Speaker 1: Cool zone media.
Speaker 2: For as long as women have existed, they've been called
Speaker 2: jealous and clingy.
Speaker 3: I just want to be a part of your life.
Speaker 1: Oh this is the way you do it. Huh, shut
Speaker 1: it up at my appointments.
Speaker 2: I supposed to do.
Speaker 3: You won't answer my calls. You change your number.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan, I'm
Speaker 2: your number one fan. There is nothing to worry about.
Speaker 3: You're gonna be justified.
Speaker 1: I'll take a good care.
Speaker 2: I'm your number one fan. That was Alex Forrest from
Speaker 2: Fatal Attraction, Annie Wilkes from Misery, and Miss Piggy, respectively, clingy, stonky,
Speaker 2: obsessed by the man of their desire, while the same
Speaker 2: can't be said in reverse, although with Kermit it's complicated.
Speaker 2: Characters like these have appeared in media for as long
Speaker 2: as there's ben media, and while many are iconic, it's
Speaker 2: pulling from this fairly gendered playbook right because there's obviously
Speaker 2: a difference between this behavior characterized as clingy and actual
Speaker 2: dangerous stalker behaviors. Sometimes they're not the same thing, and
Speaker 2: like no Shade to Miss Piggy, but all three of
Speaker 2: the above characters are stalking. But that's what makes it
Speaker 2: kind of hard to talk about right. There is a
Speaker 2: clear unhealthy, obsessive quality to these characters that poses a danger,
Speaker 2: but there's also this warning quality about them, like this
Speaker 2: capacity lies within every woman on the planet. People recognize
Speaker 2: this as more of a trope today, but this murky
Speaker 2: line of what constitutes clingy versus what constitutes dangerous is
Speaker 2: something that's been discoursed to death every year. There are
Speaker 2: scores of personal essays about the stigma of being viewed
Speaker 2: as clingy by a partner and how the term can
Speaker 2: be used to describe something as reasonable as respect and
Speaker 2: clear communication by someone who doesn't want to give the consideration.
Speaker 2: This same label clingy can be used to describe violent stalking,
Speaker 2: and the behaviors are equated in a really unproductive and
Speaker 2: confusing way. There's a number of writers who have spoken
Speaker 2: on the connotations of the term in casual dating and
Speaker 2: how clinginess being weaponized to make them feel bad is
Speaker 2: a way to make them stop asking for foundational respect
Speaker 2: and a relationship. But as entrenched in stereotypes as clinginess
Speaker 2: and emotionality and womanhood are, it can be funny to
Speaker 2: see these tropes poked fun at, particularly if it's from
Speaker 2: women or the people being teased in the first place.
Speaker 2: It's fun seeing a character with a lot of intensity
Speaker 2: that isn't being shamed and just is. I mean, Miss
Speaker 2: Piggy is the perfect example of that. But it's a
Speaker 2: hard needle to thread. Here's another fun stereotype. Women, young people,
Speaker 2: queer people, really anyone inclined to enjoy pop music are
Speaker 2: often portrayed as shallow obsessives. There are literal doctoral theses
Speaker 2: on this topic because modern fandom can get genuinely terrifying.
Speaker 2: So for the sake of this conversation, I'm talking about
Speaker 2: your average big fan loves the music, doesn't miss a tour,
Speaker 2: but isn't like hiding in the walls of the artists
Speaker 2: and sending death threats over Spotify streams, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean. Over time, the concept of fandom has really shifted.
Speaker 2: There's a proven trend of mocking fandoms as a way
Speaker 2: of making fans feel silly and ashamed about liking something
Speaker 2: or someone that isn't traditionally masculine. This has happened since
Speaker 2: time immemorial, putting down what young people usually the girls
Speaker 2: and gays, in order to make them seem silly or
Speaker 2: less deserving of respect. We see this time and time again,
Speaker 2: from the Beatles to Twilight to drag Race fans. And
Speaker 2: then on the other hand, there's the effect this strong
Speaker 2: parasocial fan behavior has on their relationship between idle and idolizers.
Speaker 2: That is, fans do take it too far a lot
Speaker 2: of the time and often act entitled to an idol's time,
Speaker 2: attention virginity. Yes, I went to a Jonas Brothers concert
Speaker 2: during their Chastity Built era. Fun fact. And while this
Speaker 2: is often young people feeling extreme passion and excitement and
Speaker 2: feeling like they know a celebrity because they don't know
Speaker 2: any better, it can be unsafe for the celebrity. There's
Speaker 2: a recent strain of discourse going on to that effect
Speaker 2: right now, with Chapel Roone making clear boundaries with her fans.
Speaker 2: Would you be offended if she says no to your
Speaker 2: time because she has her own time?
Speaker 3: Would you stalk her family? Would you follow her around?
Speaker 3: Would you try to dissect her life?
Speaker 2: Employ her online?
Speaker 3: There is a lady who don't know he doesn't know
Speaker 3: you at all.
Speaker 2: These stereotypes around fans, women and clinginess have been with
Speaker 2: us for a long time. And the early Internet was
Speaker 2: no exception to this. In the front half of the
Speaker 2: twenty tens, a fandom that was frequently mocked were fans
Speaker 2: of Justin Bieber or the believers you really had to
Speaker 2: be there, Hey, jag Jabay. In twenty twelve, biber Mania
Speaker 2: was at an all time high. He'd been discovered on
Speaker 2: YouTube as a thirteen year old by mega producer Scooter
Speaker 2: Braun became a protege of Usher and released his first EP,
Speaker 2: My World, in two thousand and nine. He basically became
Speaker 2: a thing right away, a pop heart throb with swoopy
Speaker 2: bangs who was known for his effect on teen girls,
Speaker 2: who were also his main audience. The songs he sang
Speaker 2: hated directly to them in those teeny bopper years, songs
Speaker 2: like One Less Lonely Girl, Favorite Girl, and in early
Speaker 2: twenty ten, the iconic Ludicrous featuring Baby and going back
Speaker 2: now nearly fifteen years later, it's a little spooky watching
Speaker 2: old videos of child Justin Bieber, because beneath this carefully
Speaker 2: curated and marketed image you do get glimpses of a normal,
Speaker 2: talented kid who's in way over his head.
Speaker 4: Hey, what's up, Internet, Guess who to Justin Bieber and
Speaker 4: I've taken over.
Speaker 2: Fun of your die. It's mine.
Speaker 4: I bought it and now it's Bieber or die. Anything
Speaker 4: that's not Bieber dies.
Speaker 2: And in many ways he was in way over his head.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, Bieber's career continued to grow. He had
Speaker 2: a gigantic social media following from the moment he became famous,
Speaker 2: and in twenty ten was said to account for three
Speaker 2: percent of all Twitter interactions. The believers flocked to all
Speaker 2: things Bieber, including a three D concert movie that I
Speaker 2: saw as a joke, so I claimed at the time,
Speaker 2: I wanted to see it. It was fine. He released
Speaker 2: a Christmas album and began work on his third studio
Speaker 2: album called Believe, and to announce his lead single, he
Speaker 2: did what any wholesome celebrity would do. In March of
Speaker 2: twenty twelve, he went on Ellen. It was his eighteenth birthday,
Speaker 2: and he announced that his first single from the album
Speaker 2: would be called Boyfriend. All right, the last time you
Speaker 2: were here, we were talking about Boyfriend, your new song
Speaker 2: that no one has heard yet.
Speaker 5: I was trying to guess what the song would sound like.
Speaker 2: And so it was released in March twenty twelve ahead
Speaker 2: of the full album in June, and it shot right
Speaker 2: to number one and just as quick aside here. Because
Speaker 2: Justin Bieber has had a number of high profiles, scandals, incidents,
Speaker 2: et ce, many of which I think were connected to
Speaker 2: him not being adequately protected as a kid. This period
Speaker 2: of time I'm talking about was before any of that.
Speaker 2: Believe came out in summer twenty twelve, and there's no
Speaker 2: real meaningful Bieber tabloid moment before twenty thirteen. So at
Speaker 2: this point he's mister sweetie, he's mister dating Selena Gomez,
Speaker 2: He's mister boyfriend. So during the launch of Believe a
Speaker 2: few months later, there were countless tie ins run by
Speaker 2: Bieber Incorporated to promote the album I'm going to single
Speaker 2: out too. There was a fragrance released called Girlfriend, which
Speaker 2: is pandering to young girls hard. In the ad copy
Speaker 2: take a Lesson.
Speaker 4: Justin Bieber launches his second perfume, dedicated to his girl fans.
Speaker 4: Girlfriend Fragrance is described as flirty, personal, and inviting. Top
Speaker 4: notes are designated to represent a chance in love and
Speaker 4: provide an exciting splash of mandarin, BlackBerry hair and strawberry.
Speaker 4: The heart is marked as Dream and includes accords of
Speaker 4: pink Frisia, star, jasmine, apricot, and orange blossom. The bass
Speaker 4: is a kid containing sensual notes of vanilla orchid, luminous musk,
Speaker 4: and white amber Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: The second was a promotion called the Girlfriend sing Off Contest.
Speaker 2: Justin announced the contest in a now lost to time
Speaker 2: video saying the following.
Speaker 4: My new fragrance is called Girlfriend, and I wanted to
Speaker 4: do this whole idea where my fans will basically take
Speaker 4: my song Boyfriend and make it into their own girlfriend version.
Speaker 4: Make your own version, rewrite it however you want to.
Speaker 4: I'll pick the best one and fly that person out
Speaker 4: to one of my concerts and have a meat and
Speaker 4: greet and stuff. It'll be fun. So make your own
Speaker 4: video right now. And I love you, I.
Speaker 2: Freaking love you, Justin, Oh my god. So girls were
Speaker 2: encouraged to rewrite the song Boyfriend to be called Girlfriend
Speaker 2: Compulsive Heterostyle right twenty twelve, and in the contest, they
Speaker 2: would sing over a karaoke track of Boyfriend, including the
Speaker 2: weirdly long intro. Entries would be uploaded by users to
Speaker 2: YouTube and the Beaber team would pick their favorite. Eventually,
Speaker 2: I guess a person named Halle one, but no one
Speaker 2: remembers Halle. There is but one girlfriend contestant that withstood
Speaker 2: history itself. On June sixth, twenty twelve, a YouTube user
Speaker 2: called WZR seven one three uploaded an entry to the
Speaker 2: contest that became instantly iconic in spite of the user
Speaker 2: not just being a complete unknown. But at first no
Speaker 2: one even knew her name, but you know her face.
Speaker 2: It's a high contrast video on an old webcam and
Speaker 2: a college sophomore's clinically white dorm room with collaged posters.
Speaker 2: A girl in the video has a side part, a
Speaker 2: green shirt, and huge blue eyes. It starts like this, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is the intro to boyfriend, and it goes on
Speaker 2: for nine seconds. And for all nine of those seconds,
Speaker 2: the girl in the video is staring down the barrel
Speaker 2: of the camera with her huge eyes and huge smile,
Speaker 2: not blinking, barely breathing, sitting a little too close to
Speaker 2: the camera, looking like the last thing you see before
Speaker 2: you die.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: She's a combination of this troped out, obsessive woman and
Speaker 2: the obsessive fan she's so tweaked out on whoever's on
Speaker 2: the other side of the camera that it's hindered her
Speaker 2: ability to use her eyelids. She is Alex Forrest, she
Speaker 2: is Miss Piggy, she is a believer, and then she
Speaker 2: launches into her parody lyrics.
Speaker 3: If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the wall.
Speaker 3: Question here with yeah, I'd always call and call. I
Speaker 3: wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you, reading
Speaker 3: all your texts to watching everything you dog nag nag
Speaker 3: on you. If I was you girl, old friends and
Speaker 3: never let you leave without a small recording device taped
Speaker 3: under your sleeves.
Speaker 2: And forty eight hours later, this clip, made by a
Speaker 2: college student in Texas who had just gotten off a
Speaker 2: shift at the Pack and Mail, had over a million
Speaker 2: views and had gone viral on Reddit. They called her
Speaker 2: the overly Attached Girlfriend aka Lena Morris and her sixteenth
Speaker 2: Minute starts.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a
Speaker 2: look back at the Internet's most famous characters of the
Speaker 2: day and figure out how their moment changed their lives
Speaker 2: and what it says about the Internet and us. My
Speaker 2: name's Jamie Loftus and I recently co hosted a screening
Speaker 2: of Chicken Run at a famous Los Angeles Movie Theater
Speaker 2: in full sexy chicken drag. So, yes, my career is
Speaker 2: going great. And today we are talking about one of
Speaker 2: the first memes. I feel like I was really fully
Speaker 2: present for a meme that communicates to you that it
Speaker 2: came out into strictly with the blown out, high contrast
Speaker 2: webcam esthetic. Our character of the day this week is
Speaker 2: indeed the overly attached girlfriend, an early YouTube star whose
Speaker 2: career and departure from the platform is a cool case
Speaker 2: study on how YouTube stardom has evolved over time, because
Speaker 2: Lena gets started when YouTube is just starting to seem
Speaker 2: like a legitimate career path, and by the time she's
Speaker 2: at the height of her popularity, American kids were saying
Speaker 2: that being a YouTuber was a more popular job choice
Speaker 2: than being an astronaut. So today we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about how that shift happened and where YouTube came from,
Speaker 2: and how fame on that platform became a thing at all.
Speaker 2: And next week we'll talk to Lena. So as the
Speaker 2: kids say, let's fucking go. It was so fun revisiting
Speaker 2: this story. Twenty twelve is a very nostalgic era of
Speaker 2: the Internet. For me, it was a time I use
Speaker 2: something called stumble Upon to find people's blogs, and it
Speaker 2: was a time where fail compilations got millions of views
Speaker 2: of people just falling down. It was Nano Raima before
Speaker 2: the AI allegations. It was Rebecca Blacks Friday. It was
Speaker 2: a time where I'd troll on eating disorder tumblers to
Speaker 2: find a new way to hate myself. That last one
Speaker 2: was sad, but I promised to tell the truth on
Speaker 2: the show. Twenty twelve was a time and when we
Speaker 2: have the sacred duty to return to if we are
Speaker 2: to understand the overly attached Girlfriend's place in Internet history.
Speaker 2: So come with me if you will to June twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: Madonna launches a tour in Tel Aviv. The same day
Speaker 2: the IDF launches an airstrike on Gaza. Nothing fucked up
Speaker 2: about that. There is a surge of gonorrhea in England
Speaker 2: and WZR seven one three who the world would quickly
Speaker 2: learn was a college student named Lena uploaded a joke
Speaker 2: entry to a Justin Bieber contest that would change her life.
Speaker 2: This is a story that wouldn't have had the sheer
Speaker 2: reach it dead without the help of two major social
Speaker 2: media platforms. Once that remain with us today YouTube and Reddit,
Speaker 2: And while Reddit has a thorough and terrifying history all
Speaker 2: its own, this week, we're going to stick to the
Speaker 2: platform that Lena chose to find her creative voice on YouTube.
Speaker 2: I think the fact that YouTube is the cultural juggernaut
Speaker 2: that it is today might surprise Lena Morris if I
Speaker 2: could teleport back to twenty twelve and tell her YouTube
Speaker 2: is weathered a lot of waves of social media turnover.
Speaker 2: It's outlived MySpace, blog Spot, snapchat, Vine, and I do
Speaker 2: believe it will ultimately outplay TikTok on a longer timeline.
Speaker 2: But it's changed a lot over the years from a
Speaker 2: business standpoint, from an algorithmic standpoint, and for the sake
Speaker 2: of this story, so I want to give you a
Speaker 2: snapshot of where YouTube and social media personalities on YouTube
Speaker 2: were at in twenty twelve, because it truly was another world.
Speaker 2: Half of the people at the height of their careers
Speaker 2: at this time have since been thoroughly canceled or moved
Speaker 2: on to other projects. Keep in mind, this was three
Speaker 2: presidents years ago. This was before all of the Twilight
Speaker 2: movies were out. Brannan is me and I was thinking
Speaker 2: vanesme you get it and to bring us there. There
Speaker 2: were two books that were massively helpful to me, and
Speaker 2: they were written by guests who have appeared on this
Speaker 2: very show. The first is Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine
Speaker 2: and the second is Taylor Lorenzz Extremely Online. So classes
Speaker 2: in session, what is YouTube? YouTube? Can I regret to
Speaker 2: inform you trace its roots back to some of the
Speaker 2: world's most embarrassing and powerful men, those being Peter Teel
Speaker 2: and Elon Musk. It was founded in two thousand and
Speaker 2: five by three expats of PayPal, which Teal co founded
Speaker 2: and Musk joined on the ground floor, and like other
Speaker 2: rising social media star Facebook, YouTube started as a botched
Speaker 2: attempt at a dating service that women had absolutely no
Speaker 2: interest in. Founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Johwito Kareem
Speaker 2: failed to launch YouTube as a dating service hard. In fact,
Speaker 2: they at one time offered women twenty bucks on Craigslist
Speaker 2: to upload videos to the service and still could not
Speaker 2: get any traction. But YouTube did have one thing that
Speaker 2: was head and shoulders above other sites. It had a
Speaker 2: really solid video uploading platform that anyone could use for free.
Speaker 2: Lorenz covers the history of how content creators on YouTube
Speaker 2: became the platform's core appeal and extremely online, and it's
Speaker 2: not as linear a path as you might expect. The
Speaker 2: founders ditched the dating angle pretty early on as they
Speaker 2: watched the site game users who seemed more interested in
Speaker 2: uploading whatever home videos, clips of TV shows they liked,
Speaker 2: and within its first year this was enough to get
Speaker 2: YouTube funding from a well respected Silicon Valley venture capital
Speaker 2: firm and rack up around one hundred thousand views in
Speaker 2: the space of an average day, which you've got to
Speaker 2: admit is not bad for the guys who were literally
Speaker 2: paying women to upload con that they didn't actually believe
Speaker 2: just a couple months earlier. Early viral successes included an
Speaker 2: unlacensed re upload of the Lonely Islands Lazy Sunday sketch
Speaker 2: from SNL, and this actually really helped legitimize the site,
Speaker 2: as well as calling in to question what was legal
Speaker 2: to post on YouTube if it wasn't actually your work.
Speaker 2: I still don't think that they've really figured that out,
Speaker 2: But soon after that, regular users started to look at
Speaker 2: YouTube as a chance to not just dump videos from
Speaker 2: their camquorders, but really build out a creative vision. Early
Speaker 2: successful YouTubers were really low fi and often pretty young.
Speaker 2: I'm honestly surprised at how many people who started their
Speaker 2: channels in two thousand and six are still around. But
Speaker 2: for longtime fans, think Smash Slash, Anthony Padilla, the Angry
Speaker 2: Video Game Nerd, Lucas Crookshank Ka Fred, and I Justine.
Speaker 2: They all launched their channels in two thousand and six
Speaker 2: and are still around to some extent today. But the
Speaker 2: early standout when it came to a YouTube channel that
Speaker 2: really held people's attention was the infamous web series Lonely
Speaker 2: Girl fifteen. And I won't get too deep into the
Speaker 2: lore behind Lonely Girl fifteen because I very much would
Speaker 2: like to make an episode about it. But if you're
Speaker 2: not familiar, Lonely Girl fifteen was a scripted web series
Speaker 2: starring actress Jessica Lee Rose playing a teenage character named Brie.
Speaker 2: She'd speak to the camera of log style while her
Speaker 2: friend Daniel hung out in the background and chimed in
Speaker 2: every now and again. As the channel continued to upload videos,
Speaker 2: it became clearer that Bree's family was a part of
Speaker 2: a freaky cult and she was slowly being primed to
Speaker 2: participate in an occult ceremony. It's a really low fly
Speaker 2: teen sci fi series, right, But the thing about it
Speaker 2: was the series pretended to be completely real, and for
Speaker 2: the first few episodes, viewers really thought that Bree was
Speaker 2: a person uploading vlogs and realizing that her family was deans.
Speaker 2: Over time, and in an early instance of YouTube fan detectiving,
Speaker 2: someone ip traced and geolocated where they were, so it
Speaker 2: was revealed pretty early in the show's run that Lonely
Speaker 2: Girl fifteen was scripted and that Brie was an actress.
Speaker 2: This was a creative experiment by a bunch of young
Speaker 2: people in LA But what seemed to surprise the YouTube
Speaker 2: brass was that even after it was exposed as scripted,
Speaker 2: the viewership kept climbing. People were really invested, and the
Speaker 2: reveal that the series authenticity was a hoax only increased
Speaker 2: its popularity. For a long time, it was the number
Speaker 2: one channel on YouTube, and part of that seemed to
Speaker 2: be because the show was good and while the material
Speaker 2: was scripted, the creators were complete unknowns, but all of
Speaker 2: a sudden they'd gotten views and attention on par with
Speaker 2: independent horror directors on zero budget and more eyes. By
Speaker 2: the end of two thousand and six, the stars and
Speaker 2: cre creators of Lonely Girl fifteen had Hollywood representatives and
Speaker 2: were appearing in mainstream magazines like The Hollywood Reporter as
Speaker 2: an example that YouTube was a place for regular people
Speaker 2: to be creative and potentially even legitimized in the mainstream.
Speaker 2: But it should be mentioned the first season of Lonely
Speaker 2: Girl fifteen aired before YouTube had ever begun monetizing its videos,
Speaker 2: meaning they made no money on it. There's another big
Speaker 2: change to YouTube. At the end of two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: a little company called Google purchased the platform for a
Speaker 2: then and still massive one point sixty five billion dollars
Speaker 2: to avoid competition with Google's inferior product, Google Video. At
Speaker 2: the time, the buy was viewed as foolish. It was
Speaker 2: helmed by then Google exec later longtime YouTube CEO the
Speaker 2: recently passed Susan Wojitski, But Google was quick to investigate
Speaker 2: what it was about YouTube that was bringing in now
Speaker 2: millions of viewers, and they wanted to figure out how
Speaker 2: to best monetize whatever it was. Going into two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven, a lot more early viral sensations blew up
Speaker 2: on YouTube think Charlie bit my Finger, Payzon Day's Chocolate Rain,
Speaker 2: David after Dentist, but there was still no clear way
Speaker 2: to maintain that virality. In two thousand and seven, users
Speaker 2: were able to monetize their videos and the invite only
Speaker 2: partner program was introduced, but few were able to actually
Speaker 2: cobble together a for real living. In the mid to
Speaker 2: late twenty tens, YouTube also became a place where musicians
Speaker 2: could be discovered, like a young Choiceavon or most famously
Speaker 2: one Justine Biber in two thousand and eight. As you
Speaker 2: pull it so with the increasing audience that was flocking
Speaker 2: to YouTube, estimates put around two hundred million people having
Speaker 2: accounts by twenty ten, there were a number of attempts
Speaker 2: inside and outside of the company to make youtubess artem
Speaker 2: fit into a box that resembled fame by the late
Speaker 2: two thousands, and during this period of growth, there were
Speaker 2: a few interesting developments. A new breed of talent agents
Speaker 2: that specialized in online stars, creator driven YouTube studios known
Speaker 2: as multi channel networks, and YouTube itself tooling with its
Speaker 2: algorithm to maximize viewership, ad revenue, and creator retention. The
Speaker 2: agent part is pretty interesting in no small part because
Speaker 2: it was a job that basically had to be invented.
Speaker 2: The most notorious YouTube agent was named Ben Lashes, who
Speaker 2: started by representing the Keyboard Cat, which is a re
Speaker 2: upload of a video of a cat from the eighties
Speaker 2: that had since died. You know this video. He went
Speaker 2: on to negotiate sponsorships and helm the careers of the
Speaker 2: likes of Doge, success Kid, Scumbag, Steve the irma gird girl,
Speaker 2: the ridiculously photogenic guy I feel like I'm losing my mind.
Speaker 2: He did, not, however, represent Lena Morris, the overly attached girlfriend.
Speaker 2: Ben Lashes basically invented this job, and other agents soon
Speaker 2: followed suit. But it's these creative multi channel networks that
Speaker 2: I think has the most powerful effect on what YouTube
Speaker 2: stardom could look like. At this time, multi channel networks
Speaker 2: held massive influence over the creator sphere and helped address
Speaker 2: the gaps and revenue that YouTube's own partner programs weren't providing.
Speaker 2: The first was a company called Next New, which started
Speaker 2: in two thousand and six and built out multiple successful
Speaker 2: channels while taking a percentage in exchange for handling the
Speaker 2: business and advertising side. They built channels around themes pop culture, fashion, automobile,
Speaker 2: let the creators focus on the creative, and then they
Speaker 2: would find the advertising dollars. YouTube wasn't so everyone could
Speaker 2: make a living. Then there was Maker's Studios, founded in
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine by successful YouTubers like Cassum g Shaik,
Speaker 2: Carl Philip DeFranco, Lisa Donovan, Danny Zappan, the list goes on.
Speaker 2: This studio was modeled on the idea of United Artists,
Speaker 2: which was founded in nineteen nineteen by Charlie Chaplin, d W. Griffith,
Speaker 2: Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, and the intention of it
Speaker 2: was to liberate and empower artists to choose their own
Speaker 2: projects out of the confines of rigid studio contracts and
Speaker 2: still make a good living. Originally, Maker Studios aim to
Speaker 2: do that same thing for YouTube by nurturing new talent
Speaker 2: through what were then referred to as super channels, the
Speaker 2: most famous of which was called the Station. The Station
Speaker 2: is also another whole story, but it served as a
Speaker 2: prototype for the YouTube and vine collab houses that would
Speaker 2: become wildly popular in the twenty tens into the early
Speaker 2: twenty twenties. The premise of the Station channel was that
Speaker 2: basically Makers student rented a nice house on Venice Beach
Speaker 2: and invited any successful YouTube to live there and cross
Speaker 2: collaborate with each other and create a ton of content
Speaker 2: for the channel. It was really popular. While he wasn't
Speaker 2: a part of the company, a young YouTuber named bo
Speaker 2: Burnham was said to couch serve at the station house
Speaker 2: from time to time. Eventually the house would be shut
Speaker 2: down due to safety concerns and excessive partying, a lesson
Speaker 2: that future social media stars definitely learned from the high
Speaker 2: house coused you know, six hundred thousand damage. Nevertheless, Maker
Speaker 2: Studios normalized the reality that YouTube was nothing without its creators,
Speaker 2: and that if the company didn't compensate and promote them accordingly, well,
Speaker 2: they would go somewhere else and find a way to
Speaker 2: do it. As Taylor Lorenz gets into the success of
Speaker 2: Maker and Next New Studios, which by the way, would
Speaker 2: be folded into Disney and the YouTube Creator Program respectively
Speaker 2: by the mid twenty tens, emphasized how important individual personalities
Speaker 2: were to the platform and for popular creators who weren't
Speaker 2: quite sure how to turn this into a career, signing
Speaker 2: with a Maker or a Next New Made a lot
Speaker 2: of sense, and they'd often end up launching series exclusively
Speaker 2: with a specific company. It was this model that actually
Speaker 2: led to the first episode of this show. Brooklyn based
Speaker 2: YouTubers the Gregory Brothers developed their auto tune the news
Speaker 2: series under Nextnew and launched a little something called the
Speaker 2: bed Intruder Song that made one Antoine Dodson a permanent
Speaker 2: and complicated figure in Internet history. Well listen to that
Speaker 2: episode for more. After the success of these companies, other
Speaker 2: multi channel networks with niche specialties started to launch, and
Speaker 2: all of these companies were raising a lot of capital
Speaker 2: to continue growing their stable of YouTube talent. They were
Speaker 2: so successful that a former YouTube executive named jo Orde
Speaker 2: Strumpolis actually left the company to launch a YouTube multi
Speaker 2: channel network of his own called full Screen, and that
Speaker 2: became a huge success in the early twenty tens, prompting
Speaker 2: YouTube to acquire Next New in retaliation in order to
Speaker 2: stay competitive. So by the early twenty tens, the idea
Speaker 2: that YouTube was a talent driven supernova was well established,
Speaker 2: but what a creator's fame could or should look like
Speaker 2: still remained a little bit opaque. Because these multi channel
Speaker 2: networks were headquartered mainly in La. This period of time
Speaker 2: meant most famous YouTubers lived in Hollywood, and this kind
Speaker 2: of spoke to the general feeling of where people seemed
Speaker 2: to think YouTube was headed. There was this feeling of
Speaker 2: maybe this is a new pipeline to mainstream stardom, the
Speaker 2: feeling of no one is going to be a YouTuber forever, right,
Speaker 2: YouTube fame will translate to movies or music, and these
Speaker 2: days that is not really an idea that exists anymore. Sure,
Speaker 2: there are exceptions. There's people like Bo Burnham, Shawn Mendez,
Speaker 2: the Green Brothers, one third of Derek Comedy, some guy
Speaker 2: named Donald Glover, Lindsay Ellis, and Liza Koshey have parlayed
Speaker 2: YouTube fame into mainstream success. But for many, the continued
Speaker 2: user growth and MLN success left some creators realizing that
Speaker 2: YouTube could actually be their job and maybe even their
Speaker 2: whole career. YouTube continued to pour money into its partnership
Speaker 2: funds to retain talent, and there are a few isolated
Speaker 2: examples of YouTubers attempting to cross over into the mainstream
Speaker 2: Around this time. I'll call back to the Fred character,
Speaker 2: remember him, Remember Fred? Hey, It's fine, It's really nice out,
Speaker 2: So I think I'm gonna go swimming later.
Speaker 3: My mom down is really cool. Pool a bit dump,
Speaker 3: It's really big.
Speaker 2: And really deep PTSD. I hated Fred, but the mainstream
Speaker 2: was determined to make Fred work on television. This from
Speaker 2: a Nickelodeon movie where John Cena played Fred's dad, And
Speaker 2: of course I'm going to want to play a clip
Speaker 2: of that dad.
Speaker 1: What do you think guys should do?
Speaker 3: The secret? It's ruthless accretion.
Speaker 5: It is you gotta look at yourself and say what
Speaker 5: time is now?
Speaker 3: Show what kind of man you.
Speaker 2: Really are, and for what it's worth. The actor who
Speaker 2: played Fred, Lucas Crookshank, is still on YouTube and has
Speaker 2: a good sense of humor about all of it. I mean,
Speaker 2: he was a teenager at the time, but still Fred God.
Speaker 2: But while most YouTubers flopped out of mainstream entertainment, you
Speaker 2: also had You're justin Bieber's. And while creators were navigating
Speaker 2: this in the twenty tens, YouTube itself was pretty preoccupied
Speaker 2: with a terrifying concept called in And this is where
Speaker 2: Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine comes in and gives a
Speaker 2: lot of context on the history of the YouTube algorithm
Speaker 2: and what kind of users it was boosting. The book
Speaker 2: explains that in the early twenty tens, the company had
Speaker 2: an increased focus on maximizing the YouTube algorithm to generate
Speaker 2: video recommendations that would keep people on the platform for
Speaker 2: as long as possible. Fisher uses the example of a
Speaker 2: French AI expert named Guillem Chaslau I know I said
Speaker 2: that wrong, who was brought to YouTube in twenty ten
Speaker 2: and was tasked with raising average watch time on the platform.
Speaker 2: He literally received an email saying.
Speaker 4: Watch time, and only watch time.
Speaker 2: The focus of the company was developing an algorithm that
Speaker 2: effortlessly catered and even anticipated the desires of viewers, making
Speaker 2: it impossible to switch to something else. Search engine expert
Speaker 2: Christo's Goodrow, who was also working at YouTube at the time,
Speaker 2: hold Fisher.
Speaker 4: Our job was to keep people engaged in hanging out
Speaker 4: with us. More watch time began. It's more advertising, which
Speaker 4: incentivizes more content creators, which draws more viewership.
Speaker 2: The YouTube algorithm was significantly improved throughout the early twenty tens,
Speaker 2: using machine learning to simulate the kind of curation that
Speaker 2: used to be done by clueless old men in boardrooms.
Speaker 2: Now it was done by an evil computer. COO Schaslo
Speaker 2: echoes this feeling, singling out the year twenty twelve, the
Speaker 2: same year Lena Morris goes viral.
Speaker 4: He says, within a few months, with a small team,
Speaker 4: we had an algorithm that increased watch time to generate
Speaker 4: millions of dollars of additional ad revenue. So it was
Speaker 4: really really exciting.
Speaker 2: YouTube was absolutely running their pre roll ads, sure, but
Speaker 2: the real value of the company was the technology that
Speaker 2: it used that detected down to absurd detail what you
Speaker 2: watched and how long do you watched. It a truly
Speaker 2: ridiculous amount of data that users were just handing over.
Speaker 2: But as this went on, Shaslow became concerned with what
Speaker 2: developing such an addictive relationship to the platform could potentially mean,
Speaker 2: for like the world I'll quote from Max Fisher one
Speaker 2: more time here.
Speaker 4: As the system honed its powers, Shilleau noticed it developing
Speaker 4: strange habits. It began nudging lots of users to watch
Speaker 4: videos espousing anger at women, sometimes particular women, like the
Speaker 4: game culture critic Anita Sarkisian, sometimes women. Generally, men were
Speaker 4: spending forty percent more time on YouTube than women were,
Speaker 4: a legacy in part of the enormous quantity of video
Speaker 4: game related content on the site in those days, the
Speaker 4: natural thing for the algorithm to do, Shilo realized, would
Speaker 4: be to privilege more male centered content.
Speaker 2: And if you know anything about Internet history, you'll know
Speaker 2: what this algorithmic tendency led to on a long enough timeline, Gamergate,
Speaker 2: a brutal misogynist harassment can pain led mainly by male
Speaker 2: gamers between twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, which led a
Speaker 2: number of women in the gaming industry to be doxed,
Speaker 2: to be threatened, and to fear for their lives. And
Speaker 2: if you know any more Internet history, you'll know that
Speaker 2: this same playbook is still used to harass marginalize people
Speaker 2: by mobs of egg profiled assholes ever since. But this
Speaker 2: is twenty twelve and Chaslou doesn't know any of this
Speaker 2: is going to happen. All he knows is that he
Speaker 2: wants to prevent this slowly radicalized recommendation algorithm from getting worse,
Speaker 2: So he started spending time on a side project that
Speaker 2: attempted to train the current algorithm to counterbalance this effect
Speaker 2: and not just push hateful rhetoric to young male viewers
Speaker 2: for profit. But before he could make any meaningful progress
Speaker 2: on this goal or really tell anyone what he was
Speaker 2: working on. YouTube leadership announced at a conference in summer
Speaker 2: twenty twelve, just a few months after Overly Attached Girlfriend
Speaker 2: went viral, that there was a new goal for the company.
Speaker 2: Employees were told that by the end of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: just about four years later, YouTube wanted a billion hours
Speaker 2: of content to be consumed a day on the platform.
Speaker 2: This was ridiculous. This was ten times the amount of
Speaker 2: viewership they were getting in the summer of twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: and it was a goal that they achieved by making
Speaker 2: the problem that Shaslow was concerned about get much worse,
Speaker 2: because his whole algorithmic ethics project was sidelined immediately in
Speaker 2: favor of the opposite, juicing the algorithm to feed users
Speaker 2: anything without any quality control of the truth or hatefulness
Speaker 2: of the content that was pushed. Though, by the mid
Speaker 2: to late twenty tens, YouTube was a full on radicalization machine,
Speaker 2: one that Fisher mentions was quite literally left unsupervised in
Speaker 2: order to achieve this billion hours a day goal. And
Speaker 2: it's so wild to think that the Overly Attached Girlfriend's
Speaker 2: launch happens at this pretty major precipice in Internet culture.
Speaker 2: Twenty twelve was a precipice in the way content creators
Speaker 2: viewed themselves. They were moving from the idea that they
Speaker 2: would abandon the platform for movies and realize that they
Speaker 2: might just be able to support themselves and mend some
Speaker 2: just by staying on YouTube. And it's a precipice for
Speaker 2: the algorithm. Taking Schaslow's account into consideration, overly attached girlfriend
Speaker 2: probably came to prominence in the last few months before
Speaker 2: the YouTube algorithm was unleashed to a violent degree. It's heavy,
Speaker 2: it's a lot, and then there's this.
Speaker 3: If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the
Speaker 3: wall question here you're with Yeah, I'd always call and call.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you,
Speaker 3: reading all your texts, to watching everything you do. Nag.
Speaker 2: And when we come back, Lena Morris gets swept up
Speaker 2: into this triple decker cyclone clusterfuck. Maybe welcome back to
Speaker 2: sixteenth minute. This morning, my cats are doing this thing
Speaker 2: where it looks like they're having sex but they're not.
Speaker 2: One is just sitting on the other like he's an
Speaker 2: egg that's going to hatch. It seems like they're both
Speaker 2: fine with it. I just don't like someone let me
Speaker 2: know what this is. And today we're talking about one
Speaker 2: of these seminal early celebrities of YouTube, Lena Morris, the
Speaker 2: overly attached girlfriend. So okay, we know about the Justin
Speaker 2: Bieber contest. We know about the both very intense and
Speaker 2: pretty scattered view of what YouTube fame could look like
Speaker 2: at the time the meme went viral, But what happens
Speaker 2: after the initial viral moment? To remind you, Lena Morris
Speaker 2: went viral on two platforms at the same time in
Speaker 2: slightly different ways. On Reddit, it's just an image of
Speaker 2: Lena that goes viral. The wide blue eyes, the brunette
Speaker 2: side parts, the vacant smile. Sir, and you might remember
Speaker 2: how this meme was formatted. Here are some examples. You
Speaker 2: don't want me to be your girlfriend anymore?
Speaker 4: Of course, I'll marry you.
Speaker 2: I told all of your friends that you hate them.
Speaker 4: Now we can hang out every day. That girl commented
Speaker 4: on your status she's a slut.
Speaker 2: Surprise. I stopped taking my birth control two weeks ago.
Speaker 2: You get it. Jealous clinging possessive jokes from twenty twelve
Speaker 2: and separate from Reddit, Lena goes viral on YouTube, where
Speaker 2: you can hear the full parody song and the launch
Speaker 2: of this character. But the upload, titled JB fan video
Speaker 2: pulls in over a million views in its first two
Speaker 2: days and gets additional traction when Reddit realizes that the
Speaker 2: source of the overly attached girlfriend image has a fuller
Speaker 2: piece of content attached to it, and the mainstream media
Speaker 2: picks up on it headlines.
Speaker 4: Like girls justin Bieber girlfriend parody is unbelievably creepy overly
Speaker 4: attached girlfriend and is the meme you've been waiting for, you.
Speaker 2: Know the type of post. And by June fifteenth, twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: Lena publicly acknowledges in a tweet that she is the
Speaker 2: person everyone's been meaning for the last week and a half, saying.
Speaker 4: I'm always amused by the overly attached girlfriend tweets and
Speaker 4: I realize my face is associated with it and I'm
Speaker 4: slightly disturbed.
Speaker 2: Still awesome from here on out. What is mercifully and
Speaker 2: consistently true of this story is that everyone basically seems
Speaker 2: to be in on the joke. It's immediately clear in
Speaker 2: early interviews with Lena that she's doing a bit, and
Speaker 2: while nearly every interview she does in these early days
Speaker 2: and for years after, demands that she does the eyes
Speaker 2: of the overly Attached Girlfriend, no one is conflating this
Speaker 2: character with the real person. And I actually do feel
Speaker 2: the need to specify that, because I think the men
Speaker 2: of today's Internet might genuinely struggle to detect a bit.
Speaker 2: I blame the algorithm. Originally, the Overly Attached Girlfriend uses
Speaker 2: the name Lena Walker to protect her true identity. Remember
Speaker 2: when we cared about that and Lena sets up public
Speaker 2: facing Facebook and Twitter accounts Because however sudden things had
Speaker 2: been in the last ten days, her decision seemed clear.
Speaker 2: Lena was going to lean into the meme and was
Speaker 2: not shying away from the newfound fame it had brought her.
Speaker 2: This was further confirmed a few days later on June eighteenth,
Speaker 2: when Lena uploaded a second parody song video as Overly
Speaker 2: Attached Girlfriend to YouTube. This time she wrote lyrics to
Speaker 2: then massive hit Call Me Maybe by Justin bieberback Canadian
Speaker 2: Carly Raid Jepson. Here's the Overly Attached Girlfriend version.
Speaker 5: Hey, I just saw you with that lady paid for
Speaker 5: her dinner. That's kind of shady gree remember your mind.
Speaker 5: You say you're dating. I know you're kidding, so.
Speaker 3: I'll be waiting.
Speaker 2: And this goes megaviral too, meaning the first two YouTube
Speaker 2: videos ever made were numbers one and two on all
Speaker 2: of YouTube. And keep in mind that in twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: this was not an easy feat. There was a lot
Speaker 2: of money and clout to combat with, but she was
Speaker 2: on a roll and signed with the manager shortly after.
Speaker 2: Though at twenty she wasn't exactly sure what she wanted
Speaker 2: to do yet and wasn't ready to uproot her life
Speaker 2: in Texas overnight. But she is ready to commit to
Speaker 2: YouTube and soon decides to not return to school, and
Speaker 2: of course, a few crummy imitators crop up, the overly
Speaker 2: attached boyfriend, the underly attached girlfriend, the regularly attached girlfriend,
Speaker 2: mime made from more normal pictures of Lena. But she's
Speaker 2: focused on building her own brand and starts collaborating with
Speaker 2: other big YouTubers, as was the trend back then, and
Speaker 2: as she pivots from full time college student the full
Speaker 2: time YouTuber, a still murky job title at the time,
Speaker 2: Lena continued to make appearances in mainstream media the next
Speaker 2: year because keep in mind, the viral lifespan of a
Speaker 2: meme personality in twenty twelve was significantly longer than it
Speaker 2: is today, and so she gets opportunities like hosting the
Speaker 2: Red Carpet of the AMAS in twenty twelve, and in
Speaker 2: twenty thirteen has a staring contest with Jessica Alba on
Speaker 2: stage at the Social Star Awards Just look into those big, sexy,
Speaker 2: creepy eyes and get it On, as well as a
Speaker 2: memorable appearance on Jimmy Fallon. And while Lena makes a
Speaker 2: lot of the moves one would expect from a YouTuber
Speaker 2: of this era, meaning VidCon appearances, fan conventions, and appearance
Speaker 2: in a truly wild twenty fifteen Delta Airlines safety video
Speaker 2: that featured every meme personality at the time demonstrating a
Speaker 2: safety joke. I'm just gonna link it in the description
Speaker 2: it's impossible to explain in an audio medium. But of course,
Speaker 2: Lena's moment as a heightened mainstream media figure passes, eventually
Speaker 2: leaving her to maintain and grow her YouTube audience. She
Speaker 2: ultimately decides to stay in Texas, not going the way
Speaker 2: of moving into the standard house or making a YouTuber movie,
Speaker 2: which rarely goes well anyway, or pursuing a legacy acting
Speaker 2: or pop music career. Instead, Lena goes into business for
Speaker 2: herself and begins to write, perform, and edit her weekly
Speaker 2: content in addition to maintaining the front facing relationship with
Speaker 2: her viewers. Pretty soon, she's got audiences on Twitter, on Instagram,
Speaker 2: on snapchat, you name a popular social media between twenty
Speaker 2: twelve and now, and she's brought her follower base along
Speaker 2: there with her. And it's interesting to trace the way
Speaker 2: this content grows and changes over time. At the beginning,
Speaker 2: Lena focuses most of her weekly YouTube stuff on the
Speaker 2: Overly Attached Girlfriend throughout twenty twelve and twenty thirteen. Here
Speaker 2: are some examples. Welcome to behind the means tonight's episode
Speaker 2: Overly Attached Girlfriend. This Mother's Day, you have a choice.
Speaker 2: Who would you rather spend it with? Your mother or
Speaker 2: the mother of your future children.
Speaker 3: For some reason, men love it when women make them sandwiches.
Speaker 3: It's one of the fastest ways to his heart and
Speaker 3: one of the best ways to make sure he'll stay
Speaker 3: with you forever.
Speaker 2: But as time goes on, Lena shares more of her
Speaker 2: own personality, formally separating herself from the character, and in
Speaker 2: classic jump cut YouTube comedy style, would perform sketches as
Speaker 2: herself talking to the overly attached girlfriend. And while some
Speaker 2: of it's dated, Lena avoids a lot of the tropes
Speaker 2: of this era of YouTube comedy. She's not screaming at
Speaker 2: the top of her lungs, she isn't going edge lord.
Speaker 2: She's making stuff that she and her audience enjoy from
Speaker 2: week to week. And if all you have to go
Speaker 2: on are these videos. If you're watching Lena's content for
Speaker 2: the next few years, it genuinely seems like she's having
Speaker 2: a good time. As the years pass, as a full
Speaker 2: time YouTuber, Lena develops a couple other characters that appear
Speaker 2: regularly on the channel and make sketches along with whatever
Speaker 2: was trending on the algorithm at that time, food review videos,
Speaker 2: reaction videos, you name it. But behind the scenes fans
Speaker 2: would learn years later Lena was not as content as
Speaker 2: the image she projected in the videos. In fact, she'd
Speaker 2: been having mental health struggles and issues with creator burnout
Speaker 2: for years, going back to her first years on YouTube.
Speaker 2: She'd been in therapy for some time after really struggling
Speaker 2: with the anxiety of producing weekly content. She felt proud
Speaker 2: of the pressure of navigating what a YouTuber's career was
Speaker 2: supposed to look like, of feeling isolated from her peers,
Speaker 2: making things by herself, and while many of the YouTubers
Speaker 2: she'd come up with had risen and fallen in the
Speaker 2: time she'd been regularly posting. Between twenty twelve and twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: Lena hit a wall, and on July twenty fourth, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: she posted a video called breaking Up with You Toobe.
Speaker 3: After about a year and a half of doing it,
Speaker 3: I started to feel a bit depressed, and starting around
Speaker 3: like twenty fourteen, I would say the beginning of twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: I sort of landed myself in a real deep depression,
Speaker 3: and I was keeping it a real deep secret from
Speaker 3: everyone around me. I felt shamed and I felt guilt
Speaker 3: for being stressed and overwhelmed in a world and with
Speaker 3: a job and opportunities that were so great. I didn't
Speaker 3: understand why I couldn't handle it.
Speaker 2: It's a half hour long video and is uncharacteristically confessional
Speaker 2: for Lena. She gets into topics that were far less
Speaker 2: trendy to discuss at the time, talking about a feeling
Speaker 2: that a lot of online creatives were starting to discuss
Speaker 2: at this time. Earlier in twenty nineteen, writer Anne Helen
Speaker 2: Peterson published what I consider to be a seminal essay
Speaker 2: about life online during late Capitalism, called How Millennials Became
Speaker 2: the Burnout Generation, and it went viral because it articulated
Speaker 2: so many feelings that young people did not then have
Speaker 2: the language to explain. And Lena alludes to feelings like
Speaker 2: that in much of this essay, along with just struggling
Speaker 2: with depression. She felt like a fraud. She didn't want
Speaker 2: to let her audience down. She felt very disarmed being
Speaker 2: at the whims of the algorithm. She was exhausted and
Speaker 2: angry and critical of herself and ashamed that she felt
Speaker 2: so unhappy while experiencing what by that time was the
Speaker 2: number one dream job for American kids YouTuber. It's an
Speaker 2: emotional video, and Lena says it's time for her to
Speaker 2: step back for her own health. Here's another clip.
Speaker 3: My releaseationship with YouTube, honestly, like started to become more
Speaker 3: negative than positive. And I'm just in a place where, like,
Speaker 3: I know, as much as I don't want to admit it,
Speaker 3: I know that this part of my life is done
Speaker 3: and it's time to say goodbye. How does it feel
Speaker 3: to be broken up with by the overly attached girlfriend that?
Speaker 2: Anyway, The comments on this video were overwhelmingly supportive, thankfully,
Speaker 2: and Lena did leave YouTube after that to focus on herself.
Speaker 2: For years, she didn't leave social media completely. Occasionally she'd
Speaker 2: post on Instagram or Snapchat. She eventually started at TikTok
Speaker 2: when that became a thing to do, and would even
Speaker 2: perform as overly Attached girlfriend from time to time, but
Speaker 2: now it was on her terms, not the strict full
Speaker 2: time schedules she'd enforced on herself for five years and
Speaker 2: in ever changing, pretty punishing YouTube landscape. In twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: Lena does I think the only controversial thing I've heard
Speaker 2: of in her entire your career and sells an NFT
Speaker 2: of the original overly Attached Girlfriend meme for over four
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars to a music company in Dubai because sure, thankfully,
Speaker 2: the NFT boom has now ostensibly passed, but were understandably
Speaker 2: very controversial in the early twenty twenties for being yet
Speaker 2: another predatory tech bubble that wasted a shitload of energy,
Speaker 2: but at the time, selling NFTs was viewed as a
Speaker 2: way for people who had been memed to death over
Speaker 2: the years to make some money from their likeness. Other
Speaker 2: meme expats like the Disaster Girl, that picture of a
Speaker 2: little girl smiling mysteriously in front of a house burning down.
Speaker 2: People like success Kid, bad Luck Brian, and the Erma
Speaker 2: Gerd Girl all sold NFTs during this time. And yes,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to argue that the blockchain is anything
Speaker 2: but a nightmare, but I do understand the reasoning which
Speaker 2: was consistent across those selling. The Internet had been using
Speaker 2: these people's image for nearly or over a decade by
Speaker 2: this point, and most hadn't been able to control or
Speaker 2: even vaguely profit from that. NFTs are fucked, and I
Speaker 2: can't really blame any of these people for wanting to
Speaker 2: get compensated for years of their image being parlayed while
Speaker 2: they had to navigate the world no ethical consumption right
Speaker 2: and for what it's worth, Lena seems to have complicated
Speaker 2: feelings about having done it now and in the years
Speaker 2: before and stance. She's been a genuinely kind and thoughtful
Speaker 2: person in how she's handled her public and private persona
Speaker 2: she popped up on YouTube one more time in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the
Speaker 2: original meme, but at the time I started working on
Speaker 2: this episode, that was it. And then on August fourth
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty four, Lena posted a video to YouTube
Speaker 2: for the first time in years, in a video titled
Speaker 2: five years Later, five years from the moment that she
Speaker 2: left YouTube. And I was really excited because it's Lena
Speaker 2: seeming a lot more comfortable with herself. She gives some
Speaker 2: updates on her life, but mostly she's just the person
Speaker 2: people fell in love with over a decade ago.
Speaker 3: I haven't done YouTube full time since I was in
Speaker 3: my mid twenties, and I don't know that I ever
Speaker 3: had a healthy relationship with YouTube. And I'm curious now,
Speaker 3: as you know, someone who's been through it and is
Speaker 3: older and has worked on my mental health and still
Speaker 3: loves creating things and making content and connecting with you guys.
Speaker 3: I'm really curious what that looks like when I'm in
Speaker 3: a healthy place. I'm curious what a healthy relationship to
Speaker 3: YouTube looks like.
Speaker 2: And the main takeaway of this video is she's thinking
Speaker 2: about coming back to YouTube. Her audience, of course, was stoked,
Speaker 2: and that was when I knew I needed to reach
Speaker 2: out to her to better understand this very specific journey
Speaker 2: been on and next week I speak exclusively about the
Speaker 2: highs and lows of life online with the overly attached
Speaker 2: girlfriend herself, Lena Morris. See You Then. Sixteenth Minute is
Speaker 2: a production of fool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted,
Speaker 2: and produced by me Jamie LASiS. Our executive producers are
Speaker 2: Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is
Speaker 2: our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is
Speaker 2: by Sad thirteen and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
Speaker 2: producer Anderson, my Kat's flee and Casper and my pet Rockbert,
Speaker 2: who will outlive us all Bye.