Taylor Lorenz

Or like once like Gen Z sort of started, like they kind of just they had their time in the sun.

She's really been able to evolve out of it.

Well, because there wasn't much you could do with Tumblr fame aside from leverage it into some career. Like because you couldn't monetize yourself on the internet in the same way, Tumblr was this channel to music, right? Like you had people using that Tumblr clout to like

get their music out there and tumblr kind of like birthed so much of like millennial music culture or youtube like you blew up on tumblr jenna marbles was huge on tumblr tyler oakley was huge and then you would sort of like leverage it into youtube fame or what i did which is leverage it into a traditional media job the worst outcome. Probably the worst thing I could have done with that fame.

But like, I feel like Tumblr was this like creative soup and it birthed so many creative people. And I feel like so much of Grimes culture is wrapped up in that like early 2010s.

really the first half of the 2010s, there was almost no criticism of social media. This was like, social media is going to liberate the world. The internet's going to change everything. And there was just this rank tech optimism that I think a lot of creative people of that era, myself included, bought into or believed in.

And Grimes was also intertwined with blogging culture because she was really made by music bloggers of the time. And Blogging was also seen as this amazing thing. There's this great book called Never Be Alone Again, and it's about the blog house era of the internet.

It talks about this, of just how this view of technology as a positive, liberatory, amazing creative space that's going to bring amazing things to the world is so imbued in music culture of that time.

and i think it's just interesting because when you hear her talk about her ideology i think she was one of the first people that i heard talking about like the singularity i had a blog about the singularity like a tumblr like a joke tumblr with my friend and i i feel like she made a comment about it that we like re-blogged or whatever but she would talk about the singularity singularity it was called like all the singular ladies or something wait what's but what's the singularity

The singularity. Wait, Kat, do you know what that is?

Guys, it is the sort of hypothetical moment in the future when AI surpasses human intelligence. Oh, that is like when the new world order begins. And like, OK, when I had this blog in like 2014 that we were like, oh, that's going to be the greatest moment. That's going to be.

Yeah. I mean, by a lot of people. Again, like this just goes back to like pre 2015, like tech brain. You had like so much boosterism from the tech press because it was the tech press was dominated by gadget bloggers that were like inherently fan boys. You had so much amazing creativity.

I mean, this is what I think Lena's book, Never Be Alone Again, gets into so much of like the blogging culture and like how that was affecting media and creativity. And so people were like, yes, yes. I can't wait for like AI and it's going to do all these amazing things. And like, we didn't have any concept of what that would be. Right.

It was just like, there was just this like excitement about technology and excitement about the future. And Grimes was one of the first people that I remember, like a celebrity that I would be like, Oh, she's talking about that stuff.

She thinks it'll bring communism. Didn't she think it would bring communism?

Yep. No.

Oh my God. What the boat looks like is insane.

I just looked at the photo. Sorry. Yeah.

This is the most like manic pixie dream shit I've ever heard.

There's something about this that I appreciate in the sense that I'm like, okay. That's fine. This is a weird creative thing and you want to sail down the thing with chickens. That's fine. That's creative. We all do creative things to feed our souls.

The problem is when you give someone this enormous amount of power and money and sort of start to take what they have to say as intellectually rigorous or something. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

Also, so much of Tumblr was just pseudo-intellectual nonsense. My own blog probably included.

First of all, I think people have a hard time if you've never been on it and probably didn't spend your formative years on it to remember that blogging and writing was the dominant form of expression on the internet at that time because you couldn't upload photos and So people were just writing and like, right. Like most people are not brilliant writers or thinkers. Right.

Like, and, and this was also the era of like, yeah, it was like pseudo intellectual of like, you know, it was very like book culture and like early kind of like Buzzfeed. Like I'm a reader, like fetishizing reading and being intellectual and like kind of being smart and, Because again, the best bloggers of that era, like the big time bloggers were smart, right?

You had to have something to say to succeed well. You had to be smart. You had to be interesting. You had to be intellectual. And so I just think like so much of Tumblr was that. And it was a lot of young people.

No matter how brilliant you are at like 20, you're not going to have the most like fully formed opinions because your brain is not developed and because you have literally almost no life experience. And so when you give someone like that a platform, I mean, I don't know, I've deleted

most traces of what i've written from those eras but like it was just sort of like encouraged right to like pseudo intellectualize and like and overanalyze your life or culture or whatever and i feel like that probably fed right into someone like her where it's like that's she's clearly that type of person already i pulled a few tweets from like the last few weeks grimes on twitter it is so monumentally embarrassing that i am finally getting into christianity because it's the only way i can quit vaping

This is like, you know, that tweet that's like, this must hit so hard if you're dumb. Yeah.

that's how i feel reading these i'm like what the hell sure what the hell sure i don't want to hate on her because i like these people like i maybe it's just i am predisposed to like i i think because like personally like and this is why i'm a journalist like i love like thinking of weird like alternatives or like i love listening to people like rant about their own weird theories about something like

if she was just doing this on Twitter and making her music, it would be totally fine. Like who cares? Twitter is for posting dumb stuff. Twitter is for venting your weird thoughts.

Like I think what we've seen and like why it's relevant is how this sort of like when she came into an enormous amount of money and power and influence and like suddenly like this person's sort of pseudo intellectual nonsense thoughts are now shaping potentially her

musk's policies or beliefs or whatever like she's given this this this political platform i just feel like i have to defend her because this is these are the kind of people i love being next to at parties yes girl like tell me your crazy theories i want to hear everything

The king of pseudo-intellectualism. He's like the final boss of pseudo-intellectualism.

The fact that Elon Musk continues to meet all of his women on Twitter or they work for him. Dark.

I don't think he can. I think that's why he has to slide into Twitter DMs because he cannot function IRL.

I think she was probably enthralled with him because here's this, like you said, his reputation at that point was still very high. People thought of him as this Tony Stark type figure, this brilliant tech guy, right? He's this amazing person building the future. He was an environmentalist. People were selling that back then, right? This is somebody that values technology.

Somebody invested in this new creative future. And yeah, I'm sure she saw so much in him. And I think, like you said, I think he probably saw... A woman that's willing to flatter him and, you know, feed his pseudo intellectual BS and his ego and ultimately sought to control her, which is what he seems to want to do to every woman he interacts with.

I don't think that even Elon realized how he would be radicalized at that point. And I, I, this is something that bothers me so much about Grimes discourse specifically on the internet is I just think that love is complicated and different people give each other different things. Because people will be like, well, how can you be in a relationship with somebody that you politically disagree with?

Or how can you be in a relationship with somebody that's like a bigot? As you mentioned, Kat, a lot of times these people don't start as bigots. If you knew they were a bigot, you wouldn't have gotten in that relationship, presumably. But sometimes you are with somebody and then you realize their beliefs have evolved. Or there are even people that I...

care about deeply that were there for me during like really critical parts of my life that I will always like care about and value that ultimately I realized they have like crazy and terrible opinions on things. And I think if you have a kid with someone too, like the sentiments change and everything.

And I mean, this is why, and I hate too that so many women, because so many women and more progressive women too are stuck with more bigoted men. Like I feel like we hear about that a lot, at least rather than the other way around. And the woman is chastised. And it's always like, how could you be with this monster? How could you do this?

And it's like, you don't know what they're getting from that relationship. You don't know. And yes, it would be great to have a moral high ground and all this stuff. But it's just like life is so much more complicated and messy than that. And human beings are more complicated. And even though you're right, he probably was never a leftist in any sense of the word. He's always been a union buster.

Billionaires are inherently, I would say, pretty evil. But I do think that he was a different person in 2018 than he is now.

Also, it's like if you're with somebody like that, who's like a narcissist or the love-loving stuff, you always want to get back to that point. You always believe, I think, that that is the person that they truly are. And this is just some aberrant behavior, but like, hey, just get back. Why can't this man return to the man that I knew? And as you said, it was always a mirage.

Or maybe she was overlooking a lot of things. People are like, well, how could she have more children? And it's like, again, maybe... He is love bombing him. You believe, you believe that that initial version of the person that you met is always going to be that person.

That was really good. Really good.

Yay! Thanks for having us.

Yeah. And it just goes back to also, I just have to say again, too, what I said before, which is that you don't know what a relationship is like until you're in it. Women especially are taught to compartmentalize and to, as everything that Kat said earlier, it's like you're pressured, especially once you have a child, to be together and to fix it.

And if that guy keeps giving you, which it sounds like he does, it's like he's such a manipulator. He's giving these women, especially Grimes, these tastes of him as they once knew him when they met.

I think what we see is as Elon starts to get radicalized, you start to see Grimes' politics evolve as well. And you also see her start to talk quite negatively about the media and to fight with the media. In 2021, she does this photo shoot where she's kind of trying to troll the media, where she's dressed up in this like... Typical Grimes kind of crazy outfit.

And then she's reading the Communist Manifesto. And this is when she was getting a lot of media criticism for being with Elon and enabling him because 2021 is when he really kicked off like the really awful transphobic stuff and just sort of started to make his more extreme beliefs more publicly known. And so you see her kind of feeding against that.

People were like, Oh my God, like, is she sending a message or what is this? But I think I started to see signs of like resentment of the media and like resentment of her public image. And you see her also starting to fight more with people in the replies.

Like people will say something to her and she's like, well, that's not, you know, you don't understand what's going on or, you know, like she's clearly frustrated and, I've written so much about this and I've experienced it myself.

When you see false information about yourself publicly or when you feel like part of your story is not being told or you're being chastised in the media, it is such a radicalizing force. I do think with her... she probably felt, I don't want to say persecuted, but I do think that she felt this resentment.

And that resentment, if you start to go down that road, you are fed into the right wing pipeline. The right is so good at taking that resentment and being like, you're right. You're right. And by the way, the media is evil. And by the way, all these people canceling you are evil. See what I mean? Woke people will turn on you. And so you see her starting to affiliate with more of these like

counterculture. These right-wing extremists, that's what they are. I don't want to excuse it. It's bad. It's lazy. She shouldn't do this. You should recognize like, okay, these people are also grifting off me. They also will throw me under the bus the minute I'm not politically expedient. But when you're feeling lonely, which I imagine she was, you're feeling completely isolated.

And then also endearing yourself to these far-right radicals also kind of endears herself to Elon, who's increasingly in those circles. I just see how that she started to go down that path.

She also starts to like physically hang out with these people. Yeah.

Because following, I don't want to be the follow police. Because I really... You follow everyone. Drives me insane. Because I write about right-wing influencers. Of course, I follow them. I monitor everything they do. And every day, I have some new person in my DMs. Why do you follow this person? I'm like, well, I write about them.

What's way more concerning to me, and I do think that you can deduce a certain amount of information about someone from the people that they follow because you can tell kind of their information diet, but she also starts to hang out with these people socially.

This is insane. Well, Troye Sivan makes sense.

We did study history. That's the problem.

I wish that she would just admit it. I wish that she would just acknowledge it, but I think she's into denial. And I think she feels resentment because again, when you're in love with someone and you're in love with someone and you have kids with someone and then you see yourself being hated, like, I don't know, it's hard.

Jennifer Lopez at the top.

We all want to defend ourselves online and we all think of ourselves as like, doing the right thing and the moral thing. And I just feel like she's gone down this path so far that it's, you know, a tweet is not going to get her out of it.

Also, I just want to say like the MAGA stuff, like especially the inauguration, I mean, I was at a lot of these inauguration events and stuff because I was writing about it. Again, their goal is to radicalize people and to bring people into a movement. And so you see this a lot where, you know,

somebody sort of starts to associate or they're in this vulnerable spot and you see the right, just like vultures, like seize on them again, because they're opportunists that don't actually give a shit, but this person is vulnerable. And then you see the anger, like the anger from the left, rightfully so. And that kind of pushes them.

And that doesn't mean that it's the, I hate when people say, oh, well, that's left fault. Like, oh, you know, you should, that's why we should be nicer to people. No. Well, No, but I think we have to be realistic and recognize these conditions that people are radicalized under.

Who booked it? The guy who booked it. It's me. I just think that it's funny that there's nothing about the poster that's LGBTQ looking. Like it looks like a trashy rave poster.

She ended up with egg on her face with this because then it came out that he did actually, I think, have someone playing for him or something. But I was like, did he make her tweet that? When I saw that, I thought it was so incredibly bizarre.

And I don't know if it came from a place of either... I mean, all of the sort of hypotheticals are equally dark where it's like either she noticed that this is something that was really bothering him on the internet and she's trying to curry favor by...

espousing this ultimately like kind of false information about like how great he is or he asked her to back him up because at that point he had not come clean there was now ended up being irrefutable evidence that he cheated on the video game on the video game yeah

He had like had someone play for him or something because basically somebody that actually knows about video games did this like YouTube investigation and found out that like there was no way that he could have played those amount of hours at these times or whatever, whatever. And so then he kind of sort of admitted it and people were like, Grimes, you're such a liar.

But it's just like, to me, when you see that stuff, it's so sad. There's an audience of one for that tweet, which is Elon. And it's again, her sort of lashing out what, you know, sort of like flailing in public and

trying to get him to respond to her respect her trying to get favor with him like I mean what he put her through financially emotionally and the way he takes I mean X is obviously his favorite child and he has latched on to X and brings X everywhere in the public eye which she obviously doesn't like and it's like it's this constant reminder of control and that's your child imagine having your child which you have to watch publicly be paraded around and

I have perfect speech. Is that all you have to contribute to that? Let me do the talking. No, I don't. I think that's misogynistic. I think the vocal fry, I get that too, but not as much.

She's very of the times. She's sort of like a representation of so much I think that has gone wrong, unfortunately, in culture and just the manifestations of how the internet has warped people.

And that's what we're doing today. But celebrities are these sort of like they're a way to talk about culture and they're sort of manifestations of culture. And especially in America, where celebrity is so intertwined with culture, like we have such a celebrity obsessed culture and the way we process culture so much through celebrities. I think it's important to talk about.

Yes.

Well, I was not gay on Tumblr. I would caveat what you just said, which is I think that that is very true for probably most people. I, like Grimes, was in, although I don't know if she was living in, but I was living in Williamsburg at that time in the early 2010s. I moved to Williamsburg in 2009, the year that I blew up on Tumblr myself.

I don't know if people know my origin story, but I got popular on Tumblr.

My millennial era. But living in Williamsburg in 2012, I have to say it was kind of like those TikToks where you see it romanticized, where it was like the hub of millennial culture and music culture and internet culture at that time too. Like the internet was so burgeoning and Tumblr, because this is pre- Instagram, you don't put your photos of yourself on Instagram yet. Twitter was ascendant.

There was this energy to the internet that was so driven by Tumblr. And obviously, to all the LGBTQ kids in their bedrooms and creative people, I think, around the country or the world were following it. But I think Brooklyn was like this hub of it. And I think the first time I saw Grimes in person, I was, I go to these parties at this place called 285 Kent. I feel like an ancient person.

God. It was this like music venue, whatever. And, you know, there was just a lot of like stuff happening. And I knew who Grimes was because she also was popular on Tumblr and was sort of in this music scene. And I had friends that worked in music in that era. And so that is, I just remember the first time I saw her was at some party at 285 Kent and everyone like, holy shit.

I think this must have been the year that Visions came out, like 2012 or 2013. Yeah. And just being like, wow, she's so, you know, she was like the queen of that like hipster scene, one of many queens. But like she was so emblematic of that era of millennial culture, which I think is interesting because like so many people affiliated with that culture kind of died with that culture almost.

What I condemn is the violence of our system, and I would love for you to acknowledge that.

Gosh, you're going to ask if I condemn Hamas next. This is crazy. I would love for you to acknowledge what I'm actually saying, Sean, and we seem to be talking past each other. I want to talk about the fact that half of all adults... No, I hear you loud and clear. because of cost. We need to talk about this.

70% of Americans, by the way, believe that the insurance company practices are responsible in part for Thompson's debt.

Uh, no. Joyful, or even to even say you're not empathetic about somebody losing their life when they leave behind two young boys.

I do believe in the sanctity of life. And I think that's why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately, you know, because it feels like. Serious? I mean. Joy demands execution. Maybe not joy, but certainly not. No, certainly not empathy.

So are the tens of thousands of Americans that are being murdered. So are the tens of thousands of Americans, innocent Americans, who died because greedy health insurance executives like this one push policies of denying care to the most vulnerable people.

I am laughing at Tommy's insane mischaracterization of why people are angry.

It's hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don't lionize criminals, as if we don't have, you know, we don't stand... murderers of all sorts, and we give them Netflix shows.

There's a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels. And you see that in moments like this.

So you're going to see women especially that feel like, oh, my God, right? Like, here's this man who's revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart. He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.

I do believe in the sanctity of life, and I think that's why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately, you know, because it feels like... Joy? Serious? I mean... Joy in a man's execution? Maybe not joy, but certainly not, no, certainly not empathy. Because, again... We're watching the footage.

So are the tens of thousands of Americans that are being murdered. So are the tens of thousands of Americans, innocent Americans, who died because greedy health insurance executives like this one push policies of denying care to the most vulnerable people. the many millions of Americans that have watched people that I care about suffer and in some cases die because of lack of health care.

No, that would not. Well, why not?

The founders of Vine really did not like the most successful creators on the app. Vine servers would get a little traction, have a little success, and then the management would come in and try and thwart them. I mean, I use one example in my book where they rolled out these vanity URLs, which made it really easy.

Previously, you would have the Vine URL, like vine.co slash a bunch of numbers, which made it hard to kind of share your Vine handle. So They changed it to like vine.co slash, you know, whatever username you wanted to pick. And they didn't give creators heads up about this at all. So, of course, people essentially squatted on all these famous creators names.

And then when the famous creators complained to Vine and were like, hey, can we have like, I'm Nash Greer. Can I have, you know, vine.co slash Nash Greer? I have millions of followers. They intentionally said no to make things harder for the creators and to thwart discovery of the creators.

Yeah. The founders would constantly mess with the popular feed. So the popular feed, you would imagine, would be reflective of the most popular content on the app. That was not true. A lot of the times, the founders of Vine would keep the most popular creator's content off the popular feed because they just didn't approve of it.

And then they would stack the popular feed with content that they approved of. And they were essentially trying to force feed content to their users but it wasn't reflective of what was actually popular on the app. And so there was this disconnect and I think it hurt engagement.

And also it made creators irate because they were like, you know, I know that my video meets the threshold to be on the popular page and yet it's being excluded. And so they rightfully felt like Vine was thwarting them again at every turn.

Essentially, these top creators at 1600 Vine were like the Vine mafia. They controlled what was popular on the app because the app was not algorithmic. It was very susceptible to manipulation by the top creators. And the top creators all joined together, about 20 of them.

Oh my God. Okay. So MadCon was founded by this entrepreneur, Bart Bordelon. He had the idea for this sort of like teen tour of Vine stars. And so this was when you started to see basically a lot of content creators go on tour to make money because there was starting to bridge the kind of like digital and physical worlds. You started to see a lot of early Vine meetups just get like blow up.

Like there was this early Vine meetup in Central Park with, I think it was Nicholas Megalis, Rudy Mancuso, but some of the top creators on the app and literally hundreds of people came. They swarmed Central Park. It got shut down by the police.

And they would plan out their content and they really created this click where like they would refine each other's content, essentially resharing each other's content and collaborate and manipulate what became popular on the app. You're a content creator. You post one video, you have it refined by the 20 other most popular creators.

And so I think Bart and others started to recognize the opportunity of kind of IRL events with Viners. And so the idea was to take these, you know, this young talent from Vine and put them on a traveling tour where they would perform for, you know, hordes of adoring teenage fans, mostly girls.

I know, right? Perform. I mean, this is what the whole problem with these tours is.

Well, I will say, listen, Shawn Mendes carried Madcon on his back because Shawn Mendes, Shawn Mendes, obviously, as everyone knows now, is like a very successful musician. So he performed music. Mostly it was just doing like funny skits and jokes in front of the audience because these boys didn't have any kind of discernible skills.

like talents that they were really known for outside just like kind of being hot and like making funny videos like belatable videos um and so they would get up on stage and they would mostly just kind of like joke around with each other but there wasn't it wasn't i mean this is why a lot of these tours failed in the end is because they couldn't really perform but the people that came really didn't care that much like a lot of the young kids didn't care that much because they just wanted to meet their favorite vine star

creators on the app like that's going to be a top video on the app now and they had this kind of cadence to their schedule they would wake up every morning they would meet off and down by the pool at 1600 vine they would brainstorm ideas script things out for the day spend the afternoon recording and then edit and post and yeah they had this machine going for a while

Well, as a tech reporter, I heard about it, obviously, when Twitter acquired it pre-launch. It was in beta. The day that it exited beta, I downloaded it.

Within a couple of days, I was in Grand Central Station and I recorded this like stop motion kind of animation thing of people walking through the big hall of Grand Central Station and it made the popular page. And that was like a huge deal for me at the time, you know.