What The Heck Happened To The Internet? — With Ryan Broderick

Summary

Big Technology Podcast: "What The Heck Happened To The Internet? — With Ryan Broderick"

Release Date: January 8, 2025

Hosts and Guests:

• Alex Kantrowitz – Host of the Big Technology Podcast
• Ryan Broderick – Reporter, author of the newsletter Garbage Day, and host of the Panic World podcast
• Ranjan Roy – Founder of Margins

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1. Introduction and Context

In this enlightening episode of the Big Technology Podcast, Alex Kantrowitz delves deep into the transformative shifts that the Internet has undergone, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Joined by Ryan Broderick and Ranjan Roy, the conversation explores the evolution of online culture, the rise of new viral phenomena, changes in social media algorithms, and the broader implications for media and politics.

2. The Pandemic's Impact on Internet Culture

Alex initiates the discussion by highlighting viral moments like Hayley Welch's controversial TikTok comment and the emergence of "Costco Guys" as examples of how internet fame has become more accessible and diverse. He posits that the shift from a "follow" model to "for you" algorithms has democratized content visibility.

Ryan Broderick agrees, noting the era before these changes felt like a "digital monoculture" where similar content prevailed globally:

"We kind of lived like that for about a decade. The biggest difference now is apps like TikTok are breaking that by showing you hyper-personalized feeds of content specifically for you." ([03:07])

Ranjan Roy adds perspective on how the pandemic transformed online engagement:

"The Internet stopped being a subcultural space." ([05:12])

3. Rise of the Zinternet and Normie Culture

The trio discusses the concept of the "Zinternet," a term coined by Ryan's associate Max Reed, describing a segment of the internet populated by everyday individuals engaging with straightforward, relatable content.

Ryan elaborates on how platforms like TikTok now cater to everyday humor and relatable scenarios:

"If you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff... TikTok's algorithm identifies that and shows it to you." ([07:31])

Ranjan connects this to generational shifts, reflecting on his own experiences as a 40-something dad:

"The Zinternet captures the 4U verse following dichotomy pretty well." ([08:17])

4. The Emergence and Potential of Blue Sky

A significant portion of the discussion centers around Blue Sky, a social network aiming to revive more traditional follower-based interactions amidst the algorithm-driven feeds of platforms like TikTok.

Ryan is optimistic about Blue Sky's growth, comparing its potential trajectory to Twitter's user base in 2011:

"If it continues at the pace it's at, it will hit it [100 million users]." ([12:40])

Ranjan appreciates Blue Sky for fostering genuine networking and engagement:

"I'm posting for the love of posting, just pure love of posting. It's from my actual network." ([19:55])

Alex expresses skepticism, questioning whether Blue Sky can sustain its growth amidst a saturated social media landscape:

"With so much interesting things happening within the group chats, why would you go to a sort of less relevant social network to sort of see what's going on?" ([16:16])

5. Subcultures and the Depths of the Internet

The conversation shifts to the resilience of smaller online subcultures and their existence beneath the mainstream Zinternet.

Ryan underscores that while these communities still exist, they are now "deep, hidden under layers of dark social in group chats and discords":

"They're not nearly as visible... until something happens in one of those communities." ([11:05])

An example discussed is the controversy surrounding a Muppet fan account's misconduct on Twitter:

"All the malfeasance was happening in DMs." ([11:53])

6. BuzzFeed's Struggles and the Changing Media Landscape

Ranjan highlights BuzzFeed's recent sale of assets like First We Feast for $82.5 million as a sign of the media company's financial troubles:

"BuzzFeed as a business is in a lot of trouble and is just trying to clean up their balance sheet." ([36:51])

Ryan criticizes traditional digital media companies for being ill-equipped to handle successful internet properties:

"Buzzfeed doesn't know what to do with [First We Feast]. The media companies of the 2000s and 2010s... are a missing link between two very different eras of how media is made." ([38:06])

Alex connects this to the shift in social media algorithms, suggesting that platforms like BuzzFeed thrived when aggregating similar viral content before algorithms took over:

"The core purpose of BuzzFeed is no longer needed as social media's algorithms became so effective." ([41:03])

7. Monetization of Viral Content and OnlyFans’ Role

The discussion transitions to the monetization strategies of viral content creators, particularly focusing on OnlyFans.

Ryan explains how OnlyFans has become a lucrative platform for creators like Lily Phillips, who employs viral stunts to drive subscriptions:

"She's trying to monetize this stuff... porn stars and sex workers online now have a much easier way of directly making money off of going viral." ([28:19])

Ranjan observes that public content often serves as lead generation for paid content:

"The public content is just lead gen for the paid stuff." ([34:37])

Alex notes the shift towards more provocative content as creators aim to drive audiences behind paywalls:

"The algorithms are pushing that very hard... It's all getting lazier and sillier because it's trying to get you to go behind the paywall." ([33:00])

8. Political Realignments and the Decline of the Culture War

A pivotal segment of the episode examines the intersection of internet culture with political dynamics, particularly the waning interest in traditional culture war topics.

Ryan posits that age cohorts influenced by long-standing online culture wars are beginning to shift focus:

"I'm waiting to see what replaces it... the culture war is a direct result of sort of reconfiguring society." ([51:53])

Ranjan reflects on the generational disinterest in repetitive political narratives, suggesting that new forms of identity and conflict are emerging:

"The algorithm demands something new. You can't keep saying the same thing over and over again." ([52:45])

Alex speculates whether the Republicans' recent victories have muted the intensity of culture war narratives:

"Is it possible that the culture war is less interesting, basically, because the Republicans won?" ([50:45])

9. The Future of the Internet and Media

In their closing thoughts, the hosts and guests contemplate the future trajectory of the Internet and media consumption.

Ryan references Jonah Peretti's master's thesis on identity in late-stage capitalism, suggesting that fractured identities are leading to the decline of traditional culture war content:

"Identity has become so fractured and I think so boring for people that I am waiting to see what replaces it." ([52:55])

Ranjan echoes this sentiment, emphasizing that the current moment marks the beginning of a new era in digital consumption:

"We're definitely at the beginning of something new. Hopefully, it's not too scary." ([56:15])

Alex concludes by highlighting the ongoing transformation and the uncertainty that accompanies it, inviting listeners to stay engaged as the digital landscape continues to evolve.

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Key Takeaways

1. Algorithmic Shift: The transition from follow-based to algorithm-driven content feeds has democratized viral fame, allowing everyday individuals to gain widespread recognition without traditional follow networks.

2. Pandemic’s Role: COVID-19 accelerated online engagement, transforming the Internet from a niche subculture to a mainstream cultural influence, profoundly affecting consumption patterns and mental engagement.

3. Emerging Platforms: Blue Sky represents an attempt to revive traditional social networking amidst a crowded landscape of algorithm-heavy platforms, emphasizing genuine engagement over viral algorithms.

4. Media Industry Challenges: Traditional digital media companies like BuzzFeed struggle to adapt to the new Internet dynamics, leading to asset sales and questioning their long-term viability in a rapidly changing environment.

5. Monetization Through Platforms: Platforms like OnlyFans have capitalized on the shift by enabling direct monetization of viral content, prompting creators to adopt more provocative strategies to drive subscriptions.

6. Political Shifts: The traditional culture wars are losing steam, with younger generations seeking new forms of identity and expression online, potentially leading to significant political realignments.

7. Future Uncertainty: The Internet is at a critical inflection point, with ongoing changes in user behavior, platform dynamics, and content monetization shaping the future of digital media and online culture.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ryan Broderick on the shift from digital monoculture:

  "We kind of lived like that for about a decade... have moved away from the follow model on social media." ([03:07])

• Ryan Broderick on the deeper, hidden subcultures:

  "They exist. It's just they're not nearly as visible... as they used to be until something happens in one of those communities." ([11:05])

• Ranjan Roy on Blue Sky’s authentic networking:

  "When I do get engagement, it's from people that I've interacted with online for years... that's the latter, which is good." ([19:11])

• Ryan Broderick on Blue Sky's potential growth:

  "If it continues at the pace it's at, it will hit [100 million users]." ([12:42])

• Alex Kantrowitz on the diminishing role of platforms like BuzzFeed:

  "The core purpose of BuzzFeed is no longer needed as social media's algorithms became so effective." ([41:03])

• Ryan Broderick on OnlyFans' impact:

  "Porn stars and sex workers online now have a much easier way of directly making money off of going viral." ([30:53])

• Ryan Broderick on the end of the culture war era:

  "A lot of people right now are saying, okay, well, this thing that's going viral, should I care about it? It's just happening." ([32:08])

• Ranjan Roy on the new inflection point:

  "We're definitely at the beginning of something new. Hopefully, it's not too scary." ([56:15])

---

This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of the evolving Internet landscape, providing listeners with valuable insights into the forces reshaping online culture, media consumption, and political discourse. Through engaging dialogue and expert analysis, Alex Kantrowitz and his guests shed light on the complex interplay between technology, society, and individual behavior in the digital age.

Transcript

[Alex]

Let's talk about what the heck happened to the Internet, which has gone through a major cultural shift of late. That conversation with reporter Ryan Broderick and our own Ron John Roy is coming up right after this.

[Ryan Broderick]

Hey, I'm Michael Kovnath, host of the Next Big Idea Daily. The show is a masterclass in better living from some of the smartest writers around. Every morning, Monday through Friday, we'll serve up a quick 10 minute lesson on how to strengthen your relationships, supercharge your creativity, boost your productivity, and more. Follow the Next Big Idea Daily wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jesse Hempel]

Struggling to keep up with customers with agentforce and Salesforce Data Cloud deploy AI agents that know your customers and act on their own. That's because Data Cloud brings all your data to AgentForce, no matter where it lives. Get [e-mail] data welcome to Big Technology.

[Alex]

Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today because we're going to talk about what's happening to the Internet. We've talked about this a bit on the show in the past, but we're going to go into it in much greater depth today looking at the changes in algorithms, the content that rises to the top and what it's doing to our brains. And we have such a great group to do it with us today because joining us is Ryan Broderick. He is a reporter and writes a great newsletter called Garbage Day. You can find it at Garbage Day email. He's also the host of of the Panic World podcast. Ryan, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

[Ryan Broderick]

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

[Alex]

And of course, we couldn't have this conversation without Ranjan Roy of margins and our Friday show fame. Ranjan, welcome to a Wednesday show. How you doing?

[Ranjan Roy]

I am so excited to learn what happened to the Internet from Ryan. So I'm waiting. I'm ready.

[Ryan Broderick]

Let's get into it.

[Alex]

Same here. All right, Ryan, let's talk a little bit about the genesis of this show. So a few months back, Ranjan and I were looking at some of the great phenomenons coming up on the Internet. There was the hawk to a meme where this woman, Hayley Welch, made, I would say an X rated comment on an interview TikTok and all of a sudden became an instant celebrity, which is something we'd never seen before. And then you have phenomenons like the Costco guys coming up which are sort of like, I guess we would call them mass appeal Internet celebrities, which to my mind hadn't happened at the same frequency and the power that they're hitting today. And so like our theory was basically that we've moved away from the follow model on social media and now we have the for you everywhere, right? So the for you on TikTok, the for you on Twitter, everything is dominated by an algorithm that chooses what might be interesting to you and not what you follow. And it's shifting the, the diet of content that we consume and the stuff that rises to the top online, which is why you end up having so much interest in people like Hoktua and these Costco guys. Why don't you take that thesis on to start and let me know if you think that is accurate.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think you are right, that we have definitely shifted to a world where 10 years ago everyone could look at the Internet and sort of see the same stuff. You know, I always call it like the Gangnam Style era, the peak Ellen show moments. And it did feel like there was some sort of digital monoculture which sometimes interacted with real world monoculture. And we kind of lived like that for about a decade. I would say that the biggest difference now is yes, apps like TikTok are breaking that by showing you hyper personalized feeds of content specifically for you. So you and I don't have the same TikTok feed and you never the two shall meet. But I look at Hoktua and the Costco guys and that kind of mainstream normie Internet virality that we're seeing right now. And I put most of the blame on the pandemic, which I've recently been going back and kind of reassessing. And my view of it now is that essentially everyone that wasn't online before 2020, who would ever be online, came online. And now we're getting enough distance from this moment where it feels like every month or so, very normal people do very normal people things online. Everyone's like, I can't believe this is viral. And then they just become famous. And that is a definite change from, you know, how things worked in the 2010s, is part of that, that the.

[Ranjan Roy]

Pandemic broke everyone's brain and they're online?

[Ryan Broderick]

Well, I mean, I think we can all agree that yes, we're all a little unwell from being online during the pandemic. But no, I would say it's Internet culture became culture in 2020. This is like the moment where Stephen Colbert is wearing AirPods and doing his TV show on Zoom from his bathtub. You know, the barriers broke down, every family got A group chat that didn't have one. Everyone's parents were suddenly on Facebook 247 if they weren't already. The Internet stopped being a subcultural space is what I would argue.

[Alex]

Can I follow up quickly on this? So it's interesting to me that you've talked about how we all used to watch the same stuff on the Internet, like Gangnam Style, and then it sort of spread into subcultures with the. For you. But then you have that. That's crossed with this theory that you have that we all went online at the same time, which is interesting because you then have these new normal people, celebrities like we're talking about with Hawk Tua and the Costco guys. So do they transcend this for you ification, or are these, you know, memes, the Costco guys and Hawk Tua, are they now dominant on a subpart of the. Of a very large subculture on the Internet? Or are they the. The thing or they a niche that Ranjan and I only end up in because we're normies.

[Ryan Broderick]

So, okay, let's think about Grumpy Cat, shall we? So Grumpy Cat is a weird looking cat that went viral on Reddit because the cat looked weird. And the initial kind of virality of an image like that 10 years ago was being driven by people who were super online power users, bloggers, aggregators, young people who were super into vine, were sharing Logan Paul videos. It was not mainstream. And most of what we sort of think about as Internet culture, as meme culture, has never felt very mainstream. But now, because everyone is online and because they don't need aggregators, they don't need communities to surface things for them, it's kind of becoming, it feels counterintuitive. But essentially, if you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff, like a blowjob joke or going to Costco, you can open up TikTok. And TikTok's algorithm identifies that and shows it to you. And there's no arbiter there other than the machinery of the app. So that's why I think we're seeing what Max Reed kind of dubbed the Zinternet. Because if you're just like a normal basic guy and you open up TikTok, it's going to show you normal basic guy stuff, as opposed to 10 years ago where you might hear about something viral and that weird Redditors were talking about Pepe the Frog or something. Those days feel over to a degree.

[Ranjan Roy]

I am liking this. And again, the Zinternet, Max Reed had defined as the network adjacent to the sports Internet of 40something dads and the hustle Internet of Miami crypto bullshit and the reactionary Internet of trad influencers. And when I'm thinking about this, as a 40something dad myself and who has plenty of normie friends, in the early 2000 and tens, I would have been the one surfacing what is going viral for them. And we all went on group chats that probably went from Facebook messenger to even signal and WhatsApp. And then now they are just the meme time to delivery is so much shorter if I'm sending it or they're actually informing me of what's going viral.

[Ryan Broderick]

Right. Like this morning my mom sent me an Instagram reel making fun of the United Healthcare shooter. Like, that's, that's crazy. That's a crazy reversal. I'm, I'm the online.

[Ranjan Roy]

You're the online guy.

[Ryan Broderick]

I should be sending her dank memes, not the opposite.

[Alex]

What happens to these smaller online subcultures then? Do they still exist? Are they bigger than before? Or is there a chance that they just end up getting subsumed into these broader, you know, zinternet and normie culture parts of the Internet? Because I guess, like, imagine somebody who's like, in one of like the online radicalization communities. Because, like, this is, this is the thing with the Internet. The Internet is great for what's not normal, because you can sort of find a place to dissent or, you know, object against the mainstream. So if you were a really online person, there is probably a chance that you gravitate towards some, you know, some dissenting community in some way. And sometimes that ends up being a radicalization or it could end up in all these different things, sort of. Maybe that was what made the Internet fun in the beginning, was it was just like, yeah, they would never air this or they would never talk about this on the mainstream airwaves.

[Ryan Broderick]

That's exactly right.

[Alex]

But I guess, like, now that the normal is there, do you think that these subcultures are actually going to lose some of their appeal to like, let's say the normal people who were on the Internet and just trying to find things they liked?

[Ryan Broderick]

Well, I think you're asking this question at a very interesting moment because Blue sky is now north of 25 million users and it's well on its way to. Let's let, let's say that by this time next year, maybe even sooner, Blue sky is going to be around 100,000. Blue sky will be around 100 million users. Which I looked up this morning was what Twitter was at 2011. So, like, that's how fast this niche platform is growing. And Blue sky, to me, is a total reaction to this Internet. It is all of the. The. The remaining weird subcultures of the Internet decamping to there and using the site's, you know, blocking and filtering and list organizational tools to carve out those spaces. The other thing here is that a lot of these Internet communities were based on places like, you know, they were living in Reddit or Tumblr or communities like that, which were public. Now they're on Discord, and the only time you might ever see them is when a meme breaks containment from Discord. So they do exist. It's just they're not nearly as visible, I think, as they used to be until something happens in one of those communities. Like there's like, the drama around the Muppet fan account that was doing, like, know he's like, creeping on followers, asking.

[Ranjan Roy]

For news, asking for news.

[Alex]

Oh, you knew about this, Ron John?

[Ranjan Roy]

Of course.

[Alex]

I'm clearly an inhabiter of this. And, like, my Internet is Costco, guys. But you guys are seeing something else. What happened with these Muppets?

[Ryan Broderick]

So there's a guy who was running a Muppet. Him and his wife were running a fan account for the Muppets, and then a bunch of followers of this account put him on blast and was like, this guy is going around saying he's polyamorous, and he's using that as an excuse to hit on and, like, sexually harass his followers. And then a bunch of other Muppet fan accounts, like, came out with statements being like, we don't like this. You know, we condemn this guy. And I think that's like, a really good model for thinking about this stuff, which is, like, up until that point, I did not realize how deep and vast the Muppet fan community was for adults. And apparently it's quite big.

[Alex]

This happened on Discord, or where did. What social network does that happen?

[Ryan Broderick]

It happened. So it's a Twitter, it's an X account.

[Alex]

Right.

[Ryan Broderick]

But all the malfeasance, if you will, was happening in DMs. So I think that is one way to think about this, is that the Internet is probably as big and strange as it was from the very beginning, but it's now deep, hidden under layers of dark social in group chats and discords and DM groups and things like that.

[Alex]

So I want to push back quickly on the Blue sky thing that it's going to hit 100 million users. I don't think that's guaranteed at all. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that haven't we seen so many of these social networks get that initial spark and then fizzle? I mean, what makes us think that Blue sky is going to be Twitter and not Clubhouse?

[Ryan Broderick]

I think it was not the point.

[Alex]

Of the show, but I want to just.

[Ryan Broderick]

No, no, I think it's a fair question. I think if it was already Clubhouse, the most embarrassing moment in social media history, as far as I'm concerned.

[Ranjan Roy]

Internet history.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah. Acting like that was anything other than just like a conference call simulator for bored rich guys during the pandemic. Hate that app. I think it would have already fizzled. I think the product is good and it's very malleable. You can do things with it that we haven't been able to do with a social network in a long time. You can code things for it, you can develop apps for it. It's fairly open and I think the initial energy needed to grow to 100 million in, let's say a year's time has, like, the domino has already kind of fallen there. I think it. There could be, you know, history gets, you know, things get crazy. But I do think if it continues at the pace it's at, it will hit it.

[Ranjan Roy]

And I also. Blue sky for me kind of captures the 4U verse following dichotomy pretty well because the following functionality works really well. When I go there, I don't get a heavy dopamine hit, I get a light dopamine hit. I get that Twitter used to be for me and I actually think that could be the staying power that as more people go on, because remember, like going on to any social network now. And if you call TikTok a social network, Instagram, you can't just post and have something go viral. Like it has to be really specific content followed by really specific people. So Blue sky, to me it is that kind of return to you have some kind of following follower relationship. People will see your content and you can have some kind of back and forth and engage in some interests. So I think they could be that space for everyone looking to go back to that, that, that other model. And everyone has gone towards the 4U algorithmic model. So that's just getting saturated.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, I actually had my first Blue sky post, my first Skeet break, a thousand reposts this week and God, people on the Internet are dumb and like, discourse is so stupid regardless of where you are. But it was interesting to sort of watch the how different virality is on Blue sky to something like x or even TikTok, because it is just like you're generating discourse. And then if the discourse is interesting enough, people will just jump on and they'll share it and they'll talk and they'll fight with each other all day, every day, the way Twitter used to be.

[Alex]

You know, one thing that's come to mind during this discussion and watching this rise of Blue sky has been this question that I've had unrustled with about whether social media is going to still be relevant. And Ryan, you brought up a great point, right, which is that a lot of the action, a lot of the most interesting stuff on the Internet now happens in group chats and happens in discord and doesn't happen in the social media feeds. And another reason why I'm skeptical of Blue Sky's ability to grow is just because it's so exhausting to try to go and, you know, attack a new platform and build a new audience. And I know this is only speaking for content creators, but I also think that, like, with something like a Blue sky, you have now have Blue sky, you have threads, you have Instagram, you have Twitter. And instead of like one winning out, which there won't be an absolute winner, you're just going to have diluted experiences everywhere. And if there's so much interesting things happening within the group chats, why would you go to a sort of less relevant social network to sort of see what's going on? So I wonder if social media itself is in the process of becoming less relevant right now.

[Ryan Broderick]

That's interesting. Did you feel that way in, like.

[Alex]

2012, so 2000, I mean, 2012, I think Facebook was really the place that most people were hanging out on. So you might have seen. I don't think so, actually, because, yeah, 2012, you had Facebook, that was still a dominant platform. You had Instagram, which was interesting, and Twitter was maybe at its height, I.

[Ryan Broderick]

Would pick 2012 to compare our current moment to, because, yes, you did have Facebook, which was huge. And it was slowly becoming sort of the way that most people use the Internet, especially on mobile. You had Twitter, which was completely saturated with the media and was sort of becoming this centralized feed of American and international media and politics. But you also had fairly large competitors like Tumblr, like Reddit, like Pinterest. StumbleUpon, I think, was still in the mix at that point. Right. When you and I first started working together, you know, stumbleupon was the Thing driving the most traffic, not Facebook for most publishers. So there were a lot of websites and I didn't feel at the time that the Internet was being diluted by having so many fairly similar and overlapping social media platforms. I think it's kind of annoying right now that we have a million Twitter knockoffs and we have to kind of shuffle through them, but I think that's actually kind of clearing up pretty quickly. I mean, I was spending all year posting the same stuff to X, Bluesky threads and LinkedIn. And over the course of the last couple months I've lost interest in kind of all of them except for bluesky. So LinkedIn is fine. It's good for traffic. I don't read the comments because they're bad, but I don't feel so pessimistic about having this many social media sites because it's kind of what everyone's been asking for for a decade anyways, more websites to go on, more stuff to look at. So I think it's all right. I'm optimistic about it.

[Ranjan Roy]

I also, I think little competition is a good thing, but I think to push back a little for me, Blue sky, what's interesting around it is to me, it's an actual social network in the sense that I'm posting on there. I am not getting any engagement. I'm getting minimal middle engagement. I'm posting for the love of posting, just pure love of posting. But when I do get engagement, it's from people that I've interacted with online for years, a lot of the people who I'd not seen on X in a long time, and people I kind of consider online friends, acquaintances or whatever. So it's only really from an actual network. And I think that's interesting to me because that's what the original promise of this was. There's distribution and then there's the actual kind of networking engagement side. And Blue sky is the latter, which I think is good because there hasn't been that on any of the big platforms in a long time.

[Ryan Broderick]

I would agree with that. Yeah.

[Alex]

So is Blue sky sort of a counterbalance to this for you Internet right now?

[Ryan Broderick]

It is.

[Alex]

I think just wait until it grows though.

[Ryan Broderick]

Right, because that's it. I mean, these things always evolve in strange directions, but I think right now it is reinvigorating a muscle online that has atrophied over the last five years.

[Alex]

So, Ryan, I know we've talked broadly about why things like Cocktua go viral, but it's very interesting to me what goes viral on the Normal person. Internet, as we're calling it, or the Z Internet, so to speak. Let's just go through two quick ones that I'd love to get your perspective on why this is so appealing, if you have any thoughts. First of all, the Costco guys bring the boom.

[Ryan Broderick]

That's what we do.

[Alex]

We bring the boom. We bring the boom. This is a dad and a son that eat the double chalk, double chocolate cookie, and a chicken bake at Costco. And they've turned this into a bit of a media media empire. They brought in the Rizzler, which is this very cute fat kid from New Jersey who has this Riz face where he, like, puts his finger on his chin and he looks at you and you're like, oh, God.

[Ranjan Roy]

Wait, the Costco guys brought in the Rizzler?

[Alex]

The Rizzler is not even a relative. Oh.

[Ranjan Roy]

He was like a separate.

[Ryan Broderick]

He's just a phenomena. He's. He's another viral kid that they teamed up with.

[Ranjan Roy]

See, I need to be explained. This one I got.

[Alex]

He had a famous. Because he was wearing a black panther costume and trying to. I think, trying to convince his dad that he was famous, that he was. That he had superpowers, and his dad just kind of mercilessly mocked him, and it became super viral, and now he's joined forces with the Costco guys.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Ranjan Roy]

This is the Internet history I came here for today.

[Ryan Broderick]

I genuinely thought they were all related. It was a shock to me. Truly a shock.

[Alex]

So why the Costco guys?

[Ryan Broderick]

I would say that on the normie Internet, the Zinternet, you know, however you want to describe it, there are essentially two kinds of things that are constantly going viral. Stuff that local radio stations would talk about 30 years ago, and stuff that would be on America's Funniest Home Videos. And the Costco guys are essentially like a morning radio, like, shock jock kind of vibe. Like, making funny songs and, like, talking about, like, relatable stuff. And then they're making videos that are perfect for America's Funniest Home Videos. Like, it's just. It's just the stuff that has always been popular. I think I like their videos because they have a haunting, uncanny valley aspect to them where no one's really blinking and they're kind of doing all these weird things in, like, desolate, suburban Florida parking lots and shopping malls and stuff. But I think most people just think it's funny.

[Alex]

Well, there was this one video where you saw, like, a Behind the scenes of the dad coaching AJ Big justice. Big justice, right?

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Alex]

The dad coaching Big justice into every single line that he was gonna say. And it was quite haunting.

[Ryan Broderick]

It is haunting. Although my read on it is, like, they're all having fun. And I think the dad. I mean, I went deep into his, like, down in the rabbit hole with him. He was, like, trying to become an influencer on Facebook for a while with, like, a talk show about beer or something. And I think he used to be a wrestler, and now he's trying to go back into wrestling based off the fame of the TikToks. But he's, like, involving his family. And I don't know, like, if you compare that to, like, the other stuff that's popular on the Internet, like, I think it's fairly harmless. It's goofy, you know, but I think it's okay.

[Ranjan Roy]

Yeah, I kind of like that America's Funniest Home Videos because to me, it's almost like Everybody Loves Raymond or some show from even the 90s. That was the monoculture. That was safe, but just a little interesting. I never actually watched it, but. But just a little fun. And maybe it's just the modern equivalent of that on, like, whatever platforms exist now instead of network tv.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think that's right. It doesn't look exactly like network tv, but I think it's interesting that a lot of the aesthetics of what would be popular on the radio or on network TV is being recreated by people now on TikTok. And it's never gonna be exactly the same because you don't have this massive sort of budget or a writer's room or sort of executives thinking about how to reach people in Springfield or whatever. But there's always, I think, gonna be an appetite for just basic relatable slope.

[Ranjan Roy]

So is this a good thing? Instead of the suits on at Rockefeller center choosing what's gonna be good now? I don't even know what the Costco dad's name is, but just regular A.J.

[Ryan Broderick]

Bufumo.

[Ranjan Roy]

A.J. bufumo out there.

[Ryan Broderick]

Why do I know all these people's names out there?

[Ranjan Roy]

Just doing the work, doing the hard work, understanding what people will like is that.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, you're asking, like, is it better? And I would say that, like, my major concern with anybody in their situation is, are they being paid? Are they, like, getting compensated for what they're doing? Are the working hours, like, humane for the children? Like, these are the. And, you know, these are the fears I have with all of the people who turn virality into sort of a business, you know, because Hollywood has a lot of problems, a lot of Bad stuff happening there. But you never know what an individual might do to try to keep up with the. The viral machine.

[Alex]

One more thing I'm going to say about this family is I think they were about to go out of style. Like the Costco guys were done until they dropped the song.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yep.

[Alex]

We bring the boom.

[Ryan Broderick]

And sometimes you got to reinvent it, you know, Sometimes you just got to, you got to shake things up.

[Alex]

I listened to that. I was like, oh God, here we go. I can't not click with these Costco guys. And I clicked and I was like, oh, this song is good.

[Ryan Broderick]

You seen their Christmas video where it's like the whole family.

[Alex]

Grandma's, they got lights going on. That's terrible.

[Ryan Broderick]

I love it. Every time they release a new video, I send it to everyone I know and I'm like, we should make a video like this. Why not?

[Alex]

As long as Rizzler's in it, I'm watching.

[Ranjan Roy]

Who do you think are the biggest early 2010s virality moments? Who missed out on this boomer? Was it, you know, side eyed Chloe, the little girl? Like the little girl meme? I mean, because if the Rizzler can wear a Black Panther suit and go viral and join the Costco and collab with the Costco guys, who are all the people that missed out on this, this boom in Normie Influencers. Which memes do you wish had made it?

[Ryan Broderick]

I was talking to someone this week who made the good point that like Rebecca Black probably would have been able to cat. Oh, yes, right.

[Ranjan Roy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

But to connect the two dots of like the, of Hoctua and the Costco guys. What I do think is really interesting here is that when Hoctua blew up, she was reached out to by Jake Paul's production company and he's essentially created a company that captures viral stars, then figures out how to effectively franchise them. So there's clearly now these groups that exist that have been on the Internet long enough that they realize that, okay, we can capitalize on this moment. And we also saw this during the pandemic with Ben Lashes, the meme manager who was selling the rights to different famous memes as NFTs for a while. There's a big interest right now around how do you turn a viral moment into a sustainable media business. It doesn't work totally all the time, but it does seem like there are people who are trying to solve that problem right now, which is curious to me.

[Alex]

Yeah. Ron Orion, you even wondered in your post after the Hawk to a moment whether her talk to A podcast would be popular. And it turned out to be, like, one of the top podcasts for a couple moments there right after it launched.

[Ryan Broderick]

Right. Right up until the big Pookie reveal. And then I think people kind of.

[Alex]

Lost interest, and people don't. The reviews aren't great.

[Ryan Broderick]

Do you know about. Pookie is the boyfriend.

[Alex]

Right.

[Ryan Broderick]

And it turned out that he's just some guy, but people were like, who's Pookie? Because she hadn't said, like, his real name. But he's just a guy.

[Alex]

He's just a guy. Oh, you know? Yeah. I mean, it is, like, people in relationships won't post their significant other because I think they get more likes that way. I don't know. Is that a real thing?

[Ryan Broderick]

It's a thing for, like, Korean pop idols, Japanese pop idols. You're not supposed to say you are in a relationship so that the fans can kind of pretend that they're dating you. So I can see the psychology of that working on Instagram as well.

[Alex]

Right. So one last one I want to talk about is this Lily Phillips, and we should talk about OnlyFans, because she is an OnlyFans star that has been talking about sleeping with a thousand people.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yes.

[Alex]

And she slept with, like, 100 men in a day at the end of 2024. And for some reason, I think the algorithms are pushing that very hard. So does she fit into that, like, kind of talk radio show type of thing? And it's not only the algorithms, by the way. She's been covered by, like, almost every, you know, entertainment news site from the Post to Daily Mail. What do you think, Ryan?

[Ryan Broderick]

So Lily Phillips was getting a lot of pickup because she's part of a wave of OnlyFans creators that have smartly realized that if they go viral with their clothes on, they can drive subscriptions to their OnlyFans. Right. So she started kind of experimenting with viral stunts. She then decides that she's gonna try to break the world record for most people slept with in one day, which is currently 919, and it's held by the actress Lisa Spark. I looked this up the other day.

[Alex]

Impossible.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Anyway, I don't want to get into.

[Ryan Broderick]

Logistics, but it's best to think about it.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

So Lily has said that she is now training for a thousand men in one day. So she tried 100 men. The reason it went super viral is because Josh Peters, The South African YouTuber that once pranked Katie Hopkins by giving her a cunt award, if you ever saw that video during the pandemic it's pretty good. He went to London and filmed a behind the scenes of Lily Phillips sleeping with 100 guys. And in that video, which is absolutely brutal to watch, like, I watched some of it and I was like, this is the darkest thing I've ever seen. She breaks down and starts crying afterwards. And that moment has, I think, been politically weaponized by a lot of right wing and far right accounts on X who are sort of pointing at it like, this is, you know, this is the end of Western civilization. I don't think what Lily Phillips is doing is particularly new though, because like I would say every nine months since the Internet was invented, we have all started screaming at each other about something a porn star was doing. Like, remember, like 10 years ago there was like, oh, this new porn parody is so messed up. Oh my God, I can't believe they would make this.

[Alex]

Like, I don't remember that, but I'll take your word for it.

[Ryan Broderick]

I was on the porn parody beat for a while. I had a. Yeah. And like, you know, I think there's just kind of a natural fascination there. Lily Phillips, though, because she's British, I think, has smartly also figured out that she can kind of tap into the British tabloid culture to kind of generate interest. So I think she's just pulling a bunch of levers at once here to kind of get attention and to tie it back to Hoktua and the Costco people and all the rest. Like, she's trying to monetize this stuff. She's trying to figure out how to monetize it. And for her it's much easier because she can be naked on OnlyFans and then you can just go see that if you want to pay. So in a lot of ways, I think porn stars and sex workers online right now have a much easier way of directly making money off of going viral.

[Alex]

Right. And it worked for her.

[Ryan Broderick]

It does, yeah.

[Ranjan Roy]

This actually makes me in the question of is this better or worse than the days of people in suits at big media companies deciding what would be normie culture now? It's like the most extreme is the easiest road to it, which is not. Not the most heartening thing, but I guess it's democratized a bit more.

[Ryan Broderick]

So, yeah, I. It's funny, I've been asked several times recently by like, other reporters, other publications, you know, the simple question of does any of this matter? Which is, I think this question that a lot of people in the US Particularly right now, are asking after the election, where we had nine months of insane memes that kind of ended up meaning nothing, like brat Summer meant nothing. And so I think a lot of people right now are saying, okay, well, this thing that's going viral, should I care about it? Which I think is the wrong question, because it doesn't really matter if you care about it or not. It's just happening. And in a lot of ways, I think now more so than ever, it is just simply a reflection of the national id, the sort of collective unconsciousness kind of idea. And I think it's very basic and kind of dumb. Like, I just think it's just like a rolling cascade of dumb stuff.

[Alex]

You know, Ryan, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I have to ask you, how big is OnlyFans? And how did it get that big?

[Ryan Broderick]

How big is OnlyFans?

[Alex]

Yes.

[Ryan Broderick]

Very big. A recent report in Newsweek estimates that 1.4 million American women are using OnlyFans.

[Alex]

That's. I mean, we have only 300 million people, so. But they're. They're using it. They're. They're using it as creators.

[Ryan Broderick]

As creators. Correct.

[Ranjan Roy]

I think. One other note on that as the. On the business side of it, it was reported they made $1.3 billion in revenue, $658 million in profit. Like, that level of profit margin you just don't see in any kind of business, basically, other than software, I guess. But, I mean, they're basically just raking in pure profit from all of this as well. So.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, and you should take what OnlyFans models say with a bit of. With a grain of salt, because they are trying.

[Ranjan Roy]

No, that's the. That's the company, though.

[Ryan Broderick]

No, no, no. For what I'm about to say, because they're. They. They can be provocative on purpose to get your attention. But one OnlyFans model recently, Sophie Rainbow, claimed that she made $43 million on OnlyFans in a year.

[Alex]

You know, that's a lot of money.

[Ryan Broderick]

That's a lot of money, my foot. Photos on there are not doing nearly as well, unfortunately. But it is. And the thing is, like, it has really changed the nature of what we're seeing online, because I think many young people, especially women on OnlyFans who are using it to make a living have realized that a site like Instagram will never reward you for a million for 10 million views. Not really. It's not sustainable. So I think another factor for why viral content is getting stupider is because people just aren't spending a lot of time and effort on it because they want you to go click and pay to go look at their real stuff. So as paywalls have filled up the web, I think that has also changed the nature of what we're all seeing, which is that it's all getting lazier and sillier because, and more provocative because it's trying to get you to go behind the paywall.

[Ranjan Roy]

I guess the public content is just lead gen for the paid stuff. So you're all, you're all seeing the entry level appetizer at best.

[Alex]

Okay, so there's, there's a lot more that I want to speak about, including the hot ones buzzfeed has recently sold hot ones. And whether the future of media is eating, eating hot wings. Also all these crypto coins that are part of the Internet right now. And some of the online discussion around the UHC shooter and why it seemed to create a bit of a realignment among groups online. So we're going to do that right after this.

[Jesse Hempel]

I'm Jesse Hempel, host of hello Monday. In my 20s, I knew what I wanted for my career. But from where I am now, in the middle of my life, nothing feels as certain. Work's changing, we're changing, and there's no guidebook for how to make sense of any of it. So every Monday, I bring you conversations with people who are thinking deeply about work and where it fits into our lives. We talk about making career pivots, about purpose and how to discern it, about where happiness fits into the mix and how to ask for more money. Come join us in the hello Monday community. Let's figure out the future together. Listen to hello Monday with Jesse Hempel. Wherever you get your podcasts. Struggling to meet the increasing demands of your customers. With AgentForce and Salesforce Data Cloud, you can deploy AI agents that free up your team's time to focus more on building customer relationships and less on repetitive low value tasks. That's because Data Cloud brings all your customer data to AgentForce no matter where it lives, resulting in agents that deeply understand your customer and act without assistance. This is what AI was meant to be. Get [e-mail] data and we're back here.

[Alex]

On Big Technology Podcast with Ryan Broderick. He writes the newsletter Garbage Day. It's garbage Day. Email. You can go sign up for today. He's also the host of the Panic World podcast. And we're also here with Ron John Roy of Margins. But right before this, Ranjan told me. All right, Alex, if we're going to talk with Ryan about Internet culture, we have to talk about Effectively what's happened to BuzzFeed and what it's done with its assets. Ryan and I were both at BuzzFeed, so I'll turn it over to Ron John, you can fire it away with any questions.

[Ranjan Roy]

Well, so they sold off first we Feast, which is the, like a parent company of the Hot ones Hot Wings TV show or YouTube show for $82.5 million or 2x what Sophie Rain makes. And then it was also, it's interesting because like, from the pure, like almost corporate finance standpoint, basically buzzfeed took out a ton of debt even to go public. To buy up complex networks, they had to shed that asset. This is the next big asset that they're trying to shed to make their debt payments. So BuzzFeed as a business is in a lot of trouble and is just trying to clean up their balance sheet. But in the press release, the most ridiculous part of this was Jonah Peretti said that basically this is part of the media company Buzzfeed Inc. Strategic transformation into a media company positioned to fully benefit from the ongoing AI revolution. So somehow eating chicken wings on TV gets you $83 million. And also Buzzfeed is going full AI and proudly so. So I think this is probably one of the weirdest but most important media stories going on right now.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think it's important to point out that for people who don't know, Hot Ones was created by Complex. So it is not like it did not come out of the same world that Alex and I were in. It was purchased by buzzfeed and now they're selling it and I am a Hot Ones defender. I think that show is great and I think it deserves honestly, what it gets. It's very popular and I think it's very clever. I think it's also fascinating that a digital media company doesn't know what to do with it because it's very like the first refuse company. As I understand it was created after the show started to get bigger, not the other way around. And I think that to me is the major takeaway here is that the media Companies of the 2010s are not equipped to even maintain the successful Internet properties of the 2020s. I think it's just a totally different philosophy and mindset.

[Ranjan Roy]

Actually. Do you think the Logan and Jake Paul media management company would be better equipped to handle something like first we feast at scale than a BuzzFeed?

[Ryan Broderick]

I think so. I would guarantee they have far less overhead because they probably have four employees working 14 hour days or something. Hey, if you work by the way for the Paul brothers. You should unionize. If you hear this, you should unionize. I think that'd be really funny. No, I think that, like, I view the digital media companies of the 2000 and tens, you know, the Buzzfeeds, the Gawkers, the Vices, the Mashables, whatever, as a weird, like, CRO Magnon man missing link between two very different eras of how media is made. So they kind of appear and they're like, okay, we're going to act like a newsroom, we're going to act like a media company, but we're going to make content that is essentially just like worthless garbage that goes online that can go viral for ad traffic. Right. And the problem with that is that you have a lot of people with a lot of jobs that you don't really need if you're making a YouTube channel. And I think that is essentially the transition that we've just seen is that you can just do it much cheaper and much easier and much more nimbly if you create a company that's meant for making content, not for making articles and investigations and all the rest of it.

[Alex]

And, Ryan, it's very interesting because some of the things that we started talking about at the very beginning of this show, the transformation of social networks from Follow Models to for you, is sort of partially responsible for the diminishment of a site like buzzfeed, which was basically predicated at being effectively a website that was a for you site. Right. It was going out and finding out what was interesting and then surfacing it to you and then you would share it online. Whereas, like, the algorithms became so good for the social media companies that you didn't really need, like, the core purpose of buzzfeed anymore. That's my diagnosis, at least.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah. I had heard some behind the scenes chatter after the dress that sites like Facebook.

[Alex]

Yeah. This Internet meme that people are like, is it blue and black or black and gold? Blue and gold. White and gold. Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Everyone saw something different.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yes. And I had heard some background chatter at different social platforms, places like Facebook, that were so horrified by the spread and sort of complete domination of one thing on their site that it was almost like a phishing attack. It was almost like a worm. And I do also think that when you're thinking about why the Internet has changed, that was also part of it, which was that all these platforms were so inundated by one thing to such a degree that they're like, this can never happen again. It breaks our sight.

[Ranjan Roy]

Oh, my God. I love this conversation right now. I mean. No, but hold on. I. Like, if the dress was this critical inflection point where at first. And again, you're right, because at that point, when was that? 2015? Six? Right around mid-2010, let's say.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ranjan Roy]

That was when Facebook shifted from distribution to actually, like, for news companies and media companies to actually wanting to be the ones to own and host the content and post your videos here, post your memes directly here, and you can get more traffic by sharing it. So maybe the dress was the critical inflection point where the platforms took over.

[Ryan Broderick]

It was the Oppenheimer's bomb. Yeah. It changed everything for digital media. Yep. That's my theory.

[Alex]

And then we exploded that watermelon on Facebook Live, and they're like, all right, that's it. Enough of BuzzFeed.

[Ryan Broderick]

You know, like, you know, you can't. You can't force it. You know, you can't. You can't force it like that. Yeah. It's just a totally different landscape now. And you don't need a company of 700 to a thousand people to make videos on YouTube.

[Ranjan Roy]

Like, oh, wait, sorry, the watermelon. To remind myself and listeners it was buzzfeed. What. What exactly happened again?

[Ryan Broderick]

The Try guys. And the Try guys wrapped a watermelon with rubber bands until it exploded on Facebook Live.

[Alex]

Yeah. Put it on Facebook Live. So everybody was tuning in to see when the watermelon would blow up, and it had just obscene numbers of concurrent viewers. Like, probably beat out almost all of television viewership that week.

[Ryan Broderick]

Right.

[Ranjan Roy]

And you don't need a company with $300 million in capital and a thousand employees to put rubber bands around a while.

[Alex]

You did. I don't know. The Try guys, they were great. They tried lots of stuff. They're still trying things.

[Ryan Broderick]

They're still trying stuff to this day. They say they're out there trying things, you know, good for them. Yeah. You just. You just don't. And I also think that, I mean, we're seeing this massive shift speaking of the Try guys. But, like, there was another former buzzfeed crew, the Watcher team, who got in hot water with their users this year for trying to launch a subscription service because they couldn't afford to grow their company anymore off of YouTube revenue. And I think that is a massive trend that's happening everywhere right now. You just can't run a proper company with viral traffic anymore. It doesn't translate.

[Alex]

Ryan, can we talk a little bit before we go about this sort of the political side? Of things or, yeah, I would still call it a political side of things. So there was this shifting of a lot of these comedy and mainstream podcasts that supported Donald Trump in the run up to the 2024 election. And it's been interesting to watch what's happened in the past couple months as like they gain these audiences and even some of the political channels and then sort of, we're almost boxed into views and then are starting to lose some of those audiences. Just one example, I think that when this ua, the United Healthcare shooter was revealed, or even after, you know, right immediately after the shooting, a lot of their audiences became pretty pro shooter and they became uncomfortable with that. And so talk a little bit about like what happened there and you know, whether we're going to see a further realignment with these audiences and these online entertainers.

[Ryan Broderick]

So the, the, the Shooter's age is 26, right? So that means 10 years ago, right, when Donald Trump is sort of gearing up. That's the year of Gamergate. That's the start of the Breitbart kind of led culture war era. That guy was 16, so he's essentially only lived in a world of online culture war. And I think it's very telling that the minute he allegedly carried out this attack, a lot of people in that same age cohort were like, does the culture war not matter? Should we just go after CEOs instead? And in fact, I've written about this where you see on Reddit all these posts about like, we're going to give up the culture war for a class war now. And to me that speaks to the, I think the hollowness and the sort of loss of energy around culture war topics because I think people are just really bored of it. It can't really stay, you know, it doesn't hold. And so I do think we're seeing a realignment. I don't know if it'll last. You know, the online right is very good at reinvention, but right now I do think a certain era of this stuff is ending in a very violent and strange way.

[Alex]

Sorry, can you explain that? Like why? I mean, the culture war not mattering and ending. It seems like the culture war has just been present in American life from the beginning.

[Ryan Broderick]

The online popularity of the United Healthcare shooter, to me speaks to a desire among young Internet users for a better, I don't wanna say target, but like a better focus of their anger. Like they are angry. We know that there are is an Internet full of angry young men. And Steve Bannon identified how to get these guys on his side 10 years ago. He's been very open about using Milo Yiannopoulos to weaponize Gamergate to activate this online army. I think that a lot of that stuff is beginning to feel kind of silly and I think that this is an inflection point for a lot of these guys who are realizing that, you know, spending all day moaning about how women don't like them on X, like isn't really satisfying them anymore. And this happens all the time. Like the, the, the Gamergate era came directly after the new Atheism movement, which was a similar attempt at sort of engaging with a new kind of young man archetype. So I think we are seeing it yet again and I don't know where it's headed, but it does feel like a change is currently happening.

[Alex]

I mean that's, it's kind of, if that's what's happening where, like the, where people who feel disenfranchised and hurt by the system begin taking their anger out and. Well, obviously we don't really know much about this alleged shooter, why he did it, but we do know about the celebration of it. And if they start taking their, their anger out and sort of channeling it in these ways, it could sort of, and it's like kind of scary to even say this, but like it could sort of presage a, a pretty violent and dark era of American life. If that's the case, I think though.

[Ranjan Roy]

At least let me know if I am reading this or understanding this correctly. It's not that necessarily this very specific thing is the future, like shooting CEOs and powerful people is what it is. It's just that the things that we've been talking about for the last eight years are no longer interesting. And I kind of do think that because I mean, one thing I'll say even in terms of Trump in this last political campaign I found to be less interesting on a kind of day to day basis. And I thought maybe that actually would not be a good thing for him. I mean, he obviously ended up doing very well, but, but the way he was interesting, it almost felt like a band, an old school rock band playing the same songs 20 years down the road. You might even go see them and it's fun, but it's just not that exciting. Like it felt like the issues and the, the, it was all the same thing and then we're moving to something else. I don't know what that is, but it's not going to be able to be defined traditional. Right Left.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah. There was a really interesting moment on a recent episode of Piers Morgan where he's interviewing Peter Thiel. And the United Healthcare shooter is a big fan of Peter Thiel. He was, he was a big avid reader of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and a lot of what you would call like, the radical, centrist, reactionary, you know, online tech guy kind of thing. Right. And you can kind of see Peter Thiel begin to realize that this Internet hate machine that has been taking its anger out on women and children and minorities for the last 10 to 15 years could be pointed at people like him. And, and you can see, I mean, he's always sweating because he's just like, he's very moist. He's like a very moist man. But you can kind of see the fear in his eyes as he realizes that, like, the, the Pandora's box that has been opened is now very unpredictable. And I do think it's shifting and evolving and we just don't know which direction it's headed in.

[Alex]

Is it possible that the culture war is less interesting, basically, because the Republicans won? I mean, I'm like, throwing this out there, but, like, it is possible. You know, the left said whatever they could about how, you know, Trump was a racist misogynist, and he ended up, you know, pulling in a majority of Hispanic men and probably more minority voters than recent Republicans have. And so, like, if that didn't stick, it's like, okay, it's almost like, all right, move on from the culture war.

[Ryan Broderick]

A big prediction I have for this next Trump administration is that Trump starts to feel like the establishment because he won the popular vote and he so thoroughly dominated this election. So he can't really, he can't really sort of continue as this, like, renegade because this is like, this is the second round anyways. And so I suspect we will start to see the beginnings of a, if not anti Trump reactionary movement on the right or sort of within young men, at least a, an attempt to kind of redefine being an angry young man. That is not downstream of Trump. I, I, I think that is definitely a real possibility.

[Ranjan Roy]

Yeah. I think also, as you said, it could be both that the right one and in, I mean, many ways, a lot of the issues that three, four years ago seem to be completely dominant in another direction and now completely aligned in the other. But I think it's just, I mean, going back, the for you feed demands new content, demands new topics. The algorithm does not favor the same old, tired stuff. We never would have guessed. Hoc2 would be a thing like. And I mean, it still builds on a classic the blowjob joke, but on top. But other than that, it's new and the algorithm demands something new. And you can't just keep saying the same thing over and over again. So it'll be different. And that's kind of scary in some ways, but it's been scary for a while.

[Ryan Broderick]

And to try to connect the dots with everything we've talked about today, I think I can do this. Are you guys familiar with Jonah Peretti's master's thesis that gets passed around sometimes.

[Alex]

I am unfortunately here for the audience.

[Ryan Broderick]

So he essentially theorized that in late stage capitalism on algorithmic social platforms, identity would become very important because that's how you would essentially link with other users. The Internet is a very frictionless identity less place. And so people create these structures to find each other. And that was true for 10 years. And I think that really informed our politics. I think that the culture war is a direct result of sort of reconfiguring society to be based on like busty girl problems and like 16 things that only short guys would know. You know, it's an outgrowth of that.

[Alex]

You know, you're from this neighborhood of Kansas City when.

[Ryan Broderick]

Exactly. But that stuff doesn't work anymore. That stuff doesn't work in terms of how people, in terms of what people care about. It doesn't really go viral. Identity has become so fractured and I think so boring for people that I am waiting to see what replaces it. And you know, it could be class consciousness, sure, I don't know. But I think it is changing. And I think young people are clearly desperate for something new, some new way of interfacing with each other online and thus everywhere else. And I think we are right now in the process of watching them discover what that is and figure out what that is. But I think it will be different and it will inform our politics.

[Alex]

Brian, before we go, I just want to ask you one thing that's kind of been bugging me through this conversation. And I'm sure you're going to have a smart answer to it. But this idea that we started off with, with people all using the Internet, once Covid started, weren't they already on the Internet? Like that's, to me, is it just like a matter of usage or. I see Ron John's also shaking his head, but I want to turn this over to you just to sort of highlight the magnitude of the change that's led us to where we are.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think before COVID Yes. Everyone probably had a smartphone. Everyone was, you know, familiar with a couple sites like Facebook and Instagram, and they were on there and they check them, you know, every couple hours and that'd be it. Because of COVID and specifically lockdown. In the early months of the pandemic, there was not really any new TV being made. There was not really any new movies coming out. There was not really much else. You couldn't really go. You couldn't go outside. There was really not much else to do other than stare at the Internet. And for about three to four months, all of the world was being run by Twitter. Just tweets were running the whole planet. And I think it created an effect where many normal people who maybe would sit down at the end of the day and watch NCIS or wake up in the morning and drive to work, listen to the radio, a lot of those people went down Internet rabbit holes and they developed new hobbies and they discovered new interests and they started using social media in a way they never used before. So maybe it's wrong to say that more people came online, but I do think an overwhelming amount of people, for maybe the first time ever, actively engaged with the Internet and thus were shaped by it. And now we're living in the aftermath of what that did to people's brains. That's how I would describe it.

[Alex]

Wild. Ranjan, any final thoughts or final questions?

[Ranjan Roy]

I think my takeaway here is we're definitely. I think we're definitely at a really interesting inflection point, I think, where you'd said this is basically 2012ish in digital and digital consumption years, which I think, like, that was the era was pivotal, pivotal. People were on Facebook. People are starting to experiment with other social networks. People were online more increasingly. But we had no idea what the next couple years would look like, much less decade. So I think we're definitely at the beginning of something new. Hopefully it's not too scary, but starting out.

[Ryan Broderick]

So, yeah, hopefully it gets a little more fun.

[Alex]

The newsletter is Garbage day email. The podcast is Panic World. You can find it in your podcast app of choice. You could also find ranjan's [e-mail] and you can listen to Ranjan and I every Friday here on Big Technology Podcast. Ryan, Ranjan, thanks so much for coming on. Great speaking with you guys. This was fascinating.

[Ryan Broderick]

Thanks for having me.

[Ranjan Roy]

See you soon.

[Alex]

All right, Ranjan. Alright, Ryan, we'll have to have you both back on to do this again next year to see how Big Blue sky is. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.