Weekly Scroll: Addicted to Posting
From Washington Post reporters to presidential campaigns, everyone's too online
Taylor Lorenz Rides Again
Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at the Washington Post, where she writes about online trends and culture. She’s a magnet for controversy even in the best of times - here’s how I described her when reviewing her book Extremely Online:
You can’t discuss Taylor Lorenz’s book without writing about Lorenz herself. Lorenz is ‘extremely online’ in the classic meaning of the phrase. She is an endless source of internet drama, and starts online fights and discourse as easily as she breathes. She has enormous Main Character Energy. She has a number of bizarre personality quirks like drinking gallons of water per day, keeping her thermostat at ungodly temperatures, absolutely refusing to ever say how old she is, and being the internet’s most persistent COVID doomer even now in the year of our lord 2023. She proudly leans into the culture war and is a constant target for the right-leaning crowd.
Lorenz was invited to a ‘digital influencer’ event at the White House last week, where she took the opportunity to share this photo with her close friends group on Instagram:
This is a classic Lorenzian move. What do you do when you want people to know you’re important enough to get White House invites and be in the same room as the President, but also your core friend group is hyper-online leftist influencers who love to call that President ‘Genocide Joe’? You share a picture calling him a war criminal.
The picture leaked from Lorenz’s friend group and landed her in hot water. At first Lorenz denied the picture was real, saying You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes. Then, NPR called around and found four of her friends1 willing to go on the record that they saw the post on her Instagram story and it was real. In a great example of ‘the coverup is worse than the crime’, NPR also reports that she initially lied to her Washington Post editors about the post and that now the Post is conducting an internal investigation. In the never-back-down-never-admit-fault fashion that characterizes modern politics, Lorenz is now also denying that she ever denied the post was real, and is instead claiming it was ‘just a meme’.
Long time readers will know that I’m constantly repeating the founding concept of this blog: Posting is the Most Powerful Force in the Universe. Quoting that post:
People have always been driven by the desire to gain status, and promote their views. They’ve always done stupid things to impress their friends. There’s always been a thrill from being counter-cultural, from getting lots of attention, from going against the grain.
What’s new is the scale that the internet provides. What was already a potent drug became irresistible. Previous generations played status games that were addictive like opium, this generation is playing status games that are addictive like super fentanyl (which yes, is a real thing). The algorithms we’ve designed to promote viral content cause a rush that can’t be replicated. The allure of posting can make you throw your life away purely to seem cool to a group of people you’ve never met in person. That allure can cause the world’s most beloved people to light their own reputations on fire, the world’s richest people to abandon their businesses.
This is yet another example of someone potentially lighting themselves on fire to post. Taylor Lorenz has one of the single best jobs in media. What she does as a ‘internet trend and culture reporter’ is honestly not that important.2 She’s good at her job, but ultimately she writes stories about AI cat videos and slang words like Cheugy. Lorenz gets the prestige of writing for the Washington Post while being able to basically just write about any TikTok meme that captures her fancy. This is a top 0.01% journalism job. People would kill for that gig.
And she’s going to potentially fumble the bag because she couldn’t help but call Biden a war criminal on social media while literally on the clock! While on the job, in her official capacity! I don’t think Lorenz will actually lose her job here, because she’s an internet celebrity and firing her would be an enormous shitshow the Post probably doesn’t want. But there’s a non-zero probability it could happen!
Even if you think Biden is a ‘war criminal’, you call him a war criminal at the bar after the event while having a drink with all your other loser internet-poisoned leftist friends. You don’t do it on social media! You don’t do it while you’re literally still sitting at the event in question, on the job! And yes it was a ‘Close Friends’ story, but anyone with a million followers (and specifically anyone who professionally writes about social media) should know that things always leak.
It’s just that Lorenz can’t help herself. She’s addicted to posting. That kind of addiction is not metaphorical, it’s real, and there are people out there who literally cannot stop posting even if it might ruin their lives. Ironically, Lorenz has quite a deal in common with people she despises politically like Elon Musk, JK Rowling, Chaya Raichik, etc. They’re all internet poisoned in the same way, just from opposite angles. And perhaps that’s just part of the Yin and Yang of Taylor Lorenz - she only has her job because she’s addicted to posting, but that same addiction will constantly drag her backwards.3
Bet on Infinite Scroll
I created a prediction market to see how many subscribers I’m likely to have by the end of the year. The markets think we’ll be around 10K!
Trump’s Campaign is Too Online
You know who else is far too online besides Taylor Lorenz? The entirely of the Trump campaign and the MAGA movement generally.
Last week we talked about Trump’s very odd livestream with edgelord Adin Ross. This week, Trump returned for another bizarre online event when he joined an ‘X Space’ with Elon Musk. You may remember that months ago, Elon was a big Ron DeSantis backer and that DeSantis kicked off his doomed campaign with an Spaces event that crashed before it could even get started. But Twitter made sure to fix their technical issues behind the scenes this time - the site wouldn’t repeat those embarrassing glitches this time around.
Hahahahaha nope the exact same thing happened:
It’s worth noting that sites like Twitch and Kick semi-regularly host livestreams with half a million to a million viewers - and those sites are streaming video+audio. Twitter’s engineering team should absolutely be able to handle a million people tuning in for just audio, but Elon fired 75% of the company when he bought it so maybe the guys who knew how to do that are working for Meta now. At points, Elon dropped from the call and you could hear a still-connected and unmuted Trump shuffling around in the background.
But beyond the technical failures4, the stream did eventually get going. And it was exactly the sort of bizarre spectacle you’d expect from a Trump/Musk conversation.
Trump spoke with a distinctive lisp for almost the entire event, turning every ‘s’ sound into a ‘th’. He sounded like a guy whose dentures have come loose and who’s constantly trying to suck them back into his mouth while he talks. It was bad enough that ‘Dentures’ was trending on Twitter’s sidebar.
On substance, the event was just as bad. There were points where Musk would get into some technical aspect of climate science5 and Trump would rant about nuclear in response. You may think that’s reasonable - nuclear power is a potential solution to decarbonizing the economy. Except that Trump was ranting about nuclear weapons, for some unknown reason. It’s the kind of thing that almost makes you feel bad for Elon.
This is all a result of a campaign that’s far too online. They’ve stopped doing as many in person rallies in favor of events like the Adin Ross stream and the Musk Space. Trump himself is famously online, and chases blindly after whatever cultural grievance is shoved in his face by the algorithm on any given day. The Trump/Musk event was an exercise in preaching to the already-converted, but they don’t seem to realize that because they’re so online. They’re lost in the sauce, unskewing polls online, posting badly forced memes in a desperate attempt to garner social media attention, unable to deal with what the mostly offline public cares about.
You can see this most clearly in the misadventures of JD Vance. Since becoming Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Vance has been ensnared in a number of weird controversies. Vance was caught saying that we need to ‘punish’ childless people with higher taxes and insulting people without kids as childless cat ladies. He’s agreed with a podcast host who said that the sole purpose of post menopausal females is child rearing. And just this week he implied that both Italian, German, and Irish immigration was a big problem for America while completely misunderstanding the movie Gangs of New York.6
Vance is a champion at taking popular positions like “Give a tax break to parents” or “It’s nice when grandma helps babysit the kids” and reframing them in the most divisive 4chan/incel coded language possible. That’s how you get the phrase ‘sole purpose of post menopausal females’. He is genuinely steeped in far-right online insanity. That’s his culture. It’s why he can’t stop putting his foot in his mouth and it’s why the weird attacks work - he’s genuinely a weird freak who can’t stop spouting overly online nonsense.
The entire conservative movement is becoming more and more captured by these currents over time, largely as a result of a conservative media echo-chamber system that rewards extremism and boundary pushing. I think a general rule of politics is that the party perceived as having the fewest freaks wins. You never want to be the party with the biggest freaks, or the most freaks, or the most prominent freaks. But that’s where the GOP is headed. Their isolated spaces like NewsMax, Fox News, Truth Social, and talk radio don’t help their weird problem. And Elon may be adding to it by turning Twitter into a shittier right wing clone of every other social site.
A Good Stick
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Links
Reddit continues its winning streak, as advertisers continue to increase spend on the site. The online ad market has bifurcated for a while - Google/Meta do phenomenal business while the rest of the web’s ad markets have withered and died. But Reddit may be coming to challenge the duopoly.
Not sure how to summarize this, but an interesting post about the direction of Substack and how much of it feels like the cheap monetization of people’s diaries.
The NYTimes has a sobering report on how social media is being used to fuel anti-immigrant riots and violence across Europe.
A new study shows that TikTok’s algorithm mysteriously shows less content that is critical of China than any other major social network. I wonder why that could be?
Anne Helen Petersen has a great series on the phenomenon of Bama Rush. Highly recommended reading even if you don’t normally care about that kind of thing.
The friendliest social network you’ve never heard of.
Parents and Gen Alpha kids are having unintelligible conversations because of ‘brainrot language’.
Is demure the opposite of brat?
Posts
Imagine not one but FOUR of your close friends being willing to snitch to NPR about how stupid your Instagram stories are. Brutal.
I would throw myself and this blog in that category as well. Very little of this matters!
A final thought on the Lorenz situation: One of her greatest online maneuvers has been to negatively polarize a lot of journalists in her favor. It’s absolutely true that Lorenz is frequently attacked by some of the worst right-wing idiots on social media. So when she’s criticized for more legitimate reasons, a whole class of online bloggers/podcasters/etc tends to rush to her defense, assuming that *all* attacks against Lorenz are meritless.
One last note on the technical failure - Musk blamed a ‘DDOS attack’, which sources inside Twitter immediately denied was true. Insane levels of cope from Musk.
Where he actually has mostly mainstream views
The movie’s plot revolves around a xenophobic nativist gang who try to kill members of an Irish gang. For some reason, Vance’s lesson is ‘don’t let in the immigrants’ rather than ‘nativism is bad’.
"Vance is a champion at taking popular positions like “Give a tax break to parents” or “It’s nice when grandma helps babysit the kids” and reframing them in the most divisive 4chan/incel coded language possible. That’s how you get the phrase ‘sole purpose of post menopausal females’. He is genuinely steeped in far-right online insanity. That’s his culture. It’s why he can’t stop putting his foot in his mouth and it’s why the weird attacks work - he’s genuinely a weird freak who can’t stop spouting overly online nonsense."
I veer back and forth between this ^^^ and thinking that the 2016, Trump-critical, JD Vance is the real one, and part of the reason he comes off so fucking weird now is that he's trying to comport himself like a Trump bro, and that MAGA chitin just sits uncomfortably on his bug-like frame. and everyone can see it.
> the misadventures of JD Vance
Sounds like a Wes Anderson movie or something.
Great post!