Occasionally, during an otherwise impassioned conversation about mental health, social media and the perils of being online while female, Taylor Lorenz and Monica Lewinsky will start laughing. It is usually Lewinsky who lightens the mood, as when Lorenz says: “The biggest mistake of my career was going on MSNBC and trusting a reporter,” to which Lewinsky replies: “Not mine!”, then starts chuckling.
The pair are convening on Zoom with the Guardian for the release of Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet.
Lorenz is the millennial tech journalist celebrated for charting, and decoding, shifts in online culture, whose high profile has sometimes attracted merciless rightwing harassment. Her first book chronicles the first 20 years of social media via its content creators, from the mommy bloggers of the noughties – who she argues created the business model for the influencer economy as a whole – and Myspace Scene Queens to the misogyny of the YouTube prank era and Gamergate a decade later. Many of her case studies (Lorenz says she spoke to more than 600 people for the book, though not all could be included), demonstrate that, while the internet has given women influence, it has also enabled them to be bullied and shamed for using it.
The subject fascinates Lewinsky, who has spent the last decade reclaiming the narrative after she was pushed into the public eye – then under the bus – during the 1998 Clinton scandal. As a TV producer and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, she has become a powerful voice in the re-examination of toxic attitudes of the 90s and noughties. She is also an anti-bullying campaigner, drawing on her own experiences. Her newest campaign, which launches this week, is a short film seeking to combat negative self-talk, which she says she still struggles with.
Lorenz is in her Los Angeles apartment in front of an orderly background of graphic prints and neat bookshelves; Lewinsky is framed by huge, beautiful windows at a friend’s knockout house, where she is staying in New York. (“You should see the art,” she says. “I just keep thinking: how big is my bag? No, I’m kidding.”)
The two are friendly: they connected on Twitter before meeting through a mutual friend a couple of years ago. In many ways their experiences of the internet are very different. The scandal that capsized Lewinsky’s life occurred in the dial-up years, shortly before Lorenz’s book begins; the story broke online via the Drudge Report and was dissected in news site comment sections. Lewinsky describes herself as “patient zero of losing my reputation online. I went to bed one night a private person, and the next day I was known by the entire world. That couldn’t have happened without the internet.” Lorenz, meanwhile, cannot remember a time, as an adult, when she did not have her own social media platform. But as they compare the internet as they know it, it’s heartening to hear that they both have hope – and compelling ideas about how it could be better.
Monica Lewinsky: Taylor! Why did you want to write this book?
Taylor Lorenz: Usually, stories about the rise of social media are primarily told through the lens of corporate narrative. I wanted to zoom out and also tell the user side: to talk about the rise of the power users, who swayed these platforms in really amazing ways, and the quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar content creator industry that emerged around it.
Lewinsky: One of the strands that really struck me – I don’t know if this was intentional – was that you really focused on a lot of women creators.
Lorenz: The creator economy was founded by women. It is a female-dominated industry, which is why I think Silicon Valley has not taken it seriously. The book talks about the rise of mommy bloggers, the earliest YouTubers, the beauty bloggers, the people on Vine, many of which were women. Women pioneered it and continued to dominate it, as well as LGBTQ+ people and people of colour – people who were shut out of the traditional media landscape, especially in the aughts.
Lewinsky: It’s fascinating – a lot of my interest in this area has been from a negative perspective, but much of today’s activism has been amplified by social media. It has given so many people voices.
Lorenz: One thing Julia Allison [a mid-aughts blogger who was vilified by outlets including Gawker] talked to me about is that she didn’t have fans to defend her. It’s very sad to me what these women were put through. Now everyone has a platform – they have fandoms. If you mess with someone they like, you’re gonna hear about it. Back then her fans would go to her blog every day but they didn’t have a social media account to fight back. The one thing I’m grateful for is my followers: they fight back, they defend me. In the old media landscape, you’re just hung out to dry. I mean, obviously, you know how I feel about your story – it’s horrific. I can’t imagine the powerlessness that you would feel without your own platform.
Lewinsky: People often ask me whether I think it would have been different in 98 had social media been around, and of course, we can all imagine the negatives – the Twitter handles and hashtags. I saw enough memes and jokes, and still see them, thanks to the new algorithms on some social media sites! But it also would have provided support. On a very personal note, [in 1998] I could only get support from strangers in the most old-fashioned, analogue way: if they sent a letter. Sometimes the highlight of my day would literally be going to get the mail, which is pretty pathetic.
Lorenz: It’s so crazy. I was thinking about all of this, the way that a lot of this stuff has played out recently, especially around the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial. Just how pervasive misogyny still is, especially against abuse victims – but against anyone, any woman that’s in the public eye. It’s really bad.
Lewinsky: I think what is so problematic – in varying degrees, but particularly for women – is that we’re all collateral damage to the internalised misogyny that bubbles from what happens in a social world. But now I’m thinking about the empowerment, actually, that the creator content world can provide people by having a voice and a presence. I do think that the importance of revisiting of some of the stories of young women – Britney Spears and myself and Paris Hilton and Amanda Knox – Lorena Bobbitt is another one, a really important one. There are a number of young women whose lives were upended by the treatment that they received – we received – at the hands of global media.
Lorenz: To me, I think, the traditional media is just as corrosive as the internet.
Lewinsky: Oh, interesting. Even some of the younger reporters?
Lorenz: Not the reporters, the institutions. I just think that a lot of journalists are incredibly irresponsible. They have a lot of internalised misogyny themselves and they frankly have absolutely zero idea how to cover online harassment and they will use you up, exploit you for their own game – especially TV. TV news is so corrosive, I cannot wait for it to die the death that it deserves; the harm it has done to society is just irreparable. The internet has a million flaws, and it’s vicious and toxic, but I would never go back to the media ecosystem of the 90s.
Lewinsky: I want to go back to something you said earlier that I was blown away by: that you interviewed 600 people for the book?
Lorenz: Over 600 people – there are so many people who shaped the early internet. And again, Silicon Valley narratives – media narratives – frankly write them out of history. For most of my career, my reporting [on social media] has not even been a beat. It’s not even recognised – most mainstream outlets fundamentally cannot support that type of work. They can’t support journalists that are getting swatted and doxxed and harassed and having their family members – they don’t want to actually do it. They don’t want the attention that comes with it. And it’s always women. There’s all these men that can go to the darkest corners of the internet and write critically, and it never blows back on them. If I respond to my haters in the slightest way, it is flipped and used against me. It’s very frustrating. And there is the safety aspect of it. I’ve dealt with a huge smear campaign; people buying traffic to send weird websites to the top of my SEO; somebody paid a bot network to spam everyone that followed me and the Washington Post before I joined, lying, saying I was fired. People think online harassment is some mean comments on Twitter – that’s not what it is. It is me losing out on thousands of dollars of work; I’ve been removed from podcasts, I’ve had speaking engagements cancelled because they don’t have security, or they don’t want to deal with the backlash.
Lewinsky: I’m sorry that happens.
Lorenz: It happens a lot.
Lewinsky: I’ve had a version of that, but it’s connected to something different. Yours is connected to just being a woman online and doing her job.
Lorenz: But you – it’s life. You know, you were a young woman making your way in the world. You did nothing wrong, in my opinion.
Lewinsky: I can’t agree with that.
Lorenz: I’m sorry. Like, I guess, maybe, OK, you can look back at some things, like maybe that original choice, but, I’m sorry. I don’t think that’s very unique – I don’t think you made any decision that a lot of 24-year-olds wouldn’t also make. I think we need to recognise that. I grew up knowing who you were but, like a lot of millennials, we were just kids – I never knew the full story. It wasn’t until I saw the Beanie Feldstein –
Lewinsky: Impeachment! [Feldstein played Lewinsky in FX’s 2021 TV series Impeachment; Lewinsky was a producer.]
Lorenz: – that I really learned the story and started reading about it. I was so disturbed. What you went through, it’s unbelievable. I mean, I actually can’t believe you’re alive.
Lewinsky: Me either, sometimes. I have a friend who, every time I see her, at some point in our hangout, she’ll just sort of shake her head and go: “I can’t believe you’re still here.” I feel very grateful for whatever combination of positive and negative traits I have that allowed me to survive.
It’s so interesting to hear you talk about Impeachment, because I don’t know if that would have even come about had your generation not helped me start a new chapter, in response to the Vanity Fair piece I wrote in 2014. I think people who didn’t live through what we call in my family “the brainwashing”, from the media and the political sphere, were coming to a story with just the facts. When you come to it in black-and-white facts, it is insane to think – if I talk about myself in the third person – that the youngest person, by over 20 years, than every other main player in that story, is the one who who bore the biggest brunt, and had the most long-term consequences. I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to support myself in the last decade. But I didn’t have savings. I lost a career. I lost decades. And there were a lot of other things, not just financial, but social things. And when I think about that – I was 24. Our brains are just finishing maturing at that time.
It’s one of the reasons this year’s [anti-bullying] campaign is important to me. I have had a lot of help with my negative voice, after every insecurity I had about myself was amplified. That stuck with me for a long time. It still sticks with me. I have a list – this is so mortifying, this is how vain I am – but when I do a photoshoot, I have a list already in my computer, ready to send to the photographer: could you please look out for this, and this and this, and this and this – that is a reflection of self-criticism.
Anderson Cooper did this really fascinating documentary eight years ago, which had a really big impact on me. They got access to all these 13-year-olds’ phones –
Lorenz: I remember this.
Lewinsky: These young people, they had taken 150 photos for one selfie they would post. I was really struck by the negative self-talk in the 149 photos that they weren’t choosing.
Lorenz: The mental health [impact of social media] is getting worse: it’s harder, especially for young people, to separate who they are online from who they are as people, when so much of their identity is mediated by the internet and the feedback.
Lewinsky: It’s also built on things that are not real, like filters. The whole point of a filter is saying: I want to look better, which means you’re not good enough. We tend to not think about how our thoughts are poison, but they really can be.
Lorenz: So many of the early pioneers of the social internet have quit the internet completely, or they met very tragic ends, unfortunately, including Heather Armstrong [an early mommy blogger who died by suicide this year] and other people that are no longer with us. The biggest advice I think I have for anybody online is that you have to have an incredibly strong sense of self. I think so many kids don’t, unfortunately; you’re just thrown in the water without knowing how to swim. I kind of think that the internet turns everyone into characters, and you lose control of your narrative about your own life, which is so disorienting, and usually only famous people go through that. But when you get a lot of attacks online, you also go through that. I have a very strong sense of who I am. I couldn’t survive on the internet without it.
Lewinsky: You do – it’s one of the things I admire about you. You’re very authentic and comfortable being who you are. And you’re very private: is that a conscious choice because of your experiences?
Lorenz: Yeah, generally, I don’t like people knowing about my life. I have very strong boundaries, because I spend all day writing about the internet. And it’s a place that I work at. And everyone should [have boundaries]: it’s crazy out there. The amount of data that’s being collected and harvested and used against us. Plus I don’t want people developing a weird parasocial relationship with me. I break a lot of news – that’s what I want to be known for.
Lewinsky: You mentioned Gamergate in your book, which is one of the most well-known examples of women going into male territory and a takedown happening.
Lorenz: One hundred per cent. It’s interesting. I think Gamergate served as a blueprint for weaponizing the internet. And these media companies still haven’t learned any lessons from it.
Lewinsky: In some ways they still haven’t had to. I mean, we could have six hours on section 230 [a law that protects online forums from liability for content] and how that has meant they don’t have to be responsible. The fact that we could even have, you know, nonconsensual porn that’s released, and people make money from it – it’s mind-boggling.
But I mean, in my moments where I sort of believe in humanity, I think we can [improve the internet]. We found a way to bring sustainability into business – I’m hoping that we can do [something similar with with tech products]. Safety, mental health and – I know it sounds corny – compassion need to be baked into these products before they come out. Though I think that’s where compassion clashes with capitalism, like what we’re seeing with AI: people are just rushing to market because they’ll make the most money. But I hope we get there – like a certificate – you have to have something.
Lorenz: I totally agree. I talk about that in my book: the need to build a better internet. We all need to demand better systems. I think internet users do have a lot of sway, as a collective; tech companies are responsive to public outrage and media pressure. I agree, I think a lot of the root problems here are related to capitalism, and the desire to put shareholder profit above a generation’s mental health. What we have is this hyper-capitalist tech landscape where we have very few platforms – Meta and Google – that dominate everything, they’re not accountable, and they don’t give a shit about the negative consequences. Even if there are a lot of incredibly thoughtful, brilliant people working in tech that do care, these companies never let it impede their business goals. And that’s the problem. It’s about shareholder value. I think we need a less profit-driven social landscape. I love your idea of some sort of certification.
Lewinsky: The tech companies could also benefit from taking qualitative research and data a lot more seriously, instead of it being lip service. I was in a lecture – Jill Bolte Taylor was talking about how certain colours and shapes trigger different aspects of your brain. And I’m thinking: what are the colours that calm you down and make you kinder? Rather than sort of fomenting the outrage.
Lorenz: I do think technology can lead us to a better world. So much of the internet is about connecting people; the positives outweigh the negatives. Maybe I’m delusional; we’re in a bad time right now. But things can change very quickly. The world can change so fast, and so things can get better.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz is out now. Read more about Lewinsky’s anti-self-bullying campaign at standuptoyourself.com
