Speaker 1: Coolso Media. Hi everyone, Jamie here. We're taking a week
Speaker 1: off at cool Zone for the holiday, So this week
Speaker 1: is going to be a rerun one of the very
Speaker 1: early episodes of sixteenth Minute on the Dress. I just
Speaker 1: wanted to say a few things at the top. We
Speaker 1: will be back next week with I'm thrilled to report
Speaker 1: because I just did the interview on an interview with
Speaker 1: the guy from the Wicked Witch of the West, she
Speaker 1: came down in a bubble Bro video Matt Pacerro. That'll
Speaker 1: be out next week, followed by our three part series
Speaker 1: on the Mani Sphere. Thank you so much to everyone
Speaker 1: who reached out to everyone in the LA area who
Speaker 1: has been kind enough to come out to my solo show.
Speaker 1: There is a bonus show that has been announced that
Speaker 1: will be happening on November twenty ninth at the Lyric
Speaker 1: Hyperion Theater. We're going to be doing one extra workshop
Speaker 1: of the show. So if you weren't able to get
Speaker 1: tickets because all the other shows sold out, feel free
Speaker 1: to come out this week. Feel free to come out
Speaker 1: on Friday to the show. That's November twenty ninths. And finally,
Speaker 1: because Thanksgiving, as I hope you know is a crock
Speaker 1: of shit. I wanted to encourage everyone in joining me
Speaker 1: this week in donating and contributing to the Native Women's
Speaker 1: collective and nonprofit that nurtures the health and safety of
Speaker 1: Native women in the US. So if you're interested, the
Speaker 1: link is below, and with that, please enjoy this re
Speaker 1: release of our episode on the Dress. See you next week. Clickbait.
Speaker 1: If I had to define it, clickbait is a combination
Speaker 1: of fake news and a freak show. It was a
Speaker 1: sign of the declining state of reliable journalism in the
Speaker 1: Western world and an early symptom of where American journalism
Speaker 1: finds itself. As I record this, major newsrooms are shuttering
Speaker 1: or vastly reduced during an election year, and most major
Speaker 1: newspapers are owned by billionaires who resist criticism, resulting in
Speaker 1: the remaining papers running on people pleasing fumes, setting cocourage
Speaker 1: their readers to turn their heads from massive human atrocity.
Speaker 1: Ten years ago, things were bad, but not as bad,
Speaker 1: which is something people in the present always say. Ten
Speaker 1: years from now, we'll be pining for the salad days
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty four as we enlist our third gradiers
Speaker 1: in the Water Wars but for now it's true. The
Speaker 1: clickbait culture of the mid twenty tens was alarming, it
Speaker 1: worse annoying at best, but it didn't feel existential in
Speaker 1: quite the same way. The word clickbait was a runner
Speaker 1: up for the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, tied with normcore and man's plain. And if
Speaker 1: there's a more twenty fourteen sentence than that, I am
Speaker 1: not aware of it. Here are some major headlines you
Speaker 1: could find at this time. What were in Hillary's emails?
Speaker 1: We have some guesses. The gritty Power Rangers reboot with
Speaker 1: James Vanderbeek is the stuff of nightmares. Thirteen unconventional things
Speaker 1: to do with your Gallantine this year you know garbage
Speaker 1: and can say I'm being mean because these are headlines
Speaker 1: I wrote. Come with me if you dare to. Twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen The Big Short Steve Jobs, the movie the Boring One,
Speaker 1: not the hilarious Ashton Kutcher one, fifty Shades of Gray.
Speaker 1: We're at peak, justin Bieber peak, Fettiwop, the year of
Speaker 1: hotline bling and Hamilton. Obama is rounding out his second term.
Speaker 1: It's the year he allows an airstrike on a children's
Speaker 1: hospital in Afghanistan. Gay marriage will be legal across the
Speaker 1: US this June, and ten days after that, a dumb
Speaker 1: bitch named Donald Trump will go down and escalator in
Speaker 1: New York and announce he's wonning for president. I have
Speaker 1: managed to graduate from college as semester early, and in
Speaker 1: fighting for my life at my first proper writing job
Speaker 1: at the Boston Globe. My job, as will become relevant
Speaker 1: to this story, is writing click bait. Or that's not
Speaker 1: totally right, because yes, I reported to the Boston Globe building.
Speaker 1: I ate my grilled Jesus among them, but very rarely
Speaker 1: was I writing actual news. For the most part, I
Speaker 1: was creating hashtag clickbait content, very little of which required
Speaker 1: original reporting. While I technically worked for the Globe and
Speaker 1: was in their newsroom, I was practically two steps removed.
Speaker 1: Boston dot Com was the Globe's hyperlocal sister site, and
Speaker 1: a now defunct vertical called Bdcwire was their clickbait site.
Speaker 1: I was one of three writers at BDC Wire, populating
Speaker 1: the site with stories as if there were ten writers,
Speaker 1: and in twenty fifteen I worked two full time jobs,
Speaker 1: first at this now defunct website as well as co
Speaker 1: managing a now defunct improv theater and Cards on the Table.
Speaker 1: I was fired from The Globe not six months later
Speaker 1: for refusing to take down a tweet about comm I
Speaker 1: don't know, you're only twenty two months. I'm getting distracted.
Speaker 1: Early twenty fifteen, I did. We'd get to do some
Speaker 1: original reporting here and there, but my main gig was
Speaker 1: sourcing viral news and rephrasing my sources with citations that
Speaker 1: sites like these would adorably and deceptively call hat tips.
Speaker 1: And I'd love to tell you what more of these
Speaker 1: stories were, but as any journalist who started working in
Speaker 1: the age of the Internet knows, almost none of it
Speaker 1: is available now without the assistance of the Internet Archive.
Speaker 1: BDC Wire is gone, along with those articles I wrote,
Speaker 1: like ten reasons Chris Evans being from Massachusetts is the
Speaker 1: one reason not to end at all, or whatever I
Speaker 1: was reading on today's Internet, Bdcwire never existed, So just
Speaker 1: a reminder you are listening to a future piece of
Speaker 1: lost media. But in the mid twenty tens, a lot
Speaker 1: of writers got their start the same way I did
Speaker 1: at this time, including probably writers you like now, from
Speaker 1: young gen xers to elderly zoomers. We were tasked with
Speaker 1: regurgitating stories that social media cared about and regurgitating them
Speaker 1: to make them seem like actual news. We weren't making
Speaker 1: shit up like tabloids, but there was a sense that
Speaker 1: one writer was vomiting into another writer's mouth, and so
Speaker 1: on and so on to maximize site traffic and profit.
Speaker 1: We the writers never got paid equitably, but for places
Speaker 1: like The Boston Globe and other major news organizations who
Speaker 1: were hemorrhaging money due to the inability to adapt to
Speaker 1: the Internet when the moment counted, these clickbait sister sites
Speaker 1: became a temporary attempt at increasing cash flow, or, as
Speaker 1: I knew it, tricking a group of twenty two year
Speaker 1: olds into thinking they were real writers in exchange for
Speaker 1: bad pay and a content mentality. So basically, I was
Speaker 1: working for a regional ripoff of early BuzzFeed. And to
Speaker 1: be clear, I am not conflating BuzzFeed the website with
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed News, which is a Pulitzer winning and recently tragically
Speaker 1: shuttered news division. Nor am I saying that working at
Speaker 1: a BuzzFeed content mill was bad or even uncreative. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that my BBC wire magnum opus. I saw
Speaker 1: Shrek the Musical five times colon. This is my story
Speaker 1: fucking ripped, not that you can read it anywhere. What's
Speaker 1: interesting is that this regurgitation media strategy, inspired by BuzzFeed
Speaker 1: combing the Internet to fill their website full of clickable,
Speaker 1: eccentric hashtag content, often legitimize Internet characters of the day
Speaker 1: as legitimate news figures, and this was never more true
Speaker 1: than in the mid twenty tents. A quick brief on BuzzFeed.
Speaker 1: At this time, the company had been around since two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, and its legitimate news arm, BuzzFeed News,
Speaker 1: wouldn't be launched until a year later in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: Founder Jonah Peretti had made BuzzFeed an algorithmic project from
Speaker 1: the start. In a twenty thirteen profile of Paretti in
Speaker 1: New York Magazine, early BuzzFeed is described as Peretti's quote
Speaker 1: out algorithm to call stories from around the web that
Speaker 1: were showing stirring the virality. In return for functioning as
Speaker 1: a sort of early warning system, BuzzFeed persuaded partner sites
Speaker 1: to install programming code that allowed the company to monitor
Speaker 1: their traffic. Like a lot of social media we discussed today.
Speaker 1: Peretti's original project begun while he was working at the
Speaker 1: similarly click minded Huffington Post, was collecting a shitload of
Speaker 1: data at best. He wanted to know what people were
Speaker 1: interested in. If I'm being cynical, he wanted to sell
Speaker 1: it back to us in an easy to consume package,
Speaker 1: and we were happy to do it. By twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed had grown exponentially and started creating original content in
Speaker 1: addition to their bread and Butter, which was both curating
Speaker 1: and rephrasing viral stories from other corners of the Internet
Speaker 1: to drive traffic, and one thousand different quizzes on which
Speaker 1: ice cream flavor you were based on your mental illness
Speaker 1: diagnosis something like that took them all, no judgment, min
Speaker 1: chocolate chip, OCD, bipolar whatever. Much of early BuzzFeed was
Speaker 1: extremely goofy and what I think is now sort of
Speaker 1: associated as being an embarrassingly millennial thing, but there was
Speaker 1: no shortage of talent there. Quinta Brentson produced a lot
Speaker 1: of her early viral stuff at BuzzFeed, and many people
Speaker 1: in their writing and performance stable ended up bailing on
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed because they were treated like mill workers and not
Speaker 1: artists think comedians and writers like Gabe Dunn and Alison
Speaker 1: Raskin think. Super successful YouTubers like Sophia and Nigard think
Speaker 1: whether you love them or you hate them for cheating
Speaker 1: on their wives, the try guys, But regardless of the
Speaker 1: level of talent, there's no point in denying it. A
Speaker 1: lot of early BuzzFeed was rehashed stuff, either sent in
Speaker 1: by users or gently lifted by a fleet of young,
Speaker 1: aspiring writers like myself to proliferate a sticky story that
Speaker 1: someone else had posted online for free all ready. The
Speaker 1: goal show it to a wider audience with some light
Speaker 1: commentary and yield a massive profit for Daddy BuzzFeed and
Speaker 1: one of BuzzFeed's greatest main character cosigns in its history
Speaker 1: came on February twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, a day that
Speaker 1: launched two huge viral stories. One was about a pair
Speaker 1: of lamas that escaped in an Arizona retirement home.
Speaker 2: In Sun City. Today, this may have been the very
Speaker 2: definition of the Wild West. A slow, sometimes high speed
Speaker 2: pursuit of two lamas on the loose, breaking away from
Speaker 2: their owners, at times from each other, seizing their moment
Speaker 2: and their shot at freedom, And.
Speaker 1: The other one is one whose impact is still almost
Speaker 1: bafflingly still enduring today.
Speaker 3: The dress.
Speaker 1: Your sixteenth minute starts now sixty.
Speaker 4: Six.
Speaker 1: The dress. It's a potent and memorable piece of Internet lore.
Speaker 1: One where your perception mattered was this dress, which was
Speaker 1: first posted by Scottish mother of the bride, Cecilia Bleestale,
Speaker 1: in this weird, blown out photo from a designer outlet
Speaker 1: in England. Was this dress blue and black? Or was
Speaker 1: it white and gold? It was blue and black, And
Speaker 1: I knew that right away, because I'm perfect and I've
Speaker 1: never made a mistake. And even though it sounds old timey,
Speaker 1: I mean, after all, we're talking about an optical illusion
Speaker 1: that resulted from an objectively shitty phone camera. It's kind
Speaker 1: of hard to overstate what a sensation the dress became.
Speaker 1: I remember this day so clearly because this story broke
Speaker 1: my second week working as a professional writer and as
Speaker 1: a kid who'd been brought in to write clickbait. It
Speaker 1: was like a gorgeous gift had descended from space. As
Speaker 1: I was reflecting, I wanted to make sure I wasn't
Speaker 1: fluffing the memory in my mind, so I reached out
Speaker 1: to my buddy Kevin Slain, who was one of the
Speaker 1: other three writers working overtime to create hashtag content on
Speaker 1: BDC Wire to be read by hashtag nobody for hashtag
Speaker 1: seventy hours a week, and he remembered this day really
Speaker 1: clearly too.
Speaker 4: My name is Kevin Slain, and I am a staff
Speaker 4: writer at The Boston Globe covering entertainment and culture and
Speaker 4: what's up? Not much, Jamie, how are you?
Speaker 5: I am good after all these years.
Speaker 4: I'm good, real throwback talking to you today about this day.
Speaker 5: About I know about this historic day that is over
Speaker 5: nine years ago now, which feels not great, Okay. So
Speaker 5: I just wanted to go because I feel like I
Speaker 5: was writing out like how I imagine this day. I
Speaker 5: think it was like, certainly in my first month working
Speaker 5: at BDC wire, do you remember the dress day in
Speaker 5: our little corner?
Speaker 4: So I remember what I did that day, and at
Speaker 4: least in my case, we're talking about Thursday, which was
Speaker 4: kind of like the dress dropped at night, you know.
Speaker 4: It was the wave the day went for me was
Speaker 4: I was at work. I wrote a story about the Lamas,
Speaker 4: which was the big I remember Idi, a predecessor to
Speaker 4: the dress I dreamed some lamas.
Speaker 1: I can't find it on the way back, miss, but
Speaker 1: I was like, okay, okay, Lama's first Lamas are the story.
Speaker 4: I had to go back through my Twitter archive and
Speaker 4: I found that I tweeted out the story that I
Speaker 4: wrote about the lamas. Thank GOHI was just you know,
Speaker 4: our house style at the time, lots of gifts, lots
Speaker 4: of old text, just you know, us trying to be BuzzFeed.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah.
Speaker 4: But anyway, so I did that, and then a bunch
Speaker 4: of us went to a happy hour at the Banshee,
Speaker 4: which was just where a lot of us went after work,
Speaker 4: and I proceeded to get really drunk and sing a
Speaker 4: lot of karaoke, and at some point someone pulled out
Speaker 4: their phone and started showing it to everyone, being like,
Speaker 4: check this out. This dress thing is crazy. And I
Speaker 4: reacted to it the way that I think I did
Speaker 4: to a lot of that stuff for the time, because
Speaker 4: this was like our first media job. And I just
Speaker 4: felt simultaneously like enthralled by the conversation but also repulsed,
Speaker 4: and I felt, you know, probably undeservedly above it all.
Speaker 4: And so the thing was that back then they really
Speaker 4: had like a flat hierarchy in terms of like who
Speaker 4: could say what, and everyone would just send all staff
Speaker 4: emails all the time. And I remember pulling out my
Speaker 4: phone and looking and seeing that our old homepage had
Speaker 4: like three stories on the dress right on the top,
Speaker 4: and there was like an active email chain going on
Speaker 4: about this, and me, very drunk, just was like, this
Speaker 4: is ridiculous. I can't believe we have three stories on
Speaker 4: the dress on the homepage. And whoever did that got like,
Speaker 4: you know, offended that I said that rightfully.
Speaker 1: So well, I mean that's a lot. I didn't remember
Speaker 1: there being three stories. But that also makes sense because
Speaker 1: there were like three different verticals sort of all like
Speaker 1: going to the same place, and we were all trying
Speaker 1: to get clicks on the same thing that we were
Speaker 1: all sort of ripping off.
Speaker 5: For a BuzzFeed. It was just like weird. It was
Speaker 5: a weird time, It really was.
Speaker 4: And I even went and then looked at the like
Speaker 4: the next day I looked in the wayback machine. It
Speaker 4: was even more of that. It was like the night
Speaker 4: producer who wrote like a short little thing, and then
Speaker 4: our old boss who I won't name, wrote this like
Speaker 4: very ridiculous in his own voice style post, and then
Speaker 4: someone else wrote like their take on the dress, and
Speaker 4: then another of our old bosses then asked John Henry
Speaker 4: to weigh in about the dress. And there's a video
Speaker 4: I can't find of him talking about the dress, which
Speaker 4: I wish I could find, because I think that.
Speaker 5: What I wish we had the John Henry futage.
Speaker 4: That's uninged, right, like, who needed that?
Speaker 5: Well, thank you, thank you for reminiscing with me. This
Speaker 5: was beautiful.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's weird to think about now, and I know
Speaker 4: it's objectively not true. It was a totally different time
Speaker 4: and you can't help but look back at it fondly,
Speaker 4: despite the fact that I was hating myself through the
Speaker 4: entire portion of it.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much to Kevin, who is a real writer
Speaker 1: for the Boston Globe and has been for years. So
Speaker 1: this day was genuinely a huge day for news on
Speaker 1: and about the Internet. The FCC had just voted to
Speaker 1: classify Internet service providers as public utilities, effectively creating net neutrality,
Speaker 1: but the dress was indisputably the main character. Here's the
Speaker 1: cliff notes of what happened in February twenty fifteen. A
Speaker 1: Scottish couple was preparing for their wedding and the bride's
Speaker 1: mother texted her daughter a photo of the dress she
Speaker 1: was considering wearing the dress. It's not a great picture,
Speaker 1: but it is a very mid twenty ten's mother of
Speaker 1: the bride dress. There is this little cropped jacket, some
Speaker 1: color blocking, unnecessary lace elements. But the color that was
Speaker 1: the question. The bride, Grace posted the photo of the
Speaker 1: dress to her Facebook and explained the dilemma. Her mom
Speaker 1: assured her that the dress was blue with black lace,
Speaker 1: but Grace was seeing it as white with gold lace,
Speaker 1: so she posted the question to her Facebook so her
Speaker 1: friends could weigh in, and a week long debate was sparked.
Speaker 1: So the dress first became a main character in her
Speaker 1: small community in colin Say, Scotland. Then the wedding happened
Speaker 1: and Grace's mom wore the dress. It was a topic
Speaker 1: of discussion at the wedding too, and it's actually members
Speaker 1: of the wedding band that take the dress from a
Speaker 1: local phenomenon into a global one. Singer and guitarist Caitlyn McNeil,
Speaker 1: who was a close friend of the couples, said of
Speaker 1: the dress, iurl we forgot about it until we saw
Speaker 1: it at the wedding which the mother of the bride
Speaker 1: was wearing, and it was obviously blue and black. In
Speaker 1: any other timeline, this would be a footnote that Grace's
Speaker 1: mom would half remember when giving the dress to Goodwill
Speaker 1: a decade later. But this was a time on the
Speaker 1: Internet where viral stories were social currency, and Katelyn McNeil
Speaker 1: had taken up the mantle of the dress. It was
Speaker 1: her who ended up posing what would become the viral
Speaker 1: seed that would take this story global. On her tumbler,
Speaker 1: the post attached to a picture of the dress said, guys,
Speaker 1: please help me. Is this dress white or gold or
Speaker 1: blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and
Speaker 1: we are freaking the fuck out. I can't handle this.
Speaker 1: It got about five thousand notes, and if you aren't
Speaker 1: tumbler literate, that was a lot of interaction on the
Speaker 1: platform for the time. And here's where BuzzFeed comes in,
Speaker 1: As the legend goes BuzzFeed writer Kate's Holderness was running
Speaker 1: the BuzzFeed tumbler at that time and was tasked with
Speaker 1: what a lot of writers were back then, finding popular
Speaker 1: garbage to amplify. But this was not petty content theft.
Speaker 1: Katelyn McNeil was writing so high on the dress fumes
Speaker 1: that she sent Holderness her post saying, BuzzFeed, please help.
Speaker 1: I posted a picture of this dress. It's the last
Speaker 1: post on my tumbler, okay, and some people see it
Speaker 1: blue and some people see it white. Can you explain
Speaker 1: because we are going crazy? Holderness replied, holy crap, it's
Speaker 1: blue and black. I don't understand. I made a poll,
Speaker 1: and she links to what she posted off of Caitlin
Speaker 1: McNeil's tip. A classic BuzzFeed post published in the early evening.
Speaker 1: As Kevin correctly recalled, the post was simply titled what
Speaker 1: color is this dress? There was a poll to vote
Speaker 1: black and blue or white and gold. The post started
Speaker 1: doing well right away, but pretty much everything on BuzzFeed
Speaker 1: at that time did. It was after folks left for
Speaker 1: work that things went nuts. The dress was literally an
Speaker 1: overnight success. When the BuzzFeed team returned the next morning,
Speaker 1: Holderness's post had reached eight hundred and forty thousand views
Speaker 1: per minute. At its peak, it had broken BuzzFeed's traffic record,
Speaker 1: becoming its most successful post of all time, and once
Speaker 1: the BuzzFeed post took off. The dress became a popular
Speaker 1: subject of discussion on virtually every social media platform at
Speaker 1: the time, but Twitter tends to be the thing that
Speaker 1: people still talk about these days. Facebook is for moms
Speaker 1: and creepy cousins, but in twenty fifteen, it was Twitter
Speaker 1: where famous people ruined their own lives by weighing in
Speaker 1: like some freaky plebeians just like us. It was right
Speaker 1: before celebrities all realized in Unison that they needed their
Speaker 1: own social media managers, and so you could be pretty
Speaker 1: sure that it was the actual Justin Bieber saying.
Speaker 3: And for everyone asking, I see blue and black.
Speaker 1: And it was the real Taylor Swift when she said,
Speaker 1: I don't understand this odd dress debate, and I feel
Speaker 1: like it's a trick somehow. I'm confused and scared. Ps
Speaker 1: it's obviously blue and black, or Mindy kaaling with one
Speaker 1: of the most twenty fifteen tweets of all time, the
Speaker 1: dress is worse than the Sony hack to me, Beyonce
Speaker 1: said nothing. This is all a little pedestrian For Beyonce,
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed was at the top of their game, and so
Speaker 1: of course made more content about the dress. Twenty four
Speaker 1: hours after the first post about the dress went live
Speaker 1: on the site, nine out of ten trending BuzzFeed posts
Speaker 1: were about the same dress. They were fucking relentless. Why
Speaker 1: are people seeing different colors in that damn dress? The
Speaker 1: dress is blue and black, says the person who saw
Speaker 1: it in person. This second photo of the dress definitely
Speaker 1: proves that the dress is blue and black. What the
Speaker 1: dress color you see says about you? And the one
Speaker 1: post that wasn't about the dress, here's the first picture
Speaker 1: of Eddie Redmain as transgender painter Lily elba Oh twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: And don't forget at this time, BuzzFeed's video vertical was
Speaker 1: also really popular on YouTube, and that was also going
Speaker 1: nuts with traffic from the dress.
Speaker 2: You are seen white and gold.
Speaker 4: Where are you looking at?
Speaker 1: No, you're kidding, you heard correctly, that's Quinta Brunson. I
Speaker 1: just think that's really funny. So, yes, the dress is
Speaker 1: a goofy sensation, and it even trickles down to lowly
Speaker 1: worm regional BuzzFeed ripoff writer Jamie Loftus. But keep in
Speaker 1: mind BuzzFeed is a business, and people with any monetary
Speaker 1: stock in BuzzFeed were doing donuts in their Mercedes about
Speaker 1: this fucking story. There was even this bizarre essay by
Speaker 1: then editor in chief Ben Smith, saying that the dress
Speaker 1: phenomenon was this sign of BuzzFeed's power.
Speaker 3: He said, the explosion of Kate's holderness is post about
Speaker 3: the dress White and Gold, by the way, is a
Speaker 3: reminder that while we now do so many more things,
Speaker 3: we've never moved away from our roots. Hindeed, we launched
Speaker 3: the acute or Not app yesterday.
Speaker 1: Sir, your underpaid employee reblogged a Tumblr post, but by
Speaker 1: all means keep talking. This post in particular is so
Speaker 1: weird to reflect on now. It sounds so certain that
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed will be the vanguard of what makes something special
Speaker 1: on the Internet, and that a post like the dress
Speaker 1: is all a part of the game of five D
Speaker 1: chess that BuzzFeed is playing, and that they're the reason
Speaker 1: that the dress succeeded. Smith continued, we are interested most
Speaker 1: of all in what a story does, not just in
Speaker 1: how many people read it, but in what effect it
Speaker 1: has on their lives and on the world. Kate's post
Speaker 1: delighted people and connected them to steal an idea from
Speaker 1: z Frank, Its power was less in the encapsulated item
Speaker 1: itself than in the network around it. That's true of
Speaker 1: a brilliant piece of entertainment. It's true of a recipe
Speaker 1: or a DIY suggestion. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is getting millions and
Speaker 1: millions of impressions from this story, one that Kaitlyn McNeil
Speaker 1: literally handed to them. But it's BuzzFeed that keeps the
Speaker 1: profits from the engagement. At a time where impressions were
Speaker 1: what defined your success and your advertising profits, as is
Speaker 1: so common in these stories, it was like everyone was
Speaker 1: benefiting from the dress story, except, of course, anyone involved
Speaker 1: in the actual story. It didn't take long for completely
Speaker 1: unrelated businesses to start commenting on the dress. To capitalize
Speaker 1: on the trend, Pizza Hut posts a picture of a
Speaker 1: shitty pizza with the caption It's white and gold. Two
Speaker 1: newscasters wear the dress on air as a bit The
Speaker 1: original dress on a website called Roman Originals sells out immediately.
Speaker 1: Brandon Silverman, the the former CEO of social media monitoring
Speaker 1: site crowd Tangled, said this when asked about the range
Speaker 1: of institutions that wanted in on this story. This is
Speaker 1: from a twenty sixteen retrospective on the Day of the
Speaker 1: Lama and the Dress from twenty sixteen, written for where
Speaker 1: Else BuzzFeed, Silverman says.
Speaker 6: This, We've seen other stories go viral, but the sheer
Speaker 6: diversity of outlets that picked it up and we're talking
Speaker 6: about it was unlike anything we had ever seen. Everyone
Speaker 6: from QVC to Warnerbros. To local public libraries to Red
Speaker 6: Cross affiliates were all posting links to it on their
Speaker 6: social accounts. That kind of diversity and who's sharing story
Speaker 6: pretty much never happens, and certainly never to that degree.
Speaker 1: And of course, no Internet main character would be complete
Speaker 1: without the backlash, which, in the case of the Dress
Speaker 1: came in the form of people bemoaning that this story
Speaker 1: had overshadowed more important news from the same day. And
Speaker 1: even this mentality feels a little bit dated now. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's important to discuss the other new news of the day,
Speaker 1: but favoring something goofy and meaningless over hard news wasn't
Speaker 1: something that started in twenty fifteen. Although that said, I
Speaker 1: do think there's a case for saying that the success
Speaker 1: of posts like the Dress tells people in tech developing
Speaker 1: social media algorithms at this time what kind of stories
Speaker 1: are distracting for people, leading to an era of the
Speaker 1: algorithm favoring engagement driven posts over carefully reported news. To
Speaker 1: talk about what made the dress special in terms of
Speaker 1: what it said about where social media was picking its
Speaker 1: main characters at this time, I turned to a writer
Speaker 1: who has spent her career writing about the Internet, often
Speaker 1: meaning the Internet turns on her. Taylor Lorenz released her
Speaker 1: book Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and
Speaker 1: Power on the Internet last year, taking a look at
Speaker 1: the short and eventful history of online influencers, including a
Speaker 1: fair number of characters of the day, and yes, the
Speaker 1: dress herself. We caught up on Zoom about this very
Speaker 1: particular moment in Internet history.
Speaker 7: I'm Taylor Lorenz and I'm the author of Extremely Online,
Speaker 7: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.
Speaker 1: This has been your beat for some time. How did
Speaker 1: you become the person to talk to about the Internet.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I'm like peak millennial. I graduated directly into
Speaker 7: the procession the two thousand and eight financial crisis, and
Speaker 7: I had had like random internships in college and summer jobs,
Speaker 7: but I didn't really know what I was doing, and
Speaker 7: so I was working retail food service. I worked for
Speaker 7: a messenger company, I was babysitting, was I worked at
Speaker 7: a call center for a while. I was just kind
Speaker 7: of making money and I discovered Tumblr, which back in
Speaker 7: two thousand and nine was ascended as a social platform,
Speaker 7: and that was kind of my gateway into blogging, and
Speaker 7: I just started blogging about stuff. At the time, I
Speaker 7: was really against the mainstream media because they were writing
Speaker 7: really stupid things about tech and millennials and it was
Speaker 7: making me mad, and so I would just go on
Speaker 7: my blogs and ran about whatever I felt like ranting about.
Speaker 7: I was really inspired by this woman, Katie Natopoulos, who yes,
Speaker 7: she was blogging back then too, and she had this website.
Speaker 7: She had all these funny like blogs and sites, and
Speaker 7: she seemed to be like the only person that I
Speaker 7: thought was. She was like a couple years older than
Speaker 7: me and seemed really cool, and I just thought, I'm
Speaker 7: going to try to write about the Internet, but like
Speaker 7: from the perspective of somebody that actually uses it.
Speaker 1: There are stories that feel or my feeling at first
Speaker 1: was it feels very connected to a certain type of
Speaker 1: platform or like a certain era in social media. When
Speaker 1: I was reading extremely online, I was like, oh, right,
Speaker 1: the dress was kind of this cross platform success story.
Speaker 1: Could you impact that a little for me of like
Speaker 1: how the original story and then BuzzFeed kind of had
Speaker 1: a mutual role in this story success. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, just to kind of like explain the landscape throughout
Speaker 7: the early to mid twenty tens, you had this explosion
Speaker 7: of digital media sites spurred by VC funding, you know, BuzzFeed,
Speaker 7: Mike dot Com, Race to Work, Mashable, Like, there were
Speaker 7: all these like digital media sites, and the primary way
Speaker 7: that they were gaining traffic was going into sort of
Speaker 7: what were then the depths of the Internet, mostly Tumblr
Speaker 7: and Reddit, getting the most viral content off those platforms
Speaker 7: and repackaging it on the website. Because that was an
Speaker 7: era when not a lot of people were going and
Speaker 7: spending a lot of time and getting their news and
Speaker 7: information and entertainment from social media directly itself. It wasn't
Speaker 7: as widely adopted. People didn't know how to navigate the
Speaker 7: Internet yet, so Buzzheed would just sort of like mine
Speaker 7: this content. Kates was working at BuzzFeed at the time,
Speaker 7: found a Tumblr post about the dress and was like, wow,
Speaker 7: this is kind of crazy. It was getting a little
Speaker 7: bit of traction on Tumblr, and she thought, let me
Speaker 7: post it on the BuzzFeed website, because that's kind of
Speaker 7: again the business model at the time was finding what
Speaker 7: did while on Tumblr and then bringing it to this
Speaker 7: wider audience, the BuzzFeed, And of course she publishes it
Speaker 7: on BuzzFeed and it just goes insane.
Speaker 1: A bunch of other.
Speaker 7: Places immediately published their own versions of that story, but
Speaker 7: BuzzFeed got like all the upside kind of from it,
Speaker 7: Like they got all the traffic they were able to
Speaker 7: monetize through ads on that article page. Like right, nobody
Speaker 7: was picking through as much to the original Tumblr that day.
Speaker 1: I was cruising the wayback machine and I was like,
Speaker 1: this is what I think of as like peak BuzzFeed.
Speaker 1: How did they get there? Like what made BuzzFeed special
Speaker 1: or early to this kind of content mining.
Speaker 7: BuzzFeed was one of the first true sort of like
Speaker 7: digital media companies of that wave. There was this idea
Speaker 7: in the two thousands. It's really spurred by the rise
Speaker 7: of blogging, that you could build digital media platforms and
Speaker 7: capture digital media ad dollars. There's all this money moving
Speaker 7: from traditional advertise to digital advertising. The traditional advertising had
Speaker 7: been with newspapers and traditional media, and so the thinking
Speaker 7: was back then was all those traditional ad dollars are
Speaker 7: going to go to the digital version of the news
Speaker 7: media that the advertisers were advertising with. So there was
Speaker 7: this website like vox and you know, other sites were
Speaker 7: sort of created to capture those ad dollars. Obviously that
Speaker 7: didn't happen. The money actually ended up going to Facebook
Speaker 7: and Google directly, which is why that whole crop of
Speaker 7: digital media companies died pretty much or like as a
Speaker 7: shell of themselves. But traffic was the most important thing.
Speaker 7: Traffic was so important because the more views you got,
Speaker 7: the more digital like display ads you know we're seeing,
Speaker 7: the more money the platform would make. And this is
Speaker 7: when a lot of platforms, including Facebook, were prioritizing link posts.
Speaker 7: They hadn't pivoted to video yet. There wasn't a lot
Speaker 7: of multimedia because the Internet speeds weren't there yet, so
Speaker 7: it would make the sites really slow and clunky to load.
Speaker 7: Instagram was barely had video at that time, so links
Speaker 7: were really kaying and if you could create a very
Speaker 7: shareable link, you could get tons of traffic. Therefore the
Speaker 7: company would make tons of money. And BuzzFeed was just
Speaker 7: expert at this because BuzzFeed realized very early that Internet
Speaker 7: users at that time didn't want to go through Reddit.
Speaker 7: You have to remember this was pre algorithmic feeds. Algorithmic
Speaker 7: feeds were not really a thing back then. I think
Speaker 7: Twitter only rolled out their algorithmicfeed in twenty sixteen twenty fifteen.
Speaker 7: It was really like the Internet was very manual, and
Speaker 7: so if people went on a platform, they couldn't especially
Speaker 7: Tumblr at that time was completely reverse chronological, right, so
Speaker 7: if you went on the platform, it was hard to
Speaker 7: kind of find the most interesting viral content. So you
Speaker 7: relied on this intermediaries like BuzzFeed to go into these
Speaker 7: platforms scrape out the most engaging content and presented to
Speaker 7: you all in one place. On this case too, I
Speaker 7: think it's really interesting that the dress post it was
Speaker 7: posted on a Tumblr that was like a fan tumbler
Speaker 7: for this girl, Sarah White show White ChIL. I always
Speaker 7: mispronounce her name, even though yes Lovely who was like
Speaker 7: a YouTuber manager. So it was just like the chances
Speaker 7: of somebody finding that Normally, yes, it was getting reblogged
Speaker 7: on Tumblr, but BuzzFeed was really like the amplifier.
Speaker 1: Basically Thanks so much to Taylor, and check out Extremely
Speaker 1: Online in stores now, and we'll be right back with
Speaker 1: another interview about why the success of the dress marked
Speaker 1: the beginning of the end for dumb fun on the internet.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I am the author of
Speaker 1: the twenty fifteen post was SNL's isis sketch too offensive?
Speaker 1: As fascinated as I am about how the dress went
Speaker 1: viral and what now feels like an almost old fashioned way,
Speaker 1: I wanted to take a second to do my due diligence.
Speaker 1: Why were people seeing this dress as two different color schemes?
Speaker 1: This was a major subject clickbait from clickbait at the time,
Speaker 1: most notably a Wired piece published the day after that
Speaker 1: ended up racking up over thirty two million views. In
Speaker 1: that piece, writer Adam Rodgers asked professor Bevill Conway, who
Speaker 1: studied color and vision at Wellesley College, to comment, and
Speaker 1: Professor Conway said that it was some combination of the
Speaker 1: varying ways in which people perceive light, and that the
Speaker 1: picture was just shitty quality and really blown out. Here's
Speaker 1: his fancy science explanation. Your visual system is looking at
Speaker 1: this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias
Speaker 1: of the daylight axis. People either discount the blue side,
Speaker 1: in which case they end up seeing white and gold,
Speaker 1: or discount the gold side, in which case they end
Speaker 1: up with blue and black. This also connects to the
Speaker 1: maddening feeling of the dress switching colors before your eyes,
Speaker 1: like Quinta yelled about in the BuzzFeed video. So if
Speaker 1: you were a neuroscientist with a focus on vision, and
Speaker 1: I know you're not, this actually prompted a pretty rich
Speaker 1: scientific discussion. The Journal of Vision dedicated a whole issue
Speaker 1: to the dress with some pretty interesting findings. They spoke
Speaker 1: to fourteen hundred p respondents, with fifty seven percent seeing
Speaker 1: black and blue, eleven percent black and brown, thirty percent
Speaker 1: white and gold, and two percent. Other tests included showing
Speaker 1: the dress in artificial yellow and blue light to see
Speaker 1: if that's shifted by us, and a study from Pascal
Speaker 1: Wallash showed the really interesting trend that people who woke
Speaker 1: up early were more likely to see the dress as
Speaker 1: white and gold, and people who went out at night
Speaker 1: moore were likely to see black and blue. And I'll
Speaker 1: admit reading about why your brain makes you see the
Speaker 1: dress as one thing or the other is really really interesting,
Speaker 1: even when what's being explained to you is a pretty
Speaker 1: straightforward optical illusion. And even though as I'm writing this
Speaker 1: episode this only happened about nine years ago, it feels
Speaker 1: like it's longer. It reminds me of a targeted ad
Speaker 1: I got for a T shirt sold by ClickHole, which,
Speaker 1: if you're not familiar, is a spinoff of the Onion
Speaker 1: that specifically satirized clickbait. The shirt says the Internet nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three to twenty fourteen, and it gets at this
Speaker 1: feeling I'm having that shortly after the dress, the Internet
Speaker 1: became less fun. Of course, this is coming from a
Speaker 1: very Western, privileged perspective, but it's pretty commonly held that
Speaker 1: in the US, around the time that the twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: election cycle began, social media became less fun. Let's not
Speaker 1: to say it was a cakewalk before. There are many
Speaker 1: stories of discrimination and harassment that took place here, many
Speaker 1: of which I'll cover on this show. But I'm trying
Speaker 1: to get at the ratio of fun stories to existentially
Speaker 1: terrifying stories, the ratio of hey, what color is this?
Speaker 1: To bigoted conspiracy theories in the mainstream. The dress kind
Speaker 1: of feels like the end of an era. Early twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen wasn't an Internet that wasn't poisoned with hate, but
Speaker 1: it felt like an Internet whose hate didn't poison everything,
Speaker 1: and less than a year later that didn't really feel true.
Speaker 1: I didn't speak to anyone involved in the original dress
Speaker 1: story for reasons I'll get to, but I wanted to
Speaker 1: better understand how the Internet shifted in the year after
Speaker 1: the dress to bring us to the kind of viral
Speaker 1: stories we were seeing in twenty sixteen. Just a year later.
Speaker 1: For Perspective, their Ringers round up of twenty sixteen viral
Speaker 1: stories included some classics like Chewbacco Mom, but also just
Speaker 1: the word Nazism. So yeah, there was a mainstream shift
Speaker 1: that had taken place. And this was for a reason,
Speaker 1: not just because of the heightened bigoted extremism in the
Speaker 1: Western world, but because of how our social networks were functioning.
Speaker 1: It's something that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti commented on as
Speaker 1: recently as twenty nineteen, less than five years after the
Speaker 1: dress story. In November twenty nineteen, he told Max Read
Speaker 1: at Intelligencer, the dress was.
Speaker 3: A kind of perfect thing to catch fire at that moment,
Speaker 3: the Internet was less polarized and politicized, and it had
Speaker 3: shifted to mobile fully, so people were looking at mobile
Speaker 3: devices with the dress. You saw it on your phone
Speaker 3: and you were with people. You could hold the phone
Speaker 3: up and say what color is this. Plus, in the
Speaker 3: early days of BuzzFeed, our traffic would die in the
Speaker 3: evening because people would watch television or go out with
Speaker 3: their friends. Now, with mobile, we see primetime for our
Speaker 3: content as the same as primetime for television. People are
Speaker 3: sharing content and looking at content later.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind this is a quote from less than
Speaker 1: half a decade later, but the difference between twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: and twenty nineteen on the US Internet made it feel
Speaker 1: like he was talking about twenty years ago. I mean,
Speaker 1: hell on the Internet. Forty years passed between November twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen and November twenty twenty, and since this interview, BuzzFeed
Speaker 1: has changed even more. Paretti pulled the plug on his
Speaker 1: Pulitzer winning news operation only seven years after it launched
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three, and is currently focused on rerouting
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed to AI. Depressing, yes, but not surprising, because after all,
Speaker 1: Paretti start the company to operate on algorithms with no
Speaker 1: creative at all, and now he has robots instead of writers,
Speaker 1: and the company is worth less than ever. I talked
Speaker 1: to a second author who published a great book about
Speaker 1: social media and full disclosure, he's also my best friend's boyfriend.
Speaker 1: He's the best and pertinent to you. He has a
Speaker 1: thorough knowledge on how social media algorithms have been forcibly
Speaker 1: evolved and monetized to serve those that make them money,
Speaker 1: not their users. Max Fisher currently co hosts Offline on
Speaker 1: Crooked Media, and wrote about this very topic in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two's The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of how
Speaker 1: Social Media rewired our minds and our world. Here's some
Speaker 1: of our talk.
Speaker 8: My name is Max Fisher, and I'm a journalist and podcaster.
Speaker 1: Because we're talking about the dress today is what is
Speaker 1: your personal recollection of the dress? Saga? Were you you
Speaker 1: were working in media at the time, right?
Speaker 8: I Not only was say working in media, but I
Speaker 8: was working not at BuzzFeed, but at Fox dot com,
Speaker 8: which was a fellow kind of web you know, new journalism,
Speaker 8: left leaning startup that was trying to chase audience on
Speaker 8: social media. So it felt very much kind of in
Speaker 8: our wheelhouse. It was something that we were all really
Speaker 8: excited about. Wow, look a post can get this much
Speaker 8: attention by you know, doing something that Facebook really likes
Speaker 8: and that social media algorithms really like. And we were
Speaker 8: trying to do not the dress exactly, but we were
Speaker 8: trying to do like, you know, the policy Wonk version
Speaker 8: of the dress every day. So we thought it was
Speaker 8: like this amazing moment that we paid a lot of
Speaker 8: attention to.
Speaker 1: So I know that you've spent a lot of recent
Speaker 1: years thinking about how our algorithms work, and you know
Speaker 1: the implications of that. Were you thinking about this ten
Speaker 1: years ago? What did that algorithm chasing look like?
Speaker 8: I was thinking about it, But like a lot of
Speaker 8: journalists I think of our generation, I thought of it
Speaker 8: as just purely a good thing, as just a thing
Speaker 8: where it's like, oh, if I write my piece that
Speaker 8: I was going to write anyway on the Iran nuclear deal,
Speaker 8: but I phrased the headline in a certain way, then
Speaker 8: Facebook can deliver me, thanks to its algorithm, huge amounts
Speaker 8: of traffic and eyeballs and people who want to read
Speaker 8: the story. And that's great, and that's so nice that
Speaker 8: social media can be there to help us reach a
Speaker 8: larger audience. So I was aware of it, but thought
Speaker 8: of it as kind of a relatively neutral force, like, sure,
Speaker 8: maybe you play up certain emotions in your headlines and
Speaker 8: certain ideas that you know are likely or to go viral,
Speaker 8: but again maybe like a lot of people. It wasn't
Speaker 8: really until after Trump was elected, like a year and
Speaker 8: a half after that, that I started to think of
Speaker 8: social media and social media algorithms as something that could
Speaker 8: be bad. At this point, I really thought that they
Speaker 8: were just a good thing.
Speaker 1: And also just I think, certainly on my end, there
Speaker 1: was a lack of thinking about how this algorithm chasing
Speaker 1: translated to money, which in retrospect feel very naive of me,
Speaker 1: but there was at the time. It seems like money
Speaker 1: to be had from you know, taking these stories that
Speaker 1: you would find on social media and then you know,
Speaker 1: delivering them and making you know, question mark a shitload of.
Speaker 8: Money, right, I mean, the idea for the web startups
Speaker 8: of that era was that you will get so many
Speaker 8: more eyeballs on social media, and then so many more
Speaker 8: people will click through to your website and they will
Speaker 8: see ads on your website, so then you will make
Speaker 8: more money and we weren't thinking of it, and maybe
Speaker 8: you guys were breaking it in to the Boston BuzzFeed.
Speaker 1: But almost impossible to conceive that we were.
Speaker 8: I mean, maybe this was idealistic, but we were thinking
Speaker 8: of it as this will be great because it will
Speaker 8: make journalism sustainable. Like, we were all veterans of the
Speaker 8: two thousand and eight financial crisis, so we had all
Speaker 8: lived through a time when there were no jobs to
Speaker 8: be had because the industry was collapsing because the Internet
Speaker 8: social media had taken all of the revenue that used
Speaker 8: to go through classifieds. So the idea that, aha, now
Speaker 8: we're going to leverage that same social media to get
Speaker 8: all these ad impressions. We can have a sustainable business again,
Speaker 8: and won't that be so great for like the future
Speaker 8: of the industry. And like before I worked at Fox,
Speaker 8: I worked at the Washington Post, and they'd loved the
Speaker 8: idea that you would do the journalism you were going
Speaker 8: to do anyway, but right in in a way that
Speaker 8: will please algorithms, or right the headline in a way
Speaker 8: that will please algorithms, so that we can make more
Speaker 8: money and continue to pay for foreign correspondence. So it
Speaker 8: is a very starry eyed era that boy has sure
Speaker 8: not aged well.
Speaker 1: Used a phrase that just feels very inherent to what
Speaker 1: the dress was. You use a phrase the old algorithm.
Speaker 1: What do you mean when you say the old algorithm?
Speaker 8: Oh? Yeah, okay, So I think we all know that
Speaker 8: algorithms are what drive everything and how you experience social media.
Speaker 8: There are the programs on every platform that select what
Speaker 8: you see the order you see it in, that choose
Speaker 8: what kind of emotions to surface, what kind of like
Speaker 8: political valance to surface for you. They're the absolute core
Speaker 8: of the social media business model. The era before algorithms,
Speaker 8: social media was a loser business that didn't make any money,
Speaker 8: and people didn't spend that much time on like rimbor MySpace,
Speaker 8: You didn't spend that much time on the site live journal.
Speaker 8: After they developed algorithms, that is when people's time on
Speaker 8: site exploded because they are so effective at making the
Speaker 8: experience of being social media very engaging and addictive, and
Speaker 8: that's what turned social media companies into huge businesses. So
Speaker 8: for a long time, the way that those algorithms worked
Speaker 8: from their first invention and like the end of the
Speaker 8: two thousands, like Facebook kind of starts it in two
Speaker 8: thousand and six with the Facebook news feed, but it
Speaker 8: takes a while for their platforms to catch up up
Speaker 8: through like the era of the dress, the way that
Speaker 8: it worked, the old quote unquote old algorithm promoted whatever
Speaker 8: content was. They tend to promote outbound links, like it
Speaker 8: will promote a link to some other website or news site,
Speaker 8: even if it's like a lollcat or something something off
Speaker 8: the platform, and it would be whatever is the link
Speaker 8: that people would click on the most. And what that
Speaker 8: tended to privilege is if you remember like upworthy. Upworthy
Speaker 8: was like a website that existed to create content specifically
Speaker 8: to cater to like the old Facebook algorithm, because it
Speaker 8: was like curiosity gaps or it was like you won't
Speaker 8: believe what happened next, so you're like, oh, I guess
Speaker 8: I'll click on that link, and then you click on
Speaker 8: that link, and then Facebook or Twitter learns, okay, we
Speaker 8: promote that link to a lot of people, they will
Speaker 8: click on it. And the dress is kind of the
Speaker 8: last gasp of that old algorithm because it is again
Speaker 8: you see the link and the way that it displayed
Speaker 8: on not just Facebook, although Facebook was the big one
Speaker 8: at the time, but all of the platforms read it Twitter,
Speaker 8: it would displays you would see a cutoff image of
Speaker 8: the dress, and then you would see a headline about
Speaker 8: people see it in different colors, So it really makes
Speaker 8: you want to click. So everybody who saw this link
Speaker 8: on their news feed you were like, oh, I have
Speaker 8: to click through and figure out what color the dress is,
Speaker 8: even if you only spend eight seconds on that post.
Speaker 8: The algorithm learns that serves it to everyone on the
Speaker 8: platforms because it creates these outbound links, and that is
Speaker 8: when BuzzFeed starts to get you know, a million people
Speaker 8: a minute or whatever the numbers were.
Speaker 2: Looking at it.
Speaker 1: A section of your book covers really thoroughly. Like twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen is a really important year for this shift. So
Speaker 1: the way that the algorithm looks in late February twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen and at the end of the year seems pretty different.
Speaker 1: What is changing with how algorithms are used on social
Speaker 1: media throughout.
Speaker 8: This era, So there's not like a moment of shift,
Speaker 8: like they don't pull a big lever and go over
Speaker 8: to new set of algorithms. But bummer, bummer, I know,
Speaker 8: but over like twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, the big
Speaker 8: social media platforms make a bunch of incremental changes that
Speaker 8: shift to a set of algorithms that just fundamentally privilege
Speaker 8: a different set of things. The language that Facebook uses
Speaker 8: for this, and they are kind of like leading the
Speaker 8: charge at this point because they're still dominant way back
Speaker 8: in this era, is that they want to start privileging
Speaker 8: quote emotionally engaging interactions. And what that means is that
Speaker 8: instead of pushing up to the top of your feed
Speaker 8: whatever is the link to an outbound website that they
Speaker 8: think you were likely is to click on, they want
Speaker 8: to promote whatever content in your feed, whether that's a link,
Speaker 8: or it's a discussion, or it's a Facebook group or
Speaker 8: it's a photo that is going to generate the most
Speaker 8: discussion on that post. And the reason they do that
Speaker 8: is they want to keep you on the platforms because
Speaker 8: if you click that outbound link, now you're on BuzzFeed,
Speaker 8: and Facebook doesn't make any money from you spending time
Speaker 8: on BuzzFeed. They want you to spend as much time
Speaker 8: on Facebook in discussion whatever as they can. And they
Speaker 8: frame this it's like, oh, we're going to start giving
Speaker 8: you They call it like meaningful connections or like meaningful
Speaker 8: interactions as if it's going to bring you, like all
Speaker 8: sorts of love and friendship, but of course that is
Speaker 8: not at all what it brings, because these algorithms are
Speaker 8: incredibly ruthless in running billions of what are basically tests
Speaker 8: like little social science experiments every single day. And what
Speaker 8: is the exact kind of content that will get people
Speaker 8: to engage in these quote unquote emotionally engaging interactions, not
Speaker 8: just to spend time on the site, but also to
Speaker 8: post back in the site in ways that we'll get
Speaker 8: other people to spend time on the site. And like,
Speaker 8: what is the content and the set of emotions that
Speaker 8: are going to be most engaging. And like, you know,
Speaker 8: as any any student of human nature will know, it's
Speaker 8: not the nice stuff. It's not you know, here's your
Speaker 8: friend's baby, you know, your cousin got a new job promotion,
Speaker 8: your aunt had a great it's outrage primarily, and especially
Speaker 8: moral outrage. And it's anything that expressed fear or hatred
Speaker 8: or discussed with some sort of social outgroup. And that
Speaker 8: might be you know, political partisans on the other side
Speaker 8: that for a lot of people, that's racial groups, religious groups, immigrants,
Speaker 8: anything that cultivates a sense of like there is a
Speaker 8: social group out there that I don't like, and I
Speaker 8: find them to be scary, or I find them to
Speaker 8: be offensive and I want to rally my in group
Speaker 8: against them. That is the thing that the algorithms, as
Speaker 8: they are being introduced to all of these platforms over
Speaker 8: twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, learn to surface above all else.
Speaker 8: And Facebook's own researchers are tracking all of this, and
Speaker 8: they're finding both that this is enormously successful at making
Speaker 8: people spend more time on the website, but also that
Speaker 8: it's really bad for them. There's this paper that's kind
Speaker 8: of the last gasp of when Facebook used to put
Speaker 8: publish research into what their algorithm does with users. In
Speaker 8: May twenty fifteen, Facebook's researchers, because they have accessed all
Speaker 8: this data, published this paper warning that this change to
Speaker 8: this new algorithm was sorting people into not just like
Speaker 8: minded discussions, but within those discussions was consistently surfacing whatever
Speaker 8: was the angriest or most emotional or most extreme viewpoint
Speaker 8: that everybody agreed with, and that that created an effect
Speaker 8: that was quote associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over
Speaker 8: time and misperceiving facts about current events, which is a
Speaker 8: somewhat euphemistic way of saying that people became more extreme
Speaker 8: in whatever beliefs they already held, and that they became
Speaker 8: likelier to believe misinformation or conspiracies, because of course, if
Speaker 8: you already are angry about something, a conspiracy about it
Speaker 8: will make you feel even angrier.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: I was fascinated to read how that information was at
Speaker 1: one point public, and I think, like how it feels
Speaker 1: completely inconceivable that they would publish anything like that to
Speaker 1: the public just five years later or even two years later.
Speaker 1: And how you know it was? It was well known
Speaker 1: internally and it seems like I mean you explained I
Speaker 1: think inside and also outside of Facebook, the sort of attempted,
Speaker 1: the attempts to blow the whistle on like hey, this
Speaker 1: is really not good for us. So I mean, it's
Speaker 1: of course like profit is why that happens. But I
Speaker 1: at what point do these platforms sort of switch to
Speaker 1: infinite growth?
Speaker 8: So that had always been the business model since those
Speaker 8: first days of the news feed back on the like
Speaker 8: late two thousands, But what happens actually around the same time,
Speaker 8: around twenty fourteen, is they start to realize that the
Speaker 8: pool of human attention is and that's what they trade in.
Speaker 8: That's their asset that they are chasing is seconds of
Speaker 8: your day that you're spending on the platform, so they
Speaker 8: can sell ads against it. And they realize around twenty
Speaker 8: fourteen that they've kind of reached saturation collectively on how
Speaker 8: much of that they hold. Where at this point people
Speaker 8: spend As of twenty fourteen, people on average are spending
Speaker 8: more time on social media platforms than they do interacting
Speaker 8: with other people socially in real life, which is staggering.
Speaker 8: And that gap, of course has only grown since. So
Speaker 8: what they realize when they get to this point where
Speaker 8: they realize, okay, we've kind of saturated the market for
Speaker 8: how much human attention we can captures, they get into
Speaker 8: this arms race with each other for who can hold
Speaker 8: more of that attention. And that is when they go
Speaker 8: from just having a existing business model of infinite growth
Speaker 8: to needing to, like you said, take every step that
Speaker 8: they can, no matter how extreme, to try to outcompete
Speaker 8: each other for how much of that attention they hold.
Speaker 8: And this is when all of the social media companies
Speaker 8: again is around like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, higher up,
Speaker 8: all of the big names and artificial intelligence. Like every
Speaker 8: major European and American researcher at every big research university
Speaker 8: suddenly works at Facebook, which is like that seems unsurprising
Speaker 8: now because these are trillion dollar companies, but at the
Speaker 8: time that was really shocking because this is just like
Speaker 8: this was like Fancy or MySpace. This is just like
Speaker 8: a weird little website, and all of a sudden, all
Speaker 8: of these like rock stars of artificial intelligence work for
Speaker 8: them because what they are doing is they are trying
Speaker 8: to make the social media algorithms that govern what you
Speaker 8: see as smart and as ruthless as possible. This is
Speaker 8: when YouTube sets towards this big internal goal they have
Speaker 8: for one billion hours of daily watch time, meaning that
Speaker 8: everyone who uses YouTube will collectively watch one billion hours
Speaker 8: of video every single day, which is ten times what
Speaker 8: they had across the platform at the time they set
Speaker 8: this goal. So they're starting to really design their business
Speaker 8: models and their engineering around the idea that they need
Speaker 8: to in order to survive drastically increase the stickiness and
Speaker 8: addictiveness of being on their platform, which is when they
Speaker 8: kind of start getting into all of these dark arts
Speaker 8: of emotional and psychological manipulation.
Speaker 1: It feels so clear now and at the time where
Speaker 1: you're like, this is weird.
Speaker 2: Why am I so upset on.
Speaker 8: Well, the thing that I always think about that I
Speaker 8: did not appreciate at the time. I didn't get its significance.
Speaker 8: But looking back, I'm like, oh, okay, I see how
Speaker 8: that was. Like a big watership moment is around twenty fifteen,
Speaker 8: when gamer gait goes from being this thing that is
Speaker 8: happening on the fringes of Reddit and the fringes of YouTube,
Speaker 8: where it's like a bunch of like young white guys
Speaker 8: are really mad about video games for some reason I
Speaker 8: don't understand why, to all of a sudden it's completely
Speaker 8: dominant on all of the social platforms, and it's the
Speaker 8: like number one thing day after day on the platforms,
Speaker 8: and all of these like weirdo gamer Gate characters like
Speaker 8: Milo Gianopolis and Mike Cernovich, all of a sudden they're
Speaker 8: like mainstream political figures. And that is we know now
Speaker 8: in retrospect, because this is the time when social media
Speaker 8: algorithms started to realize that stuff like gamer Gate was
Speaker 8: going to be so so effective at increasing engagement. So
Speaker 8: that's why when you go away from the social media
Speaker 8: algorithms of the era of like the dress what you
Speaker 8: get instead of the social media algorithms of gamer Gate,
Speaker 8: which I would not consider a trade up.
Speaker 1: This is also the time where which I feel like
Speaker 1: ties right into the Milo stuff, where Breitbart really starts
Speaker 1: to pop off, and it feels to me, i mean,
Speaker 1: very diabolical match of the BuzzFeed model of like luring
Speaker 1: people in with really splashy headlines. As we're like coming
Speaker 1: out of this era of the Dress and things were
Speaker 1: getting more politicized and engagement driven to you know, really
Speaker 1: monetize and push outrage. What are the success stories and
Speaker 1: how do they sort of shape what the new algorithm favors.
Speaker 8: That's a great way to put it. I think you're
Speaker 8: exactly right that if BuzzFeed and like upworthy were they
Speaker 8: sites that embodied and benefited from the kind of pre
Speaker 8: twenty fifteen social media ecosystem and algorithms, then the site
Speaker 8: that embodies and most benefited from the post twenty fifteen
Speaker 8: social media algorithms is definitely Brightbart. There was this huge
Speaker 8: Harvard study or it was like led through Harvard, but
Speaker 8: it was a ton of different scholars that came out
Speaker 8: after the twenty sixteen election and was kind of trying
Speaker 8: to ask, like, Okay, what happened, what was the like
Speaker 8: something the internet played some role in the twenty sixteen election.
Speaker 8: Social media played some role, but we're I'm not quite
Speaker 8: sure what it is. So let's do like a big
Speaker 8: systemic investigation into what the social web looked like in
Speaker 8: the run up to the twenty sixteen election. And one
Speaker 8: of the big things they found is that from May
Speaker 8: twenty fifteen to November twenty sixteen, when the election was held,
Speaker 8: which is kind of the onset of that era of
Speaker 8: the new social media algorithms, Breitbart was the third most
Speaker 8: shared media outlet on all of social media, which is
Speaker 8: crazy when you know that Breitbart has like no staff,
Speaker 8: they have no budget. It's a terrible experience to be
Speaker 8: on their website. They don't produce very many articles. And
Speaker 8: before this algorithmic shift, they had been a teeny tiny
Speaker 8: little website with no readership. And there was like this
Speaker 8: kind of narrative that like, oh, yes, Steve Bannon, who's
Speaker 8: running Breitbart, is some like genius of the dark arts
Speaker 8: of the social web. And what we learned from this
Speaker 8: Harvard study and from a lot of subsequent investigations is
Speaker 8: that he was not. The people of Breitbart were not
Speaker 8: these geniuses. They were passive beneficiaries of the algorithms of
Speaker 8: Facebook and Twitter, basically plucking this website and similar websites
Speaker 8: out and pushing them in front of huge audiences of people.
Speaker 8: Like Breitbart got more audience and engagement on Facebook than
Speaker 8: Fox News did in the run up to the election,
Speaker 8: and Fox News is like a bajillion dollar company with
Speaker 8: hundreds of reporters.
Speaker 1: I mean, and certainly in the case of Breitbart, it
Speaker 1: was just saying shit and presenting it as news, and
Speaker 1: you know, like I wasn't saying fascistic shit, but there
Speaker 1: were times where I was just kind of saying shit,
Speaker 1: and they're like, and she's a reporter. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to reflect on.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I hadn't thought about
Speaker 8: that before. But you're right that this was kind of
Speaker 8: the first stage and a shift that now feels much
Speaker 8: more complete from getting your news from a news source
Speaker 8: to then you're getting your news from a new source
Speaker 8: repackaged for social media, So then you're getting your news
Speaker 8: from a news source that is saying shit. I now
Speaker 8: most of us get our news from people who are
Speaker 8: just saying shit on social media, and we kind of
Speaker 8: like trust or hope that the like viral posts that
Speaker 8: we're reading is at some point sourced from something real,
Speaker 8: and sometimes it is, and it's just spun in a
Speaker 8: way to like get more engagement on social media. But
Speaker 8: you know, it's just as possible that it's made up,
Speaker 8: or that it's exaggerated, or that it's out of context.
Speaker 8: So it is, in retrospect, like the start of a
Speaker 8: larger shift to the just saying shit era of media consumption,
Speaker 8: because on some level, you know, even though we do
Speaker 8: all care about getting accurate information from credible sources, our
Speaker 8: brains unfortunately are really really drawn to things that are
Speaker 8: emotionally satisfying or that delivered like outrage which feels very
Speaker 8: affirming to indulge in, or that deliver a sense of
Speaker 8: like moral righteousness or in group versus out group, and
Speaker 8: that can overpower that desire that we do also feel
Speaker 8: for real credible information, which is of course only gotten
Speaker 8: worse since twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much to Max for speaking with me in
Speaker 1: full disclosure. His cat is so large now I have
Speaker 1: to be honest in the interest of contextualizing the dress
Speaker 1: in real time, I did leave something off about its
Speaker 1: longer future. To this day, there's an entire page about
Speaker 1: the dress on the Roman Original's website where it was manufactured,
Speaker 1: calling it the quote phenomenon that revealed differences in human
Speaker 1: color perception, which have been the subject of ongoing scientific
Speaker 1: investigation in neuroscience and vision science.
Speaker 5: I mean sure.
Speaker 1: And while some subjects on this show will require a
Speaker 1: bonk on the head to fully remember who is Chili nighbor,
Speaker 1: who is being dad sidebart, the mid character is so
Speaker 1: often insert name of food, insert type of person, whatever,
Speaker 1: but the dress rarely needs introduction if the person was
Speaker 1: online at the time. There were retrospectives of the dress
Speaker 1: story being written as recently as last year. When I'm
Speaker 1: building out episodes for this show, step one is to
Speaker 1: reach out to the main character themselves to see if
Speaker 1: they want to talk. After all, the dress was for
Speaker 1: someone's wedding, and the mom who wore the dress stated
Speaker 1: at the time of the incessant optical illusion that she
Speaker 1: was annoyed that she was being excluded from most news coverage.
Speaker 1: Cecilia and the married couple got the classic fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: treatment for this era, the married couple Grace and Keir
Speaker 1: and Cecilia and her partner Paul, were flown out to
Speaker 1: la to be on the Ellen Show, and the couple
Speaker 1: got a briefcase full of ten thousand American dollars. The
Speaker 1: mother and stepfather of the bride got underwear for some reason,
Speaker 1: half black and blue and half white and gold, and
Speaker 1: that was it, and Cecilia was pissed from a Guardian
Speaker 1: piece from late twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: Should it be on display somewhere?
Speaker 1: Blaisdell wonders, should it be in a whatever? It still
Speaker 1: got sweaty marks on though, need the clean So nine
Speaker 1: years later, I wanted to see where everyone was, and
Speaker 1: that's where this story takes an especially dark turn. When
Speaker 1: I went to find out where that couple is now,
Speaker 1: I found this headline from July twenty twenty three. Man
Speaker 1: behind viral blue black dress illusion charged with trying to
Speaker 1: kill wife. I don't want to rehash it too heavily here,
Speaker 1: but the relationship had been tremendously abusive since before the
Speaker 1: dress and their marriage, culminating in husband Keir making repeated
Speaker 1: violent attempts on Grace's life isolating her from friends and
Speaker 1: family and attempting to murder her during the spring of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. He then went to court and denied
Speaker 1: all charges and most clickbait in twenty twenty three because yes,
Speaker 1: all of the same outlets reported on this story again
Speaker 1: made the somewhat lazy observation that the dress had previously
Speaker 1: been used in a domestic violence awareness camp pain in
Speaker 1: South Africa back in twenty fifteen, featuring a woman wearing
Speaker 1: the dress in white and gold while covered in black
Speaker 1: and blue bruises. Why is it so hard to see
Speaker 1: black and blue? The ad asked. I think this ad
Speaker 1: is very weird, even if the intention was well placed,
Speaker 1: and the wave of twenty twenty three press connecting it
Speaker 1: to the real life terror campaign taken out on Grace
Speaker 1: felt just as wrong because virtually all of those pieces,
Speaker 1: while sympathetic to her, ended in some tired version of
Speaker 1: By the way, the dress was black and blue and
Speaker 1: as of this month. In May twenty twenty four, I
Speaker 1: am recording this a month after we finished this episode.
Speaker 1: Kiir Johnston is being held in prison after pleading guilty
Speaker 1: to attacking and attempting to kill Grace back in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two. At the time, Grace called and texted people
Speaker 1: for help after years of reporting abuse and said that
Speaker 1: her husband was trying to kill her after she was
Speaker 1: violently attacked, strangled, and was threatened with a knife. As
Speaker 1: of this recording, the case is ongoing, and we wish
Speaker 1: Grace nothing but peace and getting as far away from
Speaker 1: any of this fucking discourse as she needs to. And
Speaker 1: it's further proof that any Internet story on a long
Speaker 1: enough timeline begins to reflect the ugliness of the world
Speaker 1: that the Internet reflects and so often warps. Okay, cutting
Speaker 1: back into the original episode here, I'm sort of hesitant
Speaker 1: to say that there's a clear lesson to be learned
Speaker 1: from the saga of the dress, but it certainly encapsulates
Speaker 1: a moment in Internet history that feels ungo backable, and
Speaker 1: there's no better example of that than all the writers
Speaker 1: who were paid at the time to make it mean
Speaker 1: something outside of being an increasingly rare monocultural moment that
Speaker 1: swirled in normal people with tech profits and our attention.
Speaker 1: So the dress means something, but what exactly that is
Speaker 1: is a little elusive. Almost ten years on, I feel
Speaker 1: kind of nostalgic for a time where the Internet could
Speaker 1: unite over a neutral issue. But as a twenty two
Speaker 1: year old clickbait writer, I didn't even have the time
Speaker 1: to appreciate it because I needed to form an edgy, smart,
Speaker 1: adjacent opinion about it as quickly as possible. Here's a
Speaker 1: passage from a reaction to the dress and the Lama's
Speaker 1: success as stories on the heels of the net neutrality decision.
Speaker 1: The essay is called the open Internet will keep us
Speaker 1: stupid and happy. At this point, it's unfathomable to think
Speaker 1: of anything short of a gale force windstorm full of
Speaker 1: knives that could prevent the Internet from brimming with memes, gifts,
Speaker 1: and asenine materials from content farms.
Speaker 7: Hell.
Speaker 1: I used to write for a content farm in Boston,
Speaker 1: and yes, I have written an article called how Seth
Speaker 1: MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West can
Speaker 1: teach us about how to run our tech companies, and
Speaker 1: that is objectively gross. The Internet is stupid, but it
Speaker 1: was almost stupid and expensive. Thanks to the net neutrality
Speaker 1: vote passed yesterday, we won't need to worry about our
Speaker 1: access to lama and confusing dresses being hindered for now. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wrote this, and what the fuck was I talking about? Anyways?
Speaker 1: Good for her. I'm sure she'll never overthink anything again.
Speaker 1: Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It is written, hosted, and executive produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 1: Our other executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: and our supervising producer and editor is Ian Johnson. Our
Speaker 1: theme song is by Sadie Dupui and I would like
Speaker 1: to thank all of the pets, Anderson the Dog, Mike, Kats,
Speaker 1: Flee and Casper, and my pet rock Bird, who will
Speaker 1: outlive us all. Bye e