What The Heck Happened To The Internet? — With Ryan Broderick
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Let's talk about what the heck happened to the internet, which has gone through a major cultural shift of late. That conversation with reporter Ryan Broderick and our own Ranjan Roy is coming up right after this.

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today because we're going to talk about what's happening to the internet. We've talked about this a bit on the show in the past, but we're going to go into it in much greater depth today, looking at the changes in algorithms, the content that rises to the top, and what it's doing to our brains.

and we have such a great group to do it with us today because joining us is ryan broderick he is a reporter and writes a great newsletter called garbage day you can find it at garbageday.com he's also the host of the panic world podcast ryan great to see you welcome to the show thanks for having me excited to be here and

And of course, we couldn't have this conversation without Ranjan Roy of Margins and our Friday show, Fame. Ranjan, welcome to a Wednesday show. How are you doing? I am so excited to learn what happened to the internet from Ryan. So I'm waiting. I'm ready. Let's get into it. Same here. All right, Ryan, let's talk a little bit about the genesis of this show. So a few months back, Ranjan and I were looking at some of the great phenomenons coming up on the internet.

There was the Hawk 2 meme where this woman, Hayley Welch, made, I would say, an X-rated comment on an interview TikTok and all of a sudden became an instant celebrity, which is something we'd never seen before. And then you have phenomenons like the Costco guys coming up, which are sort of like

I guess we would call them mass appeal internet celebrities, which to my mind hadn't happened at the same frequency and the power that they're hitting today. And so like our theory was basically that we've moved away from the follow model on social media and

And now we have the 4U everywhere, right? So the 4U on TikTok, the 4U on Twitter. Everything is dominated by an algorithm that chooses what might be interesting to you and not what you follow. And it's shifting the diet of content that we consume and the stuff that rises to the top online, which is why you end up having so much interest in people like Hawk2 and these Costco guys. Why don't you take that thesis on to start and let me know if you think that is accurate.

I think you are right that we have definitely shifted to a world where 10 years ago, everyone could look at the internet and sort of see the same stuff. You know, I always call it like the Gangnam Style era, the peak Ellen show moments. And it did feel like there was some sort of digital monoculture, which sometimes interacted with real world monoculture. And we kind of lived like that for about a decade.

I would say that the biggest difference now is yes, apps like TikTok are breaking that by showing you hyper personalized feeds of content specifically for you. So you and I don't have the same TikTok feed and never the two shall meet. But I look at Hakutua and the Costco guys and that kind of mainstream normie internet virality that we're seeing right now. And I put most of the blame on the pandemic.

which I've recently been going back and kind of reassessing. And my view of it now is that essentially everyone that wasn't online before 2020, who would ever be online, came online. And now we're getting enough distance from this moment where it feels like every month or so, very normal people do very normal people things online. Everyone's like, "I can't believe this is viral."

And then they just become famous. And that is a definite change from how things worked in the 2010s.

Is part of that that the pandemic broke everyone's brain and they're online? Well, I mean, I think we can all agree that yes, we're all a little unwell from being online during the pandemic. But no, I would say it's internet culture became culture in 2020. This is like the moment where, you know, Stephen Colbert is wearing AirPods and doing his TV show on Zoom from his bathtub. You know, the barriers broke down. Every family got a group chat that didn't have one. Everyone's parents were suddenly on Facebook 24-7 if they weren't already. It's

The internet stopped being a subcultural space is what I would argue. Can I follow up quickly on this? So it's interesting to me that you've talked about how like we all used to watch the same stuff on the internet, like Gangnam Style, and then it sort of spread into subcultures with the 4U. But then you have that that's crossed with this theory that you have that we all went online at the same time, which is interesting because...

you then have these new normal people, celebrities like we're talking about with Hawk Tua and the Costco guys. So do they transcend this for youification or are these, you know, memes, the Costco guys and Hawk Tua, are they now dominant on a sub part of the, of a very large subculture on the internet or are they the thing or are they a niche that Ranjan and I only end up in because we're normies? Yeah.

So, okay, like, let's think about Grumpy Cat, shall we? So Grumpy Cat is a weird looking cat that went viral on Reddit because the cat looked weird. And the initial kind of virality of, you know, an image like that 10 years ago was being driven by people who were super online power users, bloggers, aggregators, you know, young people who were super into Vine were sharing Logan Paul videos like it was not mainstream.

And most of what we sort of think about as internet culture, as meme culture, has never felt very mainstream. But now, because everyone is online and because they don't need aggregators, they don't need communities to surface things for them, it's kind of becoming... It feels counterintuitive, but...

Essentially, if you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff like a blowjob joke or going to Costco, you can open up TikTok and TikTok's algorithm identifies that and shows it to you. And there's no arbiter there other than the machinery of the app. So that's why I think we're seeing what Max Reed kind of dubbed the Zinternet. Because if you're just like a normal basic guy and you open up TikTok, it's going to show you normal basic guy stuff.

as opposed to 10 years ago where, uh,

you might hear about something viral and that like, you know, weird Redditors were talking about, you know, Pepe the Frog or something that those days feel over to a degree. I am liking this. And again, this internet Max Reed had defined as the network adjacent to the sports internet of 40 something dads and the hustle internet of Miami crypto bullshit and the reactionary internet of trad influencers. And when I'm thinking about this as a

40-something dad myself and who has plenty of normie friends in the early 2010s I would have been the one surfacing what is going viral for them and

And we all went on group chats that probably went from Facebook Messenger to even Signal and WhatsApp. And then now they are just... The meme time to delivery is so much shorter if I'm sending it or they're actually informing me of what's going viral. Right. Like this morning, my mom sent me an Instagram reel making fun of the United Healthcare shooter. Like that's...

That's crazy. That's a crazy reversal. I'm the online one. You're the online guy. I should be sending her dank memes, not the opposite. What happens to these smaller online subcultures then? Do they still exist? Are they bigger than before? Or is there a chance that they just end up getting subsumed into these broader, you know, Zinternet and Normiculture parts of society?

The Internet, because I guess like imagine somebody who's like in one of like the online radicalization communities, because like this is this is the thing with the Internet. The Internet is great for what's not normal because you can sort of find a place to dissent or, you know, object against the mainstream.

So if you were a really online person, there's probably a chance that you gravitate towards some dissenting community in some way. And sometimes that ends up being a radicalization or it could end up in all these different things. Maybe that was what made the internet fun in the beginning was it was just like, yeah, they would never air this or they would never talk about this on the mainstream airwaves. That's exactly right. But I guess like now that the normal is there,

Do you think that these subcultures are actually going to lose some of their appeal to like, let's say the normal people who were on the internet and just trying to find things they liked? Well, I think you're asking this question at a very interesting moment because a blue sky is now north of 25 million users and it's well on its way to let's let, let's say that by this time next year, maybe even sooner, uh,

Blue sky will be around 100 million users, which I looked up this morning, was what Twitter was at 2011.

So like that's how fast this niche platform is growing. And blue sky to me is a total reaction to this internet. It is a, all of the, the, the remaining weird subcultures of the internet decamping to there and using the sites, you know, blocking and filtering and list organizational tools to carve out those spaces. The other thing here is that a lot of these internet communities are

were based on places like you know they were living in reddit or tumblr or communities like that which were public now they're on discord and the only time you might ever see them is when a meme breaks containment from discord so they do exist it's just they're not nearly as visible i think as they used to be until something happens in one of those communities like there's like the drama around the muppet fan account that was doing like you know

He's like creeping on followers. Oh my God. Asking for nudes. Asking for nudes. Oh, you knew about this, Ron John? Of course. I'm clearly an inhabitor of this. Like my internet is Costco guys, but you guys are seeing something else. What happened with these Muppets? So there's a guy who was running a Muppet. Him and his wife were running a fan account for the Muppets.

And then a bunch of followers of this account put him on blast and was like, this guy is going around saying he's polyamorous and he's using that as an excuse to hit on and like sexually harass his followers. And then a bunch of other Muppet fan accounts like came out with statements being like, we don't like this. You know, we condemn this guy. And I think that's like a really good model for thinking about this stuff, which is like up until that point, I did not realize how deep and vast the Muppet fan community was.

for adults. And apparently it's quite big. This happened on Discord or what social network? So it's a Twitter, it's an ex-account. Right. But all the malfeasance, if you will, was happening in DMs. So I think that is one way to think about this is that

The internet is probably as big and strange as it was from the very beginning, but it's now deep hidden under layers of dark social in group chats and discords and DM groups and things like that. So I want to push back quickly on the blue sky thing.

that it's going to hit 100 million users i don't think that's guaranteed at all you don't like it it's not that i don't like it it's just that haven't we seen so many of these social networks get that initial spark and then fizzle i mean what makes us think that blue sky is going to be twitter and not clubhouse i think i know it's not the point of the show but i want to just no no i think it's a fair question i think if it was already clubhouse

the most embarrassing moment in social media history as far as I'm concerned. Internet history. Yeah, acting like that was anything other than just like a conference call simulator for bored rich guys during the pandemic. I hate that app. I think it would have already fizzled. I think the product is good and it's very malleable. You can do things with it that we haven't been able to do with a social network in a long time. You can code things for it. You can develop apps for it. It's fairly open.

And I think the initial energy needed to grow to 100 million in, let's say, a year's time has like the domino has already kind of fallen there. I think I think it there could be, you know, history gets, you know, things get crazy. But I do think if it continues at the pace it's at, it will hit it.

And I also blue sky for me kind of captures the for you versus following dichotomy pretty well. Cause the following functionality works really well. When I go there, I don't get a heavy dopamine hit. I get a light dopamine hit. I get the, that the Twitter used to be for me. And I actually think that could be the staying power that as more people go on, cause remember like

Going on to any social network now, and if you call TikTok a social network, Instagram, you can't just post and have something go viral. Like it has to be really specific content followed by really specific people. So Blue Sky, to me, it is that kind of return to you have some kind of following follower relationship.

People will see your content and you can have some kind of back and forth and engage in some interests. So I think they could be that space for everyone looking to go back to that other model. And everyone has gone towards a 4U algorithmic model. So that's just getting saturated. Yeah. I actually had my first blue sky post, my first skeet break a thousand reposts this week. And God damn.

People on the internet are dumb and like discourse is so stupid regardless of where you are. But it was interesting to sort of watch the how different virality is on blue sky to something like X or even tick tock because it is just like.

You're generating discourse. And then if the discourse is interesting enough, people will just jump on and they'll share it and they'll talk and they'll fight with each other all day, every day, the way Twitter used to be, you know? One thing that's come to mind during this discussion and watching this rise of blue sky has been this question that I've had and wrestled with.

about whether social media is going to still be relevant. And Ryan, you brought up a great point, right? Which is that a lot of the action, a lot of the most interesting stuff on the internet now happens in group chats and happens in Discord and doesn't happen in the social media feeds. And another reason why I'm skeptical of Blue Sky's ability to grow is just because it's so exhausting to try to go and, you know, attack a new platform and build a new audience. And I know this is only speaking for content creators, but I also think that like,

with something like a blue sky, you have now have blue sky, you have threads, you have Instagram, you have Twitter. And instead of like one winning out, which there won't be an absolute winner, you're just going to have diluted experiences everywhere. And if there's so much interesting things happening within the group chats, why would you go to a sort of less relevant social network to sort of see what's going on? So I wonder if social media itself is in the process of becoming less relevant right now.

That's interesting. Did you feel that way in like 2012? So 2000, I mean, 2012, I think Facebook was really the place that most people were hanging out on. So you might have seen, I don't think so actually, because like 2012, you had Facebook, that was still a dominant platform. You had Instagram, which was interesting. And Twitter was maybe at its height.

I would pick 2012 to compare our current moment to because, yes, you did have Facebook, which was huge. And it was slowly becoming sort of the way that most people use the Internet, especially on mobile. You had Twitter, which was completely saturated with the media and was sort of becoming the centralized feed of American and American.

you know, international media and politics. But you also had fairly large competitors like Tumblr, like Reddit, like Pinterest. StumbleUpon, I think, was still in the mix at that point. Right. When you and I first started working together, you know, StumbleUpon was the thing driving the most traffic, not Facebook for most publishers. Right.

So there were a lot of websites and I didn't feel the time that the internet was being diluted by having so many fairly similar and overlapping social media platforms. I think it's kind of annoying right now that we have a million Twitter knockoffs and we have to like kind of shuffle through them. But I think that's actually kind of clearing up pretty quickly. I mean, you're,

I was spending all year posting the same stuff to X, Blue Sky Threads, and LinkedIn. And over the course of the last couple months, I've lost interest in kind of all of them except for Blue Sky.

So, you know, LinkedIn is fine. It's good for traffic. I don't read the comments because they're bad. But I don't feel so pessimistic about having this many social media sites because it's kind of what everyone's been asking for for a decade anyways, like more websites to go on, more stuff to look at. So I think it's all right. I'm optimistic about it.

I also, I think little competition is a good thing, but I think to push back a little for me, Blue Sky, what's interesting around it is to me, it's an actual social network in the sense that I'm posting on there. I'm not getting any engagement. I'm getting minimal, middle engagement. I'm posting for the love of posting, just pure love of posting. But when I do get engagement, it's from people that I've interacted with online for years.

a lot of the people who I had not seen on X in a long time and people I kind of consider online friends, acquaintances or whatever. So it's only really from an actual network. And I think that's interesting to me because that's what the original promise of this was. There's distribution and then there's the actual kind of network and engagement side. And Blue Sky is the latter, which I think is good because there hasn't been that on any of the big platforms in a long time.

I would agree with that. Yeah. So is blue sky sort of a counterbalance to this for you internet?

Right now it is, I think. Just wait until it grows though, right? That's it. I mean, these things always evolve in strange directions, but I think right now it is reinvigorating a muscle online that has atrophied over the last five years. So Ryan, I know we've talked broadly about why things like Coctua go viral, but it's very interesting to me what goes viral on the normal person internet, as we're calling it, or this internet, so to speak, right?

Let's just go through two quick ones that I'd love to get your perspective on why this is so appealing. If you have any thoughts. First of all, the Costco guys. Bring the bars, what we do.

This is a dad and a son that eat the double choc, double choc, chocolate cookie and chicken bake at Costco. And they've turned this into a bit of a media empire. They brought in the Rizzler, which is this very cute fat kid from New Jersey who has this Rizz face where he like puts his finger on his chin and he looks at you and you're like, oh God. Wait,

Wait, the Costco guys brought in the Rizzler? The Rizzler is not even a relative. Oh, he was like a separate phenomenon? He's another viral kid that they teamed up with. Oh, so he's a kid.

uh see i need to be explained this one i got well he had a famous because he was uh wearing a black panther costume and trying to i think trying to convince his dad that he was famous that he was uh that he had superpowers and his dad just kind of mercilessly mocked him and it became super viral and now he's joined forces with the costco guys yeah this is the internet history i i came here for today i genuinely thought they were all related uh it was a shock to me uh truly a shock

So why the Costco guys? I would say that on the normie internet, the zinternet, you know, however you want to describe it, there are essentially two kinds of things that are constantly going viral. Stuff that local radio stations would talk about 30 years ago and stuff that would be on America's Funniest Home Videos. And the Costco guys are essentially like a morning radio, like shock jock kind of vibe, like making funny songs and like talking about like

relatable stuff and then they're making videos that are perfect for america's funniest home videos like it's just it's just the stuff that has always been popular i think um i like their videos because they have a haunting uncanny valley aspect to them where no one's really blinking and they're kind of doing all these weird things in like desolate suburban florida parking lots and shopping malls and stuff but uh i think most people just think it's funny

Well, there was this one video where you saw like a behind the scenes of the dad coaching AJ. Wait, Big Justice is the son. Big Justice, that's right, yeah. The dad coaching Big Justice into every single line that he was going to say, and it was quite haunting.

It is haunting, although my read on it is like they're all having fun. And I think the dad, I mean, I went deep into his like down in the rabbit hole with him. He was like trying to become an influencer on Facebook for a while with like a talk show about beer or something. And I think he used to be a wrestler and now he's trying to go back into wrestling based off the fame of the TikToks.

but he's like involving his family. And I don't know, like if you compare that to like the other stuff that's popular on the internet, like I think it's fairly harmless. It's goofy, you know, but I think it's okay. Yeah. I kind of like that. America's funniest home videos. Cause it, it, to me it's almost like, or everybody loves Raymond or some show from even the nineties. That was the monoculture that was safe, but just a little interesting, but,

I never actually watched it, but just a little fun. And maybe it's just the modern equivalent of that on whatever platforms exist now instead of network TV. I think that's right. It doesn't look exactly like network TV, but I think it's interesting...

that a lot of the aesthetics of what would be popular on the radio or on network TV is being recreated by people now on TikTok. And it's never going to be exactly the same because, like, you don't have this massive sort of budget or a writer's room or sort of, like, executives thinking about how to reach, you know, people in Springfield or whatever. But there's always, I think, going to be an appetite for just, like, basic relatable slop. Yeah.

So is this a good thing instead of the suits at Rockefeller Center choosing what's going to be good now?

I don't even know what the Costco dad's name is, but just regular AJ Buffumo out there just doing the work, doing the hard work, understanding what people will like. Is that better? Yeah, you're asking like, is it better? And I would say that like my major concern with anybody in their situation is,

Are they being paid? Are they like getting compensated for what they're doing? Are the working hours like humane for the children? Like these are the, and you know, these are the fears I have with all of the people who turn virality into sort of a business, you know, because yeah, Hollywood has a lot of problems, a lot of, a lot of bad stuff happening there, but you never know what an individual might do to try to keep up with the viral machine.

One more thing I'm going to say about this family is I think they were about to go out of style. Like the Costco guys were done until they dropped the song. Yep. We bring the boom. Sometimes you've got to reinvent it. You know, sometimes you just got to, you got to shake things up. I listened to that. I was like, Oh God, here we go. I can't not click with these Costco guys. And I clicked and I was like, Oh, this song is good. You've seen the Christmas video where it's like the whole family. Grandma's got lights going on. Yeah.

That's terrible. I hate that. I love it. Every time they release a new video, I send it to everyone I know. And I'm like, we should make a video like this. Why not? As long as the Grizzlers are in it, I'm watching. Who do you think are the biggest early 2010s virality moments who missed out on this boomer? Was it side-eyed Chloe, the little girl meme? Yes.

I mean, because if the Rizzler can wear a Black Panther suit and go viral and join the Costco and collab with the Costco guys, who are all the people that missed out on this boom in normie influencers? Which memes do you wish had made it?

I was talking to someone this week who made the good point that like Rebecca Black probably would have been able to catch this, right? But to connect the two dots of like the, of Hawk Tua and the Costco guys, what I do think is really interesting here is that when Hawk Tua blew up, she was reached out to by Jake Paul's production company. And he's essentially created a company that captures viral stars and then figures out how to effectively franchise them.

So there's clearly now these groups that exist that have been on the Internet long enough that they realize that, OK, we can capitalize on this moment. And we also saw this during the pandemic with Ben Lashes, the meme manager who is selling the rights to different famous memes as NFTs for a while. There's a big interest right now around that.

How do you turn a viral moment into a sustainable media business? It doesn't work totally all the time, but it does seem like there are people who are trying to solve that problem right now, which is curious to me. Yeah, Ryan, you even wondered in your post after the...

to a moment whether her talk to a podcast would be popular and it turned out to be like one of the top podcasts for a couple moments there right after it launched. Right up until the big Pookie reveal and then I think people kind of lost interest. And people don't, the reviews aren't great. Do you know about Pookie? No. Pookie is the boyfriend, right? Oh, sorry. Pookie is her boyfriend and it turned out that he's just some guy but people were like, who's Pookie? Because she hadn't said like his real name but he's just a guy. He's just a guy. Oh, you know, yeah. I mean, it is like,

people in relationships won't post their significant other because I think they get more likes that way. I don't know. Is that a real thing? It's a thing for like,

uh korean pop idols japanese pop idols you're not supposed to say you are in a relationship so that the fans can kind of pretend that there's they're dating you so i can see the psychology of that working on instagram as well right so uh one last one i want to talk about is this lily phillips and we should talk about only fans because she is an only fan star that has been talking about um sleeping with a thousand people yes uh and she slept with like

100 men in a day at the end of 2024. And for some reason, I think the algorithms are pushing that very hard. So does she fit into that like kind of talk radio show type of thing? And it's not only the algorithms, by the way, she's been covered by like almost every, you know, entertainment news site from the post to Daily Mail. What do you think, Ryan? So Lily Phillips was getting a lot of pickup because she's part of a wave of OnlyFans creators that have

smartly realized that if they go viral with their clothes on, they can drive subscriptions to their OnlyFans, right? So she started kind of experimenting with viral stunts. She then decides that she's going to try to break the world record for most people slept with in one day, which is currently 919, and it's held by the actress Lisa Sparks. I looked this up the other day.

It's not even possible. Yeah. Anyway, I don't want to get into the logistics. No. It's best not to think about it. So Lily has said that she is now training for a thousand men in one day. So she tried a hundred men. The reason it went super viral is because Josh Peters, the South African YouTuber that once pranked Katie Hopkins by giving her a C-U-N-T award for

If you ever saw that video during the pandemic, it's pretty good. He went to London and filmed a behind the scenes of Lily Phillips sleeping with 100 guys. And in that video, which is absolutely brutal to watch, like I watched some of it. I was like, this is the darkest thing I've ever seen. She breaks down and starts crying afterwards. And that moment has, I think, been politically weaponized and

by a lot of right wing and far right accounts on X who are sort of pointing at it like this is, you know, this is the end of Western civilization. I don't think what Lily Phillips is doing is particularly new though because like

I would say every nine months since the internet was invented, we have all started screaming at each other about something a porn star was doing. Like remember like 10 years ago, there was like, Oh, this new porn parody is so messed up. Oh my God. I can't believe they would make this. Like, I don't remember that, but I'll take your word for it. I was on the porn parody beat for a while. I had a, yeah. And like, you know, I think there's just a kind of a natural fascination there. Um,

Lily Phillips, though, because she's British, I think has smartly also figured out that she can kind of tap into the British tabloid culture to kind of generate interest. So I think she's just pulling a bunch of levers at once here to kind of get attention and to tie it back to Hakutua and the Costco people and all the rest. Like she's trying to monetize this stuff. She's trying to figure out how to monetize it. And for her, it's much easier because she can be naked on OnlyFans and then you can just go see that if you want to pay.

So in a lot of ways, I think porn stars and sex workers online right now have a much easier way of directly making money off of going viral. Right. And it worked for her. It does, yeah. This actually makes me in the question of is this better or worse than the days of people in suits at big media companies deciding what would be normie culture. Now it's like the most extreme is the easiest road to it, which is not a...

Not the most heartening thing, but I guess it's democratized a bit more so. Yeah, it's funny. I've been asked several times recently by like other reporters, other publications, you know, the simple question of does any of this matter? Which is, I think, this question that a lot of people in the U.S., particularly right now, are asking after the election where we had, you know, nine months of insane memes that kind of ended up meaning nothing. Like Brad Summer meant nothing.

And so I think a lot of people right now are saying, okay, well, this thing that's going viral, like, should I care about it? Which I think is the wrong question because it doesn't really matter if you care about it or not. It's just happening. And in a lot of ways, I think now more so than ever, it is just simply a reflection of the national id, the sort of collective unconsciousness kind of idea. And I think it's very basic and kind of dumb. Like, I just think it's just like a rolling cascade of dumb stuff, you know?

Ryan, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I have to ask you, how big is OnlyFans and how did it get that big? How big is OnlyFans? Yes. Very big. A recent report in Newsweek estimates that 1.4 million American women are using OnlyFans.

that's i mean we have only 300 million people so but they're they're using it they're they're using it as creators as creators correct i think one other note on that as the on the business side of it it was reported they made 1.3 billion dollars in revenue 658 million dollars in profit

like that level of profit margin, you just don't see in any kind of business basically other than software, I guess. But I mean, they're basically just raking in pure profit from all of this as well. So, yeah. And you should take what only fans,

Models say with a grain of salt because they are trying to... No, that's the company though. No, no, no. For what I'm about to say. Because they can be provocative on purpose to get your attention. But one OnlyFans model recently, Sophie Raine, claimed that she made $43 million on OnlyFans in a year.

That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. My foot photos on there are not doing nearly as well, unfortunately. And the thing is, it has really changed the nature of what we're seeing online because I think many young people, especially women on OnlyFans who are using it to make a living, have realized that a site like Instagram...

We'll never reward you for a million, for 10 million views. Not really. It's not sustainable. So I think another factor for why viral content is getting stupider is because people just aren't spending a lot of time and effort on it because they want you to go click and pay to go look at the real stuff.

So as paywalls have filled up the web, I think that has also changed the nature of what we're all seeing, which is that it's all getting lazier and sillier and more provocative because it's trying to get you to go behind the paywall. I guess the public content is just lead gen for the paid stuff. So you're all seeing the entry-level appetizer at best.

Okay, so there's a lot more that I want to speak about, including the hot ones. BuzzFeed has recently sold hot ones. And whether the future of media is eating hot wings. Also, all these crypto coins that are part of the internet right now. And some of the online discussion around the UHC shooter and why it seemed to create a bit of a realignment among groups online. So we're going to do that right after this. I'm Jesse Hempel, host of Hello Monday.

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and we're back here on big technology podcast with ryan broderick he writes the newsletter garbage day it's garbageday.email you can go sign up for today he's also the host of the panic world podcast and we're also here with ron john roy of margins um but right before this ron john told me all right alex if we're going to talk with ryan about internet culture we have to talk about

what's happened to BuzzFeed and what it's done with its assets. Ryan and I were both at BuzzFeed, so I'll turn it over to Ranjan. You can fire away with any questions. Well, so they sold off First We Feast, which is the parent company of the Hot Ones, Hot Wings TV show or YouTube show for $82.5 million or 2x what Sophie Rain makes. And then it

It was also, it's interesting because like from the pure, like almost corporate finance standpoint, basically BuzzFeed took out a ton of debt, even to go public, to buy up complex networks. They had to shed that asset. This is the next big asset that they're trying to shed to make their debt payment. So BuzzFeed as a business is in a lot of trouble and is just trying to clean up their balance sheet. But in the press release, the most ridiculous part of this was Jonah Peretti said, you know,

Basically, this is part of the media company, BuzzFeed Inc's strategic transformation into a media company positioned to fully benefit from the ongoing AI revolution. So somehow, eating chicken wings on TV gets you $83 million. And also, BuzzFeed is going full AI and proudly so. So I think this is probably one of the weirdest but most important media stories going on right now.

I think it's important to point out that for people who don't know, Hot Ones was created by Complex. So it is not like it did not come out of the same world that Alex and I were in. It was purchased by BuzzFeed and now they're selling it. And I am a Hot Ones defender. I think that show is great. And I think it deserves, honestly, like what it gets. It's very popular and I think it's very clever.

I think it's also fascinating that a digital media company doesn't know what to do with it because it's very much like the, the first refuse company, as I understand it was created after the show started to get bigger, not the other way around. And I, I think that to me is the major takeaway here is that,

The media companies of the 2010s are not equipped to even maintain the successful internet properties of the 2020s. I think it's just a totally different philosophy and mindset. Actually, do you think the Logan and Jake Paul media management company would be better equipped to handle something like First We Feast at scale than a BuzzFeed company?

I think so. I would guarantee they have far less overhead because they probably have four employees working 14-hour days or something. Hey, if you work, by the way, for the Paul brothers, you should unionize. If you hear this, you should unionize, and that'd be really funny. No, I think that I view the digital media companies of the 2010s, the BuzzFeeds, the Gawkers, the Vices, the Mashables, whatever, as a weird Cro-Magnon man missing link

between two very different areas of how media is made. So they kind of appear and they're like, okay, we're gonna act like a newsroom. We're gonna act like a media company, but we're gonna make content that is essentially just like worthless garbage that goes online that like can go viral for ad traffic, right?

And the problem with that is that you have a lot of people with a lot of jobs that like you don't really need if you're making a YouTube channel. And I think that is essentially the transition that we've just seen is that you can just do it much cheaper and much easier and much more nimbly if you create a company that's meant for making content, not for making articles and investigations and all the rest of it.

And Ryan, it's very interesting because some of the things that we started talking about at the very beginning of this show, the transformation of social networks from

follow models to for you is sort of partially responsible for the diminishment of a site like BuzzFeed, which was basically predicated at being effectively a website that was a for you site, right? It was going out and finding out what was interesting and then surfacing it to you and then you would share it online. Whereas like the algorithms became so good for the social media companies that you didn't really need like the core purpose of BuzzFeed anymore. That's my diagnosis at least.

Yeah, I had heard some behind-the-scenes chatter after the dress that sites like Facebook... Yeah, this internet meme that people are like, is it blue and black or white and gold? Everyone saw something different. Yes, and I had heard some background chatter at different social platforms, places like Facebook, that were so horrified by the spread and sort of complete domination of one thing on their site that it was almost like...

like a phishing attack. It was almost like a worm. And I do also think that when you're thinking about why the internet has changed, that was also part of it, which was that all these platforms were so inundated by one thing to such a degree that they're like, this can never happen again. It breaks our sight.

oh my god i love this conversation right now i mean no but hold on i like if the dress was this critical inflection point where at first and again you're right because at that point when was that 2015 six so right around mid 2010s yeah yeah that was when facebook shifted from distribution

to actually like for news companies and media companies to actually wanting to be the ones to own and host the content and post your videos here, post your memes directly here and you can get more traffic by sharing it. So maybe the dress was the...

critical inflection point where the platforms took over. It was the Oppenheimer's bomb. Yeah. It changed everything. For digital media. Yep. That's my theory. And then we exploded that watermelon on Facebook Live and they're like, all right, that's it. Enough of BuzzFeed. You know, you can't force it. You can't force it like that. Yeah. It's just a totally different landscape now. And

You don't need a company of 700 to a thousand people to make videos on YouTube. Oh, wait, sorry. The watermelon to remind myself and listeners, it was Buzzfeed. What exactly happened again? It was the Try Guys.

And the Try Guys wrapped a watermelon with rubber bands until it exploded on Facebook Live. Yeah, put it on Facebook Live. So everybody was tuning in to see when the watermelon would blow up. And it had just obscene numbers of concurrent viewers, like probably beat out almost all of television viewership that week. Right. And you don't need a company with $300 million in capital and 1,000 employees to

to put rubber bands around a watermelon. Maybe you did. I don't know. The Try Guys, they were great. They tried lots of stuff. They're still trying things. They're still trying stuff. To this day, they say they're out there trying things. Good for them. Yeah, you just don't. And I also think that, I mean, we're seeing this massive shift, speaking of the Try Guys, but there's another former BuzzFeed crew, the Watcher team, who got in hot water with their users this year for trying to launch a subscription service because they couldn't afford to grow their company anymore off of YouTube revenue.

And I think that is a massive trend that's happening everywhere right now. You just can't run a proper company with viral traffic anymore. It doesn't translate. Ryan, can we talk a little bit before we go about this sort of the political side of things? Or yeah, I would still call it a political side of things. So there was this shifting of a lot of these comedy and mainstream podcasts that supported Donald Trump and the run up to the 2024 election.

And it's been interesting to watch what's happened in the past couple of months as like they gained these audiences and even some of the political channels and then sort of were almost boxed into views and then are starting to lose some of those audiences. Just one example, I think that when this United Healthcare shooter started,

was revealed or even immediately after the shooting, a lot of their audiences became pretty pro-shooter and they became uncomfortable with that. And so talk a little bit about what happened there and whether we're going to see a further realignment with these audiences and these online entertainers. So the shooter's age is 26, right? So that means...

10 years ago, right when Donald Trump is sort of gearing up, that's the year of Gamergate. That's the start of the Breitbart kind of led culture war era. That guy was 16. So he is essentially only lived in a world of online culture war. And I think it's very telling that the minute he allegedly carried out this attack, a lot of people in that same age cohort were like,

Does the culture war not matter? Like, should we just like go after CEOs instead? And in fact, I was I've written about this where you see on Reddit all these posts about like, we're going to give up the culture war for a class war now. And to me, that speaks to the I think the the hollowness and the and the sort of loss of energy around culture war topics is.

Because I think people are just really bored of it. It can't really stay. It doesn't hold. And so I do think we're seeing a realignment. I don't know if it'll last. The online right is very good at reinvention. But right now, I do think a certain era of this stuff is ending in a very violent and strange way.

Sorry, can you explain that? Like why? I mean, the culture war not mattering and ending. It seems like the culture war has just been present in American life from the beginning. The online popularity of the UnitedHealthcare shooter to me speaks to a desire among young Internet users for a better...

I don't want to say target, but like a better focus of their anger. Like they are angry. We know that there is an internet full of angry young men. And Steve Bannon identified how to get these guys on his side 10 years ago. He's been very open about using Milo Yiannopoulos to weaponize Gamergate to activate this online army.

I think that a lot of that stuff is beginning to feel kind of silly. And I think that this is a, an inflection point for a lot of these guys who are realizing that, you know, spending all day moaning about how women don't like them on, on X, like isn't really satisfying them anymore. And this happens all the time. Like the,

The Gamergate era came directly after the new atheism movement, which was a similar attempt at sort of engaging with a new kind of young man archetype. So I think we are seeing it yet again. And I don't know where it's headed, but it does feel like a change is currently happening. I mean, if that's what's happening, where people who feel disenfranchised and hurt by the system...

begin taking their anger out. And well, obviously, we don't really know much about

this alleged shooter, why he did it. But we do know about the celebration of it. And if they start taking their, their anger out and sort of channeling it in these ways, it could sort of, and it's like kind of scary to even say this, but like it could sort of presage a, a, you know, pretty violent and dark era of American life. If that's the case. I think though, at least let me know if I am reading this or understanding this correctly. Like,

It's not that necessarily it's this very specific thing is the future. Like shooting CEOs and powerful people is what it is. It's just that the things that we've been talking about for the last eight years are no longer interesting. And I kind of do think that because, I mean, one thing I'll say even in terms of Trump in this last political campaign was,

I found to be less interesting on a kind of day-to-day basis. And I thought maybe that actually would not be a good thing for him. I mean, he obviously ended up doing very well, but the way he was interesting, it almost felt like a band...

an old school rock band playing the same songs 20 years down the road. You might even go see them and it's fun, but it's just not that exciting. Like it felt like the issues and the, the, the, it was all the same thing. And then we're moving to something else. I don't know what that is, but it's not going to be able to be defined traditional right left. Yeah. There was a really interesting moment on a recent episode of Pierce Morgan where

where he's interviewing Peter Thiel and the United Healthcare Shooter is a big fan of Peter Thiel. He was a big avid reader of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and a lot of what you would call like the radical centrist reactionary, you know, online tech guy kind of thing, right? And you can kind of see Peter Thiel begin to realize that this internet hate machine that has been taking its anger out on women and children and minorities for the last 10 to 15 years

Could be pointed at people like him. And you can see, I mean, he's always sweating because he's just like, he's very moist. He's like a very moist man. But you can kind of see the fear in his eyes as he realizes that like the Pandora's box that has been opened is now very unpredictable. And I do think it's shifting and evolving and we just don't know which direction it's headed in.

Is it possible that the culture war is less interesting basically because the Republicans won? I mean, I'm like throwing this out there, but like... It is possible. You know, the left said whatever they could about how, you know, Trump was a racist, misogynist. And he ended up, you know, pulling in a majority of Hispanic men and probably more minority voters than recent Republicans have. And so like if that didn't stick, it's like, okay, it's almost like, all right, move on from the culture war.

A big prediction I have for this next Trump administration is that Trump starts to feel like the establishment because he won the popular vote and he so thoroughly dominated this election. So he can't really he can't really sort of continue as this like renegade because this is like this is the second round anyways.

And so I suspect we will start to see the beginnings of a, if not anti-Trump reactionary movement on the right or sort of within young men, at least an attempt to kind of redefine being an angry young man that is not downstream of Trump. I think that is definitely a real possibility. Yeah, I think also, as you said, it could be both.

that the right one and in many ways, a lot of the issues that three, four years ago seemed to be completely dominant in another direction and now completely aligned in the other. But I think it's just, I mean, going back, the For You feed demands new content, demands new topics. The algorithm does not favor the same old tired stuff. We never would have guessed Hawk Tua would be a thing.

Like, and I mean, it still builds on a classic, the blowjob joke, but on top, but other than that, it's, it's new. And the, the algorithm demands something new and you can't just keep saying the same thing over and over again. So it'll be different. And that's kind of scary some ways, but it's, it's been scary for a while. So, and to try to connect the dots with everything we've talked about today, I think I can do this.

Are you guys familiar with like Jonah Peretti's master's thesis that gets passed around sometimes? I am unfortunately. Yes, but I've never heard of it. So he essentially theorized that in late stage capitalism on sort of algorithmic social platforms, identity would become very important because that's how you would essentially link with other users. The internet is a very frictionless, identity-less place. And so people create these structures to find each other.

And that was true for 10 years. And I think that really informed our politics. I think that the culture war is a direct result of sort of reconfiguring society to be based on like,

Busty girl problems and like 16 things that only short guys would know, you know, it's, it's, it's an outgrowth of that. You know, you're from this neighborhood of Kansas city. When exactly, but that stuff doesn't work anymore. That stuff doesn't work in terms of how people, uh, in terms of what people care about, it doesn't really go viral. Identity has become so fractured and I think so boring for people that

That I am waiting to see what replaces it. And, you know, it could be, it could be class consciousness. Sure. I don't know. But I think it is changing. And I think young people are clearly desperate for something new, some new way of interfacing with each other online and thus everywhere else. And I think we are right now in the process of watching them discover what that is and figure out what that is. But I think it will be different and it will inform our politics.

Brian, before we go, I just want to ask you one thing that's kind of been bugging me through this conversation, and I'm sure you're going to have a smart answer to it. But this idea that we started off with, with people all using the Internet once COVID started, weren't they already on the Internet? Like that's to me, is it just like a matter of usage or I see Ron John's also shaking his head. But I want to turn this over to you just to sort of highlight the magnitude of the change that's led us to where we are.

I think before COVID, yes, everyone probably had a smartphone. Everyone was familiar with a couple sites like Facebook and Instagram, and they were on there and they'd check them every couple hours and that'd be it. Because of COVID and specifically lockdown in the early months of the pandemic, there was not really any new TV being made. There's not really any new movies coming out. There was not really much else. You couldn't really go. You couldn't go outside. There was really not much else to do other than stare at the internet.

And for about three to four months, all of the world was being run by Twitter. Like just like tweets were running the whole planet. And I think it created an effect where many normal people who maybe would sit down at the end of the day and watch NCIS or like wake up in the morning and drive to work, listen to the radio. A lot of those people were,

went down internet rabbit holes and they developed new hobbies and they discovered new interests and they started using social media in a way they never used before. So maybe it's wrong to say that like more people came online, but I do think an overwhelming amount of people for the, maybe the first time ever actively engaged with the internet.

and thus we're shaped by it and now we're living in that in the aftermath of what that did to people's brains that's that's how i would describe it wild ron john any final thoughts or final questions i think my takeaway here is we're definitely i think we're definitely at a really interesting inflection point i think where you'd said uh

This is basically 2012-ish in digital consumption years, which I think that was the era. It was pivotal. People were on Facebook. People are starting to experiment with other social networks. People were online more increasingly, but we had no idea what the next couple of years would look like, much less decade. So I think we're definitely at the beginning of something new. Hopefully it's not too scary, but...

Starting out so. Yeah. Hopefully it gets a little more fun. The newsletter is GarbageDay.email. The podcast is Panic World. You can find it in your podcast app of choice. You could also find Ron John's email at readmargins.com. And you can listen to Ron John and I every Friday here on Big Technology Podcast. Ryan, Ron John, thanks so much for coming on. Great speaking with you guys. This was fascinating. Thanks for having me.

See you soon. All right, Bronjon, all right, Ryan, we'll have to have you both back on to do this again next year to see how big blue sky is. All right, everybody, thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.