Evening, Meteor readers,

On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was.
“It’s October 3rd.”

The first person to respond to this email with the correct movie title for this iconic line gets a special shoutout in Thursday’s newsletter. And don’t google, because I’ll know! Speaking of shoutouts, I’m sending a big virtual high-five to reader Camila for setting the record for most referrals of The Meteor in a single day. There’s a sweet tote coming your way!

In today’s newsletter, Scarlett Harris chats with Taylor Lorenz about who really made the internet, men do a weird thing, and we tell you some good news.

Watching that movie,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Last summer, we added Antarctica to the list of places where it’s unsafe to be female. And now, women are fighting back. In response to a report that found a “pervasive culture of sexual harassment and assault” at a research station, The 19th explains how women geoscientists are fighting back with intervention programs geared towards providing safe work environments for their peers.

• Hundreds of men flooded a Florida tech conference last week looking for work, which isn’t out of the ordinary—except for the fact that it was a conference specifically aimed at helping women and non-binary people network. (Is this payback for all the girlies buying tickets to Chiefs games, gentlemen?)

• The New York Times has found that, since 2003, the Department of Justice has arrested and jailed more than 100,000 immigrants not for committing crimes, but so that they can testify in cases against the individuals who helped get them into the U.S.

• Did you know there’s a new housing law about to go into effect in several states inspired by and named after (but not exactly honoring) Katy Perry?

BOOK TALK

A Brief History of the Internet…And the Women Who’ve Been Left Out of It

Journalist Taylor Lorenz sets the record straight

BY SCARLETT HARRIS

PHOTO BY BRIAN TREITLER

I put off reading Taylor Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet, because after a whole day of being extremely online, the last thing I generally feel like doing is reading about it. But I’m glad I did, because Lorenz—a reporter for The Washington Post who’s known both for tirelessly covering topics like online political extremism and doxxing, and for being extremely online herself—has written a light, breezy dispatch of the last 20 years of the internet.

“I wanted to write a book that was a fun read that people could move through…and a little bit nostalgic, too, for people who lived through all of this,” she tells The Meteor.

This achievement is no mean feat given that Lorenz herself has been harassed and targeted by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. Despite this, Lorenz describes herself as a “tech optimist:” “I have experienced the best of the internet—it’s given me my career and a job that I love—and I’ve experienced some of the worst of the internet.”

Here, she tells The Meteor about writing about a medium that pendulates wildly from one day to the next, which generation is most likely to fall victim to online scams (spoiler: it’s not who you think. Or maybe it is…), and how, despite the rise of the “tech bro,” women played a huge role in making the internet what it is.

Scarlett Harris: There’s a quote in the book from one of your interviewees who says that the internet is “not the same as it was even a year ago”—and that was in 2019! What was it like to write a book in which the subject matter is changing on a daily basis?

Taylor Lorenz: This is why I wrote an internet history book! Because [it’s] changing so quickly you don’t have much time to contextualize things. It’s really hard to zoom out and look at what the internet has wrought [over] the past 20 years and really tell that story. [I end the book] in 2021. We’re at this weird moment right now—especially with COVID, which shoved everyone inside and online—that felt like a bookend to an era. I thought I should end it around then.

We’ve seen a lot of platform-specific stories, like The Social Network. We understand the history of social media through these corporate, Silicon Valley narratives. I wanted to help people understand how this all emerged without telling it through the lens of this genius tech man. I really wanted to tell this story from the user’s side.

You mention these “tech man” figureheads of industry, but interestingly Extremely Online is centered on women. Why did you choose to approach it from that angle?

So much of the internet was pioneered by women, and they’ve been completely written out of history. When you look at who were the influential content creators or whatever you want to call them, they’re often young women. [Lorenz has a chapter in the book that dissects the recent move from the women-coded “influencer” to the male-friendly “content creator.”] It’s known in the tech world that if you have a product that’s used by teen girls, that’s a good sign because they’re some of the most hyper-engaged social media users. I wanted to tell the stories of some of these women, what they went through, and the level of misogyny that happened and continues to happen.

A lot of people who are marginalized helped build [the internet]. Stay-at-home moms ushered in the blogging revolution. People like Tay Zonday, who wrote “Chocolate Rain,” ended up being the blueprint for virality, and his song is about systemic racism! [Proto-influencer] Julia Allison I write a lot about; I wish I had more time to write about what she went through. Look at what happened with the Johnny Depp trial more recently and these misogynistic harassment campaigns that are being levied against women. It’s really important to think critically about misogyny, [and] how the internet and our media landscape facilitate misogyny—because let’s be real, a lot of hate these women got were from legacy institutions who wanted to keep these women in their place.

We do have to talk about the TikTok of it all. I think a lot of people found solace in it during lockdown…but as you say, we really saw how much of a cesspool it can be—or what you call the TikTokalypse—during last year’s Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial. Do you see TikTok as harmful or helpful?

I think it’s neutral at this point. There’s reason to be concerned about it, not in terms of ownership but the instant mobs that can be generated there. Suddenly the whole app will mobilize for or against someone, whether that’s Johnny Depp or West Elm Caleb or Couch Guy. But it’s an incredible portal into our world and a valuable communication tool. It’s about how we use these tools, what we use them for, and, if we do regulate them, that we do it in a smart, not restrictive way in which people’s privacy is invaded. Some bills [that seek to regulate TikTok] are ostensibly about keeping kids safe online, but are really about taking away people’s privacy. The verdict’s still out on TikTok.

A recent tweet I saw contended that Boomers and Gen Z were the most vulnerable to online scams. Do you agree? What makes them so susceptible to the deception and fabrication of social media?

Boomers grew up in a time without the internet, so they don’t understand it and don’t know how to navigate it. Gen Z grew up with too much access to information and not enough contextualizing of that information. I don’t think anyone has media literacy—in America, especially. The majority of Americans can’t tell an opinion article from a reported article, so they certainly can’t tell the nuance of information in this content creator-driven ecosystem, especially with things like TikTok where you develop parasocial relationships with people who are telling you information that you’re so primed to believe because of the [intimacy of the] platform.

This is a failure of the public education system. We don’t teach civics or [media] literacy, and there’s all of these political actors who have a very vested interest in people not having that. You have the institution of journalism which I also don’t think is interested in people having media literacy outside of their own interests. You shouldn’t trust the mainstream news all the time, either. We see all the problematic, transphobic stuff that gets published in major news outlets, so we all need better media literacy education, and there’s no authority that we should trust. We have a huge crisis of trust.

One of the influencers you profile said, “No therapist was even trained in internet hate back then. It was hard to get help for the emotional breakdowns I was having from people lashing out at me.” We hear about law enforcement still being clueless about cyberstalking and doxxing. Do you think that’s changed?

No, it’s gotten worse. I wrote a story a couple of months ago about another horrible Supreme Court decision about online stalking being totally fine as long as the stalker intended it in a nice way! Hello, have you ever had a stalker? They’re completely delusional. It’s horrible. It’s that old trope of Oh, just turn off your phone. We live in an internet-mediated world. I could quit the internet tomorrow and these people would still be showing up at my job or harassing my family members and getting me kicked off TV shows for being too controversial. It shuts women, people of color, and LGBTQ people out of opportunities. It’s not getting better. It won’t get better until we have this gerontocracy out of power. We need people who actually get it writing the laws and figuring out policy. Right now, we have a bunch of Boomers who don’t know how to turn their computer on.

Given all this, how do you maintain your levity when it comes to the internet? Would you ever consider stepping away from social media or think that others should?

I’m very much a tech optimist. The power of the internet is its ability to connect people. Human connection is good, as opposed to isolation. I truly believe in a better world through technology.  I don’t love what the internet has become right now. The problem we’re facing is that for the past 15 years, these tech conglomerates have emerged that have taken the beauty of the internet and corporatized and commodified it. I don’t think that we want a less connected world, but I don’t think that our connections should be mediated, warped, and exploited by these completely irresponsible, terrible tech companies. We’re in a fluctuation period. It’s still very early in the course of internet history, and overwhelmingly I do consider it a positive thing.

TELL ME SOMETHIN’ GOOD 🎶

• Good news: The New York Liberty are headed to the WNBA finals for the first time since 2002. (That’s a shameless plug for a team I love.) The better news: The WNBA playoffs have seen record-breaking viewership this year. First you get the viewers, then you get the money, then you get the power.

• STI rates have been steadily rising in queer communities, but researchers have found that a common and inexpensive antibiotic (doxycycline) can be used as a “morning after” pill to prevent STIs when taken within 72 hours after unprotected sex. So if you don’t wrap it before you tap it, you’ll at least be able to pop it to stop it.

• Wondering how to talk to your kids about the climate crisis? Well, these shows are making it easier to start a very tough conversation—and I can report they’re also entertaining for adults.

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