Who built the internet? And who will save it?

Today on the flagship podcast of social media monetization strategies: 04:05 -The Verge''s David Pierce and Nilay Patel chat with Taylor Lorenz about her new book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet 55:26 - Adi Robertson joins the show to explains why publishers, and the music industry, would have a bone to pick with the Internet Archive. 1:23:13 -Vjeran Pavic helps out with this week's Vergecast Hotline question. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of social media monetization strategies. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am standing in my kitchen making cold brew coffee. So really, over the course of the last like decade, I've become kind of a coffee snob. I don't recommend this lifestyle, first of all. If you're the kind of person who can just like buy the big tin of coffee at the grocery store and then put that in a Mr. Coffee Maker and press the button and drink what comes out and be happy with it, that is the correct way to live your life. It's cheaper, it's easier, it's faster, don't ever change. I, on the other hand, have made a lot of mistakes. And so now I'm the guy who has a scale and a grinder that I can put to 50 different

• 0:43David Pierce?

  levels and I have a Chemex that I spend hours carefully dialing in the ratios and it's all just kind of ridiculous. But this is the life I've chosen somehow. This summer's project has been cold brew. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the best iced coffee. I drink iced coffee probably like 10 months out of the year. And you can make iced coffee a million different ways, but it turns out, after lots of experimentation, that the one I like the most is basically you just grind up some coffee, put it in a giant mason jar, like this one I have, and then pour water on it, stir it all up, stick it in the fridge for like 24 hours, and then it's delicious. It's so simple. This is the easiest way I have found to make coffee in years and it makes me very happy. So I'm sure at some point in the very near future, I'll be on, you know, James Hoffman's

• 1:28David Pierce?

  YouTube and I'll find some crazy new way to make coffee and it will throw me off again forever. But for now, I'm actually back to making easy coffee. It feels pretty good. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We are kind of accidentally going to spend the whole episode talking about the past and future of the internet. We're going to talk to Taylor Lorenz, who's a reporter of The Washington Post. She's been covering social platforms and the creator world for a really long time. And she wrote this book called Extremely Online that is kind of a history of the social internet and has some really interesting stuff in it. We're going to get into what she's seen and where this is all headed. Super fun conversation. Then we're going to talk to Addie Robertson about the Internet Archive, because the Internet Archive is this really important

• 2:10David Pierce?

  ...thing in the world. It's where so much of the internet gets to keep existing, even after websites change or go away or whatever. And a lot of that is in peril right now. The Internet Archive is being sued. It's changing a lot because of the norms of the internet are changing a lot. It's just all very complicated. So we're going to get into all of that and what it means for the future of the internet. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I have to just quickly make sure I got the ratios right here. I think it's like, you know, a third of the grounds and then a bunch of water and then it goes, I don't know. I haven't really been paying attention. We'll see how this turns out. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 3:52David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right. Coffee's in the fridge. I even made overnight oats for tomorrow. Future me is going to be so psyched. Let's get to it. Oh, actually, sorry. One thing before we do. We're going to do an episode in the next couple of weeks that is all meta questions about The Verge and The Vergecast. So if there's anything you've ever wondered about what gear we use, how we work, the future of The Verge, why we're all so dumb on the podcast sometimes, or anything else on your mind, tell us. Email [email protected] or call the hotline at 866 verg 11 and we'll try to answer your question on the episode. I think it's going to be fun. I've been wanting to do this for a while, so I'm psyched for getting to it. All right, now let's get to the show. The first thing we're going to talk about today is creators, because I just finished this book called Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz, and I found it totally fascinating.

• 4:38David Pierce?

  Taylor has been covering social networks and the creator economy for years at places like The New York Times and The Washington Post. And with this book, she essentially tells the story of what it means to be an internet personality from beginning to end, from bloggers to TikTok stars. It's a huge, sweeping thing, and it's a really interesting book. And even having followed some of these stories for, you know, years, it was fascinating to actually see it kind of all in a row and to see how much these platforms led to one another and how quickly everything changes. The book is out in October, by the way, but you can preorder it now. It's a really good read. The book left me with lots of questions and feelings about the past and future of social. So I grabbed Neelai Patel and we called up Taylor to talk it all through.

• 5:23David Pierce?

  Taylor Lorenz, welcome to the Vergecast.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 5:26David Pierce?

  Neelai Patel, also here. Hi, Neelai. I'm just a mere shadow to Taylor for this episode. Yeah, no, this feels right. That was, I gave you the excitement level that felt right to me in the moment, and I stand by it. Here's this guy.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  Okay, so I, there's like a lot to talk about here. I had an unusually hard time prepping for this, because normally, like, we talk to an author about a book, and there's like bits and pieces that are really interesting to us, and then lots of stuff that it's like not quite the remit of like The Verge and The Vergecast. You just like wrote a book about The Verge, which is great.

• 5:57David Pierce?

  But for some reason, you wrote this entire book, and we're going to talk about a lot of it. But the thing I want to start with is MySpace. I've become obsessed with MySpace, thanks to this book.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 6:05David Pierce?

  I have this theory, and I want to know what you think, and then we can talk about other things, but I have to start here. Which is, I feel like there's a parallel universe not that far away from this universe, where MySpace just like won. Like, your book is like a compendium of stupid decisions that tech companies made, and MySpace was right about everything, like 20 years ago, and just like beefed it. Am I crazy?

• 6:27Speaker 03

  No, you're so right. It's so crazy because I was going back through all the old MySpace like marketing decks and stuff that I was, I talked to a lot of people that, you know, were affiliated with the company, that marketed the company, worked with the company. And the the language that they use is literally identical to TikTok. It's crazy. Like, it's just so funny to like, read this like, philosophy and sort of like, the, the way that they sort of talked about their users to the way that TikTok does and, and sort of is also largely responsible for TikTok's growth. I just think MySpace was so underappreciated and it's, it's sort of laughed at, I think, by a lot of Silicon Valley people. It's like, oh, haha, remember MySpace? Because it was janky. The people that started it were, you know, kooky and it just had this reputation. But I want to live in a world where MySpace succeeded and

• 7:11Speaker 03

  see what happened because it was fascinating.

• 7:14David Pierce?

  I kind of agree. Because yeah, they were like, they were like, okay, we, we believe in creators, like, huge win that everybody 20 years later finally figured out. They, they knew music was important. They thought like customization and personalization was cool. Authenticity was cool. It's just like all this stuff that it took everybody else forever to figure out, that just a bunch of weirdos at MySpace just had from the very beginning. Was it just News Corp that killed them?

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  Wait, when you bring in News Corp, I want to point out that MySpace did succeed in that they sold themselves to Rupert Murdoch for $580 million in 2005.

• 7:46David Pierce?

  And now Tom is just like a lifestyle photographer on Instagram.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the perfect tech guy. Like, log off, be rich, no one wants to hear from you.

• 7:56David Pierce?

  100%.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think also, and I talk about this in my book, this sort of like, battle between this sort of like, philosophy of what social media was for in the late aughts and sort of this, I think that MySpace was too early, like culturally, because you have to remember back then, it was still sort of so stigmatized to like, meet people online. Like, people were doing it at somewhat of a scale, but Facebook really like normalized. And also, I mean, I talk about this in the book too, but I think Facebook News Feed is what really ushered in like, so much of influencer culture just by like, teaching us as users to post for a public audience. And I think that sort of behavior hadn't been established prior to that. And so like, people were on MySpace, certain people, right? Like creative people and music artists and things like that and, and average teenagers.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  But I think, you know, Facebook was able to sort of like, crack that code of like, normalizing, I guess, posting on the internet for people.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, so that that's the thing that really jumped out at me in this book. It every chapter is like a new company or platform comes in. And the one just before it has trained everyone on what to do. And then the new platform builds on that. And it's almost like the people on MySpace couldn't be trained to use MySpace. The way that Facebook was designed to be used. And then now the people on Tik Tok grew up in a wildly different reference frame. And they're doing all the stuff that MySpace thought people would do. It just took 35 platforms in between to get to that point. Like, there's just a stacking of reference frames. Where what you need is teenagers who grew up like this. To actually do the things that everyone thought would happen in 2005.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I think you need that those sort of fresh generations of users. To, like you said, build on it and iterate it and, you know, progress is slow and it's just so rare that. Any of these platforms can force new behaviors. Like, people can use these platforms in really unexpected and creative ways. But it's like you need those like fresh crop of people to like log on. And then they sort of log on with all of the knowledge that came before them.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, so do they? I think this is like my key question. And you have lived every facet of this specific experience. I worry that people log on new platforms now, kids log on. And they don't know that a bunch of bloggers had horrible experiences turning the ads on their blogs in the mid 2000s. And they don't know that there's an entire industry that creates like agents and marketing people and publicity people for meme generators. And all this stuff happened. And there's an entire infrastructure of this fame and all these experiences. They just experience it as though it's always been there. And they haven't necessarily actually learned anything.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  No, I totally agree. I wasn't saying learning isn't knowing the history. I wrote this book to like, try and teach, teach them. I just mean like learned user behavior, like, you know, mobile editing, like mobile video editing. It's like it, so many of these sort of like editing suites of editing tools seem very second nature, I think, actually, to kids that use them. And that's, that's from sort of like generations of social apps and sort of being exposed to an increasingly wider set of creative tools, you know, that like, I, I just mean like in that sense, like they have this sort of like inherent knowledge of, as we all do, kind of if you spend enough time online, it's like first you use Vine where you just was very simple editing, then you had Musically, now you have all these new face filters. And so like, but yeah, no, I mean, I

• 11:21Speaker 03

  wrote an internet history book, basically, because I feel like everyone ignores so much of the history, because we consume all these corporate narratives. And I wanted to kind of like zoom out and be like, remember?

• 11:33David Pierce?

  And I think one of the things that jumped out to me was like, and I wonder if you knew this going in, and this is like why you wrote the book like this, it was so much more linear than I realized. Like, that thing you just described, where it's like, everybody learned one skill and took it to a new platform and learned a new skill and then took that to a new platform where they learned a new skill and then took that to a new platform. It's just like that, that building you're describing happened, like, in retrospect, it looks like it was like super thoughtful and intentional. Living through it, it sure did not feel like that. It felt like pure chaos all the time. And I guess part of that is like, for every one of these companies that won, there are a million that lost. But like, did you have a sense coming in that it was going to kind of write itself through like that, that it's like, it really did, we stack all the way from like blogs to TikTok in a surprisingly

• 12:18David Pierce?

  straight line?

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Thank you for saying that, David, because the original draft of the book was not a straight line. It was very chaotic and I was twice as long. And I think I was trying to put too much of that. There, there is still a little bit of that when I talk about that live streaming boom and, and sort of like all this, this like rush of video apps. But the original draft, I had way, way more of the kind of like, oh, remember Foursquare also and that? And like,

• 12:43David Pierce?

  Did you have a chapter about color? You're like, let's talk about color.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  I did have color in the original. I had like all these, it might, maybe it's not in there anymore, but that was, oh my God, what a moment. But um, I tried to kind of like basically cut out all the fluff and stick to the thing because you're right, it is linear. And I think actually this is like in retrospect, you look back and you're like, oh, of course that's how it went. But it feels chaotic in the moment and it's unclear in the moment too, like who's going to succeed sometimes. And so I wanted to kind of make this like, sort of tell people like, hey, look, this is how it happened. And it's actually, you know, hopefully a coherent timeline.

• 13:16David Pierce?

  Well, and the flip side of that was that it seems like in retrospect, every one of these platform shifts came from one of these companies just being like monumentally stupid about something. Like YouTube not having a mobile app, like a good way to shoot video on mobile is just so

• 13:35Speaker 03

  I know.

• 13:35David Pierce?

  stupid in retrospect. Like what an incredibly obvious thing to do, right? And Twitter just like buying and then just loathing everyone on Vine professionally for years was like, it's just, it's just insane how you, you like, you look back and it's like any one of these platforms could have been like the big giant winner, which I think is like, part of me feels like Mark Zuckerberg is like too powerful for that to actually be the case. And that he would have just like systematically destroyed anyone. But it didn't seem like any of these platforms missed by all that much, which really surprised me in, in going back through it.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. The sort of hubris of the Silicon Valley CEOs is, is always just laughable. And I think a lot of them are well intentioned too. It's just like they can't see it or they have a, they, a lot of people, and I understand this from talking to like product people, even writing this book. It's like you have this notion of how this product will be used and then you see it being used in other ways. And you're like, no, I don't, I don't want it to be for that. I want it to be for this thing that I built it for. And it's like, but users don't care. And actually you are missing like this huge opportunity. It's like you want to shake them over and over again. At least that's how I felt when I was writing it. But then of course you read the narratives about them and it's like they flipped the story immediately. And it's like, I always knew that this was going to take off.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  It's like, no, you had to be like pulled, put kicking and screaming into it.

• 14:54David Pierce?

  Well, there's a piece there that's like really critical, which is it's not just users, it's in particular women and teen women who often use these products in surprising ways and like the wrong way that becomes the dominant way. And then everyone pretends they always knew that was going to happen. This is a theme that is in your, like every chapter of this book is basically that story.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. I know because this is like, I mean, I write it in all my regular stories too, but I think it's just like, again, you see the dismissiveness. I remember getting really upset when I was at the New York Times that all these people were kept sort of like derogatorily calling me a TikTok reporter. I don't know if you remember, but like in every Fox News headline, and my editor was like, no, obviously lean into that because we both know that TikTok is like one about to be the most powerful platform, right? This is back 2019. And these people are gonna look so stupid. They're gonna look just as stupid as they were when they were saying that YouTube is for cat videos and, you know, these silly women that wanna monetize and shop their Instagram posts. Oh, my God, silly women wanna like buy things that other women post on Instagram.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Like, I wish I could have put more from reward style in Amber Ven's box because the sort of resistance, and actually Sarah Fryer talks about this a lot in her Instagram book, which is great, but like, the sort of like resistance to this industry because it was, I mean, the creator industry was built by women, largely young women and women that are shot out of the labor market. It was not invented by Mr. Beast, as many in Silicon Valley like to sort of act. No shade to Mr. Beast. But, um, yeah, and it was really dismissed. Also, because the industries that embraced the creator economy, whatever you wanna call it, the fastest were fashion and beauty. And those are also just not taken seriously.

• 16:33David Pierce?

  And again, that's, that's one of those things that anyone paying attention to the history, like you saying people don't know the history, which is why you wrote this book, is like unlocking this whole thing in my brain. Like, nobody knows the history. And everybody who invents this tries to invent it from scratch. And now we have Elon Musk like trying to redo it all again with Twitter and X and making every mistake that everybody has already made a dozen times over on different platforms. And it just does feel like if anyone was like sitting around actually paying attention would be like, okay, we need to embrace beauty and fashion, and we need to, we need to lean into shopping and we need to lean into creators. And it's like, that was obvious, it seems like, a decade ago?

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, David, if there's one place that young women interested in fashion and beauty are gonna go, it's X. We can agree on that. They're, young women are drawn to Elon Musk, like, no, nothing, like moths to a flame.

• 17:21David Pierce?

  That's what I've heard, yeah.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, let me ask the flip side of that question. I sometimes think that maybe fashion, beauty is all shoved under a rug because it is some of the most commercialized media that exists. Like, even at the top levels of the industry, like, Conde Nast, Vogue, anyone, like, that is a commercialized space in our industry, in the media industry. And that's fine, like, anyone tours, anyone tour. But like,

• 17:44David Pierce?

  It is deeply commercial in a way that, you know, hard news, what you're reporting, Taylor, at the various newspapers you worked at is not commercialized, right? And if you allow it, Instagram to become a series of shopping malls, fronted by young women who are working essentially for free for Instagram.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:00David Pierce?

  That's in their benefit, right? So it behooves them to say this isn't so serious, even though it might be the biggest part of their business. And that cycle just seems to keep playing out.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And I, and I think it's, I mean, I, I'm not like defending sort of like the exploitation of this whole industry, which is a whole other conversation. Just sort of like this sort of app-enabled work that now we have this entire half a trillion dollar industry of millions of content creators that have no benefits or stability. It's a nightmare, but, um, but yeah, no, I mean, I totally agree. And I think also like with the models for fashion and beauty creators and the way that they build their businesses, because it's such a commercialized industry, doesn't that you can't replicate that across every sort of sector. But at the same time, a lot, a lot of things that early beauty bloggers were doing, it got cut out of this book, but I initially had a lot about Ingrid Nielsen and her deal with CoverGirl, just the, the sort of how quickly these beauty creators understood that

• 18:52Speaker 03

  actually the real money is in products and building products. And basically like flipping the notion of, I mean, there was this idea in business of like, you know, you build the product and then you market it. And these creators being like, no, you build the audience and then you just develop sort of products to market to the audience. But it's that audience first sort of model of product development, I guess.

• 19:10David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and the other, the other trend alongside of that, I think, is like everybody getting comfortable talking about how money works on the internet. Uh, and that's like, that's another one of the threads. And at one point, I think it's with Instagram really that you, you just pull back and are like, let's talk about this moment that everybody got okay talking about money on social media. And part of it was like all the stuff with the FTC and ads, but also it just seems like I don't, this like ineffable thing happened where everybody just sort of looked around and was like, money's awesome. Let's all get some.

• 19:41David Pierce?

  Now, and then it's like I go, I go on, you know, Twitter this morning and it's just a bunch of people posting like the monthly run rates for their dropshipping business. And I'm like, how is this like the thing that they're talking about on social media on a Monday morning? But like, it does feel like that flip where all of a sudden it went from like, you know, we don't talk about money, but this is a real business to like the, the money and the business and the culture are all kind of the same thing. Like, what, do you know, have you figured out why that happened? Like, who did that?

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, a lot of marketing dollars started pouring into the industry in the sort of second half of the 2010s. Also, I think that, that a lot of creators started talking about money as a way to legitimize themselves, to be like, take me seriously. I built a $48 million seltzer company. Like, I am a serious business person, which is what a lot of these people want to be seen as, as like entrepreneurs, and they are entrepreneurs. But I think the money is sort of like a way, and you see this even in news headlines and the way that the news media talks about people. It's like this creator built a million dollar business, whatever. It's like, this is why you should listen to this person because we live in this hyper capitalist society where even if you don't respect women and you don't respect young girls, if they make money, you have to respect them, you know? Because that's what we respect above all else.

• 20:51David Pierce?

  It's the story of the Kardashians, right? Like?

• 20:53Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. I mean, that's case in point, right? It's like, well, I don't always agree with these, you know, women and their selfies, but they're making money. So I, you know, I'll have them on my business podcast or whatever. But, but yeah, and I also think that's why, you know, when a lot of people are like, oh, you know, my kid wants to be a YouTuber, my kid wants whatever. Like, that's because that's the job that they're exposed to. And also they have a really, I mean, young people today, because these content creators are talking so much about money and marketing costs and things. Like, I think younger people have a interest in that and a just a much deeper knowledge of like ad rates and what CPMs mean and like, you know, things that kids probably wouldn't have known about earlier.

• 21:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, I had forgotten about that moment in time where everybody was posting fake ads on Instagram to like seem legitimate. And that was like, you talk about like a weird moment in the history of the internet. That was, that's up there.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  It's still a big problem for luxury brands.

• 21:45David Pierce?

  Is it? It's still, it's still going?

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was actually saying, talking to somebody recently about that with TikTok and the people were making fake Chanel. Chanel gave out these gifts, you know, they give out these yearly gifts and people have started making counterfeit, acting as if they have been gifted the influencer gift that year or whatever, and it's fake.

• 22:05David Pierce?

  High school punk rocker Nilay Patel wants to die right now.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  Straight up, just drive the car into the ocean and never look back. There's a piece of that, right, where commercialization equals legitimacy, right? That's what David is saying about talking about money makes you legitimate. Pretending you have sponsors makes you legitimate. But the beginning of that was that the money was like a weight, like early bloggers who put ads on their site got harassed and like shut down.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Vilified.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Where is that shift? Like, that's the one that really caught me. That, that chapter of your book about Heather Armstrong Deuce, all that's very powerful, right? She added ads to her site, her audience went after her. She ended up very tragically committing suicide recently.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  And the media.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  And the media went after her. And her arc is, I mean, it, in the beginning of your book, it's like a very powerful story that kind of previews everything to come, right? She commercializes, there's massive backlash. She says, I have to do this, it's my job. And then eventually the pressure of that job like leads to a tragic outcome. Why was that early response? Like compared to now, where commercialization, pretend commercialization adds legitimacy. In the beginning was the total opposite. Why did that flip?

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that flipped in the mid, in sort of the 2010s. And even if you, because if you look at the odds, women were, I talk a lot about Julia Allison in the book too. I think deserves, I mean, their original draft of the book, I had like pages and pages, like calling out every journalist that wrote just the most disgusting misogynistic stuff when she was a hundred percent right. I mean, every interview she does, she's talking about exactly what ends up happening.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  You have to explain to the people who Julia Allison is really.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Julia Allison was this woman who I actually knew because I used to shop her posts. I loved her when I was younger, like in like senior year of college. I think I found her somehow. She was a, she was an early influencer, basically. And she was a multi-platform influencer in sort of 2006 to 2010 ish. Was sort of like the height of her power. I mean, she was on the cover of Wired magazine, she was a huge sort of star. She was, she had this thing with Gawker where she would go into the comments of Gawker posts and promote herself, promote her blog and, and that was, you know, seen as just the most disgusting thing you could do. Like, how could you be self-promoting your blog? Which is like all anyone does on the internet. And she was vilified by Gawker and she was vilified by the media. I mean, what the media did to her and what people on the internet did to her.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  And this is a woman who signed one of the first deals with Next New Networks, you know, one of the first sort of like creating a show for YouTube, which at the time was sort of very new and revolutionary. And she had a big audience on Tumblr. She would have these shoppable posts. She would post what now we know is sort of like selfies, but it was, she called them head to toes. And there were these shoppable, sort of like she would talk about everything she wore. It was very accessible fashion. She would push affiliate codes. And she was, yeah, she was destroyed by the mainstream media and by men in tech. You know, she was trying to be sort of like a tech commentator and journalist and sort of like an influencer, you know, like a figure. And anyway, I just think, yeah, throughout the 2010s, people, it was women that were pushing these boundaries and women that created this industry.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  And, you know, when you saw CEOs in Silicon Valley talking about like the creator economy, they're completely written, they're not talking about Heather Armstrong. They're not talking about Julie Allison. They're talking about David Dobrik and these men that came onto the scene like a decade later. And that's because many of those women have left. The majority of women from that era have completely quit the internet, completely, not like they just deprecated their blog, like they don't use the internet anymore because it was so vicious.

• 25:34David Pierce?

  And then you contrast that with like Jake Paul, who you also write about in your book, not that many years later, releasing an entire song that he, that is literally just like buy my merch over and over and over.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  He literally spells out the URL to his merch shop in the song.

• 25:49David Pierce?

  And, and nobody has any problem with this. This is like, this is fine.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  And he's just called a self promoter, whereas women were called fame whores, like that, that sort of language was deeply misogynistic language was used against all these women.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Obviously have very strong feelings as a woman on the internet about sort of like online misogyny, but it's just crazy because you, it makes you want to scream. You read what they're saying and they're like a hundred percent right. And if those women were able to get the venture capital funding that all these other idiots got, I just, you know.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about that for a minute. So Jake Paul's really interesting, right? He was a YouTuber. You wrote about him a lot when he was a YouTuber. We wrote about him a lot. He was the vanguard of one class of YouTubers. It feels like that era of YouTube is over, right? For better or worse, that era of YouTube is done. It feels like view counts on YouTube generally are sort of declining because everyone's on TikTok or Shorts or Reels or whatever. Like, that's all changing. And that class of gigantic YouTubers, as you mentioned, has all pivoted to, man, it is really expensive to buy ads on our shows. What if we just made the products and used our shows as ad for the products? That's the real money. Is it over? Is that just a feeling I get, watching all these people try to sell Prime and Feastables

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  and whatever else, that that era of YouTube is over because the money is somewhere else?

• 27:05David Pierce?

  I had a Feastables yesterday for the first time ever. By the way, it was really exciting.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Was it good?

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  Was it in preparation for this interview?

• 27:11David Pierce?

  It literally was. I bought it at Target. It was a little thing. It was called Crunch.

• 27:15Nilay Patel?

  Did you fix the display?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Did you fix the display?

• 27:19David Pierce?

  My wife thought it was so stupid that I was buying this. She was like, that's just a Crunch bar for more money. And I was like, no, it's Mr. Beast. And I like explained this whole thing to her in line at Target. And the woman behind us in line looks at my wife and goes, I've been married 40 years. It's like this forever.

• 27:35David Pierce?

  So yeah, Feastables, we're best friends. But sorry, Taylor.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  I love it. No, I mean, I talk about this in my book of just sort of like how that daily vlogging schedule and that prank era of YouTube and that sort of era of excess on YouTube, I think, led to mass burnout and depression. And then, of course, the pandemic hit soon after that and TikTok launched. And I think it just like, it disrupted so much about that, those sort of like glory days of the YouTube views culture, that it's really hard to recapture. And I think YouTube's in this really weird space now because they're not the number one anymore. I mean, they're still great. They're the gold standard for monetization. If you're doing, you know, ad share and it's a stable platform, but the discovery on it is so bad. The creative tools on it, as you mentioned, they're still in the, it's crazy to me that they don't have their own video editor, you know, even.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  I think that that, like, the bottom has fallen out and a lot of YouTubers are having an identity crisis now because it's very hard. And I mean, Hank Green made a video about this a while ago that was really smart about sort of how YouTube Shorts competes with its own product almost and how it's been hard for creators to navigate and monetize.

• 28:37David Pierce?

  Well, and that that views culture thing you're talking about is one of the sort of structural things that I found really interesting throughout the book is like, we have sort of ratcheted up this thing where it is just assumed among creators that you have to post constantly all the time, or else you'll essentially be forgotten, right? And there's like, you've a bunch of people with this like existential fear that if I take one day off, the algorithm will ignore me forever and my career is over. And I can, you can see how that would like destroy you emotionally pretty fast. And part of what is wild to me is that what it seems like has happened is like, we've gotten to the point where a lot of stuff is easier to post, both like technically because TikTok makes it easy, and culturally because there's

• 29:20David Pierce?

  been this big pushback to just like, be authentic, just like prop your phone up and take a video. And it's actually like, a lot of work to look really authentic. But at any rate, is like, the polish is getting a little easier. But we're still in this place where you have to post all the time, constantly, every minute in order to be anywhere. And it feels like there ought to be a platform that is like, we can do something better. But then I think about it, and I'm like, I don't even actually know what better looks like. Better is just like Netflix, where they give you a lot more money to make less stuff. And I don't know if that works either.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  I totally agree. I don't know. I would be interested on Neel Iyasa's this too, just like running a media company. Like, I don't know, because I feel that pressure even in journalism. It's like, you have to keep posting, or people I guys even it's so hard for me, my editor last week, I wanted to file something. And he was like, just finish the stories that you're supposed to be working on.

• 30:11David Pierce?

  That's a good editor right there. I have gotten that speech many times.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  I got that in a macro for David. David's like, Neel, I'm like, I just hit FS. And it says, finish the stories you're supposed to be working on.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  But it's like this pressure, I think, anybody that sort of creates things online, and you want to hold attention online, it's very hard to hold attention on the internet because of the competition. And I don't, I don't know that any platform is better. I mean, obviously, subscription platforms are maybe better for that. But I don't know. I mean, Casey Newton was saying that he sort of atrophies, like subscribers go down sometimes if you don't post enough on Substack, apparently. And so, you've just got to keep feeding the beast, I guess.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, there's a part of it that I think is just being in service to your audience. So whether you're making journalism or entertainment or whatever, like, You need to be there because the audience is waiting. But then there's the flip side of it, which is major artists go away and they use that to their advantage. Right. They disappear. Taylor Swift disappears between albums and tours. And then she comes back with a vengeance. Beyonce disappears between albums and she's barely present when she's on tour. Like, that is a very managed persona. And I feel like that hasn't permeated yet into online culture. And you can see that more Hollywood style of media. Like they've mastered taking it away and like building demand and then filling the demand with something great

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  or something expensive, at least. Online, we, no one has figured out how to do this. And I think that is actually crushing. I think it makes, sometimes makes us make worse work. I think the question I would have for you, Taylor, is I, I suspect the algorithmic platforms make that a thousand times worse. Right? Like you have a big platform and a big newspaper. You can take a break and you come back and your bosses at the newspaper are like, we're going to publish your stories again and promote them. We have our own website. We can just like put whatever we want on it and hopefully people read it. But it's, it's ours. Whereas I feel like every YouTuber and TikToker I know is like, if I stop for one second, this robot will forget about me and I will never return. And that pressure seems very different.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  It's totally different and you're so right. And this is what I think is really hard with the whole creator world. It's very hard. I, I think that some creators have tried to make sort of like, um, you know, they try to have a schedule that they can stick to. Like, okay, my weekly videos drop every Friday and I'm going to take next week off and being transparent with your audience. But no, I totally agree with you. It's just that, that sort of culture of building and anticipation has not been brought to the internet. And I think that's why you have Mr. Beast and all these other people posting a million times, right? It's like, it's, you have to keep feeding the algorithm.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  Is there any reckoning inside of the platforms? I feel like a few years ago, burnout for YouTubers was a big topic. And YouTube itself was like, we're going to build you tools. You can take a break. And that never appears to have come to anything across these platforms.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, they didn't. They built shorts, which makes it should post even more. Yeah, no, the platforms are never going to do that because it's not in their interest. And they have absolutely no, they don't, they don't want users to take time away from the platforms. That is the opposite of their business interests. And so I don't think, and I don't think that the upside of it would equal out where it would be that much of a benefit. I think culturally, we sort of have to change. I totally agree. There was this moment, 2018, 2019, where like burnout was this like big conversation. And I talk about that in my book, sort of how it like entered in this cultural conversation. But now it's just gone again. And it sometimes comes up now and then, but I think that we still, you know, I want videos from my favorite content creators, right? But yeah, we haven't entered into that era where it's sort of like the audiences are forgiving

• 33:44Speaker 03

  and the algorithms are forgiving.

• 33:46David Pierce?

  Well, it seems like the audience thing, I think, is genuinely like really tricky and like potentially unsolvable, right? Where you've like, you train a group of people to care deeply about everything that you do. And then you stop giving them that like, that's, I can see why that's a challenge. It seems like algorithmically, like if YouTube wanted to change the incentives, it could, right? Like YouTube, and you chronicle this in the book, and we've talked about this a lot on the show, like YouTube gave people reasons to make longer videos. So they made longer videos and YouTube gave people data on what kinds of thumbnails works. So everybody started using those thumbnails, right? Like, it's all just incentives. And if YouTube were to say, you know, we think there's an overwhelming likelihood that if you make two things a week that most of your subscribers watch instead of 15 a week,

• 34:31David Pierce?

  that only a small percentage of them watch, suddenly you might have fewer better things on the internet. And like TikTok even, which is like all about discovery could be like, well, we're so good at showing you new stuff that actually the pressure to keep posting stuff can go down because we can keep people occupied. But it just doesn't seem like anybody is actually interested in figuring out how to solve that algorithmically at all.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  I totally agree. I don't think they will, but I wish that they would incentivize that, that sort of like, slow down, right? Like, don't, don't upload so much content, but that's not what they, they want you to upload as much as possible.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's, I always think about the equation I had of in media, right? Like, we make news posts on a 20-minute cycle and we make long features on a two-year cycle and we get to pick and choose. And on YouTube, and you can be either kind of reporter, like, and you can be successful as either kind of reporter. On YouTube, if you spend two years making one video, you have failed. Right? Like, you're just flat out, you have failed. You will not be a successful YouTuber. You will be poor and die penniless and alone. If you make a video every 20 minutes, you will be massively rich. And if you can just keep that pace up, you're gonna be fine. And you see AI like flooding into the zone where there's already these like weird headless channels or

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  faceless channels, I think they call them, of just like AI reading podcast transcripts? We have boots of this podcast. There's just AI reading transcripts of this podcast and it is nuts. And you can see why they're doing it. It's because volume will win. At some point, that has to eat YouTube, right?

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think at some point, there should be a reckoning where like YouTube should be like, okay, we need higher quality content. That does happen, right? With certain platforms where they're like, okay, this is too much spam. Like, I was just thinking of Spotify. I was reading Ashley Carmen's piece about sort of like how they're trying to downrank some of the like white noise podcasts and stuff.

• 36:19David Pierce?

  This is our favorite thing to talk about right now.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  To say I have a $38 million problem because I have not appropriately monetized white noise is like you, everyone should just take a hard look at themselves in that meeting room and be like, we are talking about monetizing literally white noise on our platform that is meant to promote art. Like, what have we done?

• 36:38Speaker 03

  But it's such a good metaphor for like what these platforms incentivize, which is just like content at all costs and like meaning, and I love, I love white noise, but like, you know, ultimately, it's not artistic necessarily, like.

• 36:49David Pierce?

  How much white noise do we really need is the question?

• 36:53Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know. But I do think that like as everyone is becoming a content creator and everyone is creating it, like you said, with the rise of AI where it's easier and easier and easier to create content, I think that they'll have to start prioritizing like quality content and we'll see if our attention spans are long enough to watch, you know, a longer video or not.

• 37:12David Pierce?

  As thinking about all of this strategically and analytically, like you're a person who is on all of these platforms. You're just on threads like every 15 minutes telling people to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're the most online person on this podcast.

• 37:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I like, I wonder after like years of reporting on this, but also being like sort of this deep in the weeds of like what these platforms reward. A, is it any fun being on any of these platforms anymore? And B, like, do you find yourself just like ruthlessly defeating the rules of every platform? Like when, when threads came out at first, you very clearly were like, this is my moment. I'm going to post 400,000 times on threads. Because the algorithm will promote me because there's not that many people here. I'm gonna get a billion followers. And I think it actually worked super well. But like, do you just have to live this life now? Like you know, you know too well how the sausage is made and like, this is your life now?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Oh my God. I'm doomed. I love the internet. I don't know if you can tell from my book, but I'm very much a tech optimist and I really, really love the internet and technology. And even though the Silicon Valley people drive me crazy, like I, I do have a lot of fun online and I do have fun every day on the internet. I feel like it's, it is really fun. But I am kind of a nihilist about, you know, the content creator world and kind of getting followers or things like that, because it's like, it is what it is. And I know how it goes. And I know how, you know, when you launch it, and this is why I have the following that I do on TikTok, because I did the same thing. I'm like, okay, well, TikTok's gonna reward me. It's, I know this platform's gonna be really big. I just want to get to half a million. I'm gonna keep posting until I get to half a million. And I'm gonna do that. And whatever, you know, because I want that following. I want, I

• 38:48Speaker 03

  want an audience for my work.

• 38:50David Pierce?

  That thing is like, it reminds me of what everybody did. And you were the one who wrote about this with the Johnny Depp and reheard trial, right? Where there was this moment where it was, it was basically like content arbitrage, right? And everybody's like, there's so much interested in.

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  All the video game channels were pivoting to it.

• 39:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's like, there's so much interest in this.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Every major news event now is an opportunity for audience growth. Which has always been that way for news companies, but now it's that way for influencers too. And so that's why you see, yeah, same with the war in Ukraine. You had like, you know, slime channels talking about it. That was crazy.

• 39:20David Pierce?

  But I wonder, like, do you, for, literally for you personally, you're like, okay, this is a game to be won, and I'm going to play it like a game to be won.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:29David Pierce?

  But then what? Like, is that, and I genuinely, I like, this, this might sound like I'm being sort of like backhanded insulting. I'm not. I'm genuinely curious. I think you're very good at this. But I wonder, like, at some, do you look at the half a million things on TikTok? And you're like, okay, and now I can do what I want to do? Or is it just like a forever a game to keep winning at?

• 39:49Speaker 03

  I think it's, it's always a fun game to play, but the goal is to do, is to do stories. And my, my experience, especially covering internet culture, is that audience growth, one, I am, I work in media, incredibly unstable industry.

• 40:02David Pierce?

  True.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  So my audience is a valuable asset to me in the media landscape. So I want to maintain that and maintain my relevance in the media world. But also, in terms of what I cover, which is internet culture, one, I have to be a heavy user to write about it in the way that I write about it, because I, my whole thing is like writing about things as users and like, as somebody that gets it. So I have to spend a lot of time. And also, it's good for sourcing, it's good for, it's, it's what I want, this is what I want to do. And so, yeah, I gotta keep being on here to do it. But I think because I cover it and because I'm so aware of the downsides, I do have a strong sort of like, mental barrier. And I don't, I've like, gotten better mentally at sort of like dealing with having to be on 50 platforms every day and crossposting and stuff. And I don't take it that seriously.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  I should take it more seriously. I was meeting, I was at this event last night, and they were like, you haven't got, you need to do this. And why aren't you live streaming this? And I was like, oh, I just, I do what's fun. I usually, sometimes I try to make certain numbers. Like, I'll be like, oh, I want to get to 100K on XYZ and...

• 41:01David Pierce?

  Well, so, let me ask you the flip side. And it's worth noting that David and I have known you since you were literally a social media manager, I think at Mashable.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:09David Pierce?

  Like, we, we've all known each other for a very long time. And so for me, I just know you as Taylor. A lot of the internet, and I assume some portion of our audience, knows you as a perpetual main character. Like...

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Fox News can put your name in a headline to get clicks.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  And they do.

• 41:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:24David Pierce?

  They don't even have to name who you are, just Taylor Lorenz.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they don't do that shit to me. I think they tried to do it to David once and everyone was like, who's this clown? But they do that to you all the time, right?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:36Nilay Patel?

  What is that experience like?

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Crazy.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  It seems like that mental barrier you're talking about is very important if you want to continue living through that and produce at the rate that you do. Like, I don't think I could take it, to be clear.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  No, you, it, you know, it's like everything, it gets old and you're like, oh, okay. That's just how it is. I don't know. I, I think like, I mean, it's also like, I feel like, um, whatever that metaphor is of like the boiling frog, you know, like I, I write about people with huge, I write about online attention and the online attention economy. And so you're, you're often covering people with huge platforms. Way before Tucker Carlson or any of these, you know, right wing influencers had drama with me, like I had Jake Paulers, I had PewDiePie make a video about me in 2017. You know, when he was like the biggest YouTube on the planet, like my work has always gotten attention. It's just that that never crossed into the mainstream until 2020. And I think COVID shoved everyone online and sort of forced everyone to take this internet world seriously in a way.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  And it got hyper politicized and suddenly I think like me, like other media people started to notice it. Like when you have a CNN media reporter platforming the leader of, one of the leaders of Comic Gate, you know, being like, oh, here's what, you know, this person thinks of Taylor Lorenz, this YouTuber. It's like, whoa, where did, normally that stayed on YouTube, you know? I'm like, oh, this is like in the real world now. So I think like, you know, it's led to a lot. And obviously Fox News, for many reasons, I think has chosen me as a target and that's because it drives views. I mean, I think Tucker Carlson has YouTuber energy where like he recognizes like, I'm going to make these characters. I'm going to build this online world. I'm going to have this cast of characters and some I'm painting as villains and some are my heroes.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  And that's just, that's the internet. It's very lucrative, but it's very bizarre to lose control of the narrative of your life. Like I have to say, when it first started in 2020, like I would go around and like try and correct people, like I'd be like, well, that's not true. My uncle doesn't run the internet archive or whatever Elon was saying recently. It's like, what? But now I don't do that anymore. I just kind of, it's, it's a losing battle. And also like, I don't, I don't really care. It's just like a video game.

• 43:35David Pierce?

  Also Tucker Carlson, I think is exclusively on X now. So that's cool.

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  Look, that's where the ladies are, dog. You're in the market with a lucrative teen girl audience.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  I'm dying because like I want to see that man compete on YouTube. Like, we all know the views on X are bullshit. Like, let's see him operate on a real platform and see how much of that cable audience he can actually bring on the internet. I I'm skeptical, honestly. I think he has, I mean, in what, in some ways, he's so good at the internet and like, his persona is like very good at like generating outrage, but he's flopped hard on X and.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the numbers are going down.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  I just don't think he has the juice. Yeah.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  And also, he could make the classic YouTuber juice the views video, which is to say that YouTube is demonetizing him or suppressing him. Like, nothing plays more than that.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Oh, 100%. Yeah.

• 44:22David Pierce?

  All right. So two more things, and then we're gonna let you go. One is about the book and one is about the future. The last one about the book is I want to know why live streaming didn't quite work. Like, you, it sort of comes and goes throughout the book. And there's this, there's this moment where like You Now is gonna be a thing, and then You Now just sort of like disappears. You never, like, You Now never dies in the book. It just sort of disappears into the ether. Uh, and then like Twitch is rising, but like we all kind of know what Twitch is. Like, it's, it's doing fine, but it's kind of in its own lane. Why didn't live streaming become the thing alongside some of this other stuff?

• 44:57Speaker 03

  I think we still haven't cracked live streaming. Like, I think mobile, I, do you guys remember Hype, Russ's app before HQ?

• 45:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, sure.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Turned into HQ. That was my favorite live streaming app on the planet. No app will ever come be. I actually think like the future of live streaming will look something much more like Hype, where it was so interactive and so creative and and mobile first. Twitch is really hard, as you said, like all these, most of these, and You Now, most of those live streaming apps were built for desktop. Facebook Live just tried to make everyone livestream on Facebook, which no one, that the cult, that was such a weird sort of like, no one wanted that content on Facebook. And so I don't think that we've had a sort of breakout live streaming product. One, because the technology wasn't there for most of the 20s. I mean, I think only recently we have the sort of like data capacities and stuff. And also, I don't think there's been a product that truly, like, I think it's more of a feature than a product.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  And maybe one day we'll have this product, but I think it'll have to be immersive and interactive and. Different, something new, again, something that sort of like comes after. I don't think it's gonna come from Twitch.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  But you think it could happen? Like, one of the debates that we've had a bunch is like, is live streaming waiting on like better tools and technology? Or is it just a fact that most people are boring most of the time? And that it turns out that actually what I want is like a nicely edited 10 minute video of your life, not your whole actual life.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  This is why I don't think things like Twitch are ever gonna be, like, I totally agree with you. However, there is this, you know how we're all taught to post? Like, for instance, I think we first on text posts, right? Like, oh, you see something crazy, you're gonna tweet about it, right? Now it's like, oh, my God, I saw something crazy. I'm gonna take a video and put it on TikTok and that's gonna reach everyone. I do think that the average person goes live as a certain part of like, as another sort of form of posting. Whether, you know, maybe it's just for interesting things or whatever. Like, I do think that that will happen. I just don't think it'll happen in any of the current platforms that we have now.

• 46:51Nilay Patel?

  I'm fascinated by the media ecosystem around the Taylor Swift era's tour. It is wild, right? There's a camera arms race going on there. Teen girls have brought back point and shoot cameras as a trend because of this tour. And I'm watching all of these young women say their Canon G7 Xs are the best cameras they've ever owned. Which is just, like, if you're in, like, that's wild, right? And then the other piece of it is they're all live streaming the concerts. And I, Taylor has to know this is happening. And she's built the thing to reward that behavior. And that is a feedback loop that is taking place. And it, the expectation that the concert will be live streamed and millions of people will do this thing

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  has created a culture of live streaming unto itself, which is wild. And it seems like those kinds of moments are more the future of live streaming than the sort of like, I'm gonna, like, I watch a lot of short order cooks make omelets when I, when I like shave in the morning. Like, that's what just shows up on my TikTok feed is like a thing that I will like have in the background. And that seems like one style. But then this like massive cultural live stream opportunity seems like another style. And both of them, there are like reasons you are doing it as opposed to just, I'm gonna make a thing.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  I totally agree. I don't think the future of live streaming is just the people in their bedrooms, although, I mean, that is a genre of content. But yeah, TikTok Live has been so interesting, too, just like the, that platform in general.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  If you can get your way onto the short order cook TikTok Live, it is just some of the most relaxing shit in the entire world.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  Well, and that's actually a good example of like the interactivity stuff you're talking about, Taylor. Like, my favorite live streams are the ones where the people are asleep and you can like, send them gifts to do weird stuff to them in their room while they're sleeping.

• 48:36Nilay Patel?

  David, that's very different, relaxing short order cooks.

• 48:39David Pierce?

  It's much worse, but it is much more like the future of live streaming.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is what I, yeah, I saw Pinky Doll last night, actually, the NPC streamer. But I think that's the same thing. It's like that, it's that interactivity.

• 48:53David Pierce?

  Totally. All right, last thing. So Neela and I are obsessed with Activity Pub and the Fediverse and this idea of like open social web being the next thing. And I think we're in this moment of like platform decline and chaos across the board. Everything feels like it's up in the air for the first time in a really long time. You are a person who's on all these platforms. Are you like bullish on Mastodon and the threads and the Fediverse and all this stuff? Like, what do you make of all of that coming?

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Yes. My colleague Will Aramis is like the expert on all of this. And I always sort of look to his opinions. And he's very bullish on it, too. I love it. I mean, I'm on Mastodon every day posting like I am on every app.

• 49:32David Pierce?

  I was gonna say.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  But I, no, I think it's really interesting. I don't think Mastodon itself is very user friendly and it's not going to scale. But yeah, the activity, but the interoperability stuff is definitely a theme.

• 49:46David Pierce?

  It just seems like it marries a lot of the stuff you're talking about. Like even just go all the way back to MySpace. It was like this thing where it was, you had some control and some ownership and some freedom. And then Facebook comes along and is like, we're going to make it really simple and we're going to centralize it and we're going to put it in front of everybody. It's like, if we do this next phase right, you can have the best of like the blogging era and the MySpace era and the Facebook era, kind of all in one mushy thing. I assume we will get this wrong in a bunch of unknowable ways, but it feels like we're like maybe headed back towards the right part of this. Like, Neela always likes to say it's 2003 on the internet again. And I think in a lot of ways, it's really true.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  No, totally. And I love it. I mean, I love, I'm rooting for that future because I want all of those things. Everybody wants more control. Everybody wants more freedom to post. It's horrible to be locked into these social platforms. You want to reach a wide range of people and you want more sort of flexibility in, you know, different platforms. And I'm rooting for it. I'm rooting for it. I'm still on Mastodon. I'm definitely not like giving up on any of it. And it'll be interesting to see kind of like how it all shapes.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  Is Tumblr still the platform that holds your heart? I can tell, like, reading this whole book, it was just like, like, clearly, the two platforms you love the most are Tumblr and Vine.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  And we could, we could spend a lot of time on those two platforms. But like, if I remember you from way back.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  David, you knew me when I was a Tumblr girl.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  I know. This is what I'm saying. You're still a Tumblr girl. Like, at heart, you were still a Tumblr girl, right?

• 51:08Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  Just making sure.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, Tumblr gave me everything. I started, that, that's, I was working shitty temp jobs when I discovered Tumblr. It gave me, my audience on Tumblr, that's the reason I am where I am now. Everything. I have people that have followed me from Tumblr years. And I loved Vine. And I, I could have written a whole book on Vine. Somebody needs to do something on Vine. I mean, also, like, everyone will talk because there's no stakes in that, that the company is gone and Twitter is gone. So like, there was so much stuff I wish I could have included. I literally wrote 60,000 words on Vine. It was like, okay, this is just.

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  Release that book. That's just, you should just publish that as one endless X thread. I was just like, that's how, that's how it goes down forever, is like, the server capacity of your 60,000 page book on Vine. It's just like, one, the longest thread ever published.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Finally takes X down. That would be such a great legacy to leave.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  We gotta ask that question. What do you think happens with that one? Do you think it survives?

• 52:07Speaker 03

  X? No, absolutely not. Are you kidding me?

• 52:12Speaker 03

  That app is so fucked. I mean, Elon doesn't know what he's doing. I don't know that that means it necessarily like goes out of business because Elon has endless money. But I mean, it's a joke. It's, it's, he's literally speedrunning like every mistake that these, you know, arrogant Silicon Valley men make, which is.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  Did you send him a copy of your book?

• 52:29Speaker 03

  I replied to him when he was tweeting about me calling me a stalker ex-girlfriend for posting about Twitter on threads. And I was like, you know, Elon, if you want to know more about Silicon Valley and the mistakes they make on social products, please preorder my book. And he didn't respond.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, we're gonna, we'll mail him to the Twitter headquarters.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Mail him a copy.

• 52:46David Pierce?

  All right, Taylor, thank you so much. This was awesome. Congrats on the book. I really enjoyed it.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 52:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was super fun.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Please, please preorder it. Order it.

• 52:57David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna come back and talk about the Internet Archive and why it's suddenly in crisis. We'll be right back.

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• 54:12David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So, over the last three or so years, this organization called the Internet Archive has been caught up in some pretty big deal controversies. They seem important because I think the Internet Archive is important. And there are a lot of organizations out there that are very mad at the Internet Archive. And if I'm being totally honest, I don't really understand why. It seems odd to me that publishers and the music industry and others would have a bone to pick with this organization that's just out here caching webpages so you can find them when they change. Luckily, The Verge's Addie Robertson does understand what's going on here and also why it's important and where it might go. So I figured I'd have her come on and explain. Hi, Addie. Hey.

• 54:53David Pierce?

  I thought I understood what was going on with the Internet Archive and what the Internet Archive was. And then I started reading about it, and it turns out none of this makes any sense to me. So... I want to talk about this both because it's very important and because it seems to hit on kind of like all of the complicated stories of the internet right now. But let's like truly start at the very beginning here. I know the Internet Archive as the Wayback Machine. It's the place you go and you type in a URL and you can see old versions of the URL. The Internet Archive, as I understand it, is actually much more than that. Like, what is this thing trying to do? What is its job on the internet?

• 55:30Speaker 05

  The Internet Archive, it is both an archive of the internet and an archive on the internet. So, yeah, the thing that I think most people spend most of their time engaging with is the Wayback Machine, which is just an archive of webpages. It just copies webpages, preserves them. It's incredibly important. It also does a lot of traditional preservation, though. It tends to be organized into projects. One thing that's gotten a lot of attention is that it does a lot of video game preservation. So if you want to play an old Atari game, or like an Apple II game or something from the 80s, then that's like a thing you can just go and do and they emulate them and it's really interesting. You can go and find like old copies of bodybuilder magazines from the 20s.

• 56:13Speaker 05

  There's just this like huge grab bag of things on it. But then they also run a few really specific projects. One of the ones we're probably going to talk about a lot is the Open Library, which is this very large book digitization program. And it works a little bit, I mean, like a library. You can go and you look up books and you can check them out for very limited periods of time and you get the scan of the book and you can view it and then click and turn it back in.

• 56:43David Pierce?

  Okay, so this seems like the sort of thing that to a normal person who doesn't want to think about this too much, AKA yours truly, this seems like a universally good thing, right? It's preserving things. The internet is notoriously bad at preserving things. It is good to preserve things. This seems like a good idea. Like, there's a lot of controversy happening right now, and I want to talk about that. But if you rewind five years ago, this is a thing that's been around for a long time. Has this been a controversial idea this whole time? That this is a thing that exists and is doing the work it's doing?

• 57:16Speaker 05

  The Internet Archive in general, I mean, people, it does a lot of things that are incredibly valuable that I think most people really don't have a huge issue with. I think the Wayback Machine, people largely understand, like, this is like a load-bearing part of the Internet at this point.

• 57:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, you could argue the Internet would be a demonstrably less good place without the Wayback Machine.

• 57:36Speaker 05

  But things like the Open Library are actually part of this very long struggle with publishers that goes back decades and decades at this point. That's really that publishers, I want to say increasingly, but it's been this way for a long time, just really don't want anyone doing anything with a book that they did not authorize explicitly and make money on every copy of. Like, that sounds mean, but that's also just, that's what the profit motive is, like, that's just what they're doing.

• 58:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, a thing that I've learned in the, in the prep for this is that a lot of publishers have picked big fights with libraries over the years, which is like, again, like you're saying, on the one hand, it's, it's a thing they didn't make money from, it's a way people access books. It, it strikes me as the kind of thing that is sort of insane to pick a fight with. Like, I'm mad at the library is just a bonkers battle to pick, even if it's a thing that you feel. But this has been happening intermittently forever. So I guess it's not totally shocking that people would be mad at the Internet Archive, too.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  The thing that's really a wrinkle here is that this all happened right around the pandemic. And the way this suit was filed is the Open Library's been around for a really long time. It's built around this theory called controlled digital lending, where the idea is there's a physical book somewhere, and that physical book, once a person, like, where the Internet Archive buys it, they can do what they want with it. And that includes, in this theory, scanning it, making it available in the same, like, one-to-one copy ratio that they have as a physical edition. And the idea is kind of like, very metaphorically, you're like pointing a camera at your book and letting someone else see the book.

• 59:12David Pierce?

  Sure. Well, because the the physical law on this, if I understand it correctly, is pretty settled, right? Like, if I buy a book, I then have absolute right to do whatever I want with it. I can sell it again. I can give it to you. I can rip it into tiny pieces and throw them all in the air. Like, once I own the book, I can do essentially whatever I want with the book. And that is relatively non-controversial in the actual world, right? And like, what that means digitally seems to be a very different question.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. So this theory's been around, and then the pandemic brings this all to like this whole other level. The Internet Archive opens up what they call the National Emergency Library, which is the open library, the sort of thing that takes the theory you're describing. And then the National Emergency Library removes the breaks, basically, that they used to have these sort of limits where you would say, okay, well, if somebody else has checked this book out, then someone is metaphorically using this hard copy of the book. You can't look, this other person can't look at it. The National Emergency Library was based on the idea, like, physical libraries are all closing because of the pandemic. And so we're going to just

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  let whoever, as many people, check out books as they want. And then publishers sued, and publishers sued not only over the emergency library, but over the entire concept of controlled digital lending, which is much bigger than the Internet Archive. And I think one of the reasons why they did this partly goes back to picking fights over libraries, which is that library ebooks have become this incredibly lucrative field, especially over the pandemic, because you, that was the only way you could engage with libraries. And the way that libraries can lend and buy ebooks is completely different from the way that they use just normal books, like-

• 1:00:59David Pierce?

  Oh, how so?

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  So the way that stereotypically you think about a library working is, oh, they buy a bunch of copies of books, and then they lend the books out, and they can control that. This is not the way that ebooks work. Ebooks, basically, the libraries never own the ebooks, and the ebooks are sold, like, are basically lent for the libraries to lend to patrons with restrictions that over the years have varied and have often been pretty- Restrictive, like you've got a very limited number of times that you can rent them out or that you can lend them out. So they expire very quickly. They can be very expensive. So you get the situation where publishers have got just huge amounts more control over

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  what libraries can do with eBooks than over physical books. And there's been this explosion since the pandemic of the popularity of eBooks in libraries. And so then I think this puts added pressure on publishers to say, look, the Internet Archive is operating this thing that could really eat into our profits, especially if there are libraries that decide they want to do their own version of this, that what they want to do is scan a book and lend it out.

• 1:02:08David Pierce?

  So that's kind of really what I'm wondering, because I think if I understand it correctly, a big part of the Internet Archive's defense has been like, really, you're going to pick on the Internet Archive for this tiny thing with relatively unknown titles? Like, why are you picking this fight? But then it seems like what publishers are saying, to your point, is like, well, if anybody can do this, we're hosed and we're sort of worried you're going to set a precedent that is going to just let anyone lend anything to anybody, and then Libby is going to become the most popular thing on earth and we're totally screwed.

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  Oh, no, this is, this is, just to be clear, Libby is the thing they want. Libby is the thing at Overdrive. This is like these very, very tightly controlled systems of lending, where libraries get very little say over what you can actually do there.

• 1:02:50David Pierce?

  So this is why Libby has become so popular, is because they're the one that the publishers will actually work with.

• 1:02:54Speaker 05

  And I want to be clear that I'm not even sure in a world where you can do the thing the Internet Archive is doing, Libby wouldn't exist. Because if you've actually used the library, like the Internet Archive's library, it's often pretty rough. Like, you're just looking at scanned PDFs of these books.

• 1:03:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, super rough.

• 1:03:09Speaker 05

  Like, there are a bunch of people who are going to just say, we don't want to have to go through scanning all the books in our archive. We would really like the added convenience of this thing that publishers are offering, and it's a rate they're offering it.

• 1:03:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, totally. So the publisher, Sue, this becomes a whole big thing. And the publishers, as far as I can tell, one, like extremely convincingly, made this argument and just kind of walked away with the verdict about like, what the Internet Archive is doing is not allowed, no one should be allowed to do it. This is all over. Was it, was it as sweeping as it seems like it was to me?

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  The Internet Archive is appealing and the Internet Archive argues, obviously, you know, this did not turn out the right way. It was pretty sweeping. It was very, it was pretty condemnatory to the Internet Archive. And a lot of what it was based on was the idea that there's a clear market for eBooks and therefore, the Internet Archive isn't doing something that is completely transformative and it is doing something that will take away this profit line for the publishers.

• 1:04:14David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:04:14Speaker 05

  And that was really just the crux of the argument.

• 1:04:17David Pierce?

  So then, almost immediately after, the music industry turned around and picked, as far as I can tell, basically the same fight about an even more like arcane set of things. In this case, what was it, 78 recordings from like 100 years ago? But the music industry turned around and said, "Well, we're being infringed upon the same way," right?

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, in some ways, the music lawsuit is a little bit less complicated because the system here is, yeah, there's this program called the Great 78, which is they digitize recordings that are from like the late 19th century to the roughly 1950s. And they just make them available and they're very scratchy. They're like even less, in many ways, a clear substitute. But the argument here is just, they're making this thing available. They shouldn't make this thing available. This is piracy. It's bad. They're arguing specifically that there is something called the Music Modernization Act that sort of changed the way that sound recordings were covered under copyright. And so, a lot of the cases may be going to hinge on part of that. But yeah, fundamentally, like philosophically,

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  it is still, the Internet Archive is offering this archival service that is much rougher than the commercial options that you can get, but is in some way providing a substitute for a commercial thing that could be a profit line.

• 1:05:38David Pierce?

  So this is why this whole thing is so fascinating to me because I think there's a version of the description of what's going on here that basically seems like a slam dunk. Obviously, the Internet Archive should not be allowed to do this. That basically it's like Napster but says nicer things about itself that it's like it's just a it's a piracy engine with like a higher purpose or whatever. And I can see where the publishers and the music industry is coming from on this. There's another side of this where like the alternative, I think, in a very real way for a lot of these 78 recordings is just that they would die. And it's not like anyone else out there is making a lot of effort to preserve them. And so maybe these things still need to exist.

• 1:06:19David Pierce?

  And I don't know, I end up caught in this totally intractable thing about like the Internet Archive is both like very much the good guy and very much the bad guy, kind of all at the same time.

• 1:06:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was reading this post on Tumblr of all places where the they said something like piracy has always been the nexus of art preservation.

• 1:06:38David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 1:06:39Speaker 05

  It was referring to like people who went to plays in Shakespearean eras and would transcribe the dialogue so they can pirate the play. But yeah, I think the

• 1:06:47David Pierce?

  Very Tumblr post. I love it.

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  The part of the problem for me is that a bunch of the copyright debate plays out like there is this sort of natural right to own a thing you make. That the way in which the Internet Archive seems wrong is if you look at this and you look at like a book you've written like land. And well, obviously someone shouldn't be able to steal your land, so you have this book. And I think that this is in a lot of ways a really unproductive way to look at things, though. When we were doing our best tech books, one of the books that we had on the top 10 was Common as Air. A book that's sort of arguing that the way to look at copyright is that it's a way to balance the

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  like promoting people's like desire to make creative things and letting them profit off those creative things with the fact that all culture is this thing that people build on. And that if you treat these things that people make creatively just like land, then you're going to inevitably lose out on just huge amounts of culture. You're going to just You're going to, first of all, lose the ability to comment on it. You're going to lose the ability to make things based on things other people made. And then just, yeah, very, very practically, you're going to lose just all of the culture that no one thinks is valuable enough monetarily to preserve.

• 1:08:07David Pierce?

  I mean, I think the, the natural sort of counterargument to the, the first part of that is just that, that's all true, but if you don't incentivize people to make things, they won't, right? That you should be rewarded for your creative work. And I have, I have lots of feelings about that argument. I think like one thing the internet has proven is that you actually don't really have to compensate people and they will just go do and make lots of really cool and creative things. But I also like, am paid to make things on the internet all day. So I don't know, I, I, I get why that's complicated. But I think the question of when does something fall into the category of like, this thing needs to be archived, right? Like, nobody's mad at the Library of Congress for having an archive of all of our tweets, right? I don't know, maybe people are, I'm not.

• 1:08:49Speaker 05

  Elon may well be very angry that someone is profiting off being able to see tweets.

• 1:08:53David Pierce?

  Would not be shocked, but I think that, that is something that is less controversial. But the idea of then, what the internet archive is doing is saying, not only are we taking this, we're building some kind of UI around it through which you can access it. Is that where you trip over the line of like, this is no longer preservation, this is something else? But then what is the point of preservation if you're not going to give people access to it? Like, this is the part where I, I just kind of don't net out at knowing what the right answer is supposed to be here.

• 1:09:21Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, I have been to the Library of Congress to check a thing out once. It's really hard. It requires being in Washington DC and jumping through some pretty serious hoops. It is a very difficult research option. And I think that the idea that it's okay if there's one copy of a thing that exists somewhere, like, that's not hugely satisfying. I mean, I think that the answer that people have hit on for a really long time is very pertinent in the record case, which is that almost everyone who made all that music, they are all dead. They cannot ever be incentivized to create a thing again.

• 1:09:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, it's fair.

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  There is a clear incentive like to provide for your family and there is a clear incentive. It would be really great if your children and your grandchildren could be supported by this thing you made. But I think that's also, there's eventually a balancing act. And I think I've become much less sympathetic to the idea that you are really meaningfully incentivizing creating things when the people who are protecting it are like the estate of Frank Sinatra.

• 1:10:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. Well, and not for nothing, it's like go betweens, it's the labels, right? Like often the people picking this fight are the publishing houses and the record labels who stand to gain from continuing to be the arbiter of access to all of this stuff, rather than building new systems of distribution and creativity.

• 1:10:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, and publishers and authors, a lot of authors were really split on the Internet Archive. There were people who were supporting the suit that they also believe, like there are these very contemporary novels that are getting scanned and that people are clearly reading them. Instead of buying my books, it's already really hard to get people to buy my books, et cetera. And there, yeah, there are a lot of authors who disagree and a lot of authors who really do want to see their work more widely disseminated.

• 1:11:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, this, it always makes me think of the, one of the tips I got as a young reporter and now give to lots of reporters is that anytime you come across like an academic paper that's in some journal that's really expensive that you can't buy, just email the author and they will always be so, so, so thrilled to send it to you for free. Because what, what they want is, is people to read it. They want their stuff to be out in the world, they want it to be accessed. And the idea that it's behind this gigantic paywall that somebody else profits from actually infuriates them. It's just how the system works. And I will say, I have tried this many times over the years, just emailing and being like, hey, somebody's trying to charge me like $5,000 to read this, will you just send it to me? And they're always so excited to do so, every time. It makes me so happy.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  The open library is also kind of great for the large swath of books that have not really been digitized and are not really available as ebooks and are also mostly out of print, which means anything I do is going to be me buying a used copy off Amazon. And thanks to the first sale doctrine, no one involved in publishing that is going to see a cent.

• 1:12:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's that's real. So the the kind of biggest picture end of all of this is I think what you're talking about with these questions about kind of who makes money from digital goods. It's like this is the reckoning we're having with the Internet as a whole right now, right? Especially as we talk about OpenAI and AI training data and this question of like, I have a webpage and the content of that webpage is is valuable in like newly measurable ways. And I would I would think that if I'm the Internet Archive at this moment, the idea of all of these pages that I have been archiving and and sort of lovingly caring for and chronicling over the years are going to be walled off by the companies that want to make money from the content of them, suddenly starts to become like this existential threat to the whole

• 1:12:49David Pierce?

  idea of preserving the Internet over time. Are we headed towards that? Am I catastrophizing like what companies are doing to OpenAI's web crawler? Or is this like a real possibility of where we're going?

• 1:13:03Speaker 05

  I have an email draft open right now that is just me asking the Internet Archive, hey, is it going to be a problem that places are starting to block common crawl?

• 1:13:12David Pierce?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:13:13Speaker 05

  So yeah, I don't actually know the answer yet.

• 1:13:15David Pierce?

  But it sure seems like it could be, right? Because I think like we've been talking about robots.txt, the the file that lives on tons of websites that are basically like it governs sort of which which crawlers can and can't access which parts of the site. And this is the kind of thing that like if you run a relatively unsophisticated web operation, you've just never thought about, you're just like, anybody who wants to crawl my website, come crawl my website. And now it's like the folks who run the web in ways big and small are going to start to be much more thoughtful about who they let in and out because there's real stuff to be gained and lost from who you let in and out. And yeah, I just I wonder now if the Internet Archive is going to have to go like hat in hand to every website on the Internet and be like, please allow us to preserve your website.

• 1:14:00David Pierce?

  And it's going to become a really different kind of conversation.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  This is, I think, another piece of the puzzle that I really, really struggle with, which is that I think the impulse that I really subscribe to and feel to enable free access to a lot of things turned out to then have been taken advantage of by people who have made a huge amount of money off it. Like, one of the foundational cases that is, says you can scan books is the Google lawsuit.

• 1:14:29David Pierce?

  Right, sure.

• 1:14:30Speaker 05

  The Google Books suit. And Google, in a lot of ways, it's really great that that case happened. It's really great that we said you can scan books so that you can analyze them and create these really interesting other, like, cataloging systems for them. But then, at the same time, I think there are a lot of people who feel like, okay, we went through all of this trouble to make sure that places like the Internet Archive, places whose deal is that they want to open up access to things for free, that they want to do this largely just on a nonprofit basis. They want this purely for, I mean, publishers will say that Internet Archive is not altruistic. That is like its own can of worms for reasons that I think we can all agree are not hugely profit-driven for them.

• 1:15:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 05

  And then this just, the upshot of this is that Facebook and Google and OpenAI all got rich off it.

• 1:15:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I think that question of, and the Internet Archive's motives are gonna start to get really interesting. Because I think it seems less likely to me that everyone is gonna sort of show up and immediately turn on the Internet Archive as a thing. I think most people, maybe not most people, I think many people would see the Internet Archive as a net good, despite some issues that it has. I certainly see it that way, but.

• 1:15:39Speaker 05

  I think the issue is that's not how the law works.

• 1:15:41David Pierce?

  Well, sure.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  I think the issue is that someone's going to go to court and say, well, the problem is that these companies made money off this thing. And clearly, therefore, anyone who is using these things in this particular way is depriving these people of money. And then that gets applied to the Internet Archive. And there are, one thing that has happened is like, there was a Supreme Court case that differentiates pretty strongly between profit-driven, like, profit and nonprofit fair use works. And that very heavily favored the idea that if you release something, like, if you make something for profit, it is less deserving of fair use protections. So that could factor in. But yeah, you're right. I think this is all really weird and complicated.

• 1:16:22David Pierce?

  So it seems like then maybe, maybe I had it backwards that actually this, this kind of broader shift on the internet is a, is a problem, but it's maybe scarier for the Internet Archive that one of these extremely huge lawsuits, I think I was looking at the number and it was like the, the estimated payout for the book settlement was like $19 million, which is half of the Internet Archive's budget, which is a huge number, and that the record industry, if it completely won, was looking for something like $400 million, which would, I assume essentially ends the Internet Archive as an ongoing concern. So maybe that's the bigger risk is that eventually it gets caught up in this bigger question with these bigger companies and that becomes like the real existential threat, not this sort of sea change in the norms of the internet.

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  I am, yes, I'm very worried that at some point someone's going to sue the Internet Archive in a way that is explicitly vindictive. Publishers, it seems like so far they've largely avoided the worst case scenario by just striking this at least temporary deal while the Internet Archive appeals that just says, okay, we're going to lock down the, the open library. I think because publishers realize how incredibly ugly they would look if they said, not only are we, we're going to shut down this program, we're going to like bankrupt this entire load bearing element of the internet.

• 1:17:36David Pierce?

  It's a bad look, for sure. Okay, so the, the appeal, we think is probably coming pretty soon in the book case, right? This is all kind of happening in real time here?

• 1:17:46Speaker 05

  I'm not sure exactly when it is. They have been saying just, yeah, we're appealing soon, but I don't think there's been an actual case that's hit yet.

• 1:17:52David Pierce?

  Okay. And the, the record industry thing is still in pretty early stages, right? So there's, there's more to come, but we don't know exactly how that's going to shake out yet.

• 1:18:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was filed in mid-August, and so I think the first meeting at this point is something like October. And so I don't know that we're going to know anything about it immediately.

• 1:18:09David Pierce?

  Do you have an early read on the music case? Is it likely to go the same way the publishers case did because it, it sort of deals with similar things?

• 1:18:16Speaker 05

  I'm not necessarily sure because I think that copyright and fair use is really complicated. Like the thing with fair use is that it's all case by case, but I wouldn't be surprised. I, I wouldn't be surprised if this goes badly for them. I think that courts often tend to be. Very deferential to copyright holders.

• 1:18:34David Pierce?

  Yeah. Are you as sort of broadly worried about the ongoing existence of this thing as I am? Like, I've really come around to thinking, to your point, that like, it is a load-bearing part of the internet. The internet needs something like this. And maybe there are other versions of it out there that I just don't know about. Like, maybe somebody at AWS is just like lovingly chronicling the internet for all of us and everything will be fine. But this seems like we should be rooting for the Internet Archive to continue to exist, right?

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  I think that the Wayback Machine at this point is a vital journalistic resource and a vital historical resource. And every time I see something like CNET just deleting huge parts of what amounts to one of the only repositories of early internet journalism, and saying, "Well, it's okay because it's on the Wayback Machine," I just look at that with just the most terrified large eyes.

• 1:19:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. And this will not be the last time things like that happen. And, I mean, I was reading something that said, like, "The average webpage only exists in its sort of initial form for like 90 days." Like, I think we underrate the speed with which the internet changes, not just grows, but changes. And I think the more I've learned about the Internet Archive, the more I've come to realize, like, that function alone to understand how things move over time is really important.

• 1:19:53Speaker 05

  And it's really, one of the reasons why all these cases are so important is because our culture is moving to things where there is no hard copy. That this just is the record of human culture for the last couple decades. This is where people who would have been publishing zines, or small print books, or writing letters to each other, this is where a lot of that stuff is going. And if we lose that, that's a huge gap. That's just like a cultural blackout.

• 1:20:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. Well, Addie, thank you. I feel much better. I know things now. This all didn't make sense to me a half hour ago, and now I feel like I'm getting there. So thank you. I appreciate it.

• 1:20:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, I think this is going to be really interesting cases to watch.

• 1:20:33David Pierce?

  For sure. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and do the hotline. Addie, thanks.

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• 1:21:49David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As a reminder, the hotline number is 866-VERGE-11. Call and ask us all of your biggest, weirdest, wonkiest tech questions. You can also email us, [email protected], if you don't want to call. But if you can call, call. I think it's really fun when people call. We're actually going to play two messages that we got, like, within 24 hours of each other, that I just thought were a very funny combination. Let's just hear them both. Let's play the first one.

• 1:22:16Speaker 06

  Hi, my name's Kate. I have worked in video production and media production for, like, almost a decade now. So one of the things that I deal with a lot is file transfer and moving big amounts of, you know, just like gigabytes and gigabytes of video footage from one place to another. And my question is, since I've tried a lot of systems and all of them suck, is why does Google Drive suck specifically? I know that the files that we're generating are becoming larger, then we can probably move them at a quick speed, but... Google Drive has like issues that I don't notice with other things like SharePoint and OneDrive. Like when you try and download a large amount of files, it feels like it spends so much time zipping them together that it doesn't actually, like it would be faster

• 1:23:00Speaker 06

  for you to just download them one by one. And I've tried it and it is. So I'm like, what is Google doing wrong? Because Google is Google, right? They're like, God, so they should be better at this by now. I guess that's my question. Why does Google Drive suck? And what do you guys think is the best opportunity if I'm in one place and I need to move huge gigabytes of files to another pretty fast? Also, love the show.

• 1:23:20David Pierce?

  Okay, this is an extremely good question, and I love it very much. And I love it especially because here is the other voicemail we got in the same 24-hour period as that one.

• 1:23:30Speaker 07

  Hey, David and the rest of the Verge casters, or maybe I should call you the Verge castanets. This is Jack, co-founder, CEO, and CTO of a small pharmaceutical company based here in Hillsborough, California. And the path of least resistance for us has been the Windows 11, Microsoft 365 platform. And one of the biggest issues is their OneDrive sync tool, which is the equivalent of what Dropbox has, is horrendously bad, horrendously slow. It is insane, the kind of trouble it causes, I think, the entire world. And we know that Dropbox can do this instantly and really great. And so we know that there isn't a technological problem. It's just a choice on their part. I am trying to mount the campaign of the world's

• 1:24:15Speaker 07

  greatest minds and influencers, of which you guys are included, to pressure Microsoft to fix this, make this work really, really, really well, so that it doesn't cause problems, but actually causes joy, or sparks joy, I guess is the way we should put it these days. You guys know the right people. You have a big megaphone voice. Let's do this.

• 1:24:37David Pierce?

  Okay, two thoughts on this. One, Verge castanets, absolutely not. Thought number two, I can say with great confidence that Dropbox is not better. I have used Dropbox many times. Dropbox is not better. And Veeran Pavich is here with his hand raised, which I assume means he has lots of feelings. Hi, Veeran.

• 1:24:55Speaker 08

  Hello. Thanks for having me. I can't wait to talk about cloud storage.

• 1:25:00David Pierce?

  Everybody's favorite subject.

• 1:25:01Speaker 08

  I spent too much money on cloud storage and physical storage. I just spent $2,000 on a SAN.

• 1:25:07David Pierce?

  This is why you're here. You're our supervising video producer. You move files all the time.

• 1:25:11Speaker 08

  It's all I do.

• 1:25:13David Pierce?

  I want to know both your process in general, like if you have a giant thing to move from place to place, how you do it? And then B, why most of these solutions are so terrible and if there is a better way? So start with your workflow, like get as nerdy as you possibly can. You shoot a thing, it's enormous. What do you do?

• 1:25:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we are a little bit lucky as to say that we don't use, you know, Google Drive and Dropbox and everything because we have a portal into our network storage, into our NAS or SAN actually, which is located in New York, but we have a portal that we use on the browser that we can connect to. And it works pretty well as to say it works as well as, you know, it really depends on like your connection and everything like that, but you know, like if you put a computer to sleep and you turn it back on, it'll continue doing its thing. Like that itself, it's like amazing.

• 1:26:10David Pierce?

  Isn't it wild that that's like a 25-year-old solution to this problem and we have not invented anything better?

• 1:26:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, like it's still not perfect. Most times it'll continue transfer. And most times if I start uploading the same folder, it will know, oh, you already have, you know, 12 of these files in there. I will skip and I'll continue just uploading whatever I need to finish uploading. So in that regard, it works pretty well. Is it faster or anything like that? No, but it's more stable and it's kind of all you need. The frustration with like Google Drive is that, you know, if you select two or more files, it'll start zipping the thing. And that zipping process usually gets to like 75% and then you're trying to see the like circular progress bar to see if it's moving and more often than not, you're like, okay.

• 1:26:57Speaker 08

  I think it's probably stuck. So someone mentioned downloading individual files. That is a solution. It is a terribly painful solution that also requires you to just like know which file. It it just takes a while. All of these platforms, Dropbox, Google Drive, guessing OneDrive. I haven't used OneDrive, I'll be honest. They do have a desktop client that you can download onto your machine. And I know some people don't love them. It takes a little bit more just like file management and organizational skills. But it works so much better because you can, again, let the thing upload and not have to worry about it. There's usually like an icon next to it that tells you if it's downloaded onto your local drive or if it's in the cloud.

• 1:27:40Speaker 08

  When the upload is finished, that works. I think iCloud can do better in that regard, actually, but that's.

• 1:27:46David Pierce?

  Well, I think for like day to day sort of ongoing use, that works pretty well. Like I I mostly use Google Drive and I have the same thing. I have the desktop app. And what I did was just set up a couple of like watched folders. So that if I put anything into those folders, it automatically uploads to Google Drive. And that works. It's not fast. It's also, there's also no sort of obvious way that I have discovered to say like, upload this first. It just, it's kind of a janky system. But in terms of like having a thing that just kind of happens in the background and makes all your stuff available everywhere. I agree. That is a substantially better solution than like drag and dropping everything into the Google Drive web app.

• 1:28:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, files are also getting larger. I'm like surprised that they're like, they're not better at just like cloud manager. Interfaces, like not even just Google Drive and Dropbox and everything else, but like, you know, like GoPro has a cloud subscription and a cloud like storage for all your GoPro footage. And it's like painfully bad at like file management or knowing like what is being uploaded and things like that. So there's like a lot of work on the software side that needs to be done to like make all that better.

• 1:28:51David Pierce?

  Before I lose this train of thought, did you say iCloud is better? That might be the first time I've ever heard anyone say iCloud is better than anything. Is iCloud an answer here?

• 1:29:00Speaker 08

  Oh, no, iCloud should be better.

• 1:29:02David Pierce?

  Oh, iCloud should be better?

• 1:29:04Speaker 08

  Yes, there's like a lot of times when I'm like not entirely sure like what's what's happening on iCloud. It's just like this magical thing that happens in the background and the icons are like sometimes work and right clicking and download now sometimes work. It's it's a whole mess and like, I don't know, like, have you been to iCloud.com in like?

• 1:29:23David Pierce?

  No, why would anyone do that to themselves?

• 1:29:25Speaker 08

  Right, like you can access your files that way. It's basically like, you know, the files app on your iPad or on your iPhone. But like the lack of feedback, like the like, you just have to kind of trust that it's doing its thing. And oftentimes it's not like I export all of my photos and edits directly onto the iCloud because I just want to be able to access them on any device that I have that is an iOS or iPadOS device. And for the longest time, that workflow was great. Like, I never had to like check it. In like last six months, like most files don't get uploaded and I just don't know why. And it's painful that I can't really find out why that is.

• 1:30:06David Pierce?

  So does the the tool we use, does it have a name? Is it like a thing people can go sign up for and use?

• 1:30:11Speaker 08

  I'm not entirely sure if there's like a business license to it or if you can like use it just like by logging it. It is called Media Shuttle and it does have like a companion app. It's basically just like extension or utility.

• 1:30:24David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, I've had to use this before. It's just like a 2002 web app that it's just like put file here and you put file here and it uploads. But that's all you need.

• 1:30:33Speaker 08

  That's all you need is like a tiny little window that it's like this big onto your browser that just shows you like your file hierarchy, your structure, and it just works. Signient is just this like companion app that you have to like have downloaded, which I'm guessing that's what helps to, you know, continue the upload when you're away or close the computer or just like figure out which files you already have and which files you don't need. And yeah, that one works pretty well. There are like solutions. That like production companies and like event teams use that we just can't use this like, you know, everyday users.

• 1:31:08David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:31:08Speaker 08

  Cloud storage is kind of, it is tough, I guess. Like, Google Drive is like not the safest option out there. Like, a lot of companies don't want to use Google Drive for that reason. So they will revert back to just like the Signians and the media shuttles of this world, like very niche, specific like softwares that you probably need a corporate license for, so.

• 1:31:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. Okay, so I will say to answer the why are these tools so bad question, um, I don't know.

• 1:31:34Speaker 08

  I don't know.

• 1:31:35David Pierce?

  But we're gonna find out, because it is true that Google and Microsoft have the infrastructure to be better at this. And I, I have a bunch of guesses as to why it would not be interested in giving you like blistering fast downloads and make it really easy to keep a whole file in one place so that you can pull it. But we're, we should actually investigate that. Now I'm curious. We're gonna go find out. But it seems like the best tip we can give you as a regular person is like use Dropbox, which is not where I thought we were gonna be at the beginning of this. But it's, is it the, it's the best of all the bad options?

• 1:32:04Speaker 08

  Honestly, I've had like most like wooded and the desktop client, it just sort of works. It like works pretty well. It's less aggressive with trying to like compress your files or like zip them into anything. The problem is that like, I mean, personally, like I pay for four terabytes on iCloud, two terabytes on Dropbox, and I think two terabytes on Google Drive. And it's like, I know. It's, it's like, it's way too much. And I use them all, like Dropbox is personal. Google Drive, half of it is from like, you know, a company and half of it is mine.

• 1:32:37David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:32:37Speaker 08

  And then iCloud, if you pay for, here's a, here's a tip. You can pay for iCloud storage, but if you also add Apple One, is that what it's called?

• 1:32:47David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:32:47Speaker 08

  It actually gives you more storage onto your iCloud drive. So a lot of people think that the maximum is two terabytes. You can actually double that with Apple One or add a terabyte. I forgot exactly which, which way it is. But so you can get more out of your iCloud. But yeah, getting the desktop client from Dropbox, it's, is the way to do it. And I think just like organizing files through it, it's a little bit easier. If your company uses Google Drive and want to use Google Drive, then you'll have to use the Google Drive.

• 1:33:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:19Speaker 08

  Press stop and spend like 10 minutes learning how to actually like use it well. So selective sync. Picking your folders, deleting the stuff that you don't need. There's like a lot more management that goes into it, but it works better than just like a web interface.

• 1:33:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, you can eventually kind of set it and forget it, which is a good thing. All right, Veron, thank you very much to all our callers. Thank you as always for calling. I hope that helped. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show and as always, thank you for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes. You should preorder Taylor's book, but also, you know, read theverge.com. We think it's a good website. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or suggestions for how to overcomplicate my coffee-making strategy, again, you can always email us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. It's so fun hearing all of your questions. Send me everything, all your thoughts, questions, feelings, ideas, everything. We're going to do a hotline question on every episode, so please keep them coming. And again, if

• 1:34:19David Pierce?

  you have questions about The Verge or The Vergecast, please send them in. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about banana surgery, the Google verse, and all of the other news of the week. It might be late August, but there's still a lot going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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