Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Join us.
Speaker 3: Said six.
Speaker 4: Hello, and welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where
Speaker 4: we talk to the internet's characters of the see how
Speaker 4: their moment affected them and what that says about us
Speaker 4: and the Internet. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and today
Speaker 4: we are closing a chapter of sixteenth Minute, and I'm
Speaker 4: turning the mic over to you, my listeners, to share
Speaker 4: your experiences being the main character and reflect a little
Speaker 4: bit about your experiences online. And normally at the top
Speaker 4: of an episode, I would go on as I do,
Speaker 4: but I'm actually on the road right now promoting the
Speaker 4: paperback version of my book Raw Dog Ian Let's get
Speaker 4: a horn in there. But I've actually been meeting a
Speaker 4: lot of sixteenth Minute listeners.
Speaker 2: It's been really cool. I just I don't know.
Speaker 4: I work in a series of small rooms and it's
Speaker 4: easy to forget that people actually are hearing this. But
Speaker 4: as I'm writing this right now, I am sitting in
Speaker 4: a hotel bed with my mom, drinking large iced from
Speaker 4: Dunks in Boston with a mild hangover because my friend
Speaker 4: Tory and I decided to be annoying at our favorite
Speaker 4: margarita bar from college until two am last night, So
Speaker 4: I feel great.
Speaker 2: I'm home and I'm happy, and.
Speaker 4: So it just feels like the perfect moment to reflect
Speaker 4: on what has been a very chaotic and wonderful year
Speaker 4: with this show. So, in case you missed it, sixteenth minute,
Speaker 4: the show is here to stay, but after our first year,
Speaker 4: we are going to be taking a short hiatus and
Speaker 4: are going to return in the summer with a more
Speaker 4: seasonal format, closer to the limited series work I did
Speaker 4: before this week to week format where I'm going to
Speaker 4: do deep dives and more thorough reporting on the corners
Speaker 4: of the Internet that I feel are under archived or
Speaker 4: under explored. So things to look out for the Internet
Speaker 4: and death, the actual science behind ASMR, a genre I've
Speaker 4: been consuming for.
Speaker 2: A decade and know very little about.
Speaker 4: Think about how the Internet connect to justice, connect to
Speaker 4: court cases, connects to incarceration. We're going to have a
Speaker 4: time on the sixteenth minute feed. But this last year
Speaker 4: talking to the characters of the day from week to
Speaker 4: week has been so fascinating. I felt so challenged and
Speaker 4: hopefully have grown a lot as a result. And the
Speaker 4: most important thing to me is to thank the subjects
Speaker 4: of this show who have so generously given me and
Speaker 4: you their trust in sharing their stories.
Speaker 2: It was really really cool.
Speaker 4: And an honor to you know, have an and shape
Speaker 4: those stories.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: This show has challenged my relationship and continued addiction to
Speaker 4: the Internet, and you know, more than anything, it's been
Speaker 4: fun to learn about people whose image and whose legacy
Speaker 4: we kind of take for granted.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: Plus, I'm a yapper and it's terminal, soho worked great
Speaker 4: for me, And so much of sixteenth minute has been
Speaker 4: made between here where I am right now in Massachusetts
Speaker 4: and at home where I live in Los Angeles and
Speaker 4: making a show like this, as I was saying, mostly
Speaker 4: on my couch or in hotel rooms or in hospital bathrooms,
Speaker 4: because yes, the entire thirty to fifty Faral Hogs episode
Speaker 4: was recorded in a hospital bathroom with our incredible crew
Speaker 4: of three, my producer Sophie and Ian and weekly voice
Speaker 4: work from Grant. Making the show feels very small and personal,
Speaker 4: and so getting ready for this episode and actually hearing
Speaker 4: your voice memos has been really cool and kind of weird.
Speaker 2: You guys are freaks.
Speaker 4: I've been walking around with your voice in my ears
Speaker 4: for the last week and a half and hearing the
Speaker 4: ways that this show and the Internet on the whole
Speaker 4: fits into your life has been really awesome. Not to
Speaker 4: get all parasocial, but you guys did and I promise, promised,
Speaker 4: promise to never sell you a meme coin, So let
Speaker 4: me be Paris for a second. It's really cool to
Speaker 4: be a small part of your life, and I hope
Speaker 4: you'll stick around for what's next. Okay, I want to
Speaker 4: get to your stories because they are amazing, and there
Speaker 4: was so fucking many of them. What I can promise
Speaker 4: is that of the one hundred or so submissions I
Speaker 4: received for this episode, I did listen to every single
Speaker 4: one of them, and if yours does an air, you.
Speaker 2: Are so valid, etc. But I had to make cuts
Speaker 2: of stories that were too similar, or there were.
Speaker 4: Sometimes sensitive elements that I didn't have time to handle
Speaker 4: with the proper sensitivity and care the story deserved. So
Speaker 4: if you submitted, thank you so much for trusting me
Speaker 4: with your story. If you didn't hear back from me personally,
Speaker 4: and I think over the course of these stories, we've
Speaker 4: really covered the full breadth of the human on the
Speaker 4: Internet experience, because you've sent some of the funniest stuff
Speaker 4: I've heard about the Internet, and also some of the
Speaker 4: saddest so so before we get into your voice memos,
Speaker 4: I wanted to just share the logline for a few
Speaker 4: stories that didn't make the cut. Ian Let's get some
Speaker 4: circus music going here, a story about being shamed online
Speaker 4: for defending oneself from being attacked by a goose, starting
Speaker 4: a podcast about Drake before Drake was confirmed scary, and
Speaker 4: becoming famous in Canada, being niche famous as a famous
Speaker 4: call in person for the podcast My Brother, My Brother
Speaker 4: and Me, getting cyberbullied on a Harry Potter forum in
Speaker 4: the nineties, and a message just titled the Ballad of
Speaker 4: Funky Kong. The list goes on, and let's be clear,
Speaker 4: let wull be clear, I, Jamie Loftus, have had a
Speaker 4: little experience being the niche main character myself. This has
Speaker 4: in fact happened to me twice in the last ten years.
Speaker 4: The first time was in twenty fifteen, when I did
Speaker 4: a pick me performance art project that led to headlines
Speaker 4: like this comedian slash American patriots selling Shrek nudes to
Speaker 4: benefit Planned Parenthood, which.
Speaker 2: I have nothing else to say. That's exactly what it
Speaker 2: sounded like.
Speaker 4: I painted myself like Shrek and I sold them. And
Speaker 4: one time I was at a party and my own
Speaker 4: nude was in the bathroom.
Speaker 2: Moving on.
Speaker 4: I also went viral shortly in twenty seventeen when I did,
Speaker 4: wait for it, yet another pick me performance art piece
Speaker 4: that led to headlines like this, we talked to the
Speaker 4: woman who was butt jugging infinite Jest. Again, I don't
Speaker 4: feel the need to explain this further. It's a pretty
Speaker 4: direct headline. And I do I have, you know, some
Speaker 4: love for this younger version of myself now, I mean, folks,
Speaker 4: she really wanted to be picked and eventually someone did
Speaker 4: because true fact, Grant, who I'm going to marry, is
Speaker 4: a fan of infinite jest.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 4: And he had encountered the butt chugging Infinite Gest story
Speaker 4: when it first happened, and he didn't realize that it
Speaker 4: was me who had butt chugged the book until he
Speaker 4: started googling me when he had his little crush. And
Speaker 4: to me, this is why the Internet is so addictive.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's awful.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's this increasingly hostile place that is stealing our data,
Speaker 4: our time, is weaponizing our own identities against us, while
Speaker 4: making it nearly impossible to function without it. But sometimes
Speaker 4: your future husband first heard of you because you were
Speaker 4: butt chugging infinite jest and you feel seen by the
Speaker 4: world for a second, and it's hard to find an
Speaker 4: IRL equivalent of that. I can't explain it. You're gonna
Speaker 4: hear a lot of that, but you get it because
Speaker 4: I've heard your voice memos and you're gonna hear a
Speaker 4: lot of that today, of people's moment in the sun
Speaker 4: or unwittingly becoming Internet niche famous. And after listening to
Speaker 4: these stories, I've separated them into a few little categories.
Speaker 2: Isn't that nice?
Speaker 4: Arguments about celebrities victim of bad clickbait, Internet grief pets
Speaker 4: a classic, and of course the life consuming niche Internet
Speaker 4: forum and other stories sprinkled throughout that I think you'll enjoy.
Speaker 2: But first we are kicking off or.
Speaker 4: I was the main character spectacular with the subject of
Speaker 4: a famous meme who has been on my list of
Speaker 4: subjects to cover and turned out to be a listener
Speaker 4: of the show What aget Here's Cliff.
Speaker 5: Hi, Jamie, my name is Cliff. And while I was
Speaker 5: never an Internet main character, I had the dubious honor
Speaker 5: of being one of its first memes. This was back
Speaker 5: in like the late nineties, where the movie Forrest Gump
Speaker 5: had just come out. I probably still had AOL And
Speaker 5: then Forrest Gump he sat on a bench for most
Speaker 5: of the movie telling a story, and we had a
Speaker 5: bench that had the phrase been laid off on it,
Speaker 5: and a friend and I thought it would be funny
Speaker 5: to take a picture of me sitting and just blocking
Speaker 5: the word off and haha, half a second of a chuckle,
Speaker 5: you know. And it only really worked because I was
Speaker 5: this nerdy, autistic kid and you couldn't tell if I
Speaker 5: knew what was happening or was completely oblivious. But in
Speaker 5: a way that did take off a little bit. On
Speaker 5: the early days of the Internet, of course, someone made
Speaker 5: a meme out of it, and you know where it
Speaker 5: said been laid it, they added this kid clearly hasn't,
Speaker 5: and yeah, it made the rounds. I thought it was
Speaker 5: funny at the time. I was recognized for it one
Speaker 5: time a year or two later during college at a
Speaker 5: party and people asked if I had been laid yet,
Speaker 5: and when I answered that I had, these cheers went
Speaker 5: up and everyone gave me drinks. I was odd looking
Speaker 5: back on it now, but but I don't know what
Speaker 5: I would have thought if that happened now, because you know,
Speaker 5: just I would not have been able to handle the
Speaker 5: sort of experiences a lot of the people that you've
Speaker 5: interviewed have had. And yeah, so I wonder what it
Speaker 5: would be like now, or maybe it would have never
Speaker 5: taken off because it's not something that you can really
Speaker 5: do anything with because the joke's kind of self contained.
Speaker 5: But I still see it pop up in the wild
Speaker 5: once every five ten years or so, just to remind
Speaker 5: me that the Internet does not forget So anyway, thanks
Speaker 5: for all you do. I appreciate it and look forward
Speaker 5: to hearing other people's experiences.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for calling in, Cliff. I cannot
Speaker 4: tell you how delighted I was. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 4: All Right, we're going to keep moving. One of the
Speaker 4: most interesting middle ground ways to become the character of
Speaker 4: the day is to say something publicly but not intend
Speaker 4: for it to break containment. This happens all the time,
Speaker 4: as we now have al rhithms that are boosted on
Speaker 4: locking in on trends in a way that no one
Speaker 4: could have anticipated. That is the wrong side of the
Speaker 4: internet finds you on this show. This has happened to
Speaker 4: Willie McNabb of thirty to fifty Faral Hogs fame, It
Speaker 4: happened to Coffee Wife, it happened to doctor Allie Luke's
Speaker 4: The Smell Doctor, and it could happen to you. Here's
Speaker 4: listener and friend and amazing poet Maya Williams.
Speaker 6: Hi, Jamie, So picture this.
Speaker 7: April twenty twenty two, I decide to make a TikTok.
Speaker 7: I don't always make tiktoks, but when I do, apparently
Speaker 7: this could happen. There's one clip I have of Keiki
Speaker 7: Palmer being hilarious from a Variety's Light Detector series, genuinely
Speaker 7: not knowing who Dick Cheney is. And then I have
Speaker 7: a clip of Tyler Perry on the Variety Light Detector
Speaker 7: series mimicking Keke Palmer saying, oh, I'm sorry to this man.
Speaker 7: I don't know who this man is and is, even
Speaker 7: though he does know JJ Abrams and has worked with
Speaker 7: them before. And then there's a clip of me saying
Speaker 7: further proof that he's not funny unless he's mimicking black women.
Speaker 7: No surprise, to my surprise, up to forty four thousand.
Speaker 6: Views is upon the video.
Speaker 7: I receive comments from people of many racial backgrounds saying
Speaker 7: things like, oh my gosh, I agree with this, and like, yeah,
Speaker 7: Tyler Perry could do better in entertainment. And then there
Speaker 7: are some comments that are entirely from black folks who
Speaker 7: say things like, oh, you're just being a hater, or hey,
Speaker 7: shut up, or hey, Kiki Palmer has worked with Tyler
Speaker 7: Perry before, maybe it's okay that he mimics her. And
Speaker 7: then I end up turning off the comments when someone
Speaker 7: comments sys wear, are your eyebrows activating like that childhood
Speaker 7: insecurity that I've received before, And it made me laugh
Speaker 7: but at the same time made my heart saying. So
Speaker 7: I'm like, Okay, I'm done with these comments, let's turn
Speaker 7: them off. But I wanted to share this with you
Speaker 7: because I'm very curious about what happens when people of
Speaker 7: marginalized genders are trending because of entertainment media and reacting
Speaker 7: to it, especially people of marginalized genders who are black people.
Speaker 4: So Maya brings up a great point at the end
Speaker 4: of her message, because, as we've talked about on this
Speaker 4: show many times, the Internet is informed by and often
Speaker 4: intentionally amplifies real life discrimination particularly in the video driven
Speaker 4: era that we're in right now. We've looked at stories
Speaker 4: like this, in particular recently with Taska Brown of Gorilla
Speaker 4: Glue fame, in which she was faced with rampant misogynire
Speaker 4: even from within her own community. Tayzonde of Chocolate Rain
Speaker 4: fame also spoke to this in detail in our recent
Speaker 4: series with him. Makes me think of a conversation I
Speaker 4: had recently when I was listen to me.
Speaker 2: This makes me think of a conversation I had.
Speaker 4: I sound like a pastor, but this makes me think
Speaker 4: of a conversation I had recently when I was talking
Speaker 4: about main characters at UCLA brag, thank you, and yes,
Speaker 4: I did make sure I was working with professors that
Speaker 4: were pro Palestine. I spoke at the Center for Critical
Speaker 4: Internet Theory, and after the talk, a professor who I
Speaker 4: will not reveal the name of because I cannot wait
Speaker 4: to speak with her on this show was talking about
Speaker 4: how pivotal she felt the switch from the text based
Speaker 4: to video based internet was and how she wished that
Speaker 4: her students had gotten the chance to experience true Internet anonymity, which,
Speaker 4: as we all know, could go in a number of directions,
Speaker 4: but isn't really available now, and we're going to cover
Speaker 4: stories from that era in a bit. But I hadn't
Speaker 4: really ever thought of it this way, and there is
Speaker 4: so much truth to that, because, to continue our celebrity
Speaker 4: comments spectacular, how someone looks is always commented upon, whether
Speaker 4: it's the celebrity themselves or the user. Here's Hayden and
Speaker 4: Jessica Chastain.
Speaker 2: Hi, Jamie.
Speaker 1: I have one incident where I was sort of anonymously
Speaker 1: a main character. Back in late August of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: I was checking Twitter during the workday, as one does
Speaker 1: when it's slow, and saw that the actress Jessica Chastain
Speaker 1: had tweeted something I found a little bit inane about
Speaker 1: the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that had happened
Speaker 1: a little bit prior to.
Speaker 6: That, something about like.
Speaker 1: Espousing nonviolence when faced with a bunch of violent Nazis
Speaker 1: that want to eradicate your existence. That she was one
Speaker 1: of my favorite actresses, and I was already a little
Speaker 1: bit sensitive to the topic because I'd graduated from BVA
Speaker 1: and it was a really special place to me, and
Speaker 1: up to that point it had been the location of
Speaker 1: like some of the happiest memories of my life that
Speaker 1: so far, which really had turned sour when you know,
Speaker 1: all of these places that you recognize in the news
Speaker 1: was papered over with nazeasonal white supremacists and stud So
Speaker 1: I just still to this day I sort of have
Speaker 1: like a knee jerk reaction to people being stupid about it,
Speaker 1: and I, without really thinking too hard about it, I
Speaker 1: fired off a tweet to her, like, not even thinking
Speaker 1: that she would see it, because she had, I think
Speaker 1: at that point, like half a million followers, and who
Speaker 1: even can handle your notifications at that level, you know?
Speaker 1: But it was the Martin Luther King Junior quote about
Speaker 1: the danger of the white moderate, and I like close
Speaker 1: Twitter and then went back to doing whatever spreadsheet nonsense
Speaker 1: I was doing that day. And then I checked back
Speaker 1: a little bit later and saw that she had replied
Speaker 1: and was like a step and a half away from
Speaker 1: calling me a reverse racist, and like we had a
Speaker 1: little bit of a back and forth before she stopped replying,
Speaker 1: So I thought that was sort of the end of it,
Speaker 1: but the issue just continued to snowball some as the
Speaker 1: day went on, even after she stopped engaging with me
Speaker 1: directly and like with dealing with other people, because I
Speaker 1: think at some point that Mary Sue wrote about it,
Speaker 1: and then by the evening, like one of my Twitter
Speaker 1: friends had set me an article like the huff Huffing
Speaker 1: and Post had written about it, and that around that
Speaker 1: point I started getting a wave of abuse from sort
Speaker 1: of alt right hyper conservative egg profile stuff. And I
Speaker 1: had linked it originally to the huff Post article. That
Speaker 1: was because it was way more mainstream than anything of
Speaker 1: the mary Sue.
Speaker 8: Would put out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So that sort of was it for a while,
Speaker 1: until a few years later I discovered that the reason
Speaker 1: I got so much of the right like hyper right
Speaker 1: wing abuse was because breit Bart had done an article
Speaker 1: about it. Now, that's just sort of a fun fact
Speaker 1: that breit Bart put a hit out on me and
Speaker 1: couldn't even do it right because it was just my
Speaker 1: Star Wars tand Twitter account. Every year in my calendar
Speaker 1: there's a little alert for like Chastain Beef Day in
Speaker 1: late August.
Speaker 4: And I think I speak for all of us when
Speaker 4: I say Happy early Jessica Chastain Beef Day to us all.
Speaker 4: And finally Kelly called in about the harrowing experience of
Speaker 4: becoming the top comment on a half thought out body
Speaker 4: shaming meme about Adele.
Speaker 2: Hello.
Speaker 9: My name is Kelly. I'm a book designer living in Brooklyn,
Speaker 9: and I became a very minor main character on Instagram
Speaker 9: for one day when I got into a fight with
Speaker 9: a meme account. It was May of twenty twenty, which
Speaker 9: was famously a good and healthy time for all of us.
Speaker 9: The singer Adele had just lost weight, and the account
Speaker 9: Meme Queen, made a post that I still have a
Speaker 9: screenshot of in my phone because again, good healthy time.
Speaker 9: The post features two photos of Adele looking thinner than
Speaker 9: ever before, with text above them that reads, Adele's glow
Speaker 9: up is what twenty twenty needs right now. The actual
Speaker 9: caption says, quote, her ex is punching the right now.
Speaker 9: Because I was glued to my phone on May seventh
Speaker 9: of twenty twenty for some reason, I was one of
Speaker 9: the first commenters. I commented quote, Adele has always been
Speaker 9: hot as fuck. Stop referring to weight loss as glowing up.
Speaker 2: Please.
Speaker 9: Unfortunately for me, she saw my comment early on and
Speaker 9: replied to it saying, quote, no one said about weight loss.
Speaker 9: Please don't put words in my mouth. Unquote In the
Speaker 9: screenshot I have on my phone from sixteen hours after
Speaker 9: the incident. My initial comment had fifteen, three hundred and
Speaker 9: thirty seven likes and hundreds of replies. As it does,
Speaker 9: this all happened very fast, and for several hours, I
Speaker 9: was glued to my phone against the better advice of
Speaker 9: my friends, replying back to people and arguing about the
Speaker 9: very definition of the term glow up. And there were
Speaker 9: a lot of people agreeing with me, and other comments
Speaker 9: calling out meme Queen for fat phobia, But mine was
Speaker 9: the one that everyone saw as soon as I opened
Speaker 9: the comments, and by everyone I also mean trolls. But
Speaker 9: the thing that is the most memorable to me about
Speaker 9: this experience is the carrot photo. Several days before the incident,
Speaker 9: I had posted a photo to my grid off my
Speaker 9: hand holding a bunch of very beautiful carrots, stems, and leaves.
Speaker 9: Included the caption said I'm just gonna say it, these
Speaker 9: carrots are hot. This was conveniently the most recent post
Speaker 9: on my grid, which meant that it was the one
Speaker 9: that two or three of the more aggressive trolls from
Speaker 9: Meme Queen's page decided to comment on. And so I
Speaker 9: give you the most exquisitely stupid comment a stranger has
Speaker 9: ever left on my Instagram. So the person who finds
Speaker 9: carrots hot is the one who doesn't believe in fat shaming.
Speaker 9: What anyway, I have no way of getting back to
Speaker 9: the post since it's a meme account that has posted
Speaker 9: approximately six hundred million times since. But the commenting and
Speaker 9: fighting continued on for days after the post, and I
Speaker 9: have no clue how the number shook out in the end,
Speaker 9: and people forgot about it quickly, and I unfollowed meme
Speaker 9: Queen because she posted too much weird, fat photic, normy
Speaker 9: content and not enough memes, which, by the way, can
Speaker 9: someone please explain to me how a photo of a
Speaker 9: singer looking thin with a caption about her glow up
Speaker 9: is a meme. As you've elucidated on this show and others,
Speaker 9: the conversation around women's bodies in media has not gotten
Speaker 9: any better. I appreciate all the work you've done to
Speaker 9: push us towards a better place, though, and I figured
Speaker 9: i'd share this story if you want to use it,
Speaker 9: as it's only slightly more relevant than the other. One
Speaker 9: time that I became a very minor main character, which
Speaker 9: was because my girlfriend's parents saw Richard Dreyfus go on
Speaker 9: a homophobic rant at a Jaws event, and I tweeted
Speaker 9: about it and got quoted by multiple news sources. I
Speaker 9: love the Internet.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, Kelly, And when we come back
Speaker 4: more of your stories, maybe welcome back to sixteenth minute
Speaker 4: finishing and recording. This script is all that lays between
Speaker 4: me and getting to meet my baby nephew Max. What
Speaker 4: a time to be alive. Let's keep moving. My college
Speaker 4: crush and my algebra teacher came to my book reading
Speaker 4: last night. Boston is the most perfect place in the world,
Speaker 4: and that's just a fact. Let's get back into your
Speaker 4: stories up next. Aspin called in about some of the
Speaker 4: most blood boilingly dishonest clickbait I have ever heard.
Speaker 10: When I was eighteen years old in twenty eighteen, I
Speaker 10: was the media spokesperson for Lush Cosmetics first trans Writes
Speaker 10: campaign in North America. My key quote was on display
Speaker 10: in the front window of every North American Lush store.
Speaker 10: So I got some interest from media companies to have
Speaker 10: some interviews, which mostly were simple and nice, but Refinery
Speaker 10: twenty nine put out a pretty wild clickbait article on me.
Speaker 10: In their beauty diaries titled I'm a trans college student
Speaker 10: and I spend one thousand, seven hundred and eighty two
Speaker 10: dollars a year on beauty products, which was wildly inaccurate
Speaker 10: since I mostly used free samples that I brought home
Speaker 10: and also included an eight hundred dollars top surgery consultation
Speaker 10: that I'd attended as one of those beauty products. Media comments, naturally,
Speaker 10: it went crazy. Thankfully, my full name wasn't ever shared
Speaker 10: in my interviews, but I was pretty vocal about my
Speaker 10: involvement in the campaign on social media, so I still
Speaker 10: got messages from people going is this you?
Speaker 8: Is it true?
Speaker 10: Or how can you justify spending this way? And all
Speaker 10: sorts of vitriolic, hateful comments. And I even got questioned
Speaker 10: by Lush employees at other stores if they realized who
Speaker 10: I was. I felt pretty embarrassed and definitely misrepresented, which
Speaker 10: was a hard place to be in as a transgender
Speaker 10: teenager representing an entire identity group for an international company.
Speaker 10: Refinery twenty nine did eventually change the name of the
Speaker 10: article on search engines, so now it comes up as
Speaker 10: transgender Man's skincare routine is all Lush products because they're
Speaker 10: rightfully ashamed of their clickbait lies. It was a niche
Speaker 10: main character moment, but it really has haunted me ever since.
Speaker 10: Surgery consultation is a beauty product. Again haunting. It'll never
Speaker 10: leave me.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for calling in, Aspen.
Speaker 4: I wish I could say I were more surprised that
Speaker 4: a clickbait site would sink so low as to bully
Speaker 4: a trans teenager and misrepresent getting needed care. You deserve better,
Speaker 4: Aspen forever. Let's go to the Refinery twenty nine headquarters
Speaker 4: right now. But as other stories sent in demonstrated, not
Speaker 4: all IRL to internet encounters are completely doomed. I mean
Speaker 4: most of them are. But here too, that worked out
Speaker 4: rather nicely.
Speaker 11: Hi Jamie and sixteenth minute folks, my name's Tom Lum.
Speaker 11: We ran into each other on an episode of Never Posts.
Speaker 11: So in twenty twenty one, I was working in software development.
Speaker 11: It was fine. I just was starting to lose my
Speaker 11: mind a little bit, and so I saw a job
Speaker 11: application to work as a writer for sid Show, which
Speaker 11: is a science YouTube channel that I adore. It was
Speaker 11: made by Hank and John Green, who also made stuff
Speaker 11: like Crash Course vlog Brothers and I've been a huge
Speaker 11: fan of all other stuff since I was a teen,
Speaker 11: and so I thought, you know what, I should apply
Speaker 11: to this job, mostly on a whim. This was pre
Speaker 11: COVID vaccine, so I was just spending all of my
Speaker 11: days at home alone and really starting to lose my mind,
Speaker 11: and I was just like, I need to change something,
Speaker 11: and this seems cool. I'll just give it a shot.
Speaker 11: And part of the application was they wanted examples of
Speaker 11: you doing science communication. They need a video. I've been
Speaker 11: meaning to learn how this app works, and I had
Speaker 11: also been meaning to make something about this story I
Speaker 11: had learned in college that I love to tell, which
Speaker 11: is that we once gave Bee's jet lag for science.
Speaker 11: And then I posted it to my zero followers at
Speaker 11: like midnight and then went to sleep, and then I
Speaker 11: woke up to five thousand followers, which was the most
Speaker 11: I had had on any social media ever. And then
Speaker 11: the videos started to really blow up, like it to
Speaker 11: the point where my notifications on TikTok were functionally useless.
Speaker 11: The magazine Popular Science also did a podcast episode about
Speaker 11: that TikTok in which they mispronounced my last name because
Speaker 11: they saw my username, which is Tom lum person and
Speaker 11: assume my name was Tom Lumperson. I was very lucky
Speaker 11: that this all happened when I was in my late twenties,
Speaker 11: and I had already seen many stories of virality gone
Speaker 11: wrong or going nowhere right.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 11: I obviously didn't like quit my job and throw everything
Speaker 11: into TikTok, but I started making more of those science videos.
Speaker 11: Funny enough, Hank Green commented on that original video, and
Speaker 11: then as I kept doing it, we became mutuals and
Speaker 11: then friends. So that was always a truly wild which
Speaker 11: gives me emotional vertigo if I think about too hard.
Speaker 11: I also told Hank. I told Hank, you know, a
Speaker 11: few years later, I was like, did you know about that?
Speaker 11: And he was like, did we hire you? And I
Speaker 11: was like no, but that's fine. It all weren't down
Speaker 11: the end.
Speaker 13: Hi, my name is bj Colangelo, and I am telling
Speaker 13: the story of the time I was the Twitter main
Speaker 13: character of the day, and fortunately it wasn't for doing
Speaker 13: or saying something terrible. It was Halloween twenty seventeen and
Speaker 13: I went to the airport way too early, as I
Speaker 13: am known to do, and sat down at the bar,
Speaker 13: had a drink and met two women who were meeting
Speaker 13: for the first time at the airport because they had
Speaker 13: suspected that their husbands were having an affair with each other,
Speaker 13: and they were flying to where their supposed business trip
Speaker 13: was taking place so that they could finally confront them.
Speaker 13: It was one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever evesdropped,
Speaker 13: and as we were known to do in the late
Speaker 13: twenty ten's, on Twitter, I documented the entire conversation. I
Speaker 13: posted about it, turned my phone off, got on my flight,
Speaker 13: thought nothing of it, landed, turned my phone on to
Speaker 13: call a ride share, and my phone practically exploded in
Speaker 13: my hand. Because it had gone beyond viral, it ended
Speaker 13: up on BBC three. George ta Kai's social media shared it.
Speaker 13: All of those weird aggregate sites that just compile popular
Speaker 13: tweets for the day did whole stories about it. Cleveland
Speaker 13: Magazine interviewed me about it because it was such a
Speaker 13: huge thing that had happened at the Cleveland airport with me,
Speaker 13: somebody who was at the time a journalist working in Cleveland,
Speaker 13: and it was very surreal. But because I had done
Speaker 13: my best to, you know, keep their identities as secret
Speaker 13: as possible, people were very upset that I isn't now
Speaker 13: turning into a private investigator and changing my flights to
Speaker 13: go track these people down to give them closure. Nope,
Speaker 13: it's just a weird thing that happened. I have no
Speaker 13: idea whatever became of these couples. I have no idea
Speaker 13: what became of their marriages. But it continued to be
Speaker 13: viral for days later. Netflix shared it because it has
Speaker 13: a little similar pra elements with Grace and Frankie, so
Speaker 13: that put it on even more eyes. And as somebody
Speaker 13: who also works as an entertainment journalist, that does mean
Speaker 13: that every so often I'll be talking to somebody, I'll
Speaker 13: say my name, They'll see what I look like because
Speaker 13: I have kind of a distinct look of green hair
Speaker 13: and I've looked the same way for about like a
Speaker 13: decade now, and they'll ask me, Hey, are you the
Speaker 13: lady who tweeted about the women at the airport, And
Speaker 13: I have to say, yes, yes, that was me. Even today,
Speaker 13: all these years later, I still get people randomly who
Speaker 13: will find me on other social media platforms to ask
Speaker 13: me if I ever got closure or if I know
Speaker 13: whatever happened or what became of them, And the answer
Speaker 13: is no, I don't.
Speaker 8: I do not know.
Speaker 13: Whatever happened to the shot lady and the gum lady
Speaker 13: or they're probably gay husbands.
Speaker 2: Thank you to Tom and BJ.
Speaker 4: And BJ's story in particular really stuck with me because
Speaker 4: the quote unquote overheard viral Twitter thread was such a
Speaker 4: moment in like the late twenty tens, and BJ, to
Speaker 4: be clear, did the right thing here and properly hid
Speaker 4: the identity of the folks that she was overhearing. But
Speaker 4: it is one of my dream subjects to talk more
Speaker 4: about how as social media progresses we have this habit
Speaker 4: of knee jerk surveilling each other without being careful. As
Speaker 4: BJ was like, social media to some extent is designed
Speaker 4: to of course make us feel bad, but also to
Speaker 4: have us surveil our elves and each other. It's something
Speaker 4: I have to catch myself doing all the time. But
Speaker 4: self in pure surveillance isn't what the Internet was built on.
Speaker 4: The Internet was built on, of course, little videos of pets.
Speaker 4: Here are two of your pet stories.
Speaker 14: Hi, my name is Joel Edmiston. I'm a listener to
Speaker 14: your show. My cat went viral. Basically, my cat went
Speaker 14: into the bathtub and he went in the bath with
Speaker 14: water in it, walked around. I take a video, put
Speaker 14: some audio on it and put it on TikTok. I
Speaker 14: am a comedian. I have, you know, tried to ticked.
Speaker 14: I had tried TikTok at that point, but it didn't
Speaker 14: work out and I deleted to some stuff and you know,
Speaker 14: just like on YouTube and Instagram trying to make things hit.
Speaker 14: But this cat video, I went to sleep, woke up.
Speaker 14: It was a gigantic and I've kept making videos. That
Speaker 14: was in twenty twenty one, so I've kept making videos
Speaker 14: about the cat with water stuff because he does like
Speaker 14: water and he was a kitten at the time. Older now,
Speaker 14: I you know, record my narrations over top of the videos.
Speaker 14: I'm like pleased with the The account does make me
Speaker 14: feel good because it's it's it's kept up the followers
Speaker 14: and stuff. It's on Instagram as well now in a
Speaker 14: way that I feel like it is sort of my
Speaker 14: content and not just cat content and having the camera
Speaker 14: pointed in the right place when the cat comes on.
Speaker 14: I will say, there's a lot of positive feedback on
Speaker 14: the page, also a lot of negative feedback that makes
Speaker 14: me upset in a way that I wish it didn't. Like, obviously,
Speaker 14: the negative negativity is going to be there, but I
Speaker 14: just wish I didn't care so much. I think it's
Speaker 14: called concern trolling when people act concerned for the cat
Speaker 14: over the smallest details and pretend they're they're experts, or
Speaker 14: when they're just calling me names or you know, blah
Speaker 14: blah blah, and it never sees it to amaze me. This
Speaker 14: is a cat after all, this is a cat page
Speaker 14: after all. Yeah, And I can admit that I, especially
Speaker 14: when things are really viral, I kind of read every comment,
Speaker 14: and I wish that I didn't wish that I didn't
Speaker 14: feel compelled to read every comment. Because here's what I do.
Speaker 14: I delete every negative comment that I see. I blocked
Speaker 14: the person. It's probably good practice, but the fact that
Speaker 14: I have to read every comment for it, I kind
Speaker 14: of like scroll past, you know, thoughtlessly over the positive ones,
Speaker 14: but I see any negativity, it's like a delete.
Speaker 8: Hi.
Speaker 15: I go by Sally Saint Rose and I am calling
Speaker 15: in to talk about my tiny viral moment of my
Speaker 15: fat sphinx named Joby. I rescue and adopt hairless cats,
Speaker 15: and one of my first ones was named Joby. He
Speaker 15: was amazing. He was a butterball of wrinkles. And I
Speaker 15: have always loved taking pictures of my cats and posting
Speaker 15: them online. I would post them on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr.
Speaker 15: One time I woke up and overnight one of the
Speaker 15: pictures had gone viral. People had made memes of it,
Speaker 15: passed it around, so so many people did that, and
Speaker 15: then the next thing, a video went viral of him
Speaker 15: and one of my other cats in the bathtub. I
Speaker 15: had made shower caps for them, tiny little cat shower caps.
Speaker 15: I hadn't seen anyone do that yet, and I thought
Speaker 15: that was adorable, and so I did that, and I
Speaker 15: was one of the first people to post hairless cats
Speaker 15: and the shower cats online and the people went wild
Speaker 15: for it. I had media companies reaching out to me
Speaker 15: to not only you know, use it, but they wanted
Speaker 15: to manage it. And I still have a media company
Speaker 15: that manages his videos. They get licensed out to Comedy Central.
Speaker 15: He was on Key and Peel. It was awesome. I
Speaker 15: loved the love that Joby got from people. I was like, Okay,
Speaker 15: everyone feels like me. They loved Joby just as much
Speaker 15: as I do. And it was great for a while.
Speaker 15: Then I started getting the hate comments, the hate dms,
Speaker 15: people searching out to find my personal accounts and emails
Speaker 15: so they could write me messages to let me know
Speaker 15: he's going to die. They want to kill him. He's
Speaker 15: so ugly, really bizarre things. But I just, you know,
Speaker 15: was like, hey, it's the Internet. Not going to pay
Speaker 15: them any mind. And when he was eleven, he passed
Speaker 15: away from his heart condition. He had HCM, which pretty
Speaker 15: common and hairless breed unfortunately, but he passed away and
Speaker 15: it was really sad. I was hit by grief really
Speaker 15: really hard, and I would talk about it a little
Speaker 15: bit online. And then I started noticing mass and mass
Speaker 15: amounts of people unfollowing me when he passed away. I
Speaker 15: thought it was so bizarre and I was like, why
Speaker 15: are people unfollowing just because he's no longer alive? And
Speaker 15: it was so weird. I couldn't understand. I was like,
Speaker 15: do you not love him anymore because he's no longer alive?
Speaker 15: And I did a lot of introspection about what does
Speaker 15: this mean and why are people doing this? And I,
Speaker 15: you know, had to come to the realization it's Oh,
Speaker 15: it's the Internet. He was a moment of time for
Speaker 15: people and then that was it, and I was putting
Speaker 15: my feelings onto them of how I viewed Jobi of
Speaker 15: my world. I'm, you know, will love him forever. I'll
Speaker 15: have to carry this grief for him forever. And that's
Speaker 15: not how other people viewed him. And so it really
Speaker 15: puts into perspective other really famous Internet cats that have
Speaker 15: passed away. Why they still post them continuously. You have
Speaker 15: to keep up that facade of yes, most people know
Speaker 15: that the cat is gone, but you have to keep
Speaker 15: posting their pictures as if they're not. And that has
Speaker 15: to be really hard.
Speaker 4: Thinking to Jolin Sally for their stories. We talked a
Speaker 4: little bit about Internet pets in our Moodang episode, but
Speaker 4: it's something that I would really like to continue talking
Speaker 4: about because, as Sally is alluding to, pets famously don't
Speaker 4: live as long as us, and so there is this
Speaker 4: inevitable I've monetized my pet and now I'm grieving them,
Speaker 4: And I just think it's a very interesting thing to
Speaker 4: get into more. But while we're talking about foundational pillars
Speaker 4: of the Internet, why don't we jump back into the
Speaker 4: good old text based and flash animation forums we were
Speaker 4: talking about a little earlier a lot of people are
Speaker 4: still nostalgic for this Internet. While it had many problems,
Speaker 4: it's an era of the Internet we've explored in episodes
Speaker 4: like Badger Badger, Mushroom, an overly attacked girlfriend, or even
Speaker 4: as late historically as the Dress, the days where we
Speaker 4: could still sort of talk our shit in anonymity and
Speaker 4: things went awry in a completely different way than they
Speaker 4: do now Here are your forum stories.
Speaker 16: I'm a nineties kid born in the mid eighties. I
Speaker 16: spent my earliest years playing in streets and creeks and
Speaker 16: abandoned store parking lots, doing dumb shit that would likely
Speaker 16: make it onto primetime news today. Minor vandalism, simple arts,
Speaker 16: and plenty of petty theft, just kids being a fucking
Speaker 16: menace tell us about ten or so. At that point,
Speaker 16: my half formed frontal cortex became increasingly aware of the
Speaker 16: allure of the Internet. But during my pre teen years
Speaker 16: I spent untold hours trying to ignore the six o'clock
Speaker 16: news in the background as I scour the latest links
Speaker 16: page on this bb or that usenet. It was pure
Speaker 16: information niche interest, someone's hobby and other's vault or shrine
Speaker 16: to this event or that celebrity. But if actual information
Speaker 16: or useful services weren't of interest, the chat rooms were
Speaker 16: something awful, for instance, and for all the negatives associated
Speaker 16: with that particular phase of the Internet, many people my
Speaker 16: age looked back to this as its peak. The bar
Speaker 16: for entry did not exist. Have you computer? Have you Internet?
Speaker 12: Yes?
Speaker 16: Please enjoy this unfiltered onslaught of the absolute worst takes
Speaker 16: in the history of man. Pages upon pages of topic
Speaker 16: and reply on things so momentous as the then current
Speaker 16: theft of the US election by one George war Crimes Bush.
Speaker 16: By the mid two thousands, advertisements had fully invaded these in.
Speaker 12: All other spaces.
Speaker 16: Websites cost money to host, and many of these platforms,
Speaker 16: forums and chat rooms and infoboards provided no product beyond conversation.
Speaker 16: The conversations were free and couldn't pay the bills, so
Speaker 16: we started seeing ads everywhere. Jump ahead literally any period
Speaker 16: of time. We're constantly looking for the humanity and the
Speaker 16: ocean of corportization that has superseded this thing we thought
Speaker 16: was the future. But the promise of infinite information and
Speaker 16: connection at the press of a button has become that
Speaker 16: only for data brokers and corporate sales managers. Is part
Speaker 16: of the reason we seek out these main characters of
Speaker 16: the day, that we can find something enjoyable that doesn't
Speaker 16: come with its own custom checkout page is the smallest
Speaker 16: reprieve for the those of us who saw the Internet
Speaker 16: as a great and public good before capitalism realized it
Speaker 16: could monetize literally anything. Characters of the day, while increasingly
Speaker 16: fed to us, algorithmically represent the remaining possibility of the platform,
Speaker 16: actual personalities and original thought that managed to get past
Speaker 16: the near complete commoditization of every medium and deliver something
Speaker 16: unique and human in a world increasingly devoid of both
Speaker 16: those qualities.
Speaker 17: Hi, Jamie, my name is Alex. I love your show.
Speaker 17: Thank you so much for all the hard work making it.
Speaker 17: In two thousand and five, I was a freshman in
Speaker 17: college and I posted a really crude flash animation about
Speaker 17: bathroom etiquette. It was called a Men's Room Monologue. I
Speaker 17: posted that on new grounds dot com and it got
Speaker 17: millions of views, thousands, tens of thousands of comments, and
Speaker 17: I really felt like a main character, like a celebrity.
Speaker 17: For actually a couple of months. The comments were rolling
Speaker 17: in and it really spread around the Internet onto all
Speaker 17: these other weird two thousand and five websites like Ebom's
Speaker 17: World and I'll Bin a Black Sheep. People I met
Speaker 17: in real life would find out I made the cartoon
Speaker 17: and get really excited. It was a super cool experience
Speaker 17: and people were so positive about it, which is weird
Speaker 17: looking back, because the cartoon is so badly drawn, the
Speaker 17: audio is terrible, the writing is just so I don't know,
Speaker 17: we'd call it cringe now, like what an eighteen year
Speaker 17: old boy would write in two thousand and five. I'm
Speaker 17: grateful for it. It's a little hard to watch now,
Speaker 17: and I'm grateful, I think, to have posted it back then.
Speaker 17: I think people wouldn't be as nice about this cartoon now,
Speaker 17: but the fact that they were nice kind of helped
Speaker 17: push me towards my career as a professional animator.
Speaker 18: I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft
Speaker 18: in the mid two thousands, and I was a regular
Speaker 18: shit poster on my service forum for about a year
Speaker 18: or two. Around this time, it was kind of an
Speaker 18: open seekert that George Fisher from the band Cannibal Corpse
Speaker 18: played on our server and people were always coming by
Speaker 18: and asking what his character was, and at some point
Speaker 18: someone started saying my character name as a joke.
Speaker 12: Things started to get out of hand. At that point.
Speaker 18: I had no idea who George Fisher was, and I
Speaker 18: don't even think I heard a Cannibal Corpse song at
Speaker 18: that point, ever, so I was really confused when people
Speaker 18: started messaging me and calling me George. I was getting
Speaker 18: in game mail from people giving me their actual phone
Speaker 18: numbers and women offering me sexual favors with like really
Speaker 18: explicit messages. I never responded to anything because it was
Speaker 18: so awkward, Like I would see my name pop up
Speaker 18: in the comment sections of George Fisher videos when people
Speaker 18: were asking what server he plays on. At some point,
Speaker 18: the real George Fisher like heard about people going to
Speaker 18: me thinking I was him, and he got kind of
Speaker 18: pissed because he thought I was doing it on purpose,
Speaker 18: like I was trying to impersonate him, and my friend
Speaker 18: made it pretty clear that George really didn't like me
Speaker 18: when the topic came up, and eventually he transferred to
Speaker 18: another server and I started getting less and less messages, thankfully,
Speaker 18: but I never got any closure. So I guess if
Speaker 18: you're listening George, or if you're someone who knows George
Speaker 18: and can get the word do them. I'm sorry, this
Speaker 18: is all a big misunderstanding and I didn't want anything
Speaker 18: to do anything of this.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, my boys. And when we come back,
Speaker 4: a few more stories.
Speaker 2: For the road.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to sixteenth minute, the show you write and
Speaker 4: record in bed.
Speaker 2: With your Mom. And here are a few last stories
Speaker 2: I like to share.
Speaker 4: So when it came to stories about niche internet community trauma.
Speaker 2: There was quite a bit to sort through.
Speaker 4: I think most people who have been too logged in
Speaker 4: have had experiences like this where one's time and identity
Speaker 4: are wrapped up in a community where they feel uniquely seen.
Speaker 4: The kind of community that can can consume you without
Speaker 4: really having the possibility of leaking into your in person
Speaker 4: life in a meaningful way, an actual second life, because
Speaker 4: after all, a niche interest is niche for a reason.
Speaker 4: You had to make a forum in order to find
Speaker 4: your people, and the emotional attachments that are formed and
Speaker 4: the validation received on forums like this can really affect
Speaker 4: and shape you, regardless of how big or small that
Speaker 4: community is. Here's Ayumi on being a moderator.
Speaker 19: Hi Jamie, It's Ayumi Shinozaki. While this is a very
Speaker 19: small scale version, of that, I did want to submit
Speaker 19: my story just in case it counts for something. Also
Speaker 19: just because even at a smaller scale, it helped me
Speaker 19: really put a lot of things in perspective as to
Speaker 19: how I wanted to spend my time on the internet.
Speaker 19: Moving forward, Basically, in the early twenty tens, I was
Speaker 19: part of a confession blog or a fandom, unsurprisingly magical girls.
Speaker 19: So it was Magical Girl Confessions at tumbre dot com
Speaker 19: pretty much right away it started to catch on. I
Speaker 19: was very excited about the blog as well, because of
Speaker 19: course it seemed like a cool place to gather for
Speaker 19: love of magical girls. So one of the things that
Speaker 19: would happen a lot is misgendering. At the time, I
Speaker 19: was not going by shiha pronouns I am now, but
Speaker 19: at the time I was not, I was going by
Speaker 19: they them or the demi girl pronouns I had created
Speaker 19: for myself, which are gjem gear. There was a lot
Speaker 19: of racist things, in particular because I am half Japanese.
Speaker 19: People would try to talk about how I was into
Speaker 19: Japanese enough for example, and things like that, and also
Speaker 19: on the river side accept me as Japanese and then
Speaker 19: be very racist about it, like a lot of these people,
Speaker 19: I would say, most of these people never knew me personally,
Speaker 19: never took the time to get to know who I was.
Speaker 19: They just had this idea of me, and it was
Speaker 19: very frustrating, very exhausting. By this point, I had to
Speaker 19: talk to my own therapist about Tumblr, and constantly my
Speaker 19: therapist would say, Okay, but why do you need to
Speaker 19: be here, why do you need to be working on
Speaker 19: this blog? But it's clearly hurting you so much. And
Speaker 19: my partner at the time also would express very similar feelings.
Speaker 19: And I had it in my head that if I
Speaker 19: did things the right way, then maybe people could actually
Speaker 19: see me for who I was and see that like
Speaker 19: I was separate from these confessions, people were so focused
Speaker 19: on the idea of me that they didn't take the
Speaker 19: time to get to know me as a person, and
Speaker 19: it was very frustrating. What year is it, Yes, twenty fifteen.
Speaker 19: At near the end of twenty fifteen, my grandmother in
Speaker 19: Japan was diagnosed with cancer, and we didn't know what
Speaker 19: the situation would be, especially whether or not she might survive.
Speaker 19: Despite the fact that I had not been able to
Speaker 19: go back to Japan for a decade or so with
Speaker 19: some emergency money, and I even took that a loane myself.
Speaker 19: I went with my mother and my brother back to
Speaker 19: Osaka to see my family for a week, and it
Speaker 19: was a really great experience. And it was through that
Speaker 19: experience that I realized I really wanted to come back
Speaker 19: to Japan. So once I knew I was going to
Speaker 19: leave in February, it became a thing of Okay, I'm
Speaker 19: going to leave America, but I'm also going to leave Tumblr.
Speaker 19: I just realized like there was no way for me
Speaker 19: to ever get through to these people because they had
Speaker 19: their idea of me, and I knew and I know
Speaker 19: now that no matter what I do on the Internet,
Speaker 19: people will always come to your posts with their idea
Speaker 19: of what you represent to them. And I think accepting
Speaker 19: that has been so important to my mental health and
Speaker 19: to my life as a person who has been very
Speaker 19: online all my life. And I'm so so, like so
Speaker 19: much more at peace with my Internet usage. No that
Speaker 19: knowing that, like I can basically just decompartmentalize any weird
Speaker 19: comments that people will send my way if I know, oh,
Speaker 19: they just don't know who I am they are projecting.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much Aumi.
Speaker 4: She is also a guest on the Bechdel Cast coming up,
Speaker 4: so jump over to that feed if you run a
Speaker 4: lot of episodes here. Next up a true pioneer, Casey,
Speaker 4: who was a Disney adult before Disney adults were Disney adults.
Speaker 6: Hi, Jamie.
Speaker 20: My name is Casey and my niche Internet claim to
Speaker 20: fame is that I was an early Disney content creator.
Speaker 20: I started posting Disney content on Instagram back in twenty twelve,
Speaker 20: and in March twenty fourteen, I decided to start a
Speaker 20: Disney small shop, and there weren't a lot of us
Speaker 20: back then. There was just a couple. So my business
Speaker 20: grew very quickly, and so did my Instagram following, where
Speaker 20: I posted from the theme parks, I posted my products.
Speaker 20: I would post pretty much every day to stay relevant
Speaker 20: and to get people to find me. So at its peak,
Speaker 20: I probably had around fifty seven thousand followers, which isn't
Speaker 20: a ton, but for twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 20: this is pretty big in the Disney realm. I would
Speaker 20: get recognized at the theme parks, I would get asked
Speaker 20: for photos, and I made a lot of friends this way.
Speaker 20: As you know, Internet people do. We kind of find
Speaker 20: each other, find our group. But it also made me
Speaker 20: more susceptful to toxic friendships. People that were you know,
Speaker 20: clout chasing. They were looking for the kind of bump
Speaker 20: that they would get if I was to tag them
Speaker 20: in a photo or be on story with them, things
Speaker 20: like that. You know. I found it really hard to
Speaker 20: enjoy the theme parks as time went on, because I
Speaker 20: always felt like I needed to be on in case,
Speaker 20: you know, I saw a follower or a customer. One time,
Speaker 20: a follower's dad posted a selfie in front of my
Speaker 20: hotel room door. His daughter found my room and he
Speaker 20: decided to grown man decided to take a photo in
Speaker 20: front of my room and tag me in it and
Speaker 20: say neighbors at Disney. So that was probably the scariest.
Speaker 2: Thing that happened.
Speaker 20: And I had to go to the front desk and
Speaker 20: change rooms because I didn't feel very safe there because
Speaker 20: then they started dming me and it was just very strange.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 20: As time went on, the more stylized like lifestyler, lifestyle
Speaker 20: influencer became more popular, and I was, you know, getting older,
Speaker 20: and people stopped bothering me as much. Or you know,
Speaker 20: maybe they recognized me, but didn't you know, I wasn't
Speaker 20: relevant anymore, so people didn't bother me at the theme
Speaker 20: parks anymore. But I do think that even just this
Speaker 20: little small claim to fame can really affect you. And
Speaker 20: there are times that I kind of miss, you know,
Speaker 20: being known, and I can miss the free swag. But
Speaker 20: you know, I don't think it's great for your mental
Speaker 20: health to have so many people watching your content and
Speaker 20: commenting their pinions, and the Disney influencers now they have
Speaker 20: Reddit snark pages and reading that would be the worst.
Speaker 20: So I'm probably glad that I was one of the
Speaker 20: early ones.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, Casey, And I want to be
Speaker 4: clear this is a theme park adult safe space in
Speaker 4: case you couldn't glean it from my whole vibe. I
Speaker 4: firmly believe theme park adults either had perfect childhoods or
Speaker 4: very fucked up childhoods and everyone else just doesn't understand.
Speaker 4: And finally, we have a story about a niche internet
Speaker 4: community that became a central part of Bailey's childhood.
Speaker 6: Hi, Jamie, my name is Bailey.
Speaker 21: I am an avid sixteenth minute listener, and although I've
Speaker 21: never had a proper main character moment on the Internet.
Speaker 21: I do want to share a little bit about a
Speaker 21: now defunct website that I frequented in my teenage years
Speaker 21: have called debate dot org. Spring break of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 21: I was going to a very conservative middle and high school,
Speaker 21: which I was at for six years, and I was
Speaker 21: increasingly frustrated I was one of the only kids there
Speaker 21: who wasn't Mormon. For whatever reason, I decided to join
Speaker 21: debate dot org in a moment of boredom, but also
Speaker 21: as an expression of I guess wanting to express intellectual rigor.
Speaker 6: You know, it was twenty sixteen.
Speaker 21: It was post Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for president. Now,
Speaker 21: the structure of debate dot org is interesting because, of
Speaker 21: course the main event are the debates, and you could
Speaker 21: vote on other people's debates, but there were also polls
Speaker 21: public forums of different topics. It was a common joke
Speaker 21: that I was one of three women who used the site,
Speaker 21: and although that wasn't factually true, it certainly felt like that.
Speaker 21: I ended up meeting two people in real life that
Speaker 21: I met on debate dot org. I watched Rocky Horror
Speaker 21: Picture Show for the first time with him and weirdly enough,
Speaker 21: my dad. I completely lied to him and said that
Speaker 21: I knew him from school. He was a couple of
Speaker 21: years older than me. The other person I met was
Speaker 21: my ex older than me. I should not have been
Speaker 21: in a relationship with them, and it took up a
Speaker 21: lot of my life, or what felt like a lot
Speaker 21: of my life at the time. I was involved with
Speaker 21: this person from age thirteen to sixteen in different capacities,
Speaker 21: as friends, as sexual partners, as friends again before COVID
Speaker 21: happened and I.
Speaker 6: Slowly disentangled myself.
Speaker 21: Why I'm talking about debate dot org right now is
Speaker 21: because I have a lot of complicated feelings in that
Speaker 21: it is no longer an accessible website. I think I
Speaker 21: discovered that about a year or two ago when I
Speaker 21: was trying to go and view my old profile as
Speaker 21: sort of a self flagellation exercise, and then found I
Speaker 21: could no longer access the website. And I've tried multiple
Speaker 21: times since then, including right before recording this, to see
Speaker 21: and you cannot access the website. That comes with a
Speaker 21: mix of relief and grief. I think often about a
Speaker 21: remark that you made in an episode of Sixteenth Minute
Speaker 21: that we the listeners were listening to a future piece
Speaker 21: of lost media, and that is what debate dot org
Speaker 21: has kind of turned into. The grief comes in because
Speaker 21: I no longer have a portion of my life that
Speaker 21: is documented. Oh that's my cat. She is mourning it
Speaker 21: as well. Because of the ages that I was active
Speaker 21: on that website. It shows a weird transition where I
Speaker 21: was crystallizing my opinions that I still hold on certain things.
Speaker 21: It's where I discovered David Lynch. It's where I discovered
Speaker 21: a lot of different music that I now love. It's
Speaker 21: where I formalized some political opinions that I still have
Speaker 21: to this day.
Speaker 6: Debate dot org was a fever dream.
Speaker 21: I guess I'm happy I was a part of it
Speaker 21: while I was around. I certainly will not be passing
Speaker 21: on stories of it to my children and grandchildren if
Speaker 21: they survive on a burning planet.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much to Bailey. There's so much to
Speaker 4: think about with that story, but the first thing that
Speaker 4: jumps to my mind is we should probably all hunt
Speaker 4: your right. Thank you so much for setting in your story. Okay,
Speaker 4: I saved the sticky stuff for last, as I wont
Speaker 4: to do. As many of you might know, About half
Speaker 4: of the first year of sixteenth Minute was produced while
Speaker 4: my dad was actively sick in Massachusetts and I was
Speaker 4: caretaking for him along with my mom and brother in
Speaker 4: our extended family, and the other half of this show
Speaker 4: has been produced after he passed away. Something that I
Speaker 4: don't care how parasocial it is. Listener messages and being
Speaker 4: able to talk about it a little bit on this
Speaker 4: show shortly after really was a.
Speaker 2: Tremendously healing and cool thing.
Speaker 4: It was the first time I felt like in control
Speaker 4: of what was happening in a long time. But suvice
Speaker 4: it to say I've been weirdly in the trenches for
Speaker 4: this year of studying Internet history, and the fact is
Speaker 4: that the Internet's relationship with grief and grieving is I
Speaker 4: think one of its strength. I'm very lucky to have
Speaker 4: a great in person support system, but sometimes you wake
Speaker 4: up in a cold sweat at three in the morning
Speaker 4: and you're alone, and you just need to read a
Speaker 4: Reddit post about how someone has felt the same way
Speaker 4: you have and that it sucks, and then it doesn't
Speaker 4: really get better, it just gets different.
Speaker 2: And for people who aren't.
Speaker 4: As lucky as me to have a reliable in person
Speaker 4: support system, the Internet can be transformative in processing one's
Speaker 4: grief or, as the case may be, processing one's recovery
Speaker 4: from addiction.
Speaker 2: There are still good.
Speaker 4: Corners of the Internet, and so I really appreciated these
Speaker 4: stories about the Internet and processing grief.
Speaker 2: Here's Jake.
Speaker 8: Hey, Jamie, my name is Jake. Personally, I am twenty
Speaker 8: six years old, and I started, I guess, interacting with
Speaker 8: the Internet in a real consistent way. I would say
Speaker 8: starting I was like seven or eight. Honestly, I do
Speaker 8: have a very specific memory that feels just like significant
Speaker 8: somehow in a way I can't really put words too.
Speaker 22: I in fifth grade had a friend pass away, and
Speaker 22: it was honestly a pretty traumatic accident.
Speaker 8: He drowned, And I have a very distinct.
Speaker 23: Memory of learning the news and immediately going on the
Speaker 23: Internet to help me understand. And I remember getting on
Speaker 23: Google with like the old Google, like still Sarah font
Speaker 23: back when it was a functional surge engine.
Speaker 12: Too.
Speaker 8: I typed in, you know, like what happens after you die?
Speaker 8: And like is Heaven real? And like a bunch of
Speaker 8: like honestly pretty like deep philosophical questions just asking Google.
Speaker 8: I mean, I'm a grown adult now, I've done my
Speaker 8: fair share of therapy and processing outside of that experience,
Speaker 8: but it always looking back has struck me as a
Speaker 8: maybe novel to this era that I immediately went on
Speaker 8: the Internet to cope with grief at such a young age. Anyway,
Speaker 8: maybe I'm just maybe I'm inflating my own importance here
Speaker 8: a little bit. Anyway, love the show.
Speaker 4: I want to hug baby Jake so much, and to
Speaker 4: close us out here is Ben.
Speaker 12: Hey, how's it going? My name's Ben.
Speaker 24: And in the early twenty tens, ish I was a
Speaker 24: main character minor main character on Reddit for a couple
Speaker 24: of days. I was a senior in college, as probably
Speaker 24: three or four weeks from graduation, and my grandfather, who
Speaker 24: had also graduated from that school, was losing his battle
Speaker 24: with cancer and was in the process of being moved
Speaker 24: to in home hospice care. I had been home to
Speaker 24: visit him a couple of weeks earlier and say goodbye,
Speaker 24: and even then he was determined, even if they caught
Speaker 24: me up there in an ambulance, I'm going to that graduation.
Speaker 24: But it was clear he was not making his way
Speaker 24: across the house to the bathroom, let alone the track
Speaker 24: up to Central Minnesota from rural Iowa. So while I
Speaker 24: was there, my folks were going through photos prepping for
Speaker 24: memorials things like that, and they found some photos of
Speaker 24: Grandpa on campus, and you know, I thought it would
Speaker 24: be a nice thing to replicate those photos and as
Speaker 24: a way to have a together as part of this
Speaker 24: process of graduating in this time of transition, and even
Speaker 24: though he couldn't be there physically. So when I got
Speaker 24: back up to campus, my girlfriend and I went and
Speaker 24: found those spots out on campus, you know, kind of
Speaker 24: look at the hillside and the trees and subtract sixty
Speaker 24: years and imagine if that building wasn't there. You know,
Speaker 24: I kind of dressed like him. He was wearing a
Speaker 24: checked flannel shirt and some khakis. So I found a
Speaker 24: checked flannel shirt and some khakis and took the photos,
Speaker 24: kind of posed like him and sent them emailed them
Speaker 24: back home to mom and dad. So this was, like
Speaker 24: I said, early twenty tens, so kind of early days
Speaker 24: of kind of right before the turn to the modern
Speaker 24: social media age, and kind of promptly just threw them
Speaker 24: up on without thinking on our slash picks, and they
Speaker 24: pretty quickly shot up to being the top post on
Speaker 24: the sub and then quickly after that turned into the
Speaker 24: top ten fifteen posts of Reddit. And obviously that comes
Speaker 24: with like a deluge of comments, less imposing.
Speaker 12: Then than it is now. Obviously it's not coming to
Speaker 12: my phone.
Speaker 24: I didn't have a phone that was capable of that.
Speaker 24: It was all browser based. But I think I was
Speaker 24: happy for the distraction, right. It was, you know, I'm
Speaker 24: going through this major turning of a page in my life,
Speaker 24: this chapter change, graduating college, rite of passage, becoming an adult,
Speaker 24: but also having you know this, my Grandpa's going to
Speaker 24: die in the middle of all of this weight hanging
Speaker 24: over my head. So to have this kind of like
Speaker 24: proactive thing I can do talking about Grandpa with people
Speaker 24: on the internet, I think felt productive in a way
Speaker 24: that like taking tests and writing papers didn't to distract
Speaker 24: me from it all. So it was it was kind
Speaker 24: of an It was a good distraction, and most of
Speaker 24: it was positive.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 24: There's obviously edge cases. You had your militant atheists who
Speaker 24: wanted you to know that you know it was it
Speaker 24: was a travesty that these Catholics are still allowed to
Speaker 24: run schools and brainwash the minds of our youths. I
Speaker 24: studied theology in school, and nothing turns you against the
Speaker 24: church like studying church history. Plenty of folks who really
Speaker 24: needed me to know that in the title where I
Speaker 24: put my grandfather and I sixty years apart, YadA, YadA, YadA,
Speaker 24: the correct grammar is my grandfather and me. So I
Speaker 24: obviously needed my bachelor's degree to be stripped from me.
Speaker 24: But all of it was pretty pretty positive, you know,
Speaker 24: all in good fun. Like I said, I dressed like
Speaker 24: my grandpa in the photos, and so Maclamore's thrift Shop
Speaker 24: had just come out. There's the line, I wear your
Speaker 24: granddad's clothes, I look incredible. So lots of folks posting that.
Speaker 24: On the flip side, there were also folks posting that
Speaker 24: they needed me to know that my grandfather was far
Speaker 24: more attractive than I ever would be, and you know
Speaker 24: that's fair. That went on for about for a couple
Speaker 24: of days, and then the people who write about what's
Speaker 24: going on on the internet started reaching out. There were
Speaker 24: only a few of them. The only one that I
Speaker 24: actually talked with it was the only one that I
Speaker 24: could verify kind of as a real person, and they
Speaker 24: were a blogger at the Huffington Post, plus fifty section.
Speaker 24: I think at that point I was kind of like
Speaker 24: starting to make the realization that, like, oh, I should
Speaker 24: probably be a little bit more private with this public
Speaker 24: airing of grief. But by the time that we kind
Speaker 24: of sussed that we weren't both trying to scam each other,
Speaker 24: Grandpa died, and so where they were looking for probably
Speaker 24: a little bit more perfunctory like I'm so excited to graduate.
Speaker 24: I love my grandpa so much. They got a theology
Speaker 24: major process in grief, philosophizing about family and what we
Speaker 24: leave behind and the impacts on lives that we have.
Speaker 24: To their credit, they posted what was essentially, you know,
Speaker 24: a little bit of an essay mixed with an obituary,
Speaker 24: and it still exists out there to this day, and
Speaker 24: it's something that I'm glad is there for me to revisit,
Speaker 24: you know, until the day some executive turns it into
Speaker 24: a piece of lost media. Think at twenty two, I
Speaker 24: would have had the wherewithal to write down how I
Speaker 24: was feeling and to share my thought processes more than
Speaker 24: just like talking with my roommates and my sisters, So
Speaker 24: to have this thing that I can revisit, see this
Speaker 24: snapshot of who I.
Speaker 12: Was at this moment in time.
Speaker 24: As you know, kind of my entire world is shifting
Speaker 24: in addition to losing my grandpa.
Speaker 12: Is a nice thing to have. It's a nice artifact
Speaker 12: to have of who I was.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much to Jake and to Ben. And
Speaker 4: on that note, we close out this chapter of sixteenth Minute.
Speaker 4: What do we do with the Internet? This massive thing
Speaker 4: that billionaires will not truly let belong to us? Are
Speaker 4: the good parts, the communal parts, even the healing parts,
Speaker 4: worth all the damage that it is done to us
Speaker 4: and to the planet and will continue to We're going
Speaker 4: to keep talking about it, but until next time, This
Speaker 4: is Jamie Loftus and you are listening to a future
Speaker 4: piece of lost media.
Speaker 2: Look soon.
Speaker 4: Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and Iheartwordtaps.
Speaker 4: It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Rostis.
Speaker 4: Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
Speaker 4: amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 2: Our theme song is by Sad thirteen.
Speaker 4: Voice acting is from Brant Crater and pet shout outs
Speaker 4: to our dog producer Anderson my Kats Flee and Casper
Speaker 4: and my pet rockbird who will outlive us all.
Speaker 2: Bye.