Thomas Germain

And it has.

I talked to one of these guys.

He's like 19 years old, right?

I feel like I'm, you know, a retiree talking to this kid.

And I'm like, you know, I work for the BBC.

Like, is the fact that I am about to talk about this in the mainstream media, am I ruining it now?

Like, is this... Like, they used to talk about the hug of death on Reddit, that you'd find some little beautiful thing and you'd put it on the front page of Reddit, and then it would crash the server because too many people would look at it.

And he was like, dude, it's already... Like, this trend has, like, come and gone.

You heard about it.

By the time you heard about it, it's already over.

But it's almost like, you know, people...

in people putting their graffiti on the subway car in New York in the 80s, right?

Where it's like the subway car is not a vehicle for art, but people are co-opting the system and making it their own to use it for their own purposes.

So it kind of is just this very human thing.

That's how the internet always has been to a extent.

You mean like algorithmic curation?

What it says is that the internet is still human, right?

It's shifted where it used to be just this totally independent rebel thing, but now it's this big corporate machine.

But even for all the power that the tech companies do have over our lives, it doesn't work if there aren't people going onto it

to express themselves and build community.