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A History of Content Creation, From the Blogosphere to Today

Taylor Lorenz’s “Extremely Online” charts the internet phenomena that have shaped the 21st century, focusing not on the platforms but on the users.

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EXTREMELY ONLINE: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet , by Taylor Lorenz

Early in “Extremely Online,” Taylor Lorenz’s terrific history of the online creator economy (so far), she tells the story of Heather Armstrong, a pioneering “mommy blogger” known as Dooce, on a horseback ride sponsored by a clothing brand in 2013. Saddling up is famously hard on unhabituated groins, and the eventual pain had Armstrong recalling breathing exercises she’d seen in a book on natural childbirth. Later she blogged that one of her defining images of the trip had been “hairy vaginas.”

Her fans loved that post — Armstrong was also a pioneer of oversharing — but the brand “hated it,” Lorenz reports. They hadn’t meant it when they said to be natural and fun, because they threatened to pull their sponsorship if she didn’t delete the post. Armstrong was one of the first to experience what would become a common pattern: social media platforms allowing for uninhibited voices to become stars, and those stars generating both revenue and backlash — which can be especially ferocious against women. Over the last couple of decades, these new media personalities, usually creating content that addresses their fans directly and autobiographically, went through similar experiences on Blogger, Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, Vine (R.I.P.) and TikTok.

Lorenz, who covers technology at The Washington Post and was formerly a reporter at The New York Times, is a knowledgeable, opinionated guide to the ways internet fame has become fame, full stop. She zooms by people and places widely covered by the mainstream press (Tavi Gevinson and Fortnite get one paragraph each) but slows down for people (and animals) whose popularity was driven by internet-native media. Two of the internet’s most famous Cats, Grumpy and Keyboard, are discussed at length — “Though the photo booth didn’t open until 1 p.m., the line to meet Grumpy Cat began forming at 6 in the morning” — to demonstrate the growing relation between online virality and real-world fame.

Lorenz excels at identifying relatively obscure events as turning points. In 2009, the Station, YouTube’s first creator “supergroup,” whose members lived in the same house in Los Angeles (naturally), were given money left over from a Carl’s Jr. ad campaign to make promotional videos for the fast-food chain, on the cheap. The resulting videos wildly outperformed the company’s expensive banner ads, and changed the economics of online media in ways that weren’t immediately obvious to outsiders. Later that year Business Insider declared, “YouTube Is Doomed,” not understanding the rising popularity of its rapidly professionalizing creator class.

The axle of the book is the story of Vine, a video service that launched in 2013 and — improbably, given its six-second limit — became one of the most used mobile video apps in the world. Copying the Station’s “collab house,” several Vine stars — Randy Mancuso, John Shahidi, Anwar Jibaw, Jake and Logan Paul, Lele Pons — moved into an apartment complex in Hollywood and promoted one another’s work, dominating Vine’s “Popular Now” list in ways that frustrated the company.

Vine’s rapid success and sudden implosion encapsulate most of the book’s themes: the creators who understand a new platform better than its inventors do; the competing interests of talent, agents, advertisers, audience and owners; the particular hostility directed at successful women online. Vine closed in 2017, in part because of poor relations with its star creators; as Lorenz dryly notes, “The company’s only problem was itself.” Vine’s demise fueled rather than dampened the fervor for short-term video and autobiographical content, sending experienced creators to other platforms, especially TikTok.

Lorenz has a beat reporter’s eye for detail, which can occasionally be overwhelming. Explaining the rise of online gossip sites and “Dramageddon,” a falling-out among a friend group of YouTube-famous makeup artists, she introduces six gossip sites and 13 creators in four pages. (To be fair, “Dramageddon” was also exhausting to witness firsthand.)

But “Extremely Online” aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos. The book ends with a discussion of how Covid-19 exacerbated global media consumption, and finally led both investors and mainstream media to see this new ecosystem as a creative and economic force.

It’s not clear whether the patterns Lorenz has documented — the inventiveness, the cluelessness, the competition, the drama — will settle down now that the creator economy is being taken seriously as part of the media landscape, or whether those same cycles will continue to repeat, just with more money at stake.

EXTREMELY ONLINE : The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet | By Taylor Lorenz | Simon & Schuster | 373 pp. | $29.99

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How the fight between tech founders and influencers shaped the internet

In Taylor Lorenz’s new book, extremely online women get their due.

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The story of the internet is the story of men pouring money into platforms they don’t understand — and no one understands this better than Taylor Lorenz, the author of the new book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet , out October 3.

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Over the course of the book, which spans from the early 2000s to the present, she charts the rise of blogs and the birth of social media, and specifically the ways that each platform’s power users shaped them for the better and for the worse. It offers context for questions like, “Why, to this day, can no one figure out how to reliably monetize short-form content?” and “Why has Twitter — or X, whatever — always been such a mess?” and “How come tech bros are still trying to make live-streaming happen?” Sprinkled throughout are entertaining anecdotes about why the internet looks and feels the way it is today; who knew, for instance, that part of the reason why brands demand to review sponsored content before it gets posted is because a mommy blogger once included the phrase “hairy vaginas” in an ad for Banana Republic? Or that in the early days of Instagram , Scooter Braun demanded Justin Bieber get paid for posting there? (Instagram called his bluff; he kept posting.) Or what about the group of famous Viners who asked Twitter to pay them a million dollars per year — each — to remain on Vine? (Vine died shortly thereafter; RIP.)

Having pioneered the job before most publications were paying attention, Lorenz is practically synonymous with internet culture reporting; as someone who also covers the beat, just last week I had someone compliment me on a story I wrote, except that it was actually Lorenz’s. In our conversation, we chatted about the rise of “followers, not friends,” why platforms are always clamoring for longer content, and how the FTC accidentally made sponcon cool. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You write how Silicon Valley is often portrayed as a group of brilliant, ambitious young men who can see the future, but that social media proved them all wrong. There’s a pattern in the book of men inventing a thing and women mastering and reinventing it. What are some of the ways that happened?

My book opens with the Silicon Valley version of blog culture, which was a lot of tech and political blogs, and then what women did with it, which was to create the mommy blogger ecosystem by building personal brands, commodifying themselves, and becoming the first influencers . But you see it time and time again — Julia Allison , who was one of the first multi-platform content creators and did what she called “life casting,” would document her outfits, link to things, use affiliate links for revenue generation, and had a YouTube show. The version of social media that the tech people envisioned was turned on its head and very quickly subverted by a lot of really creative and entrepreneurial young women and other marginalized people who ultimately were really disrespected.

For most of the history of social media, Silicon Valley has been incredibly hostile to these power users. [Tech founders] almost resented the power they had on the internet. Once the pandemic hit, they all started talking about the “creator economy” like it was some new thing. They’d maligned it for decades, because it primarily was pioneered by women.

What made the perfect storm for mommy bloggers to really explode during that time?

You had a lot of things happening at once: a super misogynistic traditional media climate, where women’s magazines in the late ’90s and early 2000s didn’t discuss any of the realities of motherhood, and you had these Gen X mothers who were working, they were educated and more progressive than their parents, and living in double income households who were like, “This version of motherhood doesn’t resonate with me at all . I’m gonna turn to the internet and use it as an outlet to talk about how it really is. It’s messy, and it’s hard. Sometimes I hate my husband, and I hate my children, or I can’t breastfeed, or I’m deeply depressed because I have postpartum depression.” The whole idea of the “wine mom” was born out of this era, because a lot of moms talked about turning to substance abuse and were struggling. These things were normalized by the women talking about it.

It also helped that it was text, because a lot of them didn’t even use photos of their children, or used pseudonyms. They were breaking down barriers and normalizing frank discussions about really taboo topics, and it forced the legacy media to adapt and evolve, although they still haven’t totally caught up. But in terms of public discussions of motherhood, now we know postpartum depression exists, and that not all women can breastfeed. It was this perfect timing of the new generation of mothers, the blog ecosystem being born, and then this super patriarchal traditional media.

Looking back now with what we know about online platforms, it’s kind of shocking that MySpace lost out to Facebook , when MySpace was so bullish on internet stardom. Why did it take so long for Facebook to recognize the power of internet creators and people’s hunger for online fame? And what made them finally lean into it?

I think MySpace was just way too early. For most people, it was not normal to go on the internet and post about yourself. And there wasn’t this follower-based model of social media yet; it was double opt-in, so you had to befriend someone and they had to befriend you.

Facebook was a bridge platform, basically, which is why I think it’s not relevant anymore, because it didn’t lean hard enough into creators until it was too late. Facebook is sort of the epitome of the sanitized, corporate Silicon Valley version of social media. But the Facebook News Feed played such a pivotal role in influencer culture, because it taught everyone to post for an audience.

Instagram ended up being their creator strategy, because Facebook just fumbled the bag so many times. Let’s not forget that when Vine was flailing and all the creators left Vine, before they went to YouTube, they went to Facebook. Facebook Video had all those people, and they squandered it. They had the biggest of all the biggest YouTubers and they couldn’t get the monetization right. They didn’t care about creator monetization, but YouTube had built that out, and they were just in such a better position to absorb that talent.

Why was YouTube early to embrace creators?

What’s crazy is that YouTube could have gone a different way. They saw very early on if they allowed people to make money, that would keep talent there. YouTube was also adjacent enough to the entertainment world where there were standards around paying for content and ad deals. YouTube started as an online video platform, and there were ad models in place for online video, like pre-roll or mid-roll. With Facebook, which was more text-based social media, there wasn’t a norm, there weren’t revenue models, and there weren’t monetization pathways already established. You saw a lot of struggle, like, “Who’s gonna crack monetization?” And actually, no one has cracked it. Look at Twitter. Short text updates are just much harder to monetize.

Why did influencer collab houses keep coming up and then dying out? Do you think they’ll ever come back in a big way?

Creative young people have always lived together. The Station was the first true content house, because for early internet creators collaboration was so crucial. It was like the primary vehicle for growth because we didn’t have algorithmic discovery mechanisms like we have now. So if you were living in a house and you were constantly collabing with a bunch of people, suddenly you’re following them. Gen Z kids grew up watching the Station and the FaZe Clan house, and then I think they immediately wanted to replicate it on TikTok . But then it got very professionalized, like they started as content creators living together, there was no management company that was trying to extract profit from them, or a brand that was involved or whatever.

Once people started to pay attention to content creators in 2020, all these brands and management companies started these content houses, and that business model failed very quickly, because it’s such a huge liability running a house full of kids. These houses are sort of inherently ephemeral, because certain people become more famous, certain people move on. It’s like being part of a frat — you’re not gonna live there forever. I also think that discovery has changed, so you don’t need to necessarily be living together in the same place to get discovered on YouTube, because we have TikTok and algorithmic discovery handles all of that. The pace of fame is so different: it’s so much faster.

It’s so funny seeing how early Instagram was so explicitly anti-advertising, even anti-self-promotion, when that’s literally the thing we think about when we think about Instagram. Instagram’s community guidelines once even read , “When you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside ... We ask that you keep your interactions on Instagram meaningful and genuine.” But you argue that this inadvertently invented the concept of the “sponsored post.” How did that happen?

They tried to keep it free of advertising while also allowing people to build big followings and spurring that with their “suggested user” list; they created this vehicle for sponsored content. Suddenly, brands desperately wanted to reach people on Instagram, but there was no way to advertise. So they went directly to the creators. That happened very early on: some of the earliest stuff on Instagram was sponsored content, it just wasn’t disclosed or clear what it was. When [Instagram] rolled out ads later, it was like, you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. They ended up kind of shooting themselves in the foot because we live in a hyper-capitalist society and everyone has to make money. These content creators recognized the value of fame and attention, and online brands are going to want to reach that audience. I think it was Instagram’s mistake not to realize it sooner and build out some way to facilitate brand deals between creators and big companies because they could have built a really sustainable revenue model around it. They didn’t.

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When the Federal Trade Commission sent all those warnings to creators who didn’t disclose sponsored content, everybody thought that would be the end of influencing. Instead, the opposite happened. Why?

It’s so funny to read articles from that time. They’re gleeful, like, “This is the end of influencers .” Once again, it’s people not understanding how the internet works and not anticipating regulators coming in. It was like gasoline on a fire: What it did was it actually normalized sponsored content and made it aspirational.

At the same time, you also had this very specific genre on YouTube where everyone was doing pranks and staged drama — why did YouTube incentivize those things?

This was like peak daily vlogging, when [YouTube] started to reward people who posted more frequently. Casey Neistat really kicked this off, but it was embraced by Vine creators, who leaped off Vine onto YouTube and brought their publishing schedules with them. That was how they grew — they had to constantly think of content, but there’s no way to create 24/7 interesting, engaging organic content. Nobody’s life is that interesting. So you had to stage a lot. You had to always up the ante and make things more and more extreme to get attention because it was so competitive, because everyone was posting every day. I think that’s what led to this prank culture. A lot of it also came from Vine — they were a new class of creators who were ridiculous men, and they brought that energy to YouTube and then YouTube incentivized it. Things got very out of hand really quickly.

This seemed to lead pretty directly to the Adpocalypse , when YouTubers became liabilities because they kept producing increasingly extreme content for views. What ripple effects did that have on the wider creator economy?

Advertisers were thrilled to reach people on YouTube. They were pouring tons of money into YouTube, and they weren’t thinking about it because internet culture at this point was so secondary to mainstream pop culture. The mainstream media did not pay attention to it at all aside from tabloids, and their coverage was very promotional.

Suddenly, in 2017, a lot more criticism was focused on tech. You had Trump sworn in, and everyone started to look at these platforms and start to question, “Wait a minute, are these platforms good, or are they bad?” People actually started to pay attention to what was going on on these platforms. [There was] that Wall Street Journal story about PewDiePie, the biggest YouTuber, and you saw the mainstream media doing hard reporting and looking into it and being critical. That led advertisers to freak out and pull all of their dollars, and it really hurt a lot of creators. The biggest content creators, like the Logan Pauls and the PewDiePies of the world, ultimately were totally fine. But it did wipe out and harm a lot of mid-level and small creators, because they suddenly didn’t have the advertising revenue that they had previously. I think that made a lot of YouTubers very hostile to the media , because they always blamed the media for that. Everyone I interviewed was like, “Well, if the media didn’t write these stories and get all inflammatory…” and it’s like, no, if YouTube didn’t incentivize this content.

The Adpocalypse and algorithm changes and the pressure of posting every day made a lot of creators ultimately quit altogether. What I’m wondering is — did the platforms even care? Like, did that even affect YouTube’s bottom line? Or were they secretly kind of happy about it?

YouTube ultimately did not do very much. They’ll probably claim that they did, but they really didn’t look at how burnt out everyone was. Today everyone’s just as burnt out, if not more, because now they have to make [YouTube] Shorts content. But I do think it was the first recognition that this job is incredibly hard on your mental health . People had talked about it, but it wasn’t really a public discussion until then. That was also when you saw a lot of “I’m leaving BuzzFeed videos,” remember? Everyone just started to be like, “Wait a minute, this is so hard, and I’m actually depressed, and this isn’t the dream you think it is.”

With that conversation, there started to be an acknowledgment of the labor behind it. You started to see people take it more seriously, but unfortunately, a lot of creators got chewed up and spit out and there was no lasting change and the Internet chugged along. And that’s how it always goes, right? The internet destroys people’s mental health every day, and we’re not changing the system. If you take a week off, there’s people that will replace you. It’s not like there’s a shortage of people posting online. That’s why companies sell this illusion that anybody can make it on the internet and anybody can be the next Mr. Beast, because they need people to believe that so that they keep posting and investing and making things for their platform.

You end the book with a call for people to learn from the last 20 years of internet culture. What are the most important lessons, now that we’re in this world where everyone is encouraged to be a creator of some kind or already is?

Another theme of my book is this notion of users seizing more control over platforms, and I do think we actually have an enormous amount of collective power over them. It’s always a push-and-pull dynamic, but these platforms have shown that they are responsive to public pressure time and time again. If we want better platforms, we need to hold them accountable and force change, because they’re never going to change unless we make them. [We need to] build better spaces online that are less profit-driven and horrible.

Another theme is online misogyny, and I hope people can reexamine this recent history of the internet and look at women, who pioneered all this amazing stuff and never got credit and never saw the upside. Misogyny and hate are so pervasive and I just hope that people can read it and recognize how we got to where we are.

I’m very against the notion that logging off is good for your mental health. There’s this idea that our phones and the internet are destroying everything and making us miserable. I think that’s not true. It’s the platforms, but it’s not the internet as a whole. If you look at what the internet facilitated — the good parts of the internet — it’s a tool for human connection. I don’t think we want to live in a less-connected world, because then you have institutions with an enormous amount of power, and it sucks. I think we just need to build a more positive internet and build better platforms to spend time on, but I don’t think people should retreat away. Connection is valuable. We all want connection, we all want validation, and that is what the internet can provide. But we need these hyper-capitalist, monopolistic tech platforms to get out of the way.

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The Main Character

Taylor lorenz shares her subjects’ knack for capturing attention. but her book never asks: is that good.

In the summer of 2013, a quartet of power users of Vine, the short-lived looping video app, announced an in-person meetup for their followers. The four personalities, Jérôme Jarre, Rudy Mancuso, Marcus Johns, and Nicholas Megalis, had recently realized they were basically the most popular people on the platform—Johns had just reached 1 million followers—and were curious how many people might show up.

As chronicled in the reporter Taylor Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online , when the four arrived at New York’s Central Park, they were swarmed by hundreds of fans, mostly children and teenagers. They decamped to a nearby boulder, where they snapped selfies, shot Vines, and crowd-surfed. “That was when we realized,” said Mancuso: “ Oh, these people are real! ”

Readers of Lorenz’s work at the many outlets where she’s written in the social media era are familiar with this sentiment. At the Washington Post—and before that, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, Business Insider, and Mic—her reporting has identified the real people populating the internet, the users and creators both who are building entire systems of influence and money outside the old-media bubble. She’s revealed characters as odious as Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok , and as admirable as Jalaiah Harmon, the young dancer whose Renegade went viral but who received little credit until Lorenz wrote about her in the Times .

In the process, she herself has also become something of a recurring character in the internet’s roiling drama . Often that’s not by any choice of her own; when Tucker Carlson starts talking about you , you’ve been thrust into the limelight entirely against your will. But Lorenz is also a dedicated poster whose own extremely online temperament is in some ways perfectly suited to the requirements of the job. Like a war correspondent who dashes into the line of fire, Lorenz seems unwilling—or unable—to stay out of the conversation, because that’s where the story is. Among journalists, few online characters are so compelling or so divisive. One colleague, told I was writing about this book, joked that finally we would get the chance to find out if Slate readers cared about Taylor Lorenz as much as Slate staffers do.

Lorenz positions Extremely Online not as a history of the internet but as “a social history of social media,” an account of the ways that, again and again, users have broken free of the constraints of the online platforms that hosted them, innovating in ways the tech gurus could never have predicted. Instagram did not expect the company’s early stance against brand advertising would help create the stealth influencer economy; YouTube never counted on nobodies becoming immensely popular by recording long, personal video diaries. Extremely Online is about the creators, the people who shoot vlogs or figure out the secret to appearing on every TikTokker’s For You Page, and it takes as a given that to make something that becomes wildly popular on the internet is the defining aspiration of the 21 st century.

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

By Taylor Lorenz. Simon and Schuster.

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Early in the book, Lorenz showcases Paris Hilton and Julia Allison, early-century celebrities who both became, in the disapproving words of Barbara Walters, “famous for being famous.” Lorenz’s spirited defense of Allison sets the stage for the book’s central argument. “What Julia Allison did better than anyone in her generation was to leverage attention on the internet and shrewdly monetize it,” Lorenz writes. “These two practices are commonplace today, but in the mid-2000s, they were radical.” The question I found myself asking, which Extremely Online never addresses, is really square, but nevertheless crucial: Is this good?

Throughout Extremely Online , Lorenz recounts how ordinary people stumbled into fame based on the force of their personality and their facility with the tools of whatever app teenagers are downloading fastest. The names flash by so quickly that the uninitiated can miss entire micro-eras of online popularity: “15-year-old Nebraskan Lucas Cruikshank, who portrayed an alter ego named Fred Figglehorn on YouTube”; Adam Bahner, “a 24-year-old self-described nerd in his third year of a PhD program” who started uploading videos under the name Tay Zonday; Tayser Abuhamdeh, a 24-year-old cashier who livestreamed his days at a Brooklyn corner store and, by the time he was fired, had “amassed over 135,000 followers and was making triple what he’d made at the bodega.” All these personalities and dozens more experience a dizzying shift in their lives: They suddenly have “more fame than they knew what to do with.”

That this state of things might actually be horrible, a kind of monkey’s-paw curse delivered upon these online savants, is not a possibility that Lorenz brooks. What matters is only whether they can monetize that fame. The creators in Extremely Online do battle with their own platforms, which struggle to deal with how important top creators—unpredictable, unruly, often only teens themselves—are to their businesses’ bottom lines. Lorenz charts dizzying ecosystems of evanescent enterprises launched to suck money out of the air and deliver it to creators (with a healthy percentage skimmed for the entrepreneurs, presumably): Next New Networks, Fullscreen, VidCon, Niche. Most engaging is Ben Lashes, manager to the meme stars, who delivers the deathless line, “This is the chosen one,” about Grumpy Cat.

Extremely Online is full of such quotes, many of them content-free hype bombs delivered utterly sincerely and reprinted by Lorenz with an uncannily blank affect. “When he read me the lyrics, I was like, ‘Dude, are you serious?’ ” says Chris Vaccarino, who runs a company called Fanjoy that makes merch for online creators. He’s referring to YouTube star Jake Paul’s 2017 Christmas song “Fanjoy to the World,” with its lyrics, “Fanjoy to the world, my merch has come.” The merch drop, Lorenz notes, “reportedly generated tens of millions of dollars.”

One section that really got to me, an old person, was Lorenz’s account of what happened in 2017, when the Federal Trade Commission laid down the law on stealth advertising on Instagram. Advertisers and creators worried that the introduction of the #ad tag on paid content would tank the business. Instead, followers paid the tags no mind—or, in some cases, engaged with sponsored content more than nonsponsored. “The FTC,” Lorenz writes, “could not have done creators a bigger service.” Soon, wannabe influencers were tagging their posts #ad even if they had no relationship with the company in question. “People pretend to have brand deals to seem cool,” a teenager tells Lorenz. “Like, I got this for free while all you losers are paying.”

I would describe such passages as “uncritical,” by which I don’t mean that I wish Lorenz was passing negative judgment on such behavior. It’s not exactly that I think Lorenz should—as my former colleague Ruth Graham once witheringly suggested that dumb readers want reporters to do —add parentheticals to each paragraph reading “(This was good.)” or “(This was bad.”), though I confess it might ease my mind if she did it just once . Mostly I mean that Lorenz seldom engages in any truly critical way with the events she recounts in her book, rarely interrogates or seems to think deeply about them. Even the content itself, an ideal object for criticism, is rarely given this kind of treatment. She struggles—or more accurately, rarely even tries—to explain what it is these Vines or YouTubes or posts are doing that is so engaging to their audiences.

One passage, about “relatable” YouTuber Emma Chamberlain, is notable for its elegant consideration of her aesthetic and the work it takes to maintain it; if it seems familiar, that’s because it is mostly a rewrite of Lorenz’s terrific 2019 Atlantic piece about Chamberlain. But elsewhere, critical analysis is absent. “One video that Logan Paul posted at the time, where he did splits in famous locations around the world, amassed over 20 million views,” she writes. PewDiePie’s videos “appealed to what his fans called ‘edgy humor.’ ” (As a reminder, Paul and PewDiePie are bad.) Lorenz describes a particularly horrifying video, in which YouTuber Sam Pepper staged a fake murder, but leaves the analysis to another YouTuber: “i’m actually sick to my stomach and that should not be allowed on the internet.” “All the attention only resulted in more views,” Lorenz writes, “and Pepper’s follower count popped.”

The blandness of that sentence is representative of much of Lorenz’s writing in Extremely Online . Lorenz is fond of the section-ending button that says nearly nothing: “Nothing will ever be the same.” “A bunch of those influencers were done waiting.” “The algorithm had spoken.” At times, Lorenz’s prose sounds, itself, like the product of an algorithm: “Building on the Digitour experiment, Magcon had reset the equation.” Seeking to segue from one Vine star to another, Lorenz seemingly throws up her hands and simply writes, “There was also Rudy Mancuso.” Indeed, there was, also, Rudy Mancuso.

And while Lorenz has a scorekeeper’s detailed understanding of, say, the ins and outs of Snapchat feuds in 2016, her grasp on earlier media and culture events is shakier. She credits the downfall of newspapers and old media to blogs, ignoring plummeting classified revenue, private equity vultures, and the papers’ own clumsy early attempts to go online. She asserts that Paris Hilton’s The Simple Life premiered to almost 13 million viewers, “unheard-of numbers in reality TV”—though Survivor premiered bigger and, that same year, routinely attracted 20 million viewers per episode.

But whatever. We are not reading Taylor Lorenz for her analysis of early-2000s TV! We are reading her because she has a preternatural talent for informing nonteenagers about people whom millions of teenagers love passionately. Unfortunately, for the most part Extremely Online fails to make use of its author’s superpower. Despite the subtitle’s promise of “the untold story,” the majority of the book seems based on the extensive work that mainstream and online reporters, including Lorenz herself, have done covering the influencer and creator worlds. (One notable exception is the section on Allison, a new entry in the pantheon of classic Lorenz gets.) Even the fresh quotes, and there are some, mostly come from characters familiar to anyone who’s read widely on the subject. To be sure, Lorenz is generous in citing her sources and makes a welcome point of thanking the women tech reporters who have carved out their own niches in a male-dominated industry, from Katie Notopoulos to Kat Tenbarge to Kelsey Weekman. I don’t know if she simply felt that any scoops had to go straight into the newspapers employing her or if the territory she’s covering is so well-trod that there simply are hardly any scoops left, but Lorenz seems to have been somewhat defeated by book publishing, struggling to enliven these oft-told stories in her allotted 300 pages.

What’s odd about this is that the book could have been, should have been, Lorenz’s chance to break out of the constraints that have notably chafed her while writing for mainstream outlets. “This book is a personal history in many ways,” she writes, noting her own beginnings in the Tumblr era, but it’s not really personal at all. It mostly feels im personal, a solidly assembled collection of clips and quotes, without much of a point of view animating it.

Yet Lorenz could have written a much more personal history of the past 20 years of social media. Her own ascent, rocky as it has been, is nothing if not an internet success story, mapping neatly to the argument she’s making in Extremely Online. For what is the tale of Taylor Lorenz but the tale of a creator consistently stretching the bounds of her own platforms, often in ways those platforms’ gatekeepers and guardians struggle to cope with ? The toll, she notes in an exceptional passage in the book’s acknowledgments, has been brutal: “I wrote this book almost entirely from bed, as a medically vulnerable person (still!) trying to survive a deadly pandemic while being doxxed, stalked, harassed, and attacked by some of the worst corners of the internet.”

Threading that story through Extremely Online —and the story of “the people I met online who reached out and helped me through those dark days,” who, she says, “reaffirmed my faith in the internet”—would certainly have been difficult and even painful. But it’s surprising and a mite disappointing that Lorenz, canny and ambitious as she always has been, didn’t take on the challenge of squaring her subjects’ dogged faith in the glory of online fame with her own traumatic experience of what that fame can do. The result might have been revelatory, and certainly would have represented her best opportunity to become, like the most successful of the YouTubers and Instagrammers whose stories she tells, bigger than her platform. Nothing would ever have been the same.

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Taylor Lorenz on her extremely online history of the internet

Notes on selling books via instagram stories, fighting with elon, and which platform is best at shielding users from harassment..

By Zoë Schiffer

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When Taylor Lorenz turned in the draft of her new book, Extremely Online , she found that she had written 60,000 words on the history of Vine.

“My editor was like, what the hell, ” she says, laughing. Lorenz’s incisive commentary on the app’s rise and fall captures the fundamental tension between social platforms and the creators they rely on — a dynamic that’s been a central focus of her reporting over the past decade. “Vine was TikTok before TikTok,” Lorenz writes. “In 2014, Vine owned the market despite challenges from multiple rivals. The company’s only problem was itself.”

It would not be the last social platform to get in its own way and squander a chance for dominance. In her book, Lorenz casts a sympathetic eye on the people using these platforms to create culture and build their livelihoods, highlighting cases where platforms’ indifference or outright incompetence threatens to derail the nascent creator economy.

“Creators want to monetize, and time and time again Twitter failed”

Lorenz describes Extremely Online as “a social history of social media,” starting with the mommy bloggers of the early 2000s and tracing the path of the creator to the TikTok influencers of today. Throughout the book, Lorenz focuses on those creators, providing fresh perspective even when the corporate intrigues they’re caught up in are already well known. (For those of us who live online, at least.) 

My favorite part of Extremely Online was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the incredibly detailed history of Twitter that it offers. Lorenz documents how Twitter users created its most popular conventions, from the @ symbol to the hashtag, ultimately inventing themselves the service it would one day become. When open source developer Chris Messina pitched Twitter’s co-founders on codifying the hashtag as an official feature, the men initially rejected the idea, saying hashtags were “too harsh and no one is ever going to understand them.” 

Extremely Online went on sale this week . On Tuesday morning, Lorenz spoke to Platformer about how Facebook missed its first big opportunity with influencers, what Elon Musk doesn’t get about creators, and why we should all stop tweeting. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Zoë Schiffer: In the book, you chart the rise of Twitter and how influential creators were in shaping the platform — both in the design of the product and its cultural importance. Did Twitter sleep on the opportunity to cultivate that community in a more intentional way?

Taylor Lorenz: Yes. Twitter had a leg up on Instagram initially, because it was very much a hub for culture. But creators want to monetize, and time and time again Twitter failed to roll out monetization features. Granted, it’s hard to monetize short-form text, which Elon Musk is now discovering. But the company’s leadership didn’t seem to want to, in their early days. They didn’t want to have to pay celebrities to tweet — they were concerned about that. And at first celebrities were like “why would I post somewhere for free? You should be paying me.” Now it’s 15 years later, and they didn’t have a coherent monetization plan for people. 

It feels like that misunderstanding impacted the roll out of Twitter Blue last year, when some celebrities who didn’t subscribe had their blue checkmarks taken away. 

It was a misunderstanding of the value add. 

Right. Twitter needs celebrities more than celebrities need Twitter.

Celebrities don’t need Twitter at all! Creators don’t need Twitter at all! It’s so weird to see Musk thirstily tweeting at MrBeast. 

“A creator’s goal is to maximize engagement. The platform’s goal is to monetize.”

I want to talk about two power dynamics you discuss in the book. First, the dynamic between brands and creators. In the early days, brands had more power. How has that changed?

Content creators have more power by the minute. Initially, brands had the upper hand, because we didn’t have a robust e-commerce situation. But now there’s infrastructure, and content creators can spin up a product and create their own brand. By the mid-2010’s, you see brands and influencers working very closely together. But influencers figured out, “Why would I advertise someone else’s products when I could just launch my own?” Kylie [Jenner]’s lip kits were a pivotal moment for that. 

What about the dynamic between creators and platforms? It seems even more fraught.  

It’s fraught, and it’s always been fraught. Content creators are always in tension with the platforms, because their goals are not aligned. A creator’s goal is to maximize engagement. The platform’s goal is to monetize. But once that starts happening, the creator wants to keep some of the monetization for themselves.

There’s a moment in the book where you talk about Vine creators migrating to Facebook — and how Facebook failed to capitalize on the opportunity. What happened?

Facebook fumbled the bag. They had every single big content creator before YouTube, and they refused to roll out monetization features in a meaningful way. 

And then TikTok came along…

TikTok put creators first in a way the other platforms hadn’t. Other platforms were wary of creators, because tech platforms want to dictate what their platforms are. And they don’t always like when creators use them in their own ways.

“Elon Musk is speedrunning every mistake these other founders made for the last 20 years.”

By the time Vine brought in Karyn Spencer to manage creator partnerships, it was too late. The relationship had soured so much. 

Okay, now we want to do a few rapid fire questions. Why continue to tweet (“post”)?

I don’t — I use my Twitter for advocacy around COVID. For people who want tech news, I tell them to follow me on every platform except Twitter. I’m just tweeting about COVID until I run to zero, honestly. 

Is X dead, then?

Of course. I think the 2024 election will carry it because the political people are so addicted to it, but it’s not a platform for the future. Elon Musk is speedrunning every mistake these other founders made for the last 20 years.

What does Threads need to do to pop off?

Stop with the crazy community guidelines . It was a warning sign initially with the Adam Mosseri comment around Threads not doing anything to encourage hard news . I think Mosseri is so scarred from running the Facebook news feed before the 2016 election, and getting hauled before Congress to talk about misinformation, that they’re scared of anything newsworthy. So they won’t ever be able to create a true Twitter competitor.

Blocking “potentially sensitive topic” keywords from search is so out of control. 

Should reporters today invest in growing their followings on text-based social networks like Threads, or are they better off mastering short-form video?

I don’t think it’s an either-or — and it really depends on the type of journalist you want to be. Short-form video for growth’s sake, but writing for writing’s sake. Writing good tweets does still help you get you assigned stories.

If a creator could only pick one place to focus: TikTok, Reels, or Shorts?

TikTok, obviously — because of the growth. 

“Twitter has been worthless — it’s helped me get media attention, but that’s it.”

I’ve found that going viral on TikTok doesn’t really translate into getting more followers, though.

TikTok broke the follower thing, because it’s a huge burden on users. You have to manually find people to follow and unfollow. It’s so inefficient and it makes no sense. The far superior way to deliver content is with the algorithmic feed.

Is the Substack moment over, for tech reporters?

I think the hype cycle has died down. Substack is just one tool for independent journalists, but a good independent journalist doesn’t put all their eggs in one basket.

You’ve been using social media extensively to market your book. Which channel has been most effective for you in actually converting posts into sales?

Instagram stories. On TikTok people like to follow the journey, but it doesn’t convert into sales. Plus, they just keep buying the audiobook. Twitter has been worthless — it’s helped me get media attention, but that’s it.

Actually, you know what else did really well, is when I replied to Elon. He said something mean about me, and I replied and said he should read my book. That got me 100 orders.

I guess Twitter is good for fighting with Elon.

Which tech platform does the best job protecting users from harassment? Which does the worst?

The order is (from worst to best): Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. But they’re all bad.

Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio

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Taylor Lorenz offers a new history of the ‘Extremely Online’

In her first book, The Washington Post’s technology and culture columnist offers an infectious celebration of internet youth culture

In the absence of era-defining fashion trends and radical new musical genres, the easiest way to mark historical time in the 21st century has been to chart our personal adoption of apps and our consumption of new internet services. Most people under 50 will remember the past two decades as moving in a straight line from blogs to Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Vine and TikTok.

Narrating those shifts and developments, however, presents a challenge. As Washington Post technology and culture columnist Taylor Lorenz notes early in her debut book, “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” a “complete history of the internet” would be an impossible, encyclopedic task. She instead boils the past two decades down to a “social history of social media,” the saga of how tech platforms, global audiences, and a new class of “creators” forged contemporary internet culture. Lorenz traces the rise of new forms of celebrity online over the course of the past quarter century in roughly historical sequence. She takes a reporter’s approach to cultural history, interviewing many of the most famous (or at least influential) users of various sites and apps. Along the way, she provides a thoroughgoing account of the modern internet, from the perspective of those who have, at one time or another, found ways to mine it for opportunities.

The resulting social changes wrought by and on these platforms constitute, in Lorenz’s words, a “revolution.” Communications technology ushered in “the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism” — demolishing “traditional barriers” and devastating “legacy institutions.” For Lorenz, the effects of this revolution were net positive, empowering the marginalized and providing more creative people with gainful employment.

Tapping her deep expertise in the subject, Lorenz makes a strong case that creators — not the tech platforms — truly shaped internet culture. “Online creators,” writes Lorenz, “don’t just produce content; they define the norms and dynamics of their medium.” In her retelling, tech executives never thought audiences would prefer user-generated content over “premium” content, but those who made it kept pushing the platforms forward and proving the bosses wrong. Apps that partnered with their most creative users prospered, most notably YouTube, while tech executives who fought their power-users, like those at Vine, watched their jobs evaporate.

Why BuzzFeed joined Gawker in the internet news graveyard

From the vantage of 2023, the internet has obviously been an incredible social and cultural force — but does its history amount to a true revolution ? Teens today do spend an extraordinary amount of time watching videos on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram instead of television and cinema. And on Lorenz’s particular measure of “fame, influence, and power,” creators have risen in stature as a social group; the influencers are indeed influencing. Thanks to a variety of monetization options, these tech platforms have “given more people the chance to benefit directly from their labor than at any other time in history.” Lorenz’s narrative lets us even dance on the grave of the dreaded “gatekeepers,” who can no longer prevent self-expressive teenagers from broadcasting to a potential audience of millions.

But what has humanity gained from the revolution Lorenz names and describes — besides new forms of monetization? “Extremely Online” spends little time on deep interpretations of online culture’s tentpole songs, videos and dances, or otherwise picking out the creative works that defined a generation. This is partly because most celebrations of web content have been half-ironic. Nothing is more exciting on the internet than quirky mediocrity: It was the odd baritone vocals and amateurish repetitive hook of Tay Zonday’s song “Chocolate Rain” that made anonymous 4chan users want to elevate it into an internet power-user anthem. In “Extremely Online,” likewise, earnest celebrations of creativity are rare, and usually exist to highlight times when the system failed to provide fame and fortune — as in the case of the uncredited copying of Black teen Jalaiah Harmon’s “Renegade” dance.

To be fair, pure creativity was never as important in social media as “authenticity.” The chance to see and hear people just like you propelled bloggers and vloggers over experienced establishment journalists engaging in the same topics. For a long time, Lorenz writes, this pursuit of authenticity at least provided a buttress against over-commercialization. Creators worried that their fans would reject open product placement. The last remnants of this ethos evaporated in 2017, ironically, when creators began to follow FTC guidance by being fully transparent about paid promotions on Instagram. Audiences responded by increasing their engagement; they may have wanted blatant shilling the whole time. The user demand for authorized marketing content became so integral to Instagram that third-rate influencers would buy their own luxury goods and post them with a #ad hashtag to pretend as if they, too, were part of the sponsored elite.

“Extremely Online” is infectious in celebrating the tsunami of creative youth culture, a wave that provided the world with an overabundance of homemade marketing videos for multinational brands, prank videos that verge on sociopathy and observational comedy for middle-school kids. Whenever someone complains about the dubious quality of this content stockpile, blame is quickly assigned to the platforms’ nefarious algorithms. But fans clearly adore creators’ marketing videos, sociopathic pranks, and observational comedy, or they would not watch them, buy up the creators’ merch, and attend live tours of creators where teens “stand in line for a selfie and see a dance performance comparable to a high school talent show.” One critical flaw in “Extremely Online” is that it offers little insight into the fans who worship the online creators: What makes these particular prankster vloggers and self-absorbed beauty influencers so appealing to the teenage mind?

Understanding why fans are drawn to certain creators might help us make sense of the larger question: whether anything has really changed. It’s clear that there has been an upheaval in teenage pop culture, but a true revolution would involve a major status reversal across society — where outsiders not only bypass gatekeepers but take over the establishment. YouTube and Instagram, in particular, have catalyzed the formation of a new creative class, one that recruits its members from outside the traditional union of liberal arts college graduates, art-school kids, pseudo-intellectuals and urban scenesters.

On the internet, fancy pedigrees and back-scratching networks matter much less than raw hustle. But are the creators parlaying their huge audience numbers into widespread social esteem or A-list fame? The vast majority of Lorenz’s protagonists never managed that feat, for a list of reasons ranging from mediocrity to burnout, to, in some cases, “cancellation.” In the global status hierarchy, online creators have moved upward, but their ascent has so far stopped at the tier of reality TV and soap opera stars. The castle walls of the Hollywood-designer fashion system have never seemed higher.

In “Extremely Online,” Lorenz gives us a clear and compelling history of how the money came to flow into amateur-made short video content. But the book can’t quite prove that we’ve lived through a true revolution. Our celebrity aristocracy has never been stronger. The public looks to online creators for entertainment, but does not consider them important sources of art or glamour — much as our ravenous desire for Big Macs doesn’t translate into respect for the workers who make them. In popular parlance, being “extremely online” is a pejorative term for following too closely the latest junky memes and arcane creator gossip. Lorenz ably demonstrates how online creators fought to be paid for their passion, gumption and moxie, though her book leaves the reader questioning their social relevance: There is a growing, if exhausted, middle-class army of influencers and vloggers, but the professional creative industry remains best positioned to dominate our consciousness. At the end of the day, a cat video is only a cat video.

W. David Marx is author of “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change.” He lives in Tokyo.

Extremely Online

The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

By Taylor Lorenz

Simon & Schuster. 373 pp. $29.99

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EXTREMELY ONLINE

The untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet.

by Taylor Lorenz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2023

A capable piece of historical research that breaks little new ground.

A technology journalist looks at the downside of the social media revolution.

A former tech reporter for the New York Times , Lorenz is now a columnist for the Washington Post , and she has been accused of reporting errors. In her debut book, the author walks us through the rise of the major platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and recounts the eclipse of MySpace and Vine. She identifies “mommy bloggers” as the first group to become influencers and the first to see the potential for monetization of their social media presence. (Readers interested in a more in-depth discussion of this aspect of the online world should turn to Stephanie McNeal’s Swipe Up for More! ) The development of simple video editing tools switched the emphasis from written to visual material, and internet-enabled phones meant that social media became ubiquitous. The problem with this book is that Lorenz fails to offer enough novel analysis of the industry. There are already numerous books on influencers, YouTube, online celebrity marketing, and virtually every other aspect of the social media phenomenon. The author’s theme is that while social media has changed the business and cultural landscape by giving power to creative individuals, it has also created a dangerous whirlpool of conflict, exploitation, and disinformation. True enough, but it’s hardly a revolutionary insight. Is she unaware of the widespread view that has taken hold in the past few years that social media is a very mixed blessing? This points to the most surprising aspect of the book: It seems dated and dull. The author’s online followers might like it, but other people will probably be unimpressed. Social media, writes Lorenz, “is often dismissed by traditionalists as a vacant fad, when in fact it is the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism.” If only the text reflected the gravitas of that disruption.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023

ISBN: 9781982146863

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | WORLD | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL NONFICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

POVERTY, BY AMERICA

by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023

A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.

A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted .

“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.

Pub Date: March 21, 2023

ISBN: 9780593239919

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the pocket change collective series.

by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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Book Review: ‘Extremely Online’ shows how creators and influencers have shaped social media

This cover image released by Simon & Schuster shows “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet” by Taylor Lorenz. (Simon & Schuster via AP)

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There’s no shortage of books published in the past several years that have focused on the recent history of social media companies and the founders of the tech giants running them.

In “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” Taylor Lorenz makes a valuable and entertaining contribution to that collection by telling the story through the prism of the users, creators and influencers who have shaped social media and its impact on our culture.

Lorenz, technology columnist for The Washington Post, has written what she calls a social history of social media that profiles the motley collection of figures who have had arguably more influence on the landscape of the modern Internet than most Silicon Valley executives.

From mommy bloggers to TikTok celebrities, Lorenz focuses on the users who “revolutionized new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, ambition in the 21st century.”

As someone who has covered those new approaches over the years, Lorenz is well-positioned to chronicle that history. Lorenz tells the story of how tech companies struggled to adapt to users’ needs and demands over the past two decades.

The book is an enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers such as bloggers Heather Armstrong and Julia Allison, as well as the rise and fall of platforms such MySpace and Vine.

She also explores the dark side of social media’s rise, looking at how platforms have been weaponized from “Gamergate” to the rapid spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. She lays bare the challenges created by the transformation of social media, noting that “tech founders may control source code, but users shape the product.”

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Book Review: 'Extremely Online' shows how creators and influencers have shaped social media

Washington post technology columnist taylor lorenz tells the social history of social media in “extremely online: the untold story of fame, influence and power on the internet.”.

There's no shortage of books published in the past several years that have focused on the recent history of social media companies and the founders of the tech giants running them.

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In “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” Taylor Lorenz makes a valuable and entertaining contribution to that collection by telling the story through the prism of the users, creators and influencers who have shaped social media and its impact on our culture.

Lorenz, technology columnist for The Washington Post, has written what she calls a social history of social media that profiles the motley collection of figures who have had arguably more influence on the landscape of the modern Internet than most Silicon Valley executives.

From mommy bloggers to TikTok celebrities, Lorenz focuses on the users who “revolutionized new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, ambition in the 21st century.”

As someone who has covered those new approaches over the years, Lorenz is well-positioned to chronicle that history. Lorenz tells the story of how tech companies struggled to adapt to users' needs and demands over the past two decades.

The book is an enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers such as bloggers Heather Armstrong and Julia Allison, as well as the rise and fall of platforms such MySpace and Vine.

She also explores the dark side of social media's rise, looking at how platforms have been weaponized from “Gamergate" to the rapid spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. She lays bare the challenges created by the transformation of social media, noting that “tech founders may control source code, but users shape the product.”

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Extremely online: the untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet audible audiobook – unabridged.

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Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet, revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off—“terrific,” as the New York Times calls it, “Lorenz…is a knowledgeable, opinionated guide to the ways internet fame has become fame, full stop.” For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online , she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism. By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. In this “deeply reported, behind-the-scenes chronicle of how everyday people built careers and empires from their sheer talent and algorithmic luck” (Sarah Frier, author of No Filter ), Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century. “ Extremely Online aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos” ( The New York Times ). Lorenz reveals the inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.

• Listening Length 10 hours and 27 minutes
• Author Taylor Lorenz
• Narrator Emily Tremaine, see all
• Audible release date October 3, 2023
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster Audio
• ASIN B0C1PQ7MZC
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
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Extremely Online review: A vital look at the creator economy

Taylor Lorenz goes behind the scenes of the multibillion-dollar influencer industry to trace its meteoric rise in this fascinating book

By Chris Stokel-Walker

11 October 2023

Celebrity creators have better brand recognition among younger generations than some Hollywood stars

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Extremely Online Taylor Lorenz (WH Allen)

SOCIAL media has changed our lives in many ways. It is now possible to keep in touch with close friends and family wherever they are on Earth, and to bridge divides that, in previous generations, would have seemed impossible to close. Social media is also where we engage with each other and learn about the world, making breaking news more urgent and immediate.

But the biggest impact of the past 20 years…

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Taylor Lorenz knows social media. So why is her book a dull celebration of marketing deals?

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Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

By Taylor Lorenz Simon & Schuster: 384 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

According to Taylor Lorenz , social media platforms have turned the internet, once a colorless hellscape of bad graphics and words clumped into ungainly shapes called paragraphs, into a wonderland of cute memes and hilarious videos generated by young go-getters whose creativity has been unleashed by idealistic outfits such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. These platforms are saving humanity from “legacy media,” a malevolent cabal of paragraph-peddlers Lorenz has managed to infiltrate with undercover stints as a technology reporter for the Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post .

If that strikes you as about right, then you are the perfect audience for Lorenz’s new book “ Extremely Online ,” a purported “social history of social media.” You may even be one of the influencers stuffed into this glorified press release, squeezed somewhere between vlogger Bree Avery , former MTV executive Fred Seibert and Tardar Sauce, a.k.a Grumpy Cat , “a female blue-eyed mixed-breed cat with a distinct frowning expression.”

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But if you happen to have followed the stories on child predators on Instagram , young men radicalized on YouTube , young women driven to suicide by TikTok or the unabashed racists and antisemites running rampant on Twitter (sorry, not calling it “X”), you will marvel, as I did, that a journalist whose beat is the internet — Lorenz lives in Los Angeles and currently writes for the Post — could insist on such a strangely sunny take of the digital existence.

To place “Extremely Online” against Siddharth Kara’s “ Cobalt Red ,” an investigation into the horrific exploitation of Congolese laborers who mine the minerals that power our devices, is to indict the whole of our extremely online culture.

Another instructive comparison is to Barrett Swanson’s visit to Clubhouse , one of the influencer mansions that came to dot the Westside during the pandemic years. His article in Harper’s has something of Joan Didion ’s wry bemusement about the vacuity of modern celebrity. Here is Lorenz on the same phenomenon: “The ecommerce platform Wish and the social media app Clash both rented sprawling mansions where creators could produce exclusive content. Other brands did pop-up collab houses around L.A.”

In recent years, Lorenz has emerged as the right’s bête noire for reasons I cannot claim to fully understand. Some of it may have to do with her recent unmasking of the woman behind Libs of TikTok , a dishonest clearinghouse of conservative cultural outrage. But the animus preceded that article. The obsession with her private life, social media posts and petty but unremarkable professional beefs says far more about the cultural right than it does about Lorenz. A book about her experiences in the eye of the Daily Caller storm would have made for infinitely more interesting reading than the chronicle of how surfing influencer Baxter Box got a deal with Billabong .

At the New York Times, where she first gained widespread attention, Lorenz skillfully penetrated burgeoning online communities and explained their strange rites to people who wouldn’t know Tardar Sauce from Garfield. Revisiting some of her pre-pandemic work, I encountered a talented and ambitious journalist. There were few of the omissions and misjudgments, little of the clumsiness and misdirection, that plague “Extremely Online.”

‘Barbara Walters wasn’t a brand?’: Taylor Lorenz discusses journalism branding controversy

A journalist in California was at the center of a lot of drama on social media last week.

March 7, 2022

I hope that doesn’t sound condescending; it isn’t meant to be. My point is that if Lorenz truly believes that social media platforms have been a democratizing force, she is more than capable of producing something more substantial than a fever dream of proper nouns: Pokimane , Mr. Cashier, Jenna Marbles , the Chernin Group , GrapeStory.

Who are these people? I still have no clue. Nearly every character in the book, with a few exceptions, is described as the sum of marketing deals and social media followers. “Extremely Online” is crammed with people but devoid of life, especially as the social media revolution accelerates and influencers spring up like mushrooms after spring rains.

The book made me appreciate how rare it is to encounter good writing about the internet. It does exist, though. If you want to learn how Tumblr continues to shape internet discourse, read Kaitlyn Tiffany’s seminal Atlantic essay “ How the Snowflakes Won .” To better understand how algorithms have infected our inner lives, fling aside this review and turn to Amanda Hess’ “ This Is Your Brain on Peloton ,” a superb profile of exercise influencer Cody Rigsby . Without needlessly mocking her earnest subject, Hess devastatingly deconstructs the culture of online fandom through the lens of an overpriced stationary bike’s LED display. I can’t wait for her book .

For that matter, Ben Smith comes much closer than Lorenz to a social history of the internet in his recent book “ Traffic .” But there is still a definitive, “ Liar’s Poker ”-style chronicle to be written about the Allbirds -clad elite of Palo Alto. As much as “Extremely Online” wants to be that book, it ends up reading like a marketing report, produced for Santa Monica execs who get their rocks off on fictional valuations, porn for people who’d rather “like” than love.

Lorenz believes that the advent of blogging “demolished traditional barriers and empowered millions who were previously marginalized.” Her heroes are the “influencers” and “creators” who are sometimes able to make millions by hawking sponsored content, or spon-con, in short videos intended to go viral.

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Feb. 10, 2023

A watershed moment comes in 2006, when Google buys YouTube . “Google was taking a big bet, but when it looked at YouTube’s rise, it saw pure potential,” writes Lorenz, putting every cliché in the English language through a Peloton workout. We learn in the next paragraph that “none recognized its promise as clearly as Google Video’s partnerships manager, George Strompolos.”

I don’t know about you, but the arrival of a “partnerships manager” on the scene always roils my animal spirits. Ten bucks says you’ll never guess how Strompolos felt after Google chief executive Eric Schmidt “asked Strompolos and several of his colleagues to join the YouTube team.” According to Lorenz, “Strompolos was thrilled.”

The conspicuous lack of original insight made me think Lorenz wasn’t especially thrilled by her own premise: “Blogs offered readers everything that legacy media couldn’t, revealing what writers really thought.” Yeah, no, not really. I’m pretty sure the newspapers and magazines she has worked for still publish op-eds and essays in which writers reveal what they’re thinking. Some of them even blog.

The writing here is joyless and rushed, like a hangover doom-scroll . A new platform is invented, algorithms are gamed, fortunes are made, and then the next platform comes along. The union of corporations and “creators” is treated with the import of Allied armies meeting on the Elbe River in 1945: “One campaign, for computer giant HP, featured Viners Jessi Smiles , Brodie Smith, Robby Ayala, and Zach King sharing an HP notebook/tablet.” My reaction to such developments summarizes my prevailing feeling about this book: Who cares?

How do influencers make money? And how much? She’ll tell you

Meet Lynette Adkins. She’s part of a new crop of creators focusing their content on the how-to of the business: making money from an online following.

Aug. 12, 2021

The goal, always, is to get rich and famous by making people click on things and buy stuff. Depressingly, Lorenz seems to believe that recording videos that hawk clothes made in an Indonesian sweatshop fulfills some kind of liberatory ideal.

That there is something profoundly disturbing about turning a generation into the technostate’s willing influencers never seems to disturb Lorenz. More than once, she struck me as less an internet explorer than a digital prisoner, making “Extremely Online” a kind of Stockholm syndrome manifesto.

The pandemic drove us all online; some of us have stayed there, whether out of necessity or desire. Advances in artificial intelligence will soon make digital reality even more enticing, while degrading our experience of the real world. Still, one wants to believe that there is more to heaven and earth than what is known by Tardar Sauce.

Nazaryan writes about culture and politics.

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Book Review: ‘Extremely Online’ shows how creators and influencers have shaped social media

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There’s no shortage of books published in the past several years that have focused on the recent history of social media companies and the founders of the tech giants running them.

In “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” Taylor Lorenz makes a valuable and entertaining contribution to that collection by telling the story through the prism of the users, creators and influencers who have shaped social media and its impact on our culture.

Lorenz, technology columnist for The Washington Post, has written what she calls a social history of social media that profiles the motley collection of figures who have had arguably more influence on the landscape of the modern Internet than most Silicon Valley executives.

From mommy bloggers to TikTok celebrities, Lorenz focuses on the users who “revolutionized new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, ambition in the 21st century.”

As someone who has covered those new approaches over the years, Lorenz is well-positioned to chronicle that history. Lorenz tells the story of how tech companies struggled to adapt to users’ needs and demands over the past two decades.

The book is an enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers such as bloggers Heather Armstrong and Julia Allison, as well as the rise and fall of platforms such MySpace and Vine.

She also explores the dark side of social media’s rise, looking at how platforms have been weaponized from “Gamergate” to the rapid spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. She lays bare the challenges created by the transformation of social media, noting that “tech founders may control source code, but users shape the product.”

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Extremely Online

The untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet.

• Unabridged Audio Download

Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology columnist for  The Washington Post ’s business section covering online culture. Previously, she was a technology reporter for  The New York Times  business section,  The Atlantic , and  The Daily Beast . Her writing has appeared in  New York magazine,  Rolling Stone ,  Outside  magazine,  Fast Company , and more. She often appears on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and the BBC. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a former affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Lorenz was named to  Fortune ’s 40 Under 40 list of leaders in Media and Entertainment in 2020.  Adweek  included her in their Young Influentials Who Are Shaping Media, Marketing and Tech listing, stating that Lorenz “contextualizes the internet as we live it.” In 2022,  Town & Country  magazine named her to their New Creative Vanguards list of a rising generation of creatives, calling her “The Bob Woodward of the TikTok generation.” She lives in Los Angeles, and you can follow her @TaylorLorenz on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 3, 2023)
• Length: 384 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982146863

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Raves and Reviews

"Terrific . . . Extremely Online aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos." —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "An enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers." —ASSOCIATED PRESS "Each story Lorenz spotlights is carefully chosen to highlight the power that users have historically held in shaping social media trends and culture." —TEENVOGUE.COM "If you want to understand what is happening on the internet, you start by reading Taylor Lorenz." — BLOOMBERG "Taylor Lorenz is telling the real history of the internet." —The Face (LINK)"More than just a history lesson, Lorenz’s well-researched book does a better job of connecting the dots than almost anything else I’ve read on the subject of social media’s meteoric growth, and the unexpected rise of the influencer." —TECH RADAR ”Readers will learn valuable lessons about…what goes viral and are sure to be blown away when they see the dollar amounts moving through the industry. This socioeconomics docudrama is both fun and terrifying, just like the internet.” —BOOKLIST “This astute debut from Lorenz, a Washington Post technology columnist, traces the tumultuous history of social media from the early 2000s to the present…. Lorenz accomplishes the difficult feat of wrangling a cogent narrative out of the unruliness of social media, while offering smart insight into how platforms affect their users.… It’s a powerful assessment of how logging on has changed the world.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

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‘Facebook F—ed Up’: Taylor Lorenz Tells the Untold History of the Internet in Upcoming Book ‘Extremely Online’

By Rachel Seo

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“I want to tell the stories that have been written out of history by Silicon Valley,” says Taylor Lorenz.

Popular on Variety

What previously untold story about the internet were you trying to tell with this book?

There’s been a lot of phenomenal books written about the corporate side of social media. I loved Nick Bilton’s “Hatching Twitter,” Sarah Frier’s “No Filter,” Mark Bergen’s “Like, Comment, Subscribe.” These are all seminal books about the different platforms, and, obviously, the hundred Facebook books that we have in the world. They all tell the story of the rise of social media through the lens of specific platforms and really the corporate — they get into the user side a little bit — but it’s mostly these corporate tales.

I also think it’s important to set the record straight on where the “creator economy” emerged from, because in 2021, when Silicon Valley finally woke up and was forced to take internet culture seriously because of the pandemic, there was just so much revisionist history. They were talking about how MrBeast founded the notion of productizing himself — that’s just not true. Beauty vloggers were doing that back in 2012. Mommy bloggers pioneered a lot of these revenue streams, so I wanted to also talk about that. No one has written that history, that’s just an industry that that hasn’t been covered outside of marketing books or books that are focused on specific content creators. I wanted to write an internet history book, the rise of the social internet, but not just YouTube , not just Instagram. I love those books, I can’t express enough… I just feel like they’re pieces of the puzzle. And I wanted to put together the whole thing.

You note in your book that TikTok is much more of an entertainment platform than any other social media platform. Given your extensive knowledge of its infrastructure and impact, how do you think it will transform Hollywood moving forward?

It’s actually this regression back to the original promise of MySpace. MySpace also positioned itself and talked about itself in almost identical terms to TikTok. If you go back and read the marketing decks for MySpace, they talk about it as this entertainment platform and this hub for people to get discovered and talent to get discovered, like bands and entertainers. I talk about these two warring notions of social media, which is this L.A./New York notion of social, which is very focused on entertainment and media and that MySpace model, versus the Facebook model, which is this Silicon Valley thing that focused on friends and connections. 

In the end, now with TikTok, we’re seeing that this MySpace model was ultimately more compelling. MySpace was just ahead of its time in a lot of ways. Obviously TikTok is transforming the entertainment industry in so many ways. It’s forced them all to embrace short form video… Everyone’s just trying to make these annoying short video things to have a TikTok competitor.

The whole entertainment industry has been forced to dance, but I don’t think that Hollywood executives are ignoring the internet. A decade ago, there was this hard line between the internet and Hollywood — and now I mean, look at something like Barbenheimer. It’s as much an internet creation as it is a Hollywood phenomenon.

When Max rebranded and then listed the creatives working on the shows as “creators” in the credits, the creatives were extremely upset by their use of that terminology. What do you think about the way that particular language — “creator,” “content” — has entered our lexicon? What does that indicate about our approach to art and consumption right now?

The reason that language struck such a chord in the entertainment industry, and why people have this hostile reaction to being called “content creators,” or “creators” just generally, is because it speaks to this broader tech creep that’s been happening where our entertainment landscape is increasingly dominated by tech companies and tech platforms and this sanitized dystopian language that they use to speak about creative endeavors. The reason that people have this visceral reaction is because it’s really corrosive and bad. What Silicon Valley has done to the entertainment industry is not great. Look at why people are striking right now. Things like AI and these new types of unfair deals — Silicon Valley seems to want to turn everything into a gig economy, and I think they’d love to gig-ify the entire entertainment industry.

A lot of people in entertainment are sensing that and sensing this notion that that Silicon Valley views a lot of them as replaceable or fundamentally doesn’t respect their creative work. Silicon Valley famously doesn’t respect creativity and writing. It speaks to Silicon Valley’s increase, and the tech world’s increasing dominance, in Hollywood, and obviously that makes people uncomfortable and worried for good reason.

What else do you want readers to know about this book?

It’s so interesting the way that our perception of fame has changed. One thing that got cut — it’s mentioned in there, but I had a whole 3,000-word thing about this originally — is this evolution of language and how we talk about fame. Who is a public figure has changed so much, and how we view fame and notoriety has changed. Anybody that’s into entertainment, or the future of entertainment and media, would hopefully want to read the book and find it interesting, because so much of this history has been lost to time or forgotten or swept over, and we lived through these moments. But we don’t really go back and think about them or why they were so influential.

That part of your book jumped out at me . When I read that the biggest Vine stars initially migrated to Facebook and then left for YouTube, I thought, “Wow, Facebook really screwed up.”

It’s such a lesson for anyone in entertainment, too. All of these tech companies or big Hollywood conglomerates — they want to just exploit people, they don’t want to pay. Pay your talent. Pay your talent, and they are happy, and they will keep creating. When you help them make a living, they can build these businesses and create art, and that ultimately adds value. It just goes back to paying talent what they’re worth, and of course, YouTube could be doing more always, but when you look at their program compared to TikTok or Facebook or anything else, they have the best system .

Do you foresee that deficiency in creator revenue becoming a bigger issue for TikTok in the future?

Right now, TikTok is paying people in another form of currency, which is online attention. Because TikTok has nailed discovery so much, it allows people to build these really big audiences very quickly. It’s very hard to scale on YouTube at the level that you can on TikTok. But if the discovery falters on TikTok, they’re gonna be in big trouble, because they’re also not paying people money, and ultimately, people need money to live. What people generally do now is go to TikTok, build the audience and then try and convert those people to YouTube subscribers, because YouTube is always a gold standard.

“Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Power, and Influence on the Internet” comes out on Oct. 3. Preorder it here .

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Extremely Online

The untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet.

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology columnist for  The Washington Post ’s business section covering online culture. Previously, she was a technology reporter for  The New York Times  business section,  The Atlantic , and  The Daily Beast . Her writing has appeared in  New York magazine,  Rolling Stone ,  Outside  magazine,  Fast Company , and more. She often appears on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and the BBC. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a former affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Lorenz was named to  Fortune ’s 40 Under 40 list of leaders in Media and Entertainment in 2020.  Adweek  included her in their Young Influentials Who Are Shaping Media, Marketing and Tech listing, stating that Lorenz “contextualizes the internet as we live it.” In 2022,  Town & Country  magazine named her to their New Creative Vanguards list of a rising generation of creatives, calling her “The Bob Woodward of the TikTok generation.” She lives in Los Angeles, and you can follow her @TaylorLorenz on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 3, 2023)
• Length: 384 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982146863

Browse Related Books

• Business & Economics > Entrepreneurship
• Technology & Engineering > Social Aspects
• Social Science > Popular Culture

Raves and Reviews

"Terrific . . . Extremely Online aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos." —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "An enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers." —ASSOCIATED PRESS "Each story Lorenz spotlights is carefully chosen to highlight the power that users have historically held in shaping social media trends and culture." —TEENVOGUE.COM "If you want to understand what is happening on the internet, you start by reading Taylor Lorenz." — BLOOMBERG "Taylor Lorenz is telling the real history of the internet." —The Face (LINK)"More than just a history lesson, Lorenz’s well-researched book does a better job of connecting the dots than almost anything else I’ve read on the subject of social media’s meteoric growth, and the unexpected rise of the influencer." —TECH RADAR ”Readers will learn valuable lessons about…what goes viral and are sure to be blown away when they see the dollar amounts moving through the industry. This socioeconomics docudrama is both fun and terrifying, just like the internet.” —BOOKLIST “This astute debut from Lorenz, a Washington Post technology columnist, traces the tumultuous history of social media from the early 2000s to the present…. Lorenz accomplishes the difficult feat of wrangling a cogent narrative out of the unruliness of social media, while offering smart insight into how platforms affect their users.… It’s a powerful assessment of how logging on has changed the world.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

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Book Review: 'Extremely Online' shows how creators and influencers have shaped social media

Book review - extremely online - 3x2 for apnews.

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There's no shortage of books published in the past several years that have focused on the recent history of social media companies and the founders of the tech giants running them.

In “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” Taylor Lorenz makes a valuable and entertaining contribution to that collection by telling the story through the prism of the users, creators and influencers who have shaped social media and its impact on our culture.

Lorenz, technology columnist for The Washington Post, has written what she calls a social history of social media that profiles the motley collection of figures who have had arguably more influence on the landscape of the modern Internet than most Silicon Valley executives.

From mommy bloggers to TikTok celebrities, Lorenz focuses on the users who “revolutionized new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, ambition in the 21st century.”

As someone who has covered those new approaches over the years, Lorenz is well-positioned to chronicle that history. Lorenz tells the story of how tech companies struggled to adapt to users' needs and demands over the past two decades.

The book is an enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers such as bloggers Heather Armstrong and Julia Allison, as well as the rise and fall of platforms such MySpace and Vine.

She also explores the dark side of social media's rise, looking at how platforms have been weaponized from “Gamergate" to the rapid spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. She lays bare the challenges created by the transformation of social media, noting that “tech founders may control source code, but users shape the product.”

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