Chelsey Weber-Smith

Which is crazy.

No.

No, I couldn't imagine.

But what's, I think, interesting too about this is eventually this would be hosted on Rotten.com after it kind of ran out of different places to go.

And that was a part of Rotten.com's dedication to free speech.

And, you know, I think people like Elon Musk come out of this

This era of free speech being anything and everything hosted on the Internet without any kind of real moderation.

And, you know, I mean, Rotten.com would end up going to court over different aspects of free speech.

And it kind of was this like, quote unquote, bastion of free speech.

I'm not saying I feel that way, but that was sort of the narrative that was going around.

And I just think that is a really interesting part of how the early Internet built some of the people that we're dealing with today and what they expect.

Yeah, I think that's what I mean.

And that it's so married that this type of like really sometimes exploitative or gruesome in some way or fucked up content is really connected to this like very important American ideal, even though that feels like...

kind of gross to connect some of like the worst videos out there real as well to this idea of free speech.

I'm not saying it's wrong.

I don't have a strong opinion, but I just think about the edgelordian time as having a profound effect on what people expected and wanted out of the internet.

Yeah, definitely a really charming pseudonym.

Yeah.

And I think hoaxes are harder to pull off, you know, and people just have the ability and not to say that everybody believed Bonsai Kittens was real, but a lot of people did.

And then a lot of people were just mad about the poor taste of it all.