Ryan Broderick

This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality.

With me is my personal bean dad, Grant Irving, my producer, and our fantastic guest returning to the show today is Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor, how are you?

You've been the main character of the internet a few times, I feel like.

What does that feel like when it's happening?

I have dabbled in that world myself, but I feel like you have a bit more experience than I do when the internet comes calling.

I feel like a lot of the panic around it when it would happen was like society hadn't really caught up to how silly a lot of this stuff is.

So like the first time it ever happened to me, I had a boss say they were going to fire me over it.

but it was because my family had been doxxed by 4chan and my editor basically didn't like the fact that we were getting that attention and was like, I'll fire you if you tweet about this or if you say anything about it.

And like now that seems ridiculous, but this was 2012 probably.

What'd you do to make 4chan mad?

I wrote about a fake campaign they put together called Cutting for Bieber.

They were pretending to be teenage girls who were self-harming because Justin Bieber was photographed smoking weed.

That's pretty funny.

Nowadays, I feel like if you become the main character of the internet, it probably stays more on the internet than it used to also, I would say.

Yeah.

I remember in 2019, someone tried to like call in a bomb threat to my apartment.

I guess they were going to like call the police and say that there was like a bomb there or something.

But they got the wrong address and they did it to like a French restaurant down the street.

I've always felt very bad about that.