chan people were coming at you, like swatting was this like one thing that they had.

• 4:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  They don't really have that anymore. So now it's just like, what are you gonna do?

• 4:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  You're gonna fly to LA and what, yell at me? No, you're not. You don't leave your house.

• 4:36Ryan Broderick?

  I remember in 2019, someone tried to like, call in a bomb threat to my apartment. I guess they were gonna like call the police and say that there was like a bomb there or something.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:47Ryan Broderick?

  But they got the wrong address and they did it to like a French restaurant down the street. And I've always felt very bad about that.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Did you tell them?

• 4:54Ryan Broderick?

  The French restaurant?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:56Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Did you like give them extra business?

• 4:57Ryan Broderick?

  No, the pandemic had started and I think, so this was in 2020. And I think I figured like no one was there because like, because of lockdown. So I was like, yeah, that's fine. Uh, like, sure.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  The thing is, people also understand the concept of prank phone calls.

• 5:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:20Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  You know, like, show me some evidence that you're serious or get out of here.

• 5:25Ryan Broderick?

  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 the today's main character?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 6:27Ryan Broderick?

  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 Rohn. Are you familiar with Ms. Chapel Rohn?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yes, I am, of course.

• 6:54Ryan Broderick?

  And so I am, of course, talking about the incident in Brazil, where on March 21st, 2026, Brazilian soccer player Jorginho Frelo makes an angry Instagram story about Chapel Rohn, saying that her security guard intimidated his stepdaughter at a concert in Sao Paulo. And from Cosmo at the time, Frelo's post reads, during breakfast, the artist walked 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 Chapel Rohn had to sort of say like,

• 7:39Ryan Broderick?

  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 Chapel Rohn is so often sort of dragged into these like multi-week scandals?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  I think we need to distinguish some nuance here. Because while anybody can theoretically become a main character, we also have coordinated harassment and smear campaigns against women.

• 8:05Ryan Broderick?

  100%.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  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 Rohn, 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 are main character drivers. And she's a lesbian woman.

• 8:42Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think that's actually the least talked about dimension to this, which is that like it is, 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 like their fandom has to come at the expense of someone they deem like a rival. So like if an Olivia Rodrigo stan sees that Chapel Rohn 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's a good person in real

• 9:44Ryan Broderick?

  life or whatever.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Wait, it's so crazy you bring that up because the 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 Rohn 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.

• 10:11Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Do you think Chapel becoming a main character today is different than like the history of the main character?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I put Chapel in the realm of the like Blake Lively, Amber Heard, Meghan Markle, like kind of like Burn the Witch type.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Campaigns. It's like celebrities are getting roped up into these like internet campaigns.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  I kind of think of it as like they have figured out how to weaponize what happens to normal people to celebrities.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 11:06Ryan Broderick?

  I think there's like two directions where it's like a random woman is now being held to the same media standards as someone like Chaperone 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.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:34Ryan Broderick?

  There's.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  It's weaponized both ways.

• 11:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's just 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 like 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 like almost always women that find themselves at the center of this is like overwhelmingly true. For every one bean dad, there are dozens and dozens of Chaperones. So a couple of years before, you know, our most recent Chaperone 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

• 12:20Ryan Broderick?

  to spit on that thing. Some people love it. Some people think it's like ironically great. This is when Max Reed coins the term Zinternet to sort of describe the like 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. She, I mean, did you ever eat lunchly and watch Tactua?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  I did watch a live taping of Haka Tua.

• 12:49Ryan Broderick?

  How was it? How did you like it?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  You know, I it's it's it's made for a certain community, I think. Maybe not. I don't know who.

• 13:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, I would say that's right. There's also, I think, by the time we get to like 2024, the post pandemic era, we get people who want to become the main character, want realize that there's like 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.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Yes, of course.

• 13:40Ryan Broderick?

  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 it pissed them off, like I can go, I can become famous?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  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, OnlyFans, I think of somebody like Natalie Reynolds.

• 14:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  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 Haka Tua, like that's a perfect example. 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.

• 14:42Ryan Broderick?

  One of the Pauls, I think it was Jake Paul, who was like, I'm gonna work with Haka Tua 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 like different ways with, you know, the crypto coin and the podcast and the brand deals and all that.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 15:43Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:54Ryan Broderick?

  And it has, and it comes with it like an incredible amount of baggage. Same year, 2024, Dr. Ali Luchs completes her PhD on the politics of smell. You remember this? Can you, can you sort of describe what happened here?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  She, I guess, you know, she was getting a PhD 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 PhDs in the most like niche, random.

• 16:22Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Smelling like, you know, studying lizard yawns or something. I don't know. That's how scientific discoveries happen.

• 16:29Ryan Broderick?

  I agree. All PhDs are silly. I agree with you.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  But 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 figure because of that.

• 16:41Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:56Ryan Broderick?

  They, they can be a very big figure, like, you know, a chaperone or a haq tu, 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 Jesserit 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. 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. 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,

• 17:38Ryan Broderick?

  we should all like exist in society and everyone being like, hi, I will fucking murder you if you tell me that I should exist in society.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  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? Dude, I don't know. You know what I mean? Like it is.

• 17:58Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you're cool with the tipping screens at Starbucks? Wow.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  No, I know. I know. It's all crazy. It's all crazy. Um, 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, I unfortunately was on the wrong side of these things where I would be like, oh, so you think it's okay 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.

• 18:25Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, so you're assuming that we all have perfect family lives and we don't mind if they're murdered?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  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's gotten like exacerbated by Twitter's algorithm specifically since Elon's takeover.

• 18:50Ryan Broderick?

  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 Rohn or Hauk Tua, like all the way up and down this, the spectrum here, there has to be kind of like a nugget of, I don't really know how to articulate this, but sort of a like a shared shame at like the breakdown of modern society. And the, 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.

• 19:24Ryan Broderick?

  That motherfucker back there is not real. And is videotaped on the plane. And like, 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. Like, 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-

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Oh, you don't think we should help dogs, Ryan?

• 19:47Ryan Broderick?

  No, I think, I, I, I, I think we, like, we don't need them. Uh, I think, I think, I, oh, I ha- I just saw like, a whole fucking meltdown about dogs at restaurants. Like, so yes, I mean, there's no, there's no-

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Okay, I know. That is a problem, but-

• 20:01Ryan Broderick?

  What, dogs at restaurants?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  I, yeah, well, 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.

• 20:15Ryan Broderick?

  Have you watched a dog pee on the floor inside a restaurant in LA before?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I saw a dog pee inside La Mill in Silver Lake, and, yeah, which they were not supposed to be in there.

• 20:23Ryan Broderick?

  I don't really think, I don't really think LA counts as like, an actual society or city. Like, I don't think-

• 20:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, 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. Uh, which I actually think makes the story more interesting. So obviously, she gave this quote to the Barstool Sports Podcast.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 21:27Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 21:54Ryan Broderick?

  So she was having a meltdown, but she was like, she wasn't hallucinating.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Got it. Okay.

• 22:00Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 22:29Ryan Broderick?

  And I think post-COVID, that has, there's more things that we're all fighting about, because everything's worse.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  But I think that's actually, I think that since COVID started, that I think COVID exacerbated that.

• 22:41Ryan Broderick?

  100%.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  If you think back, like, and, and I do feel the need as an immunocompromised person to constantly remind people, we are still very much dealing with COVID.

• 22:50Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, no. It ended in 2021. It was like, oh, god.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  I know. It just magically disappeared.

• 22:54Ryan Broderick?

  It's done.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  No, but, I mean, I, I think like, I mean, I, I think of this a lot now, because I, 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, 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, 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. 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,

• 23:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:50Ryan Broderick?

  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

• 24:23Speaker 02

  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?

• 24:28Ryan Broderick?

  We're no, we're, I'm doing, I'm doing a transition. We're going to be talking about the immediate main characters of the post COVID era.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. Go to a break, go to a break. Okay.

• 24:35Ryan Broderick?

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• 25:18Ryan Broderick?

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• 25:58Ryan Broderick?

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• 26:22Speaker 03

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• 27:06Speaker 03

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• 27:47Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  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, you know, was elected or whatever.

• 28:36Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:58Ryan Broderick?

  Much like the name of this show. Exactly.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:29Ryan Broderick?

  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, the little plant mommy discourse. Do you remember this?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:59Ryan Broderick?

  So for the, 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 gonna murder her, and that she's a classist, and that she should, you know, 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

• 30:39Ryan Broderick?

  milk latte, but whatever, potato, potato. Am I right?" And it's just a lot of people being like, "How dare you."

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Here's the thing that was interesting to me about that moment. That so quickly, so, like, there were a few people that initially said exactly like the stuff that you're saying, right? Like, "How dare you? 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.

• 31:28Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, 100%.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  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 have 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 shitcoin, you know? So it's like, everything was so bad.

• 31:58Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so... Yeah, 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 charged 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.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Which is interesting to me because it's like, I think there's this awareness of this phenomenon, and in its, and an attempt to exploit this phenomenon for profit, which is really just meme coins.

• 32:37Ryan Broderick?

  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 Versel, 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 of these rooms with all of 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,

• 33:20Ryan Broderick?

  a meme, a main character, and immediately making shitcoins out of it to make it look like that person had created a shitcoin, 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 Hoc2o 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 pitch that I think the Jake Pauls of the world are making to them.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, basically, like, make your shitcoin now because you're, you've got the attention.

• 33:56Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Or launch your OnlyFans now, because you've got the attention, I guess, which...

• 34:02Ryan Broderick?

  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. Anna Mardal argues that it's ableist for people to read books.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Was this the person that was working for Lockheed Martin?

• 34:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 34:24Ryan Broderick?

  Awesome. Yeah, it's awesome.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 34:27Ryan Broderick?

  We find that out weirdly.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Couldn't have made this in a lab.

• 34:31Ryan Broderick?

  Well, so here's what's really interesting. Mardal is doxed by Kiwi Farms. And that's how we find out that they work.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  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. Or they, sorry.

• 34:49Ryan Broderick?

  The whole thing starts with the discourse around whether or not it's ableist to say that writers should read books.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Or indeed at all. Some of those people are writers. What?

• 35:10Ryan Broderick?

  I agree. Yeah. No, I agree with that. Anyway, so Kiwi.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  I mean, you hate reading.

• 35:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I can't read.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:26Ryan Broderick?

  It's screenshot and passed around as 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, no.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Kiwi Farms. We hate Kiwi Farms.

• 35:54Ryan Broderick?

  No one should. Yeah, but then they.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  But guys, we're talking about a weapons manufacturer here.

• 36:00Ryan Broderick?

  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."

• 36:21Ryan Broderick?

  They are saying that they are a nepo baby hire at Lockheed Martin.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  I can't get over. This, I can't get over this.

• 36:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, there's a couple of really great comments.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  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?

• 36:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's awesome. It's yeah. So this is one comment on the scandal at the time. Reads, as a Twitter personality who organizes mobs to attack small accounts. Oh, right. That was another dimension of this is that Anna Martal 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'm no stranger to bombing fenceless. That's why this summer I'm partnering with Lockheed Martin. 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

• 37:25Ryan Broderick?

  mob and then things spiral out of control. And it is very based on sort of like early COVID era, like what you should be doing, shouldn't be doing stuff.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:46Ryan Broderick?

  I remember.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  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 this 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

• 38:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, the ultimate expression of it is the return of the R word, which like I 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.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:01Ryan Broderick?

  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, call them main characters are 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.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:32Ryan Broderick?

  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 young woman is doing, we're going to burn the world down. The, um, the Gen Z boss in a mini, you know, that whole thing.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Gen Z boss in a mini, Gen Z boss in a mini, itty bitty titties in a bomb, itty bitty titties in a bomb, five foot three in an attitude, five foot three in an attitude, sacred product in the trench.

• 40:18Ryan Broderick?

  It is always now just a young woman on TikTok or somewhere else is doing something and we're going to kill her because we, we hate looking at it.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  The Gen Z boss in 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.

• 40:34Ryan Broderick?

  It was a, is an Australian skincare company called TBH. And, uh, yeah, if you can believe it, that only happened, uh, in 2024.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  That's crazy that we've lived like 20 lives since then.

• 40:46Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  I mean, that's why we need to invade Australia.

• 40:59Ryan Broderick?

  We need, no, no.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Before, we need to put them ahead of Canada and just invade.

• 41:02Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  I see.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Call up Anna Mar doll. We need some bombs.

• 41:13Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And so, yeah, like in this, in this early 2020s era, it's, it's different. It's like, it's much more about kind of like mob rule in a way. And so that this leads us to, as you said at the top, the shrimp tails in the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. So, um, the Cinnamon Toast Crunch, uh, fiasco was, was started by comedian Jensen Karp, um, who wrote, why are there shrimp tails in my cereal? This is not a bit. There's a response from Cinnamon Toast Crunch, uh, 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.

• 41:56Ryan Broderick?

  We assure you that there's no possibility of cross contamination with shrimp. And then we get a really dark turn.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  I don't want to look into that.

• 42:06Ryan Broderick?

  Do you remember what happens next in this story, Taylor?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:11Ryan Broderick?

  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 Karp 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.

• 42:36Ryan Broderick?

  And so, yeah, basically everyone kind of waited for this viral moment to be like,

• 42:40Speaker 03

  fuck this guy.

• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  This guy's a really bad guy. Yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Okay. 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?

• 42:49Ryan Broderick?

  2021. This incident is actually when I timestamped 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, I think I think covid had like lockdown had to happen because you had to get enough people online to go like, oh, okay. So the internet's like the thing now.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:14Ryan Broderick?

  And then you have like this viral post in the spring of 2021 and everyone's like, yeah, let's me too this guy. Like, and not, 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.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:27Ryan Broderick?

  Complaining about cereal.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  I kind of feel like he put those shrimp tails in that cereal.

• 43:32Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah, probably. I mean, I was, I'm looking at it right now. Like, I could see that being cinnamon, though. There's one, there's one that looks like a shrimp tail, but the other one looks like cinnamon. I don't know.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  I could, yeah.

• 43:44Ryan Broderick?

  But I could see it, like.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  This is my one harmless conspiracy.

• 43:46Ryan Broderick?

  That, that, that he put the shrimp tails in there?

• 43:49Speaker 03

  But, yeah, yeah. He shot first. The shrimp tails were put there first.

• 43:52Ryan Broderick?

  That's true. And then we're gonna, we're gonna 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 Capitol stormed.

• 44:12Ryan Broderick?

  And, yeah, what's crazy is like this sort of ruined his entire life and career.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Really?

• 44:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he had a, he had a podcast. He was co-hosting with Ken Jennings. He was, he had, he did the, 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 like notorious asshole also.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Then, here you go.

• 44:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Look at this long thread, Jesus.

• 44:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's so long. Yeah. And he was, yeah, like, look, look at that. That's ridiculous.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  It's a 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.

• 45:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, he's doing that like performative lib thing of like, I'm gonna make this like really boring story into a multi-post thread that like sucks and I suck. And he, 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, 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 boo hoo technicality. Like, he was clearly

• 45:44Ryan Broderick?

  just like, an idiot, who's always been awful.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:49Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Again, this is a guy that randomly went viral, like, not to hold him to, you know.

• 45:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:05Ryan Broderick?

  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. Eternal September would be the term for this sort of thing. And I, 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

• 46:48Ryan Broderick?

  so intense. Like, it was, it was a really, and then, you know, obviously, it's ethered from the culture immediately after by something more important.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Bean Dad and Shrimp Guy were trying to go viral. Couch Guy and Wes 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 a 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.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  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 happen, 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

• 48:13Speaker 02

  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 it, the point is more, I feel like when we talk about main character, we're, 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,

• 48:56Speaker 02

  you know, whatever. But like, it's more about like the evolution of like, how do we treat this person?

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in terms of the gender thing, like,

• 49:06Ryan Broderick?

  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 stans as well, who get angry about this stuff.

• 49:50Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:16Ryan Broderick?

  I've been looking at research about the rise of like the first troll armies. And so Japan is like a really good one to look at. So the Neto- 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, like angry, sort of like faceless, anonymous trolling and sort of anger and resentment is actually an economic like 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.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Wait, I love that. You have to dig into that. I'm so interested in that.

• 50:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, 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."

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:11Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, don't worry, guys. We're not going to be able to share anything soon. We're going to get a mass censorship and surveillance and AI is gonna, you know.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  I'm, yeah, I'm all for it.

• 51:53Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's great.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  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 up, like, it was like 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 chartered 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

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Reply All, right? And that cancellation, or like, I don't know, like, it feels.

• 52:43Ryan Broderick?

  So you're friends with problematic people?

• 52:46Speaker 02

  No, but it just feels, well, yes, I guess I am friends with problematic.

• 52:50Ryan Broderick?

  It's almost like we're all problematic, Taylor.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  It's almost like we're all problematic. I'm definitely, you know, said some dumb shit. I wanted to outlaw air conditioning and murder people for that, you know? But it's so easy to just like pull up this entire list of like receipts online in a way that like, I don't know, like something since, since March 2020, or since really summer 2020, like, it just feels like that is more normalized now.

• 53:13Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 53:30Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that's a good way to put it.

• 54:12Ryan Broderick?

  And we're going to find out if the pre-COVID era was any different. But first, a word from our sponsors.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 54:17Ryan Broderick?

  What's an air conditioning company?

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 55:22Ryan Broderick?

  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 turker on their backs. But you don't get a lot of the like, random person tweets something stupid. You get like, I mean, there's the vagina plane incident, if you remember that, with US Airways, where they accidentally tweeted porn.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:52Ryan Broderick?

  That was a really good day in my newsroom.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  That was a good day.

• 55:56Ryan Broderick?

  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, 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.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:28Ryan Broderick?

  She goes on the Ellen Show two days later. I think I, someone, someone wrote an argument that like, Ellen DeGeneres was the apex predator that like, pruned the ecosystem of these things.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  That was such a good post. I think that was a tweet. But yes, they were like, she, you know, that was always sort of the natural endpoint of celebrity. And now that she's gone, we're stuck with these people.

• 56:50Ryan Broderick?

  I used to, 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, you know, Kellogg's be like, I'm Kirk-ing on it, you know, like, it doesn't work. And Epstein, like, the, I mean, you could.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Should we launch our own cereal? Should we?

• 57:17Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, like, yeah, like, 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, is in this period of time, 2016. They go on the Ellen Show as well. But then you have, you have two incidents across 2013 and 2014 that fundamentally changed the internet forever, which 2013, you have Justine Sacco.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  That was 2013?

• 57:45Ryan Broderick?

  2013, yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Well, that's shocking. If you asked me when that happened, I would have said 2018.

• 57:52Ryan Broderick?

  What?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  I mean, not, not what 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.

• 58:02Ryan Broderick?

  I feel like it happened way earlier. Like, to me, it feels like it happened 2009 or 10 or something.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  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 pre-Trump, because it was a different pre-Trump internet.

• 58:16Ryan Broderick?

  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, uh, 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

• 59:01Ryan Broderick?

  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 have 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?

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes. I think it's sort of the blueprint, that becomes the blueprint.

• 59:51Ryan Broderick?

  Justine Sacco is also the first ever, what we can find, recorded firing for a post.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Really?

• 59:55Ryan Broderick?

  For being a main character.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  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 some like recent grad millennials.

• 1:00:12Ryan Broderick?

  Were you the one that was organizing the like, do you use Twitter meetups at IHOP?

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  No, that was Tim Herrera.

• 1:00:18Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, yeah, I went to one of those, yeah.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  But 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 Stupera organizing it in like, 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 like public discovery of posts in that way as well. Cause 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 traveled. People weren't getting outraged in the same way.

• 1:01:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it felt like Twitter was the open water in a way.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:08Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:01:18Ryan Broderick?

  The closest thing we could find to like someone like a main character was actually from your book, which was Liz Eswin.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:29Ryan Broderick?

  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, you, you, you had like Star Wars Kid, you had Antoine Dodson. You had these people who became internet figures, but like it wasn't the same thing.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01:59Ryan Broderick?

  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, but like, and, 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 World Star Hip Hop becoming kind of big in the early 2010s and that kind of goes in one direction. And then you have, you have the separation of like the viral thing and the meme like happens around like 20, 2009 and like 2013, basically, like it separates, probably because of places like Gawker and BuzzFeed.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03:18Ryan Broderick?

  That's funny.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  But it was like, okay, this person has blogged about a lot. And I think of actually early fashion girls, like, you know, there were these like people that were like, sort of like street style icons that were like, sort of, was that guy Nick, Nick Wooster?

• 1:03:32Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  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, it's not 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.

• 1:03:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, there is something there about, like, 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. Clivicular'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 Run Off.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:32Ryan Broderick?

  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 Carls 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 there and sort of doing that thing that is now, I think, becoming more fashionable again as well, which is like, I saw someone phrases 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.

• 1:05:11Ryan Broderick?

  Like, everything that a woman does is inherently considered capitalistic and thus should be ridiculed. And Carls 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. And I'm gonna write about them all day long because of it.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, but it's like, social media wasn't there yet, but that's literally what that was.

• 1:05:38Ryan Broderick?

  And you already have this like very like, post 9/11 misogyny culture that's sort of like, in its, it's mutating and morphing and so you get this moment between like, yeah, 2009, 2013, where 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.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:06:18Ryan Broderick?

  Oh yeah, there is tons of those, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  And and there would be like manufactured outrage. But like you said, Ryan, it was like this idea of like, well, you docu, 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.

• 1:06:45Ryan Broderick?

  Right. It's 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, 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 that 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.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Ryan Broderick?

  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 shit again, which is sort of breaking my brain a bit.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  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 is fractured a lot. I mean, especially in the past, like, 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.

• 1:07:57Ryan Broderick?

  Well, the the four human users of threads, you know, have a lot to talk about.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  Well, 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, posts something that they're mad at, or put 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 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.

• 1:08:41Ryan Broderick?

  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 the their edge a bit in a way like I sort of use this as a as a watermark. It's like, oh, you get the Gen Z boss in a mini, you know, video in 2024, they're still talking about it.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:11Ryan Broderick?

  A year later, they haven't found a new woman to sort of like prop up. And does 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 the where my mind goes.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Well, TikTok is losing its juice.

• 1:09:27Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's kind of over.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:39Ryan Broderick?

  Such as women, dude. I 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, X for you page. Everything is a short form video app. And now they're all sort of tied to that. The 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.

• 1:10:23Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  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, OK, I think even the NFT crypto people have realized that there's no immediate benefit. They can't necessarily capture it. X's 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 is 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.

• 1:11:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:11:39Ryan Broderick?

  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."

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Ryan Broderick?

  And you don't ever do it again. Like, obviously Instagram, like, creates a check-in feature that you can use, and you're like, "Cool, I'll check in over here," and then you're like, "No, I'm actually kind of done checking in."

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Ryan Broderick?

  And it's like, "We can do our TikTok," and 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.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

• 1:12:44Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? If people, if people want to follow you and make you the main character somewhere, where can they do that?

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Come on over. Come out to Los Angeles. I live at, just, actually, 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.

• 1:13:10Ryan Broderick?

  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 Fialsted is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing, YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hallows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the

• 1:13:52Ryan Broderick?

  one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.