Weekly Scroll: Addicted to Posting

Taylor Lorenz is a columnist for 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 review her book Extremely online:

You can’t discuss Taylor Lorenz’s book without writing about Lorenz herself. Lorenz is “extremely online” in the classic sense of the word. She is an endless source of internet drama, starting online fights and arguments as easily as she breathes. She has enormous Main Character EnergyShe has some bizarre character traits, such as drinking gallons of water a day, controlling her thermostat at godless temperaturesabsolutely refusing to ever say how old she isand even now, in the year of our Lord 2023, is the internet’s most persistent COVID doomer. She proudly leans on the culture war and is a constant target for the right-wing mob.

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 group of friends on Instagram:

This is a classic Lorenzian move. What do you do when you want people to know you’re important enough to get invitations to the White House and be in the same room as the president, but your core friend group also includes hyper-online left-wing influencers who like to call that president “Genocide Joe”? You share a photo of yourself calling him a war criminal.

The photo leaked from Lorenz’s circle of friends and got her into trouble. At first, Lorenz denied the photo was real, saying You guys will fall for every stupid edit someone makes. Then, NPR called around and found four of her friends prepared to go on the record saying that they saw the post on her Instagram Story and it was real. In a great example of the “cover-up being worse than the crime,” NPR also reports that she initially lied to her Washington Post editors about the post and that the Post is now conducting an internal investigation. In the never-back-never-admit-it style that characterizes modern politics, Lorenz is now also denying that she ever denied the post was real, and instead claims it was “just a meme.”

Loyal readers know that I constantly repeat the basic concept of this blog: Posting is the most powerful force in the universeI quote that message:

People have always been driven by the desire to gain status and promote their views. They have always done stupid things to impress their friends. There has always been a thrill in going against the culture, in getting a lot of attention, in going against the grain.

What is new is the scale that the Internet offers. What was already a powerful drug became irresistible. Previous generations played status games that were as addictive as opium, this generation plays status games that are as addictive as superfentanyl (which is a real thing). The algorithms we’ve designed to promote viral content create a rush that can’t be replicated. The lure of posting can make you throw your life away to look cool to a bunch of people you’ve never met in real life. That lure can make the world’s most beloved people burn their own reputations, and the world’s richest people sell their businesses.

This is another example of someone setting herself on fire to post. Taylor Lorenz has one of the best jobs in media. What she does as an “internet trend and culture reporter” is honestly not that important. She is good at her job, but in the end she writes stories about AI cat videos and slang words such as Boring. Lorenz gets the prestige of writing for the Washington Post when she can basically just write about any TikTok meme she likes. This is a top 0.01% journalism job. People would kill for that job.

And she’s possibly going to blow the bag because she couldn’t resist calling Biden a war criminal on social media while she was literally at work! While she was at work, 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 a huge shitshow that the Post probably doesn’t want. But there’s a non-zero chance 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 drinks with all your other loser internet-poisoned leftist friends. You don’t do that on social media! You don’t do that while you’re literally still at the event in question, at work! And yes, it was a “Close Friends” story, but anyone with a million followers (and specifically anyone who writes professionally about social media) should know that there are always things that leak.

It’s just that Lorenz can’t help herself. She’s addicted to posting. That kind of addiction isn’t metaphorical, it’s real, and there are people who literally can’t stop posting, even if it could ruin their lives. Ironically, Lorenz has quite a bit in common with people she despises politically, like Elon Musk, JK Rowling, Chaya Raichiketc. They’ve all been poisoned by the internet in the same way, just from opposite angles. And maybe that’s just part of Taylor Lorenz’s Yin and Yang – she only has her job because she’s addicted to posting, but that same addiction will constantly pull her back.

I have created a prediction market to see how many subscribers I am likely to have by the end of the year. The markets think we are around 10K!

You know who else is way too online than Taylor Lorenz? The entire Trump campaign and the MAGA movement in general.

Last week we talked about Trumps very strange 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 recall that months ago, Elon was a big Ron DeSantis supporter, and DeSantis kicked off his ill-fated campaign with a Spaces event that crashed before it could even startBut this time, Twitter made sure that the technical problems were solved behind the scenes. The site would not have to deal with such embarrassing outages again.

Hahahahaha no the exactly the same 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 stream video + audio. Twitter’s engineering team should absolutely be able to handle a million people tuning in just for audio, but Elon fired 75% of the company when he bought it, so maybe the guys who knew how to do that now work for Meta. At some points, Elon would drop out of the conversation, and you could hear a still-connected and unmuted Trump rambling in the background.

But apart from the technical glitchesthe stream eventually got going. And it was exactly the kind of bizarre spectacle you’d expect from a Trump/Musk conversation.

Trump spoke with a characteristic lisp for almost the entire event, turning every “s” sound into a “th.” He sounded like a man whose dentures are loose and is constantly trying to suck them back into his mouth as he talks. It was bad enough that “Dentures” was trending on Twitter’s sidebar.

The content of the event was just as bad. There were times when Musk went into a technical aspect of climate science and Trump would then rant about nuclear power in response. You might think that’s reasonable – nuclear power is a possible solution to decarbonizing the economy. Except that Trump was ranting about nuclear energy weaponsfor some unknown reason. It’s the kind of thing that almost makes you feel sorry for Elon.

This is all the result of a campaign that is far too online. They have stopped hosting so many physical gatherings in favor of events like the Adin Ross stream and Musk Space. Trump himself is famously online, blindly chasing every cultural grievance that the algorithm throws in his face on any given day. The Trump/Musk event was an exercise in preaching to the converted, but they don’t seem to realize that because they are so online. They are lost in the sauce, undo polls online, place bad forced memes in a desperate attempt to grab the attention of social media, but unable to meet the needs of the majority of the offline population.

You see this most clearly in the misadventures of JD Vance. Since becoming Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Vance has been embroiled in a number of strange controversies. Vance was caught saying that we ‘punish’ childless people with higher taxes and insulting people without children as childless cat ladies. He agrees with a podcast host who said that the sole purpose of postmenopausal women is to raise childrenAnd just this week he suggested that both Italian, German, And Irish immigration was a big problem for America while completely misunderstanding the film Gangs from New York.

Vance is a champion at taking popular positions like “Give parents a tax break” or “It’s nice when grandma helps babysit” and rephrasing them in the most divisive 4chan/incel coded language possible. Thus you get the phrase “the sole purpose of postmenopausal women.” He’s literally steeped in far-right online insanity. That’s his culture. That’s why he can’t stop putting his foot in his mouth and that’s why strange attacks work – he really is a strange guy who can’t stop spreading nonsense online.

The entire conservative movement has become increasingly enamored of these currents over time, largely due to a conservative media echo chamber system that rewards extremism and boundary-pushing. I think a general rule in politics is that the party that is perceived as the party with the least 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 insular spaces like NewsMax, Fox News, Truth Social, and talk radio aren’t helping their weird problem. And Elon may be contributing to it by turning Twitter into a worse right-wing clone of every other social site.

• Reddit continues its winning streak as advertisers keep increasing spending on the siteThe online advertising market has been bifurcated for a while now – Google/Meta are doing phenomenal business while the rest of the web’s advertising markets have withered and died. But Reddit may be coming to challenge the duopoly.

• I’m not sure how to sum this up, but it’s 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 for anti-immigrant riots and violence throughout Europe.

• A new study shows that TikTok’s algorithm is mysteriously shows less content critical of China than any other major social network. I wonder how that is possible?

• Anne Helen Petersen has a great series on the phenomenon Bama rushHighly recommended, even if you don’t normally care much for this kind of thing.

• The friendliest social network that you’ve never heard of.

• Parents and Generation Alpha children have unintelligible conversations because of ‘brainrot language‘.

• Is subdued the opposite of brat?