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Journalist Taylor Lorenz isn’t the first to declare legacy media a dead industry walking. But few voice it with the conviction that she does—and an even more vigorous claim that they know its successor. The future of media, she says, lies in social media influencers and the “creator economy.” Let’s see how the peerless scrivener of influencers describes this revolution—her term—in which an online rabble is storming the tech/media Bastille with blogs, TikToks, DigiTours, and product placements.
“It has radically upended how we’ve understood and interacted with our world. It has demolished traditional barriers and empowered millions who were previously marginalized. It has created vast new sectors of our economy while devastating legacy institutions. It is often dismissed by traditionalists as a vacant fad when it in fact it is the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism.”
In fact? More than private equity, the rise of the tech platforms influencers build on, or the US Supreme Court’s multiple rulings giving corporations individual rights while weakening the rights actual individuals have to hold companies to account? That’s a huge heap of things to justify, and Lorenz doesn’t really try to do it in her new book, Extremely Online. Her long-awaited tome on online influencers and creators—who have genuinely made a difference, though the “empowering millions” part is debatable—is a surprisingly conventional business book. She accurately calls it a “social history of social media.” This is a logical approach, springing from her excellent reporting for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and her current legacy-media employer, The Washington Post.
Lorenz practically invented the influencer beat, consistently clobbering competitors by chronicling the movement’s innovators and wannabes. As one would expect, characters like Julia Allison, Jake Paul, Lonelygirl15, MrBeast, and PewDiePie pop up in Extremely Online. Lorenz expertly delineates the fine points of building a social media persona, and ultimately a business around it: creating an authentic and focused identity; building an audience through a steady, if not exhausting, cadence of clever posts; affiliating with other famous internet personalities; grabbing attention with shocking or overly personal content. And of course, parties help too. While Lorenz stops short of outright endorsing the phenomenon, it’s clear she’s down with the scene. Especially when it comes to making legacy media look clueless. Her observations about how a generation takes these creators more seriously than journalistic warhorses comes with post-touchdown spikes worthy of taunting penalties. (Her loathing for the elite and “misogynist” media is constantly invoked in the book.)
When Lorenz and I get together to discuss her book, I quiz her on the quality of what these revolutionary creators are churning out. Does she think that influencer media is better than what came before?
“I think it's certainly superior in a lot of ways,” she tells me. “The traditional media is very strict in terms of format. They just often don't present content in a way that people want to consume it.” Then she throws a bone to her employer. “There's a lot of great content that comes out from The Washington Post. It's sort of locked away in articles that people will never be able to read or will never have time to read.”
I had never thought of “articles” as a means of locking content away rather than distributing it. But Lorenz breezes past my objection. “People don't always prefer to read articles,” she says. “People want more multimedia content. There's more and more ways to consume information, especially as each of these platforms adds new features. Now you can get TikTok, Reels, YouTube videos, livestreams … The creator ecosystem is just providing more content in a wider variety of formats.”
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I ask if she thinks that creator content is superior to, say Hollywood movies. Yes, she kind of does.
“What are movies except long-form content?” she asks. “They do have a lot of budget behind them and the backing of Hollywood. I don’t think people will stop watching movies. But they also want to get news and information and entertainment in other formats, and those formats are now increasingly competing with more traditional forms of content.”
In terms of time consumption, that may be true. And there’s a lot of creativity and value in creator content. Yet also countless empty calories. Seldom do I crawl out of a TikTok rabbit hole feeling well-informed and more knowledgeable about complicated subjects. And then there’s the trust issue. Some people gleefully anticipate the end of gatekeepers. But the creator ecosystem has insufficient protections against toxic, even racist content. An oft-cited drive of creators is getting famous, and that compass too often points to the lowest common denominator. Creators are also all too eager to sell out their followers with #ads that might in other venues be called bribes.
A critical moment in Lorenz’s book comes when she writes about the FTC’s 2017 specification that any paid endorsement of food, hotels, beauty products, THC gummies, or anything else be labeled as an “ad.” At the time, the leading theory of influencing was that the value of those paid plugs sprang from the illusion created that all these cool kids really liked the crap they were photographing and gushing over. Creators braced themselves for a crash when they adopted the labels. But users didn’t seem to care. The objections were so minimal that some influencers who didn’t get endorsement deals falsely put the #ad label on their IGs and tweets, so followers would get the impression they were important enough to be bought off. In the world of creators, selling out was a virtue.
Lorenz paints a picture of a future where everyone has successful social media channels—each person a media company—that promotes their business and shares their interests and auditions for entertainment-industry jobs. Besides the nightmare prospect of millions of people having to become comedians and advertorial hosts to make a living, I have trouble with the math on this. My own social media streams are dominated by Taylor Swift performance clips. Every time she saunters across the stage, some fantastic TikTok barber loses a chance to prove to me that they should be the one to cut my hair. (I won’t even mention the possibility that in the near future the “creators” will be AI bots.)
My bet is that this revolution, just as with the internet before it, will be one with a small pool of big winners and a mass of followers. Lorenz doesn’t really dispute this, but, in somewhat of a dystopian twist, blames it on the late-stage capitalism that the creator economy is allegedly transforming. “A lot of people have sort of given up hope on any kind of traditional career—why go work for someone else, when they're going to exploit you or fire you tomorrow? They're trying to make it on the internet, because it's a huge lottery—If you make it big, you can be really successful and rich.”
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During our conversation Lorenz senses that I’m not about to celebrate the end of traditional media, and perhaps condescendingly offers some misgivings on that point. “I really believe in legacy media,” she says before signing off. “I think we should preserve it. I just want them to get with the picture.” Only after she hangs up do I think of asking her what that picture would look like—and which hot new platform I should be migrating Plaintext to.
Time Travel
Taylor Lorenz’s history of social media finds the first influencers in the early days of blogging. She didn’t go back far enough. In the early 1980s, an ex-Army colonel named Dave Hughes became an online celebrity to the 40,000 members of The Source, a dialup online service that was the primo watering hole for modem owners in the early 1980s. Not only did “SourceVoid Dave” find a national audience by pioneering the digital distribution of unedited content, but he got The Source to institute a system where creators could get a portion of online fees. Gen Z will be shocked to hear it, but back then simply connecting to a service like The Source cost $6 an hour. I profiled Hughes for Popular Computing in January 1984.
Dave kept writing of his experiences and as his writings piled up, he urged The Source to open public files so all could share. This was the beginning of what is now one of the most popular aspects of The Source: Electronic Publishing.
It is one of Hughes’ major accomplishments. Any Source user can instantly become a publisher with a potential audience of 40,000 Source subscribers. (And The Source pays a royalty, too—17 percent of connect time, up from the original 9 percent.)
To quote from a message he sent me on [the online conferencing system] EIES, “No editor published, no publisher buys—exactly what I am writing now. I can write it, agonize over it, mull it over until I decide to upload it to The Source in about five minutes of connect time (a 50 cent cost). Then I store it for about 40 cents a page. But it’s instantly accessible to about 40,000 others. And if what I have to say becomes ‘an electronic bestseller,’ then I will have arrived.”
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SourceVoid Dave has arrived with several electronic bestsellers (some of them accessed by more than 1,000 readers). His first royalty check was for $826—for a piece which, Dave notes, The Source never bought. His efforts spurred others to do the same thing, and a tiny community of Sourcewriters has appeared. “Metaphorically we are creating an electronic Left Bank of Paris,” explains Dave.
Ask Me One Thing
Moe links to a local tv news report making vicious fun out of the flaws in the current autonomous driving services in San Francisco. The reporter’s teenage son is less than enchanted with the ride. Moe asks, “Why is this kid not ecstatic at the prospect of a magic machine that can take him anywhere with a click of a button?”
Thanks for your (loaded) question, Moe. The simple answer to your question is clear from the clip. At the moment, self-driving vehicles cannot deliver the precision and flexibility of services like taxis and Ubers. The reporter opens the segment by exposing the fact that neither Cruise nor Waymo go to the museum of their choice, because the location is “outside the mapping area.” Throwing caution to the wind she decided to order a Cruise anyway. We see the car they electronically hail drive right by them and stop a few yards down the road. Not a recipe for ecstasy!
Here’s Moe’s woe: The gist of the segment is the reporter interviewing her son for his reactions, which provide the heart of the piece. Like all great reporters she rejects the idea of consulting experts when someone living in her house will do just fine. Why even put in a call to the companies she’s criticizing? It turns out that her teenage son doesn’t like the idea of autonomous cars. When mom wonders whether it could free her from endless ferrying around of kids, junior says that he likes the company. (Yeah, I bet he never sits in the back seat staring at his phone.) Her socially conscious progeny also frets about AI displacing jobs. The clip ends when the Cruise car stops short of their destination because it too is “outside the mapping area.” Fail!
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Moe, you are clearly perturbed by what seems like an intentionally know-nothing hit piece on autonomous driving technology. And you are right, Cruise and Waymo are upfront that they are in a very early stage and that passengers are limited to certain areas. They promise safety—and a glimpse of the proposed future—but not a perfect experience. The reporter obviously knew that the service wouldn’t take her and her tech-critic son all the way home but provided the video evidence anyway, both from inside the car and from another vehicle trailing her on the doomed ride.
Whether intentional or not, the underlying thesis of this ABC7 story is that self-driving cars are a stunt that will never be able to match human-controlled vehicles—literally a joke. Just like some reporters once regarded that weird thing called the internet! The reporter’s jaded offspring has probably just read Brian Merchant’s approving book about the Luddites. I don’t want to put a date on it—it’ll be years, if not decades—but the flaws reported in the story will eventually be addressed, autonomous taxis will be common, and the reporter will have to live down endless mockery of her slapdash, ill-conceived story.
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