Speaker 1: There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Toad and this
Speaker 1: is there Are No Girls on the Internet. Have you
Speaker 1: ever heard the phrase so and so is the Internet's
Speaker 1: main character for the day. That's when somebody does something
Speaker 1: that everybody is talking about and they become social media's
Speaker 1: main character. The Internet really has this way of flattening
Speaker 1: people out, turning them into characters, and then just kind
Speaker 1: of forgetting about them once they're fifteen minutes of fame
Speaker 1: is over. But on a new podcast from our buds
Speaker 1: over at cool Zone called The Sixteenth Minute Friend of
Speaker 1: the Show, Jamie Loftus explores what happens in that sixteenth minute,
Speaker 1: who these people are, and what their Internet fame or
Speaker 1: infamy says about us as a culture. I joined Jamie
Speaker 1: to discuss an Internet main character that we actually talked
Speaker 1: about here on There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 1: That lady who everybody got mad about after she tweeted
Speaker 1: about really enjoying her mornings drinking coffee with her husband
Speaker 1: in her garden.
Speaker 2: Remember her.
Speaker 1: It's a story that I think really illustrates a lot
Speaker 1: about how we're all coping these days, so check it
Speaker 1: out and be sure to subscribe to the sixteenth minute.
Speaker 3: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: Okay, I don't know if you've heard this one, but
Speaker 4: being a woman on the internet sucks. It is bad.
Speaker 4: It is so bad that maybe you just rolled your
Speaker 4: eyes at hearing me say it, like, well, a white
Speaker 4: millennial just said being a woman online is actually really hard,
Speaker 4: and not to be that brave white millennial, but yes,
Speaker 4: it really sucks being a woman on the internet, and
Speaker 4: it sucks so much that it's bad writing for me
Speaker 4: to even tell you that. But if you're a woman, girl,
Speaker 4: non binary, really just not a cis man online and
Speaker 4: other random online users know that, particularly anonymous people, you'll
Speaker 4: get a crash course in gender discrimination the likes of
Speaker 4: which you could not imagine. And of course this happens
Speaker 4: across many lines, and intersecting marginalized identities tends to mean
Speaker 4: worse abuse. That's why we have terms like misogenre to
Speaker 4: describe the elevated prejudice that black women experience, or why
Speaker 4: a study from the National Library of Medicine found that
Speaker 4: gendered racism against Asian American women has gotten worse in
Speaker 4: recent years, causing a community wide decrease in mental health.
Speaker 4: Trans women face threats of violence and violent actions at
Speaker 4: four times the rate of CIS women, compounded by the
Speaker 4: world's most powerful countries passing laws that invalidate their existence
Speaker 4: at best and enable transgenocide at worst. And that's just
Speaker 4: studies that address people who identify as women. Non Binary
Speaker 4: people face a whole separate type of discrimination. There's billions
Speaker 4: of ways to be a woman online and most of
Speaker 4: them fucking suck. And that's because being a woman anywhere
Speaker 4: still tends to fucking suck. That's one of the first
Speaker 4: things you learn on the internet. Don't be marginalized in
Speaker 4: any way, or someone's gonna threaten to kill you. You
Speaker 4: could also fall in love or meet your best friend
Speaker 4: in my case, all of the above. That's the monkey
Speaker 4: paw of logging in. It's why when I was twelve
Speaker 4: and posting on message boards lying out of my ass,
Speaker 4: pretending to be a nineteen year old boy named Aaron
Speaker 4: who wanted to store the band I got legitimate replies
Speaker 4: and asked what my favorite bands were. And when I
Speaker 4: panicked and admitted I was a twelve year old girl,
Speaker 4: the same people started asking me for pictures of myself
Speaker 4: really cool stuff. And while there were many main characters
Speaker 4: of the Internet who became notorious or were pilloried for
Speaker 4: doing something. A father refuses to open a can of
Speaker 4: beans for his daughter to teach her a lesson. A
Speaker 4: husband loves his curvw wife a little too weird. And
Speaker 4: then there are others who become the character of the
Speaker 4: day for simply existing online. Come with me if you
Speaker 4: will to October twenty twenty two. Shouldn't be a super
Speaker 4: heavy lift. You know it's It's not not recent. The
Speaker 4: day was October twenty first. Kim Kardashian tried to go
Speaker 4: to a fancy restaurant and an usher concert for her
Speaker 4: forty second birthday, but ends up at an in and
Speaker 4: Out instead. Liz Trust becomes the shortest lived UK Prime
Speaker 4: Minister of all time and resigns after only six weeks.
Speaker 4: Midnights by Taylor Swift comes out, introducing the extremely unpleasant
Speaker 4: lyric Someday, I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
Speaker 4: into the world. Swifties, please don't contact me. I'm having
Speaker 4: a hard time right now and I can't deal with you. Yes,
Speaker 4: October twenty twenty two. In two short weeks, I would
Speaker 4: give a speech at my friend's wedding and meet the
Speaker 4: man who would ruin my life for the next nine
Speaker 4: months next to a porta potty. So here's some obvious
Speaker 4: advice I can give you. Never talk to a man
Speaker 4: you meet next to a porta potty. The point is
Speaker 4: being a woman online or in the world, or me specifically,
Speaker 4: is a pain in the ass, and our main character
Speaker 4: is terrific. Proof of that with a healthy dose of
Speaker 4: class dynamic discussion to boot the wife who drank coffee
Speaker 4: in the garden, Your sixteenth minute begins now. On the
Speaker 4: morning of October twenty first, twenty twenty two, a twenty
Speaker 4: four year old woman named Daisy tweeted the following from
Speaker 4: her Twitter account at Lil Plant Mommy.
Speaker 3: My husband and I wake up every morning and bring
Speaker 3: our coffee out to her garden and sit and talk
Speaker 3: for hours every morning. It never gets old and we
Speaker 3: never run out of things to talk to.
Speaker 4: Love him so much, I know, really fucked up stuff.
Speaker 4: The story here is young woman enjoys coffee and talking
Speaker 4: with her husband for long periods of time. The reaction
Speaker 4: to this story, well.
Speaker 5: I wake up every day with chronic pain.
Speaker 4: Carcel tunnel syndrome and.
Speaker 5: Wash my OCD medication down with an iced oat milk lattape.
Speaker 6: But whatever, potato potato? Am I right? For hours?
Speaker 4: Put?
Speaker 6: What if we weren't inherently wealthy and have to work
Speaker 6: in stuff?
Speaker 2: Lol?
Speaker 6: This is cute and all that?
Speaker 5: Did you think of all the people who wake up
Speaker 5: to where it grueling hours, wake up on this streets
Speaker 5: alone or with chronic pain? Before posting this, you should
Speaker 5: be mindful next time before bragging about your picture perfect life.
Speaker 5: You might upset someone.
Speaker 6: What is the purpose of this communication? I'm happy for you,
Speaker 6: but it's just smug, self satisfied bragging. If it's true,
Speaker 6: your partner is most likely embarrassed by the tweet, or
Speaker 6: at least they should be.
Speaker 5: That is, unless you're flogging something very nice story. But
Speaker 5: haven't you been married for less than four months? This
Speaker 5: phase will end, it always does. Please don't be disheartened
Speaker 5: when it does. Remember love is a choice, not a feeling.
Speaker 6: No. No, they're a small business owner, so they are
Speaker 6: actively participating and taking advantage of other people's labors so
Speaker 6: they can have these blissful mornings. They are capitalism.
Speaker 4: They are capitalism. They don't even control the railways or
Speaker 4: the flow of commerce. I know it's not the same thing,
Speaker 4: but it feels like the same thing. I mean, Twitter
Speaker 4: is undefeated for finding me only people on earth who
Speaker 4: can be crueler to you than your own negative self talk.
Speaker 4: And that's just a fact. But to be honest, I
Speaker 4: was in a bad enough place when I saw this
Speaker 4: story that while I recognized that the backlash of this
Speaker 4: poor woman was ridiculous, I kind of resented her too.
Speaker 4: Every day I'm doing well financially, but I don't have
Speaker 4: talking to my partner for hours in the garden every
Speaker 4: day money. I don't even think I have garden money.
Speaker 4: And at the time, I hadn't met anyone to either
Speaker 4: drink coffee with or ruin my life with. But to
Speaker 4: my credit, I had the wisdom do not participate in
Speaker 4: this discourse. I did what I think is the much
Speaker 4: safer move, thought about it privately, and kept my fucking
Speaker 4: mouth shut. At the time I'm writing this, this tweet
Speaker 4: from at Little Plant Mommy has three hundred and fourteen
Speaker 4: thousand likes. This is about as close as it gets
Speaker 4: to a full on public shaming for saying something that
Speaker 4: isn't only innocuous on its face, but also doesn't appear
Speaker 4: to be courting attention outside of Daisy's Twitter circle at
Speaker 4: this time. I think she technically qualifies as a micro influencer,
Speaker 4: so less than twenty thousand followers, not just a rando
Speaker 4: talking to people she only knows in real life, but
Speaker 4: by no means someone who is courting a massive audience.
Speaker 4: You probably follow one hundred people like this. I'm basically this,
Speaker 4: And at the time this tweet was posted, Daisy had
Speaker 4: a discernible aesthetic and things that she talked to her
Speaker 4: audience about frequently, So for her, this tweet wouldn't have
Speaker 4: been outside of the realm of a very normal post
Speaker 4: that she would make about a year before this, the
Speaker 4: only other time the Wayback Machine Internet archives saved her page.
Speaker 4: Daisy's bio read as follows.
Speaker 3: Naturopathic medicine student, white woman's student emoji, licensed holistic beauty
Speaker 3: specialist branch emoji, sustainable gardener, white woman gardener emoji.
Speaker 4: A few months before the tweet that shook the Earth,
Speaker 4: she got married to a man named Matt who it
Speaker 4: seems like she loved a whole lot. That's it, and
Speaker 4: her tweets were maybe what you'd expect based on that
Speaker 4: pretty niche with a lot of slightly woo woo wellness
Speaker 4: talk that isn't for everyone, but wasn't trying to be.
Speaker 4: As I read through some of her old stuff, I
Speaker 4: didn't agree with some of it. I mean, I don't
Speaker 4: think dairy is as bad as all that, but honestly,
Speaker 4: I probably never would have found her account if it
Speaker 4: weren't for this story. People with as many seven to
Speaker 4: eleven loyalty points as I do are simply not buying
Speaker 4: what our girl Daisy is selling. And by the way,
Speaker 4: the reaction that some of these response tweets imply suggests
Speaker 4: that Daisy owned a business that personified the grueling puppy
Speaker 4: mill that is capitalism with the same energy as if
Speaker 4: she were Jeff Bezos himself. Again, not true. Daisy ran
Speaker 4: a small time esthetician business called The Holistic Esthetician, and
Speaker 4: there's nothing wrong with that outside of being a little
Speaker 4: hard for me to say. It doesn't even seem like
Speaker 4: she has employees, and that might also explain her flexible hours.
Speaker 4: And I can't emphasize enough that for this fairly small
Speaker 4: account less than twenty thousand followers, this was not an
Speaker 4: unusual post. The tweets posted around the same time were
Speaker 4: pretty similar.
Speaker 3: The perfect balance of love and light but also real,
Speaker 3: raw and imperfect is what I'm always striving for. Balance. Baby,
Speaker 3: that some highlights and a couple haircuts yesterday after months
Speaker 3: of not doing hair, and they both turned out so pretty.
Speaker 3: Makes me missdoing hair?
Speaker 4: So why did this tweet about drinking coffee in the
Speaker 4: garden blow up the Twitter algorithm? In a recent episode,
Speaker 4: I spoke with Taylor Lorenz about the phenomenon of the dress,
Speaker 4: and while Coffee Wife isn't a story she reported on
Speaker 4: at the time, she has a lot of experience in
Speaker 4: tracking stories like this, and what she found instructive about
Speaker 4: the drinking coffee in the garden story wasn't that it
Speaker 4: was more upsetting than your average woman doing something and
Speaker 4: getting yelled at online story. It was that the stories
Speaker 4: boost in the algorithm required both backlash to what Daisy
Speaker 4: said and backlash to the backlash. Here's some of our
Speaker 4: talk about that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, what was unique about that one too? Or what
Speaker 7: I think is happening more and more with these newer
Speaker 7: main characters, and I can think got to say Sidney
Speaker 7: Sweeny's a good example of this. More recently too. It's
Speaker 7: like somebody goes viral and everybody projects their ideology onto
Speaker 7: that person and they become this vehicle for making some
Speaker 7: point about society. And I think we used to not
Speaker 7: do that as much with our main characters. I think
Speaker 7: they were just like we could appreciate that they were
Speaker 7: funny or they were in a viral video or whatever.
Speaker 7: And now it's like everything has to say something about
Speaker 7: the world. And that's what I noticed when that went viral. Initially,
Speaker 7: people and I.
Speaker 8: Think I mean districtly based on how the engagement algorithm
Speaker 8: was working at that time, because a lot of people
Speaker 8: were like, let's yell at her.
Speaker 7: Well, but it was not. It was an equal parts
Speaker 7: let's yell at her and then people getting outraged that
Speaker 7: people were yelling at her, And that is It's really
Speaker 7: important to have like both of those, I think, to
Speaker 7: reach the level of virality that this did. But you
Speaker 7: know this is right, like since Twitter has been leaning
Speaker 7: harder and harder into algorithmic recommendations for years, but I
Speaker 7: think we've really seen it, especially since the Ylon era
Speaker 7: like really take hold. And I think this is an
Speaker 7: example of Twitter leaning hard into algorithmic recommendations. Were only
Speaker 7: this person is in your feed because everybody has an
Speaker 7: opinion on the commentary about it, and everybody wants to
Speaker 7: again project, they want to use this innocuous, benign, sort
Speaker 7: of generic tweet as a way to posture about whatever
Speaker 7: they want to talk.
Speaker 8: About totally, and I think, I mean, that's a really
Speaker 8: great point that, like, you know, the wave of anger
Speaker 8: towards this user is one thing, but this story doesn't
Speaker 8: really thrive unless she also has thousands of people coming
Speaker 8: to her defense, even though she's tweeting, you know, into
Speaker 8: presumably to her the void. Do you remember when that
Speaker 8: sort of phenomenon took.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, yeah, I was going to write about this
Speaker 7: recently because there was this sort of similar thing about
Speaker 7: door dash. Some person talked about DoorDash and suddenly it
Speaker 7: was like five days of discourse of people outraged about DoorDash,
Speaker 7: and then people outraged about the outrage. But the outrage
Speaker 7: at people that are expressing they're very you know, first
Speaker 7: of all, they shouldn't be expressing it at that woman,
Speaker 7: But I can understand things are triggering on the internet.
Speaker 7: Whatever they get triggered, But then it's like the other
Speaker 7: people getting very triggered that anybody is triggered, and it's
Speaker 7: just it just goes bananas. But yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 7: think also just we're dealing with a lot of really
Speaker 7: big problems in society, and people can't reach the people
Speaker 7: that actually can affect change, and the people that can
Speaker 7: affect change and have institutional power don't give a shit
Speaker 7: what average people have to say if they don't have
Speaker 7: money or access themselves to power. So these main characters
Speaker 7: kind of become the only outlet for voicing this anger,
Speaker 7: and people are used as props to make these arguments
Speaker 7: or statements or whatever because they're at least accessible.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, how have you seen, as you know, as our
Speaker 8: feeds become algorithmically driven, how the treatment has changed with
Speaker 8: regards to gender.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I think actually hatred of women is sort
Speaker 7: of fueled virality on the Internet for years, and especially
Speaker 7: since the beginning. I mean, I talk about it in
Speaker 7: the book, But the people that really pioneered the content
Speaker 7: creator industry and some of the people that put themselves
Speaker 7: online first were women. And there's a specific type of
Speaker 7: woman that gets a lot of hatred, which is sort
Speaker 7: of a semi attractive or seemingly privileged women usually an
Speaker 7: upper middle class white woman. In one sense, they do
Speaker 7: very well on the internet because they ascribe you know,
Speaker 7: they ascribe to traditional beauty standards. You know, they're usually
Speaker 7: somewhat attractive, somewhat privileged enough to do well online, or
Speaker 7: enough to get attention online. But they're also subject to
Speaker 7: some of the most vicious hate because it's just a
Speaker 7: favorite pastime of the Internet to tear women down, specifically wives,
Speaker 7: because there's this notion of like moms and wives like
Speaker 7: always doing something wrong, or like it's misogyny. I mean,
Speaker 7: it's just hardcore misogyny, and of course a separate type
Speaker 7: of really vicious hatred towards women of color or also
Speaker 7: just ripped apart constantly. The thing is, they don't really
Speaker 7: have the level of privilege, and so they often some
Speaker 7: of these wives. Curvey Wife is a good example, right,
Speaker 7: you know, she's sprung that into brand deals and has
Speaker 7: a plus size clothing partnerships and all of this. Women
Speaker 7: of color are not able to take advantage of that
Speaker 7: virality and monetize it the same way. I mean, this
Speaker 7: Coffee wife woman doesn't sound like she's leaned into it,
Speaker 7: but she could have released her own line of coffee
Speaker 7: cups or whatever you know, like and I don't know
Speaker 7: what she looks like, but I think like that people
Speaker 7: are more accepting of privileged women, almost pivoting, even though
Speaker 7: they receive an outside hatred. If you're a conventionally attractive wife, mother,
Speaker 7: or seen as a slightly privileged wife and mother, you're
Speaker 7: gonna get torn apart because that is what like misogynis
Speaker 7: on the internet. Love to come for Yeah.
Speaker 4: Thanks again to Taylor. Her book Extremely Online is available now.
Speaker 4: So talking with Taylor reset how I was thinking about
Speaker 4: this story a little. So to say that the legacy
Speaker 4: of Coffee Wife is that people hate women online is
Speaker 4: technically true, but a little undercooked. After talking to Taylor,
Speaker 4: I became convinced that this story is also a pretty
Speaker 4: damning example of modern online algorithms gaming us to engage
Speaker 4: with each other. Because, as I was going back through
Speaker 4: the quote tweets reacting to Daisy's bold statement, the mean
Speaker 4: tweets versus the defenses of Daisy are uneven. There's more
Speaker 4: nice comments coming to her defense for every tweet that
Speaker 4: says they are capitalism. There's also this.
Speaker 6: That lady said she enjoys mornings with her husband and
Speaker 6: folks said, not on my watch.
Speaker 4: I can't afford coffee. The only thing I have to
Speaker 4: drink in the garden is bird bathwater because I'm a robin.
Speaker 4: I'm an actual bird. This tweet is not relatable to
Speaker 4: my experience as a literal bird. I can't get a
Speaker 4: house because I'm a bird and can't apply for a mortgage.
Speaker 4: Privileged bitch eat.
Speaker 6: The rich has gone from no one should be a
Speaker 6: billionaire to no one living above the poverty level treating
Speaker 6: themselves and their husband to morning coffee in their gardens
Speaker 6: should be happy.
Speaker 5: I feel like this is causing so much uproar because
Speaker 5: so many people are experiencing lovelessness and indifference from people
Speaker 5: they're even romantically connected with, and seeing someone experience friendship
Speaker 5: and love that seems calm, balanced and easy is infuriating.
Speaker 4: And when it comes to the algorithm, once you've got
Speaker 4: a class war, about the class war, you are cooking.
Speaker 4: In one of the last interviews Daisy gave on the
Speaker 4: subject in December twenty twenty two with YouTuber and Jellylooz,
Speaker 4: she described what it was like experiencing these waves of
Speaker 4: discourse in what felt like a void.
Speaker 9: It just kind of like blew up within like ten
Speaker 9: hours of it posting. I posted it, I noticed that
Speaker 9: like a lot of people were like commenting and liking it,
Speaker 9: and it was kind of going a little viral, and
Speaker 9: like by the next day that I had posted it,
Speaker 9: it was just like totally blown up with lots of
Speaker 9: like lots of negativity and lots of like hate comments
Speaker 9: and people saying all kinds of like crazy stuff about
Speaker 9: me and my husband, and that kind of continued. The
Speaker 9: negativity kind of continued for a little bit, but it
Speaker 9: got to the point by like day like two or
Speaker 9: three where like everybody was just coming in on the
Speaker 9: post and being like this is actually so cute and
Speaker 9: so nice and like forget about all the haters and
Speaker 9: like all of that stuff. And I feel like, I
Speaker 9: mean when I try to go into the tweet and
Speaker 9: like look for the negativity, I literally can't find negative
Speaker 9: comments anymore because there's been so many thousands of people
Speaker 9: that have just like drowned all of the like meanness
Speaker 9: in positivity and kindness and love. And so then I
Speaker 9: kind of think that it like went in this wave
Speaker 9: of negativity, and then there was like another way where
Speaker 9: it was like where it got more popular, but then
Speaker 9: it was like turned into something really sweet and positive.
Speaker 4: She goes on to describe the few days of constant
Speaker 4: attention and requests for comment by embracing the Coffee Lady persona,
Speaker 4: even briefly adding it to her Twitter bio. And not
Speaker 4: everyone would be able to do this, but she takes
Speaker 4: it in stride, leaning into jokes that suggest that this
Speaker 4: was all some big, evil plan. She tweets things like this,
Speaker 4: this was all actually a big plot to draw everybody
Speaker 4: in and then teach them about how to grow their
Speaker 4: own food and heal the earth plant emoji, and general
Speaker 4: reflections on the weird, still developing media cycle of those
Speaker 4: last few days in October. She directly confronts the criticism
Speaker 4: in a gentle series of tweets.
Speaker 3: It's really sad to look at the thousands of hateful
Speaker 3: comments on this post, most saying spending time with your
Speaker 3: spouse is only for the rich, jobless trust fund kids,
Speaker 3: saying our marriage don't last. It really shows why a
Speaker 3: lot of marriages probably don't last. It's one thing to
Speaker 3: get to spend hours a day with your partner. We
Speaker 3: are very blessed, But most of the replies are implying
Speaker 3: that couples shouldn't have to spend time together and if
Speaker 3: they do, you must be rich.
Speaker 4: Y'all are truly silly.
Speaker 3: But thank you to all the sweet comments. I love
Speaker 3: you so much, double heart emoji.
Speaker 4: And to directly address her haters who claimed that she
Speaker 4: was capitalism, Daisy tweeted this.
Speaker 3: To answer your questions, we are not rich by any means.
Speaker 3: We've worked extremely hard to get to where we're at.
Speaker 3: We live very minimally and consciously and work jobs that
Speaker 3: match our lifestyle and allow us to live the life
Speaker 3: that we do. Thank you for all the love that
Speaker 3: uplifting comments. You know who you are, red heart emoji.
Speaker 4: Daisy threads the needle pretty beautifully here, and I think
Speaker 4: this is a good example of how women have to
Speaker 4: conduct themselves very carefully online to not get anger from people.
Speaker 4: She's not ignoring it, but if it does upset her
Speaker 4: in any way, which it could be justified to do,
Speaker 4: she doesn't indicate that publicly. She and her husband post
Speaker 4: a number of other pictures in their garden, which it
Speaker 4: turns out is where they live in a community in
Speaker 4: northern California, where he teaches yoga and she runs her
Speaker 4: small esthetician business. They tweeted pictures of them eating breakfast,
Speaker 4: drinking the famous coffee. And while they never dropped their
Speaker 4: tax returns or the degree of privilege that they grew
Speaker 4: up with, the question is why should they have to?
Speaker 4: Because the algorithm said so, There's no way around it.
Speaker 4: This story was tailor made for the Internet rage machine.
Speaker 4: Box writer Rebecca Jennings referenced as much in a December
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two essay called every chronically online conversation is
Speaker 4: the same, saying if you felt a creeping sense of
Speaker 4: dread while reading about Daisy and her husband enjoying coffee
Speaker 4: in their garden, it's possible you spend too much time online.
Speaker 4: That's because despite it seeming innocuous, Daisy's post has all
Speaker 4: the markers Twitter rage bait, and by rage bait I
Speaker 4: mean a person sharing an experience that may not be
Speaker 4: entirely universal. I mostly agree with this, and do feel
Speaker 4: that the anger towards Daisy is wildly misplaced. This is
Speaker 4: the kind of anger we reserve for Kardashians throwing parties
Speaker 4: during a pandemic, and this doesn't invalidate any of the
Speaker 4: anger or frustration that online users that were truly sorry.
Speaker 4: Triggered by Daisy's inoffensive post fault. I mean, hell, Daisy
Speaker 4: herself articulated this feeling better than anyone else here. She
Speaker 4: is on that same Angelilou's YouTube podcast.
Speaker 9: You know, as far as what I could say to
Speaker 9: the people that were doing all of that is, I
Speaker 9: just think when you're exuding that much hate to other people,
Speaker 9: that comes from a place in your heart that's hurt,
Speaker 9: because I truly believe that you know everything that like,
Speaker 9: we're all just mirrors of each other, and something about
Speaker 9: me made them feel something about themselves that was probably
Speaker 9: trauma from who knows when in their life, and that
Speaker 9: caused something and caused them to feel that way. So
Speaker 9: I think that that just comes. That kind of behavior
Speaker 9: just comes from someone being hurt. And I understand that,
Speaker 9: and I have compassion for those people because truly, maybe
Speaker 9: they know better, but they probably don't know any better,
Speaker 9: but they're just dealing with their hurt and they're dealing
Speaker 9: with it like that instead of in other healthy ways.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: So thankfully Coffee Wife had a mellow enough lifestyle to
Speaker 4: forgive and was offline enough to understand the anger without
Speaker 4: becoming enraged back when it comes to women behaving in
Speaker 4: a very particular way to not get a particular reaction.
Speaker 4: Daisy did everything right. All she did wrong was exist
Speaker 4: in a way that the algorithm was liable to boost.
Speaker 4: When I started this show, the person who was most insistent,
Speaker 4: along with hundreds of others, that I talk about coffee
Speaker 4: was my best friend Julia, and I wanted to know why,
Speaker 4: because no matter where you fell at the time, what
Speaker 4: happened over the coffee in the garden tweet was a
Speaker 4: pretty classic public shaming. And Julia is a great comic
Speaker 4: and writer who wrote a controversial essay for Gawker in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two called in Defense of Shame. She's literally
Speaker 4: an authority on shame, and not just because she grew
Speaker 4: up Catholic in New England. But that certainly didn't hurt,
Speaker 4: and Julia feels strongly that Daisy was not deserving of
Speaker 4: the backlash she got. So when is shame a necessary tool?
Speaker 4: And when is it? Whatever the fuck this is, I
Speaker 4: wanted to ask her about it first.
Speaker 10: I am Julia Claire. I'm a comedian and writer at
Speaker 10: Crooked Media.
Speaker 4: You are the person that I associate most with, like
Speaker 4: intensely feeling about this story.
Speaker 10: I am the person you most associate with the concept
Speaker 10: of shame.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, and so it really you've saved me an
Speaker 4: interview here, but also because yeah, like you felt really
Speaker 4: strongly that this woman had been shamed improperly, but you
Speaker 4: do feel tell me your feelings about a proper shaming.
Speaker 10: A few years ago, I wrote a piece for gaker
Speaker 10: Rip called in Defense of Shame. Was kind of immediately
Speaker 10: criticized by people who didn't read the piece as a
Speaker 10: defense being a defensive shaming. People were basically saying that
Speaker 10: I was co signing dogpile culture, co signing shaming, which
Speaker 10: is not at all what I was talking about in
Speaker 10: the piece. I think of shame as any lapsed Catholic would.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 10: It's a very kind of like internal experience, more of
Speaker 10: a reflective experience, not an external experience.
Speaker 2: Shame is for Shame is for me.
Speaker 4: It's not for.
Speaker 10: You, you know, it's like so to me. I mean basically, like,
Speaker 10: my defense of shame was that more people need to
Speaker 10: be kind of in touch with their own shame. And
Speaker 10: I honestly think that like a lot of the I
Speaker 10: think the fact that a lot of people aren't is
Speaker 10: the reason why they end up projecting on other people.
Speaker 10: But yeah, this was one of those things, like that
Speaker 10: was a clear case of shaming in a way that
Speaker 10: was completely needless and silly. Honestly, you're yelling at this
Speaker 10: twenty something woman because she's having a lovely mourning, right,
Speaker 10: kill yourself.
Speaker 4: Is there a productive way to shame someone on the internet.
Speaker 10: That's a really good question.
Speaker 2: I think you have to.
Speaker 10: I think if there is, you really have to be
Speaker 10: punching up. Like the whole thing with Coffee Wife is
Speaker 10: that she was just some kind of like random lady. Right,
Speaker 10: It's very different if we're all piling on to like
Speaker 10: I mean, there are some people who are really impervious
Speaker 10: to it. So it like, you know, Elon Musk seems
Speaker 10: to just revel in the fact that everyone hates him.
Speaker 10: But as far as a productive way to shame, to
Speaker 10: shame the average per I mean, no, I don't think so,
Speaker 10: and I and I really again, I don't advocate for
Speaker 10: shame as an external force. I think all of our
Speaker 10: shame should be internal, and it should be between us
Speaker 10: and the Lord. Your parents are going to be so pleased,
Speaker 10: I know, Father Leroy at Saint Edward's Parish.
Speaker 4: Your impact is felt on this podcast.
Speaker 10: Absolutely.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much to my best friend Julia Claire.
Speaker 4: You can catch every day over at Crooked Media and
Speaker 4: we'll be right back with more of Coffee Wife's sixteenth minute.
Speaker 4: Maybe welcome back to sixteenth minute today. I've had six
Speaker 4: cups of coffee and still no husband in sight. We're
Speaker 4: talking coffee wife. So not to twenty sixteen ghostbusters this situation,
Speaker 4: but take a second to imagine how this story would
Speaker 4: be different if it were a husband tweeting about enjoying
Speaker 4: time with his wife in said garden. I really don't
Speaker 4: think the reaction would be the same. In the context
Speaker 4: of hetero couples, Husbands who adore their wives tend to
Speaker 4: be lifted up as wife guys in the same way
Speaker 4: that they're more easily rewarded socially for being an active
Speaker 4: part of their children's lives. And while there's intersecting issues
Speaker 4: that caused people to project on to Coffee Wife, I
Speaker 4: still think this boils down to an Internet classic. Women
Speaker 4: are fair game for just about anything. There's no social
Speaker 4: incentive for Daisy to say she loves her husband, because
Speaker 4: when a woman adores spending time with her husband, So what,
Speaker 4: it would be selfish of her to not love spending
Speaker 4: time with him. When a woman takes good care of
Speaker 4: and loves her children, so what, that's the natural expectation,
Speaker 4: And coming up short in either department is still met
Speaker 4: with easier, more reflexive criticism, even with gains made in
Speaker 4: general gender perception. But while I do firmly believe that
Speaker 4: Daisy was dragged online for simply being happy, I want
Speaker 4: to state the obvious and say, of course women can
Speaker 4: fucking suck online. There's plenty of precedent for that, because
Speaker 4: women are people, and there are clear patterns en mass
Speaker 4: and as individuals for assists white women specifically like Daisy
Speaker 4: and myself, to behave in an insensitive at best, bigoted
Speaker 4: and benefiting from the whiteness that patriarch and capitalism rewards,
Speaker 4: and being generally a condescending piece of shit to people
Speaker 4: who are more marginalized than themselves. That's a lot of
Speaker 4: words to say a no longer trendy term that is
Speaker 4: still somewhat useful, and it is girl boss. There's a
Speaker 4: bunch of conflicting definitions of this term. Some are as
Speaker 4: simple as quote a woman, especially a young woman who
Speaker 4: is ambitious and successful in her career. Unquote and others
Speaker 4: as I think of the girl boss are connected more
Speaker 4: closely to women using the language of feminism to accrue
Speaker 4: power while actively upholding the status quo. Probably the most
Speaker 4: famous example of this is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the
Speaker 4: bestseller Lean In in twenty thirteen to encourage women to
Speaker 4: advocate for themselves in the workplace. She is the ultimate
Speaker 4: girl boss to me for a few reasons. First of all,
Speaker 4: she is a huge beneficiary of capitalism that is actively harmful.
Speaker 4: She was the COO of Facebook during years and years
Speaker 4: of infinite growth. And second of all, she's using her
Speaker 4: position as a powerful woman to sell you something. And
Speaker 4: that something is that the only thing holding you back
Speaker 4: as a woman in the workplace is not the system
Speaker 4: you find yourself in, but something you are neglecting to
Speaker 4: do it self. Helps snake oil that bullies the women
Speaker 4: who are reading it. Here's a quote. I'm sorry if
Speaker 4: this sounds harsh or surprises anyone, but this is where
Speaker 4: we are. If you want the outcome to be different,
Speaker 4: you will have to do something about it. Oh it's
Speaker 4: your fault. She also says this we need to stop
Speaker 4: telling women get a mentor and you will excel. Instead,
Speaker 4: we need to tell them excel and you will get
Speaker 4: a mentor. Oh, it's my fault. Twenty dollars well spent, thanks, Cheryl.
Speaker 4: That's the kind of girl boss shit we're talking about.
Speaker 4: So a very instructive term that is often misused after
Speaker 4: being sucked into this linguistic, misogynist vortex. The difficulty with
Speaker 4: the girl boss tag gets to why I think Coffee
Speaker 4: wife was done so dirty. There are people who aren't
Speaker 4: big fans of women who glommed onto this word to
Speaker 4: use it interchangeably with all women or women who had
Speaker 4: any power over them at work. If your manager is
Speaker 4: a woman, that doesn't mean she is cynically using tools
Speaker 4: of the patriarchy to oppress you while assuring other women
Speaker 4: they're doing something wrong in order to personally profit. It's
Speaker 4: a very specific set of behaviors, and being a girl
Speaker 4: boss doesn't mean the women in question haven't experienced gender
Speaker 4: discrimination themselves. In fact, I'd wager that all of them have.
Speaker 4: This simply does not describe a woo woo twenty four
Speaker 4: year old drinking coffee in the garden. The anger is valid,
Speaker 4: but it is misplaced. Daisy wasn't trying to make money
Speaker 4: by saying this. She wasn't aiming to change minds or
Speaker 4: hurt anyone, or, according to her, even reach outside of
Speaker 4: her normal audience. She was just sharing something you know,
Speaker 4: like we're told, is the whole point of social media,
Speaker 4: And given the state of Twitter in the fall of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two and on this specific week, the algorithm
Speaker 4: pushing this high engagement story makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4: There were a number of algorithmic shifts on Twitter and
Speaker 4: in social media writ large in this year. If you're
Speaker 4: a Twitter user yourself or I'm not going to say X,
Speaker 4: please don't contact me about this. If you're a Twitter
Speaker 4: user yourself or a proud Twitter retiree, you might remember
Speaker 4: when their timeline became completely algorithmically driven instead of what
Speaker 4: it had been for years and years, which was a
Speaker 4: real time feed of people you had chosen to follow. Now,
Speaker 4: people you didn't follow would be sorted to the top
Speaker 4: of your feed if the algorithm thought you were likely
Speaker 4: to interact with the post based on what you'd interacted
Speaker 4: with in the past, and the people you actually chose
Speaker 4: to follow might see their content get pushed further and
Speaker 4: further down. Users got really pissed off about this, and
Speaker 4: Twitter tried to mitigate the issue by splitting everything into
Speaker 4: two feeds. So if you opened the website on your laptop,
Speaker 4: it would default the new shitty algorithm feed and you
Speaker 4: could shift over to the timeline you'd had for fifteen years.
Speaker 4: But it would take some effort, and it's posts like
Speaker 4: daisies that would get sorted into this new algorithmically driven feed,
Speaker 4: the one you didn't ask for and the one that
Speaker 4: no one is prepared to be sorted into. And within
Speaker 4: a week of the Coffee Wife flare up, a looming
Speaker 4: Twitter acquisition was finally completed. After months of legal wrangling
Speaker 4: and negotiation, Elon Musk has finally bought social media company Twitter.
Speaker 4: Earlier in twenty twenty two, Elon Musk, who I think
Speaker 4: we can all agree only had the best intentions and
Speaker 4: deserves the benefit of the doubt, offered to buy Twitter
Speaker 4: on a whim for fifty four dollars and twenty cents
Speaker 4: a share, just months after he'd become the company's largest
Speaker 4: shareholder at nearly ten percent. This put the prospective deal
Speaker 4: at forty four billion dollars and Twitter accepted the offer
Speaker 4: very quickly. They genuinely didn't seem to think he'd go
Speaker 4: through with it, and accepted to all but resist a
Speaker 4: hostile takeover from Musk. But Musk, determined to pivot the
Speaker 4: platform to white supremacy, doubled down, declaring that his ownership
Speaker 4: would mean less bots and more free speech. He certainly
Speaker 4: made good on the former in the fascist content is
Speaker 4: king sense, but the crackdown on bots is pretty hilarious
Speaker 4: for a site that I can't even pay to stop
Speaker 4: auto posting my pussy and bio underneath pictures of me
Speaker 4: and my infant nephew. So yeah, this change of ownership
Speaker 4: was famously a disaster. Elon Musk tried to back out
Speaker 4: of the objectively bad deal that was his idea in July,
Speaker 4: but was unable to and was all but forced to
Speaker 4: go through with the deal less than a week after.
Speaker 4: Daisy was declared the Coffee Wife, and what happened after
Speaker 4: that was well, it's why Twitter has been in sharp
Speaker 4: decline ever since. Just a small sampler platter of incidents
Speaker 4: since this time, welcoming Donald Trump, Kanye and Alex Jones
Speaker 4: back to Twitter and generally promoting fascists challenging Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 4: to a cage match and tanking the company's net worth
Speaker 4: by over fifty percent. There's a very depressing lens that
Speaker 4: we can see the coffee wife incident through as this
Speaker 4: dying gasp of old school misogyny on Twitter, moments before
Speaker 4: it was about to get much, much, much worse. And
Speaker 4: how bad hasn't gotten on the Internet since twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4: I went to an expert, my pal, Bridget Todd, host
Speaker 4: of the incredible podcast there Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 1: Here's our chat. My name is Bridget Todd. I'm the
Speaker 1: host and creator of Iheartradios tech and culture podcast There
Speaker 1: Are No Girls on the Internet, And I guess you
Speaker 1: could say I'm a tech Internet enthusiast, aficionado, whatever you
Speaker 1: want to say.
Speaker 4: I'm excited to talk coffee wife with you. Why do
Speaker 4: you think that people had such a strong emotional reaction
Speaker 4: to coffee Wife.
Speaker 1: Well, one, I think it's absolutely algorithmic, right. I think
Speaker 1: that we know a lot about how algorithms work. I
Speaker 1: think that they absolutely are feeding us and pushing us
Speaker 1: content that is going to elicit strong reactions, emotional reactions
Speaker 1: from us. So even if you don't know this woman.
Speaker 1: Don't follow this woman. She wasn't like somebody who had
Speaker 1: a ton of followers. She had a relatively small account.
Speaker 1: Platforms know this is content that it's eliciting strong reaction,
Speaker 1: strong engagement. Let's make sure that more people see it,
Speaker 1: you know, that's the name of the game for platforms. However,
Speaker 1: I do think that the timeframe kind of matters, Like
Speaker 1: I think that this was a time where do you
Speaker 1: remember how in the very beginning of the pandemic we
Speaker 1: were all there was a sort of novelty to it
Speaker 1: where it was like who knows what's happening? But then
Speaker 1: that kind of were off, and then it was like, well,
Speaker 1: I guess this is just all of our lives now.
Speaker 1: And I think that this happened at a time when
Speaker 1: a lot of people were just sort of grappling with that.
Speaker 1: I think for me personally, it was a time where
Speaker 1: I was spending way more time than I should have
Speaker 1: been on screens on the internet, really paying a lot
Speaker 1: of attention to what strangers on the Internet were doing,
Speaker 1: because I didn't have a lot going on outside of that, right,
Speaker 1: I wasn't going out the way I used to.
Speaker 2: All of that, and I also.
Speaker 1: Think we were all feeling the sort of like existential.
Speaker 2: Dread of how reality feels right now.
Speaker 1: Right Everything is expensive, rents are rising, Inflation is terrible.
Speaker 1: It just feels like we are being squeezed from so
Speaker 1: many different angles.
Speaker 2: And so when somebody comes along.
Speaker 1: With just pure Joel, the pure Joel of a you know,
Speaker 1: having coffee in their garden with their husband every morning,
Speaker 1: and you know, isn't this nice, It's like a trigger
Speaker 1: that It's not surprising to me that it was this
Speaker 1: big tension point for so many people.
Speaker 4: That's so interesting. I think of all the conversations I've
Speaker 4: been having, I'd be curious what you think about that,
Speaker 4: of like how the pandemic sort of warped our relationship
Speaker 4: to the Internet and what it looks like trying to
Speaker 4: sort of return to straddling real life and Internet life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, boy, do I identify with that and feel you on that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can speak for myself. I am not
Speaker 1: proud of what the pandemic, how I responded to the
Speaker 1: pandemic socially, right, I also am a pretty socially anxious person.
Speaker 2: I'm somebody who's in.
Speaker 1: My head a lot, and I'm not proud to say this,
Speaker 1: but I would bet that I'm not the only person
Speaker 1: who feels this way. I think during the pandemic, you know,
Speaker 1: we were watching people die, we were watching people lose
Speaker 1: loved ones, we were watching people lose their livelihoods. It
Speaker 1: was a really tough time, and so it was hard
Speaker 1: for me as somebody who luckily was very privileged, and
Speaker 1: that that wasn't the case for me, right, Like I
Speaker 1: got COVID. People I know got COVID, but thankfully I
Speaker 1: didn't lose my loved ones. It wasn't impacting me the
Speaker 1: way that it was. I'm not an essential worker, right,
Speaker 1: and so I think that for me personally, it was.
Speaker 2: Strange, too deep.
Speaker 1: To grapple with that, this feeling of like I am
Speaker 1: going through a tough time and so is everyone. I
Speaker 1: think it for me created this dynamic where I hate
Speaker 1: to say it, but I was very much like what
Speaker 1: about my pain? You know, Like why is no like
Speaker 1: when is it going to be my turn for somebody
Speaker 1: to see me? Like I wasn't an essential worker. Nobody
Speaker 1: around me died, but I still had a tough time.
Speaker 1: I was finding myself in this like almost very narcissistic
Speaker 1: place of wanting somebody to acknowledge what I had been through,
Speaker 1: and so I think with Coffee Lady, I think it
Speaker 1: was a lot of people who perhaps were wanting someone
Speaker 1: to see their pain, wanting others to acknowledge their pain
Speaker 1: and their anxiety and their loneliness and their frustration, which
Speaker 1: is something that I can relate to really deeply, and
Speaker 1: so I think that's part of why, because some of
Speaker 1: the replies that she got would be like, I can't afford.
Speaker 2: A garden, I don't have a husband.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm alone here, I don't have any friends,
Speaker 1: Like people really making it about themselves and what they lack,
Speaker 1: and like something about that tweet I think highlighted the
Speaker 1: lack that a lot of people were feeling. And I
Speaker 1: just I really, it's easy to dunk on these people
Speaker 1: and be like, Wow, you're so disregulated that that's that
Speaker 1: this woman, this random woman's tweet is making you feel
Speaker 1: that way.
Speaker 2: But I also kind of get it.
Speaker 4: You're totally right. And I know I've been guilty of
Speaker 4: this in the past, and probably during the pandemic era Internet,
Speaker 4: where you're taking like your personal pain, and I've had
Speaker 4: moments where I'm like, I don't want to see someone
Speaker 4: happy right now because I'm not. And like, I think
Speaker 4: that there's a lot of that, but some of it
Speaker 4: is sort of manager infesting as a political statement. I
Speaker 4: can't quite get my head around that phenomenon because I
Speaker 4: don't want to discount the fact that like class rage
Speaker 4: and class anxiety online. I mean, it makes total sense.
Speaker 4: I experienced it a lot, especially it's sort of the
Speaker 4: further back you go, but she's so clearly not the
Speaker 4: person that can. I think it's interesting online when people
Speaker 4: dogpile on someone who cannot help them, right.
Speaker 1: I do think there's a gendered aspect to it. I
Speaker 1: haven't really kind of grappled with this too much just yet,
Speaker 1: but like I know, for me, when I'm scrolling TikTok
Speaker 1: or Instagram, there is something about the visualization of a
Speaker 1: woman who seems like she's got her shit together, She's
Speaker 1: got it all figured out, she wears the perfect two piece,
Speaker 1: you know, workouts that she eats right, she starts her
Speaker 1: day with like lemon water or macha instead of coffee whatever.
Speaker 4: It is, three gorgeous children who are wealthy sat Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I think that coffee Lady's tweet at least for me,
Speaker 1: triggered a kind of very gendered, almost like politicized anxiety
Speaker 1: that there are women out there who are doing it
Speaker 1: right and bridget you are doing it wrong, like something
Speaker 1: about like like there has never been a day where
Speaker 1: I'm able to start my day.
Speaker 2: Serenely drinking coffee in my garden.
Speaker 1: I actually do have a small garden, and I never
Speaker 1: start my day out there because I start my day
Speaker 1: like most people, like frazzled late for a call, just
Speaker 1: trying to chug some coffee while I'm getting dressed, like.
Speaker 2: Doing a million other things.
Speaker 1: Sure I shouldn't be taking a moment smelling the flowers, journaling, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 4: But yes, gratitude journal exactly.
Speaker 2: But who does that right? And so I think there
Speaker 2: is something where women.
Speaker 1: Are told that you have to in order to sort
Speaker 1: of signal that you have it together, your mornings have
Speaker 1: to look like X y Z. And I think that
Speaker 1: something about coffee Lady, something about that tweet signaled to
Speaker 1: women like I've got it all together? Do you feel
Speaker 1: like crap that you don't. I don't think she was.
Speaker 1: I certainly don't think she was trying to do that.
Speaker 1: But that's I think that's probably how it hit some
Speaker 1: of us.
Speaker 4: The Internet, I think, like a lot of things is
Speaker 4: sort of built to make women angry at each other
Speaker 4: and present each other. And yeah, I mean, could you
Speaker 4: speak to that a little bit. I know that that's
Speaker 4: your beat.
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean, it's just a document, a well documented fact.
Speaker 1: Algorithms want women to feel like shit. They want women
Speaker 1: to be comparing themselves to other women, they want women
Speaker 1: to be feeling bad. They want women to be feeling
Speaker 1: like crap all the time. And algorithms and platforms and
Speaker 1: tech leaders make money off of women feeling.
Speaker 2: Like shit about themselves. That's just a fact, right.
Speaker 1: And so if you've ever been scrolling Instagram or TikTok
Speaker 1: or whatever and you keep being surfaced content that makes
Speaker 1: you feel like crap, that's not you. You're not crazy
Speaker 1: or sensitive. Algorithms and platforms do that with intention because
Speaker 1: it keeps you on the platform longer, it keeps you
Speaker 1: coming back, and it makes them money. It is a
Speaker 1: very twisted dynamic that we are a cog in this
Speaker 1: cycle that is making other people, mostly men, rich off
Speaker 1: of our anxiety, off of our fears, off of us
Speaker 1: being in competition with each other and rather than like
Speaker 1: celebrating the ways that we are different, celebrating the ways
Speaker 1: in which like, oh well, like my brand is this,
Speaker 1: I'm a hot mess, I own it whatever. Whatever, algorithms
Speaker 1: trick us into thinking that all of these great things
Speaker 1: that make us who we are are actually foibles, are
Speaker 1: actually bad And yeah, I mean there's been study after
Speaker 1: study that shows that the more time you spend on
Speaker 1: particularly Instagram, the more young women feel bad about themselves,
Speaker 1: the more body anxiety they have, the more likely they
Speaker 1: are to engage in things like food issues or disordered eating.
Speaker 1: And none of that is by mistake and it's all
Speaker 1: by design. It is a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 4: And that would also apply to coffee life. That people
Speaker 4: were attacking her as if she was like the root
Speaker 4: cause of it. It was very strange. I forget who
Speaker 4: I was talking to the other day about how they
Speaker 4: felt like they had fucked up their algorithm because they
Speaker 4: said that they weren't interested in something and the algorithm
Speaker 4: kept serving that to them because they cared enough to
Speaker 4: say I'm not interested. And the only way to truly
Speaker 4: demonstrate you're not interested is to keep scrolling and don't stop.
Speaker 4: But like, if you are. If you theoretically, you know,
Speaker 4: see like a coffee wife TikTok come up and you
Speaker 4: care enough to say I don't like this, the algorithm
Speaker 4: will serve it to you again. And so I ran
Speaker 4: an experiment and it's completely true, like that the kind
Speaker 4: of content I went out of my way to say
Speaker 4: I don't like this. The algorithm responds by being like, well,
Speaker 4: maybe you'll interact with it negatively because it makes you
Speaker 4: feel bad.
Speaker 1: Yes, And so it's so I've experienced the exact same thing.
Speaker 1: I completely agree with you, And imagine how harmful that
Speaker 1: is when it's content that you find triggering. Right, when
Speaker 1: it's content that you have identified like that might not
Speaker 1: be safe or healthy for me to see and engage with.
Speaker 1: Right if the algorithm has has gleamed like, oh, she
Speaker 1: has a little bit of an issue with X y Z.
Speaker 1: Let's get showing it to her and see what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, really that cool.
Speaker 4: The part that's hard is even when I'm looking for it,
Speaker 4: it's hard to escape the like emotional experience of I
Speaker 4: don't want to see that, and like feeling that your
Speaker 4: anger for whatever reason, does seem it routes at the
Speaker 4: person because you can't you know the real kind of Yeah,
Speaker 4: this suendse conspiratorial, but like the real enemy has no face, right,
Speaker 4: And so I feel like there is this sort of
Speaker 4: very human instinct to try to place a face and
Speaker 4: a name to what is bothering you, when in reality
Speaker 4: it is something much larger, like you know, social media
Speaker 4: algorithms that are trying to make you upset, like the
Speaker 4: concept of class, and like these huge things. And it's
Speaker 4: finding a sort of villain of the day to take
Speaker 4: it out on, even when that person sucks. In this case,
Speaker 4: they didn't, but sometimes they do, but it still doesn't
Speaker 4: It's so unproductive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we are making a bunch of random people proxies
Speaker 1: for a lot of our very valid anger and pain
Speaker 1: and fear. That's why I always say, like we're it's
Speaker 1: a game and we're all being played. The only winner
Speaker 1: here are tech platforms and people who run them and
Speaker 1: people who make money from them. And so even if
Speaker 1: you are running a successful little grift for a while,
Speaker 1: engagement mating and all of that, all it takes is
Speaker 1: one algorithmic tweak and then no one's You don't have
Speaker 1: the eyeballs or the attention of the world any longer
Speaker 1: and so yeah, it's it's a game and we're all
Speaker 1: being played.
Speaker 4: What can we What can the collective learn from Coffee Wife.
Speaker 1: Something that I found really interesting about the Coffee Wife
Speaker 1: saga was how everybody assumed she was wealthy because she
Speaker 1: has a garden. And I found that to be really
Speaker 1: interesting because she was like, oh, it's not like a
Speaker 1: fancy garden. It's just a small garden in my in
Speaker 1: my like regular home. I think that it.
Speaker 2: Is very easy.
Speaker 1: And I say this because I've done it to trick
Speaker 1: yourself into thinking, like, the things that I want I
Speaker 1: can't have. I am, I am, I could never have
Speaker 1: a garden. And I think that that really the Coffee
Speaker 1: wife thing really showed me that a lot of us
Speaker 1: feel like we can't have things that we actually can have.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that makes sense, but the fact
Speaker 1: that so many people were like, well, you have to
Speaker 1: be rich to have a garden, and it's like, well, actually,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's the case, and people who are
Speaker 1: not rich have gardens all the time, and like, why
Speaker 1: are you assuming that the pastime of gardening is something
Speaker 1: that only the wealthy can do? Even if you live
Speaker 1: in a small apartment you can still have like a
Speaker 1: window garden or something.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking the
Speaker 1: things that we want we cannot have.
Speaker 2: So that's one two.
Speaker 1: I would say, Yeah, we really have to be better
Speaker 1: at understanding where we put our pain and who we
Speaker 1: make the proxies for our pain. I would say, if
Speaker 1: the person you are tweeting at cannot change the circumstances
Speaker 1: that you're upset about, maybe you're putting your rage and
Speaker 1: your anger and your emotionality in the wrong place, and
Speaker 1: that we should direct our rage and anger and emotionality
Speaker 1: to the right places.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I know those places tend to be structural and institutional
Speaker 1: and faithless, but we gotta really have a sense of
Speaker 1: what forces are actually making us unhappy. And it's probably
Speaker 1: not this lady drinking coffee in her garden.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much to bridget Todd. Listen to there
Speaker 4: are no girls on the internet every single week, I
Speaker 4: sure do. So what became of our coffee wife legend?
Speaker 4: Daisy didn't respond to my request for an interview, and
Speaker 4: I respect that she just wants to be a person
Speaker 4: who does pleasant things with people she likes. Some people
Speaker 4: just don't want a dumb bitch podcast interfering with their life,
Speaker 4: and I have to accept that. As far as her
Speaker 4: online persona, Daisy is no longer Coffee Wife. She is
Speaker 4: Daisy and appears to be spending her time generally not
Speaker 4: on Twitter nowadays. She lives in Bali, India and is
Speaker 4: returning to her lashes business later in the year. I
Speaker 4: have no idea if she's a wife, if she drinks coffee,
Speaker 4: but she's certainly Daisy, and I like Daisy, and with
Speaker 4: that the coffee wife. Your sixteenth minute ends. Now, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm on the couch with my boyfriend drinking coffee close enough.
Speaker 5: Oh I should I guess it?
Speaker 4: Should hold?
Speaker 6: I should hold it.
Speaker 4: You're right, get your coffee.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but hey, coffee in the morning, even after I've
Speaker 5: gotten off my damn shift, coffee with my wife.
Speaker 4: And we don't have a garden. We do have a
Speaker 4: little deck, but I just kind of we have.
Speaker 5: A bug in the house though, Casper Casper bugs.
Speaker 4: We do two bugs.
Speaker 8: I just the deck kind of stresses me out because
Speaker 8: there's so much pollution. Who were across the street from
Speaker 8: a We shouldn't say where, we know.
Speaker 5: We should, but you can visualize the pollution because we
Speaker 5: can see all of the gathering dust, so much dust,
Speaker 5: the accumulated dusts.
Speaker 4: So you just walked up to Casper and started kissing him.
Speaker 9: They are, they're kissing right now. There is looking Casper's forehead.
Speaker 4: You love saying you're so dirty, You're so dirty. They're
Speaker 4: the same size.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: It's great.
Speaker 5: We could try this in a garden at some point though,
Speaker 5: don't you think.
Speaker 4: Sixteenth Minute is a production of cool Zone Media and
Speaker 4: iHeart Radio. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Speaker 4: Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert
Speaker 4: Evans lemizing. Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 4: Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Special thanks to
Speaker 4: Brant Crater and Sophie Lichterman for doing voiceover and pet
Speaker 4: shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my cats Flee
Speaker 4: and Casper, and my pet Rock Bert, who will outlive
Speaker 4: us all Ye