Everything Is Content - Wuthering Heights, Misogyny Slop & The End of 'Very Online'

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

The most blessed day of the week is here – EIC drop day.Bury your face in some classic online discourse with this week's furore around a few grainy pics of Margot Robbie on-set for Wuthering Heights. Perhaps less silly – the misogyny slop network funnelling you into alt-right content... Finally, we might be spending hours online a day, but are any of us Very Online anymore? Thank you so much for listening! If you could give us a rating on your podcast app, we would be SO grateful!In collaboration with Cue Podcasts------This week, Ruchira was loving Perfect DaysOenone was loving It's My PartyBeth was loving Parks and Recreation and The End of ChildrenWhy Fans Are So Mad About Emerald Fennell's Adaptation of Wuthering HeightsEmerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation looks terrible alreadyMargot Robbie Drifts Through The Moors In A Wedding Dress In The First On-Set Photos From Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering HeightsHow Pop Culture Is Radicalizing YouThe age of being 'very online' is over. Here's why. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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but I definitely struggle with anxiety if I have multiple cups a day. Flow has been a game changer for me. If you want to stay sharp and skip the crash, visit LondonNewTropics.com to try it for yourself. And you can to stay sharp and skip the crash, visit londonnewtropics.com to try it for yourself. And you can use everything at checkout for 20% off. But hurry, it won't last forever. Thank you, London Newtropics. I'm Beth. I'm Richira. And I'm Anoni. And this is Everything Is Content, the podcast for pop

culture analysis, celebrity stories and internet drama. Whether it's the latest unhinged essay from The Cut, a new novel that's got everyone talking or just some bloody good telly, we're going to talk about it. With a flowering cherry blossom on the tree of content. This week on the podcast, we're talking about a new Wuthering Heights adaptation, why the internet hates women and the beginning of the end for being chronically online. Follow us on Instagram at everythingiscontentpod and don't forget to follow us on your podcast

player app. But first things first, what have you guys been loving this week? Please tell me. I have only got one recommendation, I must say. I've not been very good content consumer this week, but I have been loving It's My Party, which is a new podcast with comedian Catherine Bohart. There's only three episodes out right now. It's kind of like off menu if it was a party. So it's like, who's your dream guest? What food would you have? What music? The most recent one that she did was with Gabrielle, who I love, pop star. Stunning. Yeah, really good. And then she also did Nish Kumar, which was really funny and I love off

many and so I've just been enjoying that as a bit of fun. And also whenever I listen to a podcast like that, it just makes me think like, what is my dream party? And then I hyper fixate on that for about five months. What is your dream party, Pratel? I've really been thinking about this. I think definitely a theme where you have to wear something really outrageous that you could never wear at any other point in your life. I think ideally I'd love like a sit down dinner with the most fancy, expensive food you could ever have, loads of wine. And then it turns into like disco dancing, loads of my friends, but also lots of hot celebrities. That's as far as I've got.

Is there a question like how do you, because my ideal party would always involve me being able to leave the party without saying goodbye. Is that a question like how did the ideal party end? Because mine ends me shuffling out the back door like a rodent. I can't remember if you said how it ends, but Nish Kumar was like,

I do need like a quiet corner where people like need to get away from what's going on, then they can and like loads, he was like, loads of toilets, I don't want anyone queuing for the loo. There's a bar in every room so that if you're in one room, you don't feel like you have to go and queue. So some people are getting down to the granular detail. And yeah, that's a good point about leaving. I would want it to end exactly the moment when I'm done and everyone has to go because otherwise

I stay even when I don't want to be there. That's such a good point. And it's mood dependent right because I feel like one day you're like I'm a 12 midnight leave the door other times you're like it could be 5am and you're still not ready to go to bed. Like how can you judge that that's so difficult? It's so difficult yeah so you want the venue basically to just kind of like disappear and everyone's teleported home the minute that you're like your brain goes I'm done. You don't want them to stay on and have a good time while you've gone to bed. If you're not there, no one's there.

What would your dream parties be? This is so difficult. Like I said, it's mood dependent. So assuming I'm in the best mood possible, I'm really ready for a party. I feel like definitely a theme, you're right. I feel like anything that Kardashians do always looks like a really good time. In a really recent one, Khloe had her birthday and they made it like rodeo style. So there was like a bucking bull and they called it Khloe town, like Dolly town, is that what it's called? Dolly Parton's? Dollywood. Dollywood, that's it. So they called it Khloe Wood. And it was all like pink and it was

denim and diamonds. That was the theme. And it just was so fun because they committed so hard and they had so much fucking money pumped behind it. Something like that where it feels like you're wonderland. Like you said, get out of jail free card if I'm just not feeling staying up and there's no more party after I leave. And also just like cocktails on tap, all my best friends there. That's so nice. I feel like my best parties are when I'm not the one the party's about. I would kind of like a bit of the adoration and attention, but I always have the best time at other people's parties. I don't really like to be looked at. So I would have to be a guest,

but kind of the guest of honor maybe, like the favorite guest. And I'm there for, you know, someone else slightly less important, but everyone thinks it's for them. I think I'd like a Margarita machine to be there. I did look at renting one for my 30th birthday, but I can't, either too expensive for the amount of people there. And then I just thought, imagine just renting one of these completely by yourself, making yourself a single drink and then going to bed. That I think would be an amazing party. Margarita machine for one. I haven't been to a party in a long time. I feel so out of breath. I feel so rusty at this question. I was like, oh, good God. I just thought of something. What about if it's a naughty theme and they have unlimited

dance mats and it's all just themed like all your favorite games when you'd go to an arcade? Oh my God. That's it. That's what I want. That's very good. Yep. Or just at a bowling alley. Also, you should just listen to the episode, but Nish Kumar on his, he also doesn't like being the center of attention. He's like, so what I would like to happen is for some reason, all of my friends have gathered at this party. And then I'm like, surprise, it's my 40th. So it's like a reverse surprise where he's doing like a surprise birthday party for himself. Cause then he's like, it's none of the pressure that already there. It is about me because it's my birthday, but they were already

just there anyway. So that was quite a good moment. His episode's really good. What have you been loving, Ruchira? So I watched a film over the weekend called Perfect Days and it's by a director called Wim Wenders. Before I ask you if you've heard of it, I'll just give you a quick synopsis, which is it's about a man in Japan who cleans toilets. And the whole idea is even though his life is super mundane, he doesn't really have any friends. He doesn't really talk to many people. He loves looking at the trees and the light kind of shining through the trees. And this week on my social media, I can't remember how you say the word, but I shared the Japanese word for that phenomenon. That's a huge theme of it. It's like basically the beauty

of that kind of distillation of the light through forest trees. It's such a beautiful word, it's such a beautiful concept. And the film takes that concept and kind of applies it to life and finding beauty in what could be the mundane. And also like the difficulty of letting people in. And when you do, sometimes it's difficult and it hurts and it complicates a very simple life. But ultimately that's living. Those sharp edges are thrown into spectrums of light when you allow yourself to kind of let people in. It's so beautiful. Now, have you guys heard of this film? No. In my head, you said the name and I went, I thought of a poster with Jennifer Aniston on it

for about 25 years ago. It's not that film. Sounds beautiful. Is it one of those films that, like, you know, the wrong, you talked a bit about it to the wrong person, they're like, God, that sounds really boring. And you just want to like shrivel up and die. And you're like, no, you've got to watch it. I have a few of those. That's exactly how I feel. It could sound really boring to somebody, but it's such a nice film. It's such a perfect Sunday film as well. Please go watch it. I think, I think you'd both love it. It's so, it's so nice and so cozy. That sounds really beautiful. Where did you watch it? Movie or somewhere. Exactly.

It's such a classic movie film, the way I described it, so is. And also it's got 9.4 on there. And funny enough, I watched it in two parts just because we've said before, I wake up at 5 a.m. now, I go to bed at like 8, half, 8, 9. I'm a loser. But in between that, I kept seeing loads of the numbers of people who reviewed it were going up within seconds. So I think people are really loving it, which is really nice. It's a good film. I'm sold. Love. What about you, Beth? So I've got two, the first one I won't

linger on because actually it really ties into an episode we did, but I thought I'd bring it up. So it's a New York article that I read over the weekend called The End of Children, which is very much about the same thing that we covered in a... I think it was a segment. I don't think it was an everything in conversation, but you can correct me. I think it was a segment on birth rates crashing around the world and what that means for the human race. I think we did one segment about that. I can't remember. The piece is by Gideon Lewis Krauss and it's really long, but I was very much in the mood for something long, so I was like, excellent, I'll read this for about 45 minutes. And it's very well researched, takes case studies from all over the world, especially Korea

and looks at how it is, you know, this is a really traditional, very pro-natal country, but nonetheless, birth rates are plummeting, attitudes are changing, women are rejecting the traditional life and it looks into why. I think it's just everything that we talked about, but just takes it a step further on an even deeper level. I think if anyone listened to the episode and did feel particularly like their interest was piqued, as mine was actually after we finished speaking, we will link this in the show notes, I thought it was a really enjoyable long read. It's not a total doomer piece of work. It's not like everything's fucked, but it's quite a unflinching look at what it will look like or what it can look like on a planet that

is not replenishing its population. Yeah, I thought it was very interesting. So I got stuck into that and I felt smart. My second one is not as smart, thank God. It is, I've returned to a comfort show for the ages. This this one I hope that you will have both watched. If not, actually, you should watch it. It is Parks and Rec or Parks and Rec. Oh, I know this show. A fat, yeah. Isn't it just the best millennial comfort watch?

And I hadn't watched it in about 10 years. I basically I watched the Severance finale, which is excellent, amazing. Some of the best TV I've ever watched. And I was like, I need more Adam Scott, E of the best TV I've ever watched. I was immediately like, I need more Adam Scott, EG, Mark S and Mark Scout. I was like, when is he at his hottest? In my opinion, it is season two, season three of Parks and Rec. I've gone back, if anyone that doesn't know, so Parks and Recreation is a, I think it's 2008, 2009, 2015, kind of like, yeah, it encapsulated sort of post Obama second term or pre Obama

second term right up until 2016, of which we will not speak. It is about a city official, a really like bubbly, quite kooky, very optimistic city official played by Amy Poehler called Leslie Knope, trying to fix the town of Pawnee, which is a very funnily troubled town in Indiana. It has all the usual problems of a small city, I think actually is what it is. Terrible food, difficult employees, everyone is absolutely impossible to deal with, but it's just gorgeous. I think when this was on, people knew how to watch TV and love it. There was no infighting. People would just wear a little Sebastian t-shirt at Reading Festival and you'd be like, oh my God, that's the horse from the show. I love this show. And it would be

a nice conversation rather than what we've got now is everyone very tribalistic. TV is now a site of mass battle, if you don't have the right opinion. So it just took me back to such a nice time in TV when a TV show could have like 28 episodes, nine series and just be so gorgeous and comforting. So those are my two. I'm so glad you both watched it. I loved it. I can so clearly remember the first time that I watched Parks and Recreation. I think weirdly I was in Australia. I think it's when I was, I take like on my gap year. I didn't want to say gap year, that can feel a lot embarrassed. But I was on my gap year. I said it. And I was visiting my sister in Australia and her partner at the time was like,

you have to watch this TV program. And I remember just sitting there and just never standing up again. I couldn't believe how much of it. Because there's very few shows now, I have to say, that make me laugh out loud. I'll be like, that's funny. But Parks and Rec used to make me snort. So good. I did have one question about your New York piece. How much was it about people's experiences? Did it make you feel sway you either way towards a feeling of whether or not you want kids or was it more just about like the outcome of the swindling birth rates? You know what? It's a bit of both. And I think it confirmed some things that I already know

that I feel about my own decisions, but it also posed, it was very balanced. It also, there's a book actually that I bookmarked, I think it's called What Are Children For? Or something like that. And I think that's more pro-natalist. It's saying like, actually, I know a lot of people are saying, well, I'm not going to have children for the environment. But essentially, if we go that direction, the children that we'd be saving have already been born, you know, the children that we'd be giving up. So it's like the people that are having children are overwhelmingly Republican in America, for example, they're very pro-natalist. They are having lots and lots of children. And it gave me a more broader

idea of children are not the problem necessarily. Wanting to have children is not the problem. The problem is the attitude we all have. And it did actually make me feel less like a doomer. I think it was really insightful. And I'm going to read this book and hopefully, I say this, I buy the book, gathers dust in my Kindle, but I'm going to read it and attempt to finish it. And then I will return with it because I feel like I'm not done on this topic yet. And I feel like maybe us three are not done on this topic.

That's so interesting because this whole topic was on my mind today because I saw in the London Standard, a particular maternity clinic in London had shut down because of declining birth rates. So I hadn't even considered that, of course, that would be a knock on effect from the fact that birth rates are coming down and all of that kind of stuff that we spoke about. So yeah, I definitely think that I would love to talk about it again. And then the second thing I wanted to say was, you know what moment lives in my head rent free from parks and rec? Treat yourself. Treat yourself. I haven't got to that episode in this rewatch, but I don't think I've ever

forgot that. Literally Donna and Tom, some of the flashiest, shiniest people in the office, just being like- Treat yourself. Treat yourself. Treat yourself. Whenever you need a pickup, whenever you, I mean, I don't actually need an excuse ever to do it, but treat yourself. You definitely do. The spiritual treat yourself. I feel like at the moment actually, I know you post about this in your stories,

we are all suffering because of, I don't know, Mercury the Moon. Something's going on. I think today might be a treat yourself day. You watch, treat yourself. There have been over 20 screen adaptations of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, including feature films, mini series and TV shows spanning from the 1920s to the 2010s. And everyone from Laurence Olivier to Ralph Vines to Juliette Binoche and even Tom Hardy, this classic has called to many a famous name. Newly added to that list are Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi who are to portray the Gothic love

story between Catherine and Heathcliff in Emerald Funnel's upcoming adaptation with adolescents breakout star Owen Cooper set to play a younger version of Elordi's Heathcliff and it's set to be released in February 2026. Wuthering Heights is a love story for the ages about two families of landed gentries, the Lintons and the Earnshores, and the latter of which took in or adopted a young orphan who often throughout the books and the films is referred to as a gypsy and is looked down upon. Rugged Heathcliff, Earnshaw and Catherine Linton become close childhood friends and eventually fall in love, but they can't be together because of their differences in social standing.

So that's the plotted synopsis for those of you who aren't familiar, but the announcement of the new adaptation has been met with a lot of scrutiny. As I think we also mentioned in Wednesday's headlines, some people feel that Margot Robbie is too old to play a 17-year-old and others have criticized the choice of wedding dress saying it's not at all true to the era with white wedding dresses being introduced only after Queen Victoria War One and Wuthering Heights is set in the Georgian era from the late 18th century to the early 19th. And as well as this, there's many clues in the novel, which point towards Heathcliff having racial ambiguity and so many people have pointed out that a white Jacob Lordy doesn't feel

like the right casting. In a piece for Vulture by Chelsea Sanchez, which laid out all of the grievances with upcoming films, she wrote, selecting Latif, who's part Pakistani, and Chau, who is Vietnamese, to play characters who are prejudiced against Heathcliff, prompted another wave of criticism from fans who slammed the decision to cast the adaptation's only actors of colour in antagonist roles. In a piece for Day, Serena Smith wrote, we all knew Emerald Finale's adaptation of Bronte's Wuthering Heights would be terrible ever since it was announced back in July 2024.'

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, two decent actors, of course, but wildly unsuited to play a dark haired teenager and a mixed race man, respectively." And Radhika Seth for Vogue wrote, "'I say to my fellow Bronte obsessives, keep your eyes peeled for more updates and brace yourself for a retelling like no other. So I turned to you both and I asked, what do you think? Are you excited about this adaptation? And how do you feel about anachronisms in our film

TV generally? I will say, I think our very first episode was about Saltburn. We had a whale of a time discussing it. So I think it would be wrong of me to say, I'm not looking forward to it. I think whether I love or hate this film, we'll definitely cover it here. It will be enjoyable. There will be something to say. Do you know what? I am like a lot of people, I'm very precious about certain classics. And as a filmmaker, you like play with fire when you mess around with the faves. And I think there's a lot of perils we had with this particular adaptation, not respecting

the parts of the classic that people feel very protective over. But that said, this film is out next Valentine's Day, a good like 300 and something days away. And people are obviously noting the things that we've seen quote unquote wrong from this one photo that we've got. But a lot of people have been pointing out that we don't necessarily know, I don't think, any details about this. We don't know whether it is a period piece. The fact that Margot Robbie does not look like a Georgian lady, she's not got iPhone face, but she looks like a modern lady. She's wearing the white, she's blonde. Maybe it's not set in the early 1800s and is actually going to be a real twist. And so I think maybe it's premature to be upset. It could be an

adaptation set in the 20th or 21st century. Emeril Fennell, she loves to shock and surprise and do something a little bit different. So I think we know quite little. I'm trying to hold my anger and I would encourage other people to do the same. What about you, Richard? I feel exactly the same as you. It is making me laugh so much just how angry, how furious, how incensed the internet is having seen one, what looks like a paparazzi or like really grainy still of Margot Robbie on set in what possibly looks like the countryside in this massive poofy white dress with the blondest, most radiant golden hair. It's inflamed everyone, absolutely inflamed everyone. It's so funny. I do agree. Obviously, just from that alone, you can tell that there's going

to be some inaccuracies from the literal 1847 Emily Bronte book. The fact that she's wearing a poofy dress, loads of people have been so pissed off that it looks 80s. And you know what? You're not wrong. It definitely looks like a Princess Diana wedding dress to me. And I think that's right. Also, I saw people saying white wedding dresses in the UK only became a thing in the Victorian era, whereas the book is set in the Georgian era. Didn't realize there's so many historians online, apparently there are.

Sartorial as well. It's so funny. But I do think the one thing that has rubbed me up the wrong way is the racial elements of it. It does irritate me a bit that in a retelling in 2025 slash 2026, that is such an interesting, important part of the book, the racial dynamics from Heathcliff and obviously the class dynamics, which I mean, I'm sure people are already pressed about Emerald Fennell doing another class, potential love retelling. But yeah, I think that is the thing that has let me down and the casting around Jacob Allordy and the only people of colour being sideline characters, that does leave me feeling a bit

like, ugh, to be honest. I agree. Do you know what's funny? I hadn't even considered that it could not be a period piece. I just thought it might just be really anachronistic. And I do, I have to say, like I said, again, in that first episode, I do kind of love Emerald Fennell's work. I'm a big fan of a vibes movie and maybe this is going to be a lot of vibes, but I do like what she brings to the table. I do agree on the racial animal. It feels quite glaringly obvious and strange to try and pick someone that fits more closely to the book. That does feel quite odd. And I think that that is probably the only area

where I think we have to allow for artistic license. Some of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations of his plays are things like, She's the Man, 10 Things I Hate About You. There's loads of instances where things that we see as classic or some of the oldest most important tales have been rewritten and retold and packaged up in a thing that's completely alien from once they first came. But I don't think it necessarily has to make them a bad thing. As I said, there was already 20 adaptations of this film. How many ways are there to skin a cat? Maybe you've got to not skin it because that sounds mean. I hate that phrase anyways.

So, Emma Fennel does get skewered a little bit. She's almost like the anti Greta Gerwig. There's no doubt she is. She's got flair. She has got directorial talent. She's got an eye. But as was criticism between Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, it was like you came very close and then just missed the point. And I think that is what people are worried about with casting an enormous white Australian as someone like, and there's just so few instances of a book of this time with a novel where a protagonist and a romantic lead, I mean, a tragic romantic lead whose actual descriptions and ethnic markers are ambiguous and vague enough and actually he's described as having darker skin. I mean, it does feel like you have been handed an opportunity to do something,

one accurate to the text, but also like so relevant to today. Like the themes of it. I mean, I assume most people have read this or have seen one of the 20 adaptations of it. This is a book about a man that is kind of battling with like emancipation freedom, imprisoned by this, imprisoned in class, rejected by the people that are meant to love him, has to constantly reify his own social standing because of his lowly upbringing, because of his appearance. You just think like, have you read the book, Emerald? Have you? Like, and I do, I just, I can't imagine with this cast how. I mean, maybe she will. Maybe, I mean, some people are saying maybe the casting is, is itself misleading and actually other people are playing. I think that lends maybe a little bit too much sleight of hand. I don't think that's the case, but that's how desperate people are

to want this to be as good as they want it. Cause it is so beloved. I love this. I, I, I am excited for anything that is Wuthering Heights, but I am a bit nervous because I feel like this is the one that we'll get of our generation and if it's shit, they might not let us have another one. When did you first read Wuthering Heights? Both of you? I think I was like 15. So I read it way too young and I'm very curious, did both of you, whenever you, like, did you find it romantic? Because I'm a bit worried that this generation will not understand it. And they will be like, this is really problematic.

Well, they're going to call it toxic, aren't they? They're going to be like, it's gaslighting, toxic, bread crumbling bullshit, because it's such a mad story. And I guess that's another part that people are so pissed off because Emeril Fennell's called it a love story of romance, possibly in an interview once. And people are like, it's not that, it's more than that, it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when I first read it, I was like, God, there is no love that's like as powerful as two people who hate each other so much that they drive each other to death and to venomous revenge into generation me. This is real love. So yes, I was sick in the head when I first read it to you.

Yes. I definitely read it as a love story, but again, I was like 15. I haven't read it since then. I should probably reread it, but I do remember getting really obsessed with it with my friend Bethan. And I think at the same time, we then read Jane. We also would then go on long walks together as if we were doing promenades. It was a whole time. Oh, sorry. I love that. We got really into period stuff. We were like, I wish we could just Promenade, it was a whole time. I was sorry, I loved that. We got really into period stuff. We were like, I wish we could just wear long dresses, to the words. Do you know what I've heard? I've not seen it actually.

The Kiosk Odellero, she stars in it with James Housen, I think it's Heathcliff. And people do, that's 2011 that came out. People give that a lot of praise. I have not watched it. I'm sure it's available somewhere. And I would like to watch that actually, because now I've got hunger to get back into that mad Gothic Heathcliffy world. I think I didn't watch that one, but I did watch the 1992 one with Juliette Binoche and

is that one with Ralph Fiennes? I think so. Did you guys watch that one? No, only the Tom Hardy one. What do you think about adaptations in general? How do you feel about whether or not they should stay true to the book? I feel like you did say this a bit earlier, but it's the same for me. There's certain things, I feel like when it's a newer, more contemporary thing being adapted, for instance, like a Sally Rooney, for example, I do feel quite strongly that I want it to follow the narrative or weirdly like Daisy Jones in the Six. I was really pleased when that was very close to the novel. But how do you feel about adaptations in general? Are you someone that's

quite a purist or are you open to interpretation? I think I'm on the same line actually, because something like A Wuthering Heights or A Pride of Prejudice, any kind of the canon historical texts, I have no problem with. I think of Baz Luhrmann just ripping up Romeo and Juliet but keeping the language and the semantics and just applying it to modern California. I thought that was amazing. I really still love that retelling of it. Also, even with theatre, I'm thinking of Much Ado About Nothing at the moment starring Tom Hiddleston that I believe is meant to be a disco-esque style to it. I love stuff like

that. I think it's really fun and cool, but I think people are pissed off when it is either it hasn't been done so much like with The Wuthering Heights, I think most people have kept it quite core. So possibly this is maybe the first chance that we're seeing of it being pushed in a different direction. Whereas Shakespeare has just been remodeled and modelled for years and years and years. So I don't think people care as much. I think I generally feel like the older the text as well, I'm not that bothered. Do what you want. I feel the same. I'm not precious about them. I think there are so many fantastic things you can do when you deviate, but with good reason. But then there

are also, I'm thinking of the 1995 or 1996, don't know, BBC's Pride and Prejudice, which is often hailed as something that historians love because don't know, BBC's Pride and Prejudice, which is often hailed as something that historians love because it is so, they went above and beyond to use the right fabrics, to use the right musical instruments, to really get it all right. I think that is craft and that's brilliant. But then when you can do something really interesting and really different and add something new to the canon, if it's innovation and not laziness, I think fantastic. If it's like for shock and awe, and also I think people are going to be upset. I mean, people are raging off one photo because it's Emerald Fennell. The

Emerald Fennell hate train has long left the station. I'm not on it. I know we're not on it, but it definitely is too chewing down the track. So I think that it really matters who, like Greta Gerwig was to do this. I think people trust her more than a photo, whereas Emmeralds-Fennell, we saw one pic and we went, oh, what a cow. She gets a lot of shit, doesn't she? That's what I wanted to get into. Yeah. I wanted to ask, do you think that if it was someone that was seen as more credible as a director, I do think we have criticized her in one episode for this podcast, but I can't remember what, and I think it maybe was a comment that she made on something to

do with class or privilege. And I think we were a bit like, not sure that you quite get it. But do you think that's where the hate's coming from? Because it was hilarious when I was looking up the coverage from this film. And as you say, we have a couple of pictures of Margot Robbie looking absolutely stunning and the film is out for a year. We know very little and there has been article after article of people just brazenly, even Serena Smith, by the way, who's writing I love and I follow her on Instagram. She was like, we knew it was going to be shit. What is it? Is it Emerald Fennell? Because I don't know, is it because she causes so

much impact? I mean, it's funny because she's such a specific flavor, but I really, really do like her film. I love the stylisticness of them, but I do think she gets perhaps a slightly unfair beating sometimes. Can I give you my thesis on why she gets so much hate? One, I think it's because of her background and people have been able to pick at the fact that she comes from a privileged background, possibly private school educated, all of that kind of stuff. But I think that's come after and that's been retrospectively dug into, which happens a lot to women when people already dislike them. They try to find evidence for the fact that they dislike them. I think the main thing, apart from all of that additional context, is that people feel tricked by her because they watch a film of

hers, aesthetically it looks like it should be like an A24, gorgeous, Oscar-winning film. And they feel like, wait, why is she trying to pull the wool over my eyes by making it feel like I'm watching something incredibly intellectual, but then I disagree with the politics of it, or I think it's kind of just like a thriller, like a mid-tier thriller film. We spoke about mid-films, not in a derogatory way, just in the sense that they're like middle-brow, they're exciting for everyone to understand, and they talk about these big concepts, but they don't necessarily challenge you in a critical way. I think people feel like either they think of her in derogatory terms as not being smart enough to make a different kind of film, which I don't think is true. I think she's going

for that type of film. I think people feel pissed off by that process because they want to box her into something and they feel like she maybe doesn't fit into the box of not being exactly like a shit film director and also not just tackling subjects that are small and possibly a bit superficial. She does all of these different things and they just don't like it. They don't like her films. So they like to think of her as just not being very good. That is such food for thought.

If Sophia Coppola, for example, was making this film, I don't know if it would get the same amount of hate. I agree. And I could kind of imagine her taking on this kind of film, doing it anachronistically, casting Margot Robbie. I can see that well, but people would trust the process. And it's funny because she's super privileged from a dynasty of artists in that industry, maybe because she's American. We definitely take privilege when it comes from like a British aristocrat or like aristocratic adjacent person differently than we do with Americans, I think. But it's funny

because I'm so tapped into critically how people talk about Emerald that I actually don't really know what like the general public, I assume they've got a massive appetite for films. They're very successful. Salt Bum is incredibly successful. Promising Young Women was incredibly successful. So maybe the haters are just the critics and maybe that is part of it as well where they feel like almost what you're saying about the wool over their eyes thing, Ritera, where it's a bit like anything. Once you really understand something, you're better at picking out what's good and what's bad. Maybe they feel like it's annoying because everyone thinks she's so good and she's not actually that good, but that's just their own snobbery kind of showing up.

I think I agree with that. I think it's such good food for thought. I think what I've seen is people feel like she goes maybe 90% of the way to a great film and then something in the messaging falls short. That is quite frustrating as a viewer, especially people are so hungry for these kinds of films, these kind of sociopolitical commentary films, something with real bite to it to not go all the way. For example, in Promising Young Woman, it's a film about rape culture wherein the victim is looked to be punished. And then in Saltburn, it's a film about class dynamics and we leave it kind of feeling sympathy for the wealthiest

people in there. So I think people are looking for a message, maybe that she's not even putting down and I think people are going, you're not telling me what I thought I was going to hear. Probably that I think that's what you're both saying. You're not, you're not aligning with my politics. I wouldn't have done this. And so I'm frustrated at the art you're making. I feel like we're going to love this film. I feel like it's going to get five stars, five big booms. I cannot wait. Honestly, apart from, I could totally agree. I think that Jacob Elordi has been miscast. Again, we don't know because we don't know exactly the ins and outs of

this film. But should it be the case that he is just a white man or even more problematically if they kind of try and make him look in some way racially ambiguous that's very distance from his like his actual look that could be a bit off putting. But as a general concept, Margot Robbie, I already am loving the visual that one photo I'm in, I'm signed up, getting Lorenz, the former New York Times Internet Culture correspondent and generally, I think, probably one of the most influential online reporters of our time, came out with an amazing podcast on the misogyny slop ecosystem online. The episode is called How Pop Culture News is Radicalising You and her podcast, if you haven't listened already, is called Power User. In it, she talks to

Ofi Doki, sorry an amazing name by the way, a content creator and commentator who coined the term misogyny slop ecosystem. In it, they talk about the sprawling network of body language experts, tea accounts, LawyerTube and online communities that help smear campaigns, specifically ones against Blake Lively, Amber Heard, and Meghan Markle. She dives into how the TikTok creator fund exacerbated the drive to republish dubious Lawyer Talk videos. So for anyone who doesn't know, and I didn't even really know much about this, Lawyer Talk videos are videos where people claim to have law expertise, are

often just law students or former paralegals or something of that kind. And they commentate on trials like Amber Heard and Johnny Depp's defamation trial from 2022. What this did was create a quick pipeline to disinformation with high monetary value as videos got huge numbers of views because people were super interested in these cases. This network, thanks to algorithms, is possibly equal, if not more powerful than the tabloid media, but the problem is it has no semblance of rigorous journalism.

And under the guise of expertise, spreading news or analysis just operates as a vehicle of misogyny. I know you both listened to the app. What did you think of the term slop ecosystem? First of all, I really enjoyed this episode and I agree about lawyer talk. It wasn't something, it's not something I've necessarily come across. I also didn't watch the Amber herd and Johnny Depp trial just because I found it really invasive. Even as a concept, like if a video came up, I wouldn't allow myself to watch it. But I do know lots of people that got sucked in and it really doesn't

surprise me that there are these sort of pseudo experts online who are using any kind of, it's like me being like, I almost did a law conversion after my English degree, so I'm going to tell you why this is admissible in court or whatever. It really doesn't surprise me that that's going on. We spoke about it with like nutrition. I'm sure every single like subset of the internet has these fake experts. But I thought the way that they laid it out, the way that especially I found it interesting, it's like that they always are going for these women that are coming forward in moments when they are talking about times when they've been a victim of especially like male abuse. That is the moment when they strike and they,

we can't see using the examples that you mentioned of like Blake Lively, Amber Heard and Meghan Markle. And yeah, I just thought it was really fascinating. I thought misogyny slots such a good phraseology for it. And I thought it was nice to kind of look inside because they think we, well, I kind of neutrally, not neutrally, but I've kind of got to the place where I just kind of absorbed the fact that the internet is going to treat women in a way that's very different from how it's going to treat men. And I just take it as for granted. And I've never necessarily looked deeper than, well, that's just misogyny into kind of the roots of where this is permeating from because it obviously hasn't been created on its own. And the fact that even a bit like

with the Blake Lively case when we were learning more about kind of smear campaigns and how much these things are actually probably more orchestrated than we realize, I found that really fascinating to be like, actually there maybe is a world where this doesn't have to happen, where women don't have to be just immediately hated for anything that they put forward or anything that they do and immediately on the back foot, that this is a machine that is constantly being pumped and word and fed and engorged by certain voices online. So I thought, yeah, I thought it was really interesting. Yeah, the term slop, the term misogyny slop is so excellent. And I think slop in general,

it's having a great time. It's being applied to the absolute gunk of AI. So they'll say this is AI slop, basically the worst goo, the pointless nothing to it, mindless but pervasive AI slop. I think as much as I don't like living in a world where there is so much slop, it is the most fitting term for this, for this tide of it, especially as it exists for women. It's slop, it's goo, it's messy, it's everywhere. It is relentless. I think listening to this episode, I was like, it was really depressing, but like so eye opening, like they totally know what they're talking about. And I mean, Taylor Lorenz, she knows that legacy media is crumbling. What was it she said? She was like, legacy media is rubbish. It's crumbling. I'm going to dance on the grave for a lot of these places, meaning the

publications that she used to work for and the ones that are not greeting this like very real threat. And the fact that now people do hang on the word of people with the most tenuous... I could get on there and be like, well, I watched Alien Mobile, I'm basically a lawyer, here's my take on it. And I could build an audience off the back of that. People who lie through their teeth have clear biases. That's what we've got and that's what we're up against. Yes, it was a great episode. I think a big fan of them both, but it did fill me with, I say this a lot, dread because I actually don't know what you do, especially when a lot of the people making this content and buying into it are women, are fellow women. And I'm hoping that, you know, they have great

takes on this in the episode. And I'm wondering, yeah, I can't wait to talk about this because it is, it's women who are lining up to defend the men who, you know, there's a woman to hate, there's somewhere a man that is being idolized and deified. And I just don't know what we, like, what do we do about that? So this, that is a perfect thread for the other question that I have for you both. So in the podcast, they both beautifully lay out how this is the female equivalent of the pipeline to conservatism and far right, right wing content, whatever way you want to square it, how far into the right you want to talk about it. Because ultimately, the belief behind many of these videos is, don't believe women. Women lie, women are annoying and they waste our time.

That is the very pervasive, very pernicious ethos to so much of this content. The problem is so many liberal women get sucked into this because Taylor talks about how so many women feel like this type of content validates a feeling they have. And we spoke about this with Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively. I think a lot of the reasons why women found it so easy to trust Justin Baldoni's smear campaign that he wanted orchestrated is because a lot of people just don't like Blake Lively. So it was so easy to just believe, oh, I have a reason to not like her. She's X, Y, Z, all of these things. I think we've, I mean, we've spoken about the fact that, you know, there's all these pipelines from male self-help to

MMA fighting videos online to get men into the worst of red pill content. Why do you think this is such a successful pipeline for women into some of those values and is so grabby and sticky for people who think that they are liberal? I think from a really young age as girls, we're primed to looking at other women as competition, because there's never really enough space for women in any one area. Unlike men, you've got millions of examples of men doing certain things. And so then they're competitive with each other, but I think not to the extent where women are like, if someone's doing something, that's my space. We're brought up to believe that there's not enough room for all of us.

That's the first thing. So I think that we feel much more easily threatened by other women. It's something you have to really train yourself out of. We've spoken about this when we've spoken about jealousy. It's also making you think of sort of like gossip websites and this inclination of women to feel quite put out or put off when a woman takes up space, when she's very glamorous, when she's very beautiful, when she's very intelligent, when she's doing anything too loudly or too proudly because we've been socialized to believe that we should be like quiet and demure and whatever. It can sort of throw us off. And so I think there's a level of schadenfreude and enjoyment. And this is all women. And I just think that's just how we've been conditioned. I think it's happening less and less. And hopefully as you get older,

you kind of learn how to control it. Or maybe you want, you know, you're encouraged not to feel that way anyway. But I do think that there's something in the way that we've been programmed to see each other that means that there is a level of threat. And so I do think we get a level of enjoyment when someone tells us that someone, a woman who's perhaps very successful and very beautiful is actually a meanie or whatever it is. And so that's where I think the slippery slope comes in because it taps into a little chip that we've kind of been given on our shoulder, a little like a weakness that we already have. And then so once you're in, it's really fun. It's like the way that I mean, they still do it now, but not to the same extent, but tabloids and magazines years

ago, like Hello and stuff like was all about denigrating women and it was women consuming that content. So it's, it's a similar thing. But the problem is, as you said, and as they say in the podcast is actually lots of these similar, really similar to the travel by content, lots of people making this content, you might go to watch it to find out why Amber Heard is actually, I'm saying this like facetiously, but why Amber Heard is actually the problem in this whole case. And at the same time, in the same breath, the person that's telling you this video will also actually be aligning very closely with Trump's views. And so kind of just by dint of being in that area of the internet, you're also exposing yourself to all kinds of political content that you maybe didn't even

realize that you were headed towards. I don't know, what do you think, Beth? I agree completely. I think it's twofold. I think it taps into two very female socialization. One of it is, yeah, the Schadenfreude, and it reminds me of a piece way back in 2022 about the herd depth trial called Why We Love to Watch a Woman Brought Low by Jessica Bennett. And she details this phenomena, kind of goes all the way back through literature, looks at the trope of the difficult woman, the scorned woman, Madea in ancient literature who kills her own children to get revenge on her husband, Glenn Close, fatal attraction. And even though we have all of these facts and statistics to support the idea that actually, you know, men are dangerous

in this way to women at quite a high level of risk and risk of death, et cetera. They use all of these tactics as abusers. We still are so quick to believe that a woman is highly devious and we often base it on what we've seen in fiction. And there's a quote in this about the piece. She says, whether you believe misheard or not, watching a woman be exoriated in public has been popular entertainment since the middle ages. Somehow misheard seems to become a stand-in for every evil, lying woman getting her comeuppance. Alpha Queen B's in high school, the girl who slept with her boyfriend or girlfriend, every manipulative ex. She's Eve, she's Medusa, she's Lady Macbeth. She invoked vamps and vampires, wicked stepmothers,

witches. And I think that's it. It's entertainment and it feeds into this idea that we have of, well, there's the wrong woman, but I can be the right woman if I align against the wrong woman. And I think that's one half of it. And I think the other half of it is a lot of these women are convinced they're on a moral crusade. They're convinced that they found the true evil. Women are very, we are socialized to be very protective, to be, you know, kind of on the side of justice. We know what it feels like. Every woman knows what it feels like. And that's what the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, a lot of his biggest offenders, open about the fact that they are victims of domestic violence, which is why it makes it so complicated. It

reminds me of turfism in the UK. This is, again, a group of women who have been, I believe, radicalized and convinced to assign villain status to another vulnerable group. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago. It is less than 1% of the population that we have convinced are the villain. And this group of women will do, they will alienate themselves from family, from jobs, from society to push this agenda that they are protecting other women. And I think this is the driving force behind the female fans of bad men. It's, but I'm on the right side of things. Gender doesn't matter. I am a woman. I know what it feels like to be abused.

So how do you even convince someone out of that when they are so, they believe wholeheartedly that they are righteously correct? I think it's the two parts. I think it's that chip on the shoulder, that schadenfreude, and that unshakable feeling, I'm on the right side of history. Everyone else will catch up that cult-like mentality. That is such an amazing point. So many amazing points you raised. It's so true. It's this concept of, I'm the good immigrant. Those types of people are the people who are taking our benefit system, ruining our country, blah blah blah, but I'm the good immigrant. You're so right as well about the Amber Heard trial.

I reported on it and I wrote a piece and you're so correct in that. So many of the posts were from former SA victims saying, it's just so unfair because of women like her, people don't trust people like me. And it is just complete othering rather than allyship or an ability to see that this person over there is experiencing the same things I am. It is just so fascinating and so honestly heartbreaking that this pattern just keeps cropping up across politics, society, everything, essentially this kind of othering and dehumanisation of the people over there versus what I'm going through, this complete division.

The other thing I was going to say is, say you know somebody who is taken in by this kind of slop and they still think of themselves as liberal, I think they really have to look at the people on their side. Joe Rogan today basically came out in support of Justin Baldoni and furthered more claims about the false allegation, whatever the claim, the conspiracy, that this is ultimately about an affair gone wrong, which has just been parroted over and over and over to diminish Blake Lively's claim, which is ultimately at its heart, a union claim about fair workers'

rights, which is, you know, a thing that is often a very important factor of the left. The people who are supporting Justin Baldoni are trying to make it about a relationship gone wrong, all those kinds of things, and make her voice just sound ridiculous. Candice Owens chiming in as well and really parroting this pop culture story is something that's important to her politics. So many right wing clinging onto this facetious, what looks like a celebrity story and making it front and center of their image, these horrible right wing pundits. So it's not apolitical.

It's not apolitical at all. It's so deeply political and it's so important to the new face of the right at the moment who are weaponizing things like this. So if you, you know, if you are enjoying this kind of content and you think it's so important to the new face of the right at the moment who are weaponizing things like this. So if you, you know, if you are enjoying this kind of content and you think it's, and you think you're able to, without engaging with those horrible parts of the internet or those horrible parts of politics, I don't think that's possible. I just don't think it is. The more we talk about it, the more it's just making you think it literally is

like the Salem witch trials again. It's women who've done something that you can't quite explain, but it doesn't feel right and it's going against the natural order of what we expect a woman to do. So we are going to persecute them. Often in opposition to men who have done objectively verifiable heinous things, which we literally have evidence for, who within three years are doing like the face of Dior. Whereas like in Amber Heard's case, she's living in Spain with her kids pretty much completely under the radar. I think because of the kind of lines at work we're in, I've really interrogated this even within myself, I definitely like at school would really enjoy takedowns of women. And

I can still find myself listening to certain types of gossip and thinking, oh, this is really fun, but then I will have to bring myself out and be like, who do you think you are? And even we said this so many times and they say this really well on the podcast, but about the Blake Lybie thing where people were just like, well, I didn't really like her. And they were like, look, you can just like her for getting married on a plantation. That is horrific. But that doesn't mean that she's then open to workplace sexual harassment. That doesn't work. I think this is where women are so perilously open to being mistreated because our likability, our ability to make people think that we're kind and we're sweet and that we're good and that we're honorable, directly impacts how

much people are willing to protect us. The fact that she'd already smeared her image, it's literally like going, well, she's fair game then, whatever, which is atrocious. There's no such thing as a perfect victim, but we always want a woman to be a perfect victim. I think one final point for me, sort of on that point is, I think, yes, any woman on earth, this could happen to any woman on earth. As a woman, no man is ever going to go out of his way or no group of men are going to do this for you. You've genuinely more chance, a high chance of being harmed and slandered by a man than having men in great numbers come to your defense. I think historically women have only had one another, so it does feel very, feels anti-woman, anti-feminist,

feels anti-truth, not to reiterate that Depp heard, but I think a judge ruled the majority of the allegations, you know, proved to a civil standard. They ignore that. They ignore that it was a defamation trial, not a trial to prove that she was an abuser, he was an abuser. All of that is ridiculous. I think we might be watching this happen again with Rachel Ziegler, the young actress who is in Snow White film. I read a piece, a variety came out just this week by Tatiana Siegel, who also wrote some very scathing things about Amber Heard in the past. The piece sort of blames her, sort of the predicted

failure of this new Snow White film, which has made a very small splash at the box office. I think we mentioned that in the last episode as well. The piece kind of skewers her for being unruly and out of control on social media because she said fuck Donald Trump, that she's outspoken, that she is sort of this mess of a woman, this chaotic woman, unhireable. It feels like we are watching in real time all of this happen to another actress and another very young actress and it just, it feels like watching the car crash and not being able to do anything at all about it. I think I'm right, but I'm fairly certain on the rest of the entertainment that Marina

Hyde and Richard Osman also says something like, God, I know she's very young, but she not had media training. She shouldn't be saying all of this. As in speaking her political views, they were like, they should know not to. And I remember listening to that being like, what are you talking about? That's just an absolutely nuts pressure to put on an individual who should be able to talk politically, whichever way they want, and then go to their place of work, which is acting and do their job as an actor and that you know it's because of her specific things that she's saying maybe are politically in this climate feel inverted commas woke but yeah I agree I think you're really right that's definitely a situation that's going to keep unfolding.

Sorry that was the worst take ever if an actress wants to say free Palestine fucking let her. More power to her. If an actress wants to say free Palestine, fucking let her. More power to her. I read a very interesting piece on Mashable this week called The Age of Being Very Online is Over, Here's Why. And in the piece, writer Alice Porter expands on the idea that because the internet is no longer primarily a place of community and because every meme and every inside joke is leapt upon by creators, influencers of community, and because every meme and every inside joke is

leapt upon by creators, influencers, brands, and everyone constantly trying to go viral. Being heavily online now is not unusual, and it's no longer a niche identity. Everyone and their mother is terminally and obsessively online. Alice uses the example of Brat Summer, the kind of concept of chaos, frippery, excess, and fun as led by Charli XCX's excellent album, which was released last summer, which was niche and cool very, very briefly before being adopted by every brand, every group of people and has now, in my opinion, been done to death. She also writes about another mega viral moment

and I quote, similarly, seven or eight years ago, had Jules Lebron shared her very demure video on Vine rather than on TikTok last year, it might have had potential to be a private gag between you and your other very online friend rather than the concept for at least four fashion brands, autumn campaigns. All of this to say the idea that you can be more online than anyone else with an iPhone and an Instagram account

is extensively extinct. So I love this piece and as a self-proclaimed long-term, terminally online woman, I found myself agreeing with a lot of it. But then I also found myself wondering, am I maybe not looking in the right places for community? Maybe the terminally online people have gone elsewhere and simply not invited me. But I do think the internet is a fundamentally altered place. I think to be super online now doesn't mean what it once did. And I'm dying to explore it. To summarize the argument of the piece, we're all consuming the same content online, the same memes, same

references, same stories. They're getting co-opted, cannibalized by brands. And if you agree with Alice, that has kind of ruined things. So question time and the question I have for you is, one, what did you both think of the piece? And two, do you remember a time when being online felt so different from this? Do you remember when it was more about community? Did it feel like the golden age and has the golden age ended? I definitely think the golden age has ended. Like I remember a time on Twitter when the most obscure, most pointless, stupid shit would

go down and you really had to be a proper mental waster to have been around for it, like me. So I'm trying to think of, do you remember the adult baby takeover? I remember this, the adult baby takeover has been cancelled and Oni, do you know what those words mean? I can't remember if I do. Not termly online. Oh my gosh. So I can't even remember his name, but it's a former footballer basically had become more politically outspoken and more like outwardly left, which was amazing.

But as part of it, he would have people take over his like, I think 120,000 Twitter account and just post. So he would let charities do it, organizations, blah, blah, blah. And he just announced one day, he just, oh my God, I'm going to get the words out. He announced that on this day, there was going to be a takeover of his Twitter account by adult babies. So he was like, today is going to be the adult baby takeover day. And obviously everyone was like, what's an adult baby? What is that? And I don't really have any answers for that. But because of the amount of shit he was getting throughout the day, he just posted, I don't know, like 2pm, 3am, whatever, whatever time. He was like, the adult baby

takeover has been cancelled. Neville Southall said the adult baby takeover is off, goodbye. 15th of August 2018, bang in the golden years, I tell you. I don't remember that at all. It just felt like for years after, really niche memes would always descend into the adult baby takeover is cancelled, goodbye. And it just made no sense. It was so stupid. It was so dumb, the whole thing. But that's one of the last things I remember, as being so deeply profoundly stupidly online, that it was like you had to be part of the whatever

percent of people who just weren't working properly that day, were just ignoring their boss's emails. Me, basically, who saw it. But do you know what? Now you'd have Duolingo, the Duolingo owl would be posing in a nappy going, in Spanish, the adult baby takeover is back on over here. It would be immediately cannibalized. I just, I do, there's something coming to me, I don't know why my brain's like scrambled,

something to do with like a rugby sized lasagna or something, do you remember that? Do you know what that is? Yes, yes. What was that? It's at lockdown. Is it, oh my God.? Yes. Do you know what that is? Yes. What was that? Was it lockdown? Oh my God. Was it like a prank call that went wrong?

Yes. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm actually dead. It was a voicemail that got leaked about, oh my God, do you remember it was in COVID before lockdown was properly announced? All these fake voice notes were getting leaked.

And it was like, okay, guys, my friend actually works in the civil service and actually works on the pre-COVID initiation force. And yet apparently Boris Johnson is going to make a really important announcement tomorrow. There's going to be a rugby-sized lasagna that's going to be made and we all are going to have to go into lockdown. Rugby pitch-sized lasagna, is that right? Oh yeah, I do. Rugby field size lasagna for everyone to enjoy? Yeah, it's definitely changed.

I mean, I love this piece. She really made the case for the fact that it's since like the algorithms have changed because you don't see things chronologically anymore. You're also seeing stuff from random people. Twitter was so amazing back in the day because, and I know all of you will have experienced this, but there would have been a joke that started six years ago that would just snowball into something that by the end, it was completely unrecognizable from once it came.

But if you'd been there at the beginning and you'd been logged online every day, because if you missed a day, you'd be out of the loop. You would literally be able to ever catch up again. Those things have really come up anymore, but they used to come up all the time, like a reference. And you do still get them copy pastas and like references to things. But as you said, they're so overdone. Like MrBeast did a tweet about the morning routine that we did

an episode on on Wednesday and everyone's like, right, so everyone just stopped talking about this now because it's just completely ruined it. And all when celebrities reference their own meme-meology, like Dua Lipa was like, I'm always on holiday. Everyone's like, okay, you're in the fun. We don't want to feel like you're like observant of this. We want to be the voyeurs commenting on your life. You're not supposed to be like, you're not in on the joke. We're laughing at you, not with you. And so I think, I think it's chronological. I think it's the algorithms.

And I think it is the other thing of being like, again, just to use the example of the episode that we did on Wednesday about the morning routine, the screenshot of the guy diving into the pool with the timestamp. And he was like, I can't even explain how online you have to be to get this image. And I was like, probably not that online actually. Like I think everyone's seen that, whereas there was a time and age where genuinely things were completely nonsensical and it was just unbelievable. And Twitter, I remember, especially when I was at uni, I would be on Twitter just scrolling for hours and hours and hours and

I was meant to be at lectures, just laughing out loud. I haven't had that experience in years. No, it's so true. And also, I think the point of the piece, which is so brilliant, is that marketing has co-opted internet culture in such a grotesque, cringe, horrendous way. Literally, within a day of us talking about very demure, very cutesy on our podcast, and we were late to it. We, you know, obviously internet culture moves so fast. We spoke about it two days after.

These days, that is like a year after trend. My inbox was just like Reformation. I don't know, whoever, like Holland and fucking Barrett being like needs some vitamins hun, Very Demure, Very Mindful. It's so, it's so awful. Like I hate it so much. It's so condescending and patronizing and just more to the case, embarrassing. It's so awful. I hate it so much. It's so condescending and patronizing and just more to the case embarrassing. It's so embarrassing.

Yeah. It's cringe and it's not cringe in a good way that we love and that we can perpetuate. It is. It's draining the life force out of everything to the point where we couldn't even look back nostalgically at the Apple dance because you go, oh, I fucking done that to death. Imagine Charlie bit my finger. Back in the day where you'd get like one viral video a month, we'd all discuss it at work and with our parents, you know, you'd have now you'd have

Jeffree Star doing a finger palette, you'd have that fucking awful man, no offense, who sings at celebrities against my will singing a version of Charlie bit my finger to Chappell Roan, like everything is done to death, the fun and the life force is sucked out of them. It is advertisers' fault, it's also the fault of the shrinking open internet, which we did talk about. I think I talked to you at length about this, Ruchira, on the episode about TikTok's possible ban and only don't know where you were. You were fighting the ban somewhere. But basically, just to recap that, the internet used to be basically a kind of house of fun. They used to be genuinely interesting websites, forums, funny games, you'd learn things, your subgroups, communities, baffling

websites. I don't know if either of you ever had the browser extension stumble upon where you'd click it and it would take you to a random website. We loved it. I mean, often, yes, you would end up in a chat with a pedophile or a beheading video, but often you wouldn't. Often you'd end up on just the most amazing, weird website I know. That was also the internet culture back then, but I choose not to remember it. So is that like chat relax? Sort of, but it would just take you to like, you'd end up on a website. You're like, the point of the website was not to sell you anything. It was just some weird storytelling exercise.

Some like, you know, you'd press a button and something weird would happen. No one's trying to sell you anything. Whereas now the internet is, instead of being this long endless corridor of doors to open and enter and play in, it is a storefront. It is a strip mall basically. Whenever you're on the internet, the idea is someone is trying to take your money, fill your basket, empty your wallet, and then send you right back out to sell you some more things. And I think also with social media monopolies like Meta, any money there is to be made, they flattened all of the websites into four websites and they're all giving us content we don't want. They're all selling us something. So I think to be super online now, it just sort of means you're either an effective seller of things or an effective purchaser of things,

or you're exhausting yourself trying to resist the bloody law of e-commerce. But yeah, internet used to be good. I also, I was just thinking, because I'm a latecomer to TikTok, literally only getting on it this year. And I'm so shocked about TikTok Shop. I hate it every time I accidentally kick on a live of a man trying to sell me like a sponge for my car that I don't have. But that is one of the most obvious uses. But you would just make me think as you're talking then, Twitter used to be, I remember because there was a time when I used to post, I just lurk now, but because it was like 140 characters and most people were journalists or writers, everyone was really thinking about what

they were. It was a lot of clever wordplay. It was really smart. It was quippy. It was intellectual. It was like sparring and it was a different kettle of fish now. Whereas now it's like about virality, selling. Also, unfortunately, because the economy we live in, the attention economy is one of the best ways to make money. So the more eyeballs you can get, the more like you'll be able to monetize. And so the difficulty is as much as I hate all of that element, it also is the world that we live in that it's like most people need to have a side hustle or an ability to sell through one of these social media platforms. So it's like we're not only in the beast, but we're of the beast because we can't escape it. And it's really difficult then to disentangle from it because we're

also all participating in some way. Yeah, I think Vine and obviously Vine is just like the best thing that ever happened to us, obviously. And in my mind, all of those people and all of those kinds of celebrities, those really niche celebrities who just made huge audiences and made these hugely viral moments on that platform. I don't think of them as content creators who possibly or necessarily earned a fuckton from that. They were just in it for the game of doing these mad things.

Some of them definitely did, but I'm sure a lot of them didn't because A, the fact that the app wasn't even available, the platform wasn't available for more than a few years, and the fact that so many of them were just very normal people just doing weird shit. And also the genesis of the internet hadn't really offered so many pathways and routes to monetizing content. That's still quite a new phenomenon in TikTok and video content, all that kind of stuff. Whereas this was the real genesis of funny online shit and what you could do with it. So I think that almost gave it this naivety to A, you weren't literally being sold to,

B, just all of this stuff could be weird for the sake of it and you didn't have the knowledge that it would be immortalized on YouTube even when the platform died. So it was like this naivety that made it feel like so sincere and so funny. I think that it's hard to not feel like we've lost because that always feels like a point to it. There always feels like dollar signs to the nature of videos on the internet these days. And I don't feel like it has the same sincerity. Is that really boomer for me to say? No, I don't think so. I must be remembering this slightly incorrectly, so forgive me and someone can correct me, but I'm pretty sure that Vine died on the Vine because its most successful creators said, look, we're not earning any money from this. YouTube is beginning to pay

very, very well for their creators. They kind of got together, unionized essentially, went to Vine and said, look, this is what we want to do for you. We will make content for you, we'll do it exclusively, and you will pay us. We will get ad revenue, we will get some kind of revenue and we will stay with you. Vine didn't do that. Vine went under. They refused to kind of get with the times, which is why it gets to live on in this kind of perfect crystallized moment in time. It was written like it died because it didn't get with the times, but it was almost like it marked the end point of those times. I think it's like 30% of young people now want to be content creators. It's such a viable way to make money, but you have

to then, I guess, play along with it. Whereas there was a time when the best people on Twitter would end up off the back of a lot of work and a lot of tweeting with a job at BuzzFeed, with a job in a writer's room. This is something I saw happen multiple, multiple times. They would have a legitimate job in a creative industry, which of course are falling on their arses now. There are hardly any writer's rooms, hardly any jobs. That kind of media is crumbling. Now it's like, okay, you can make big sums of money, but you have to almost be in this very precarious industry. You're not going to get a job in BuzzFeed anymore. You're not going to be writing on a film because you're very funny online. You're going to remain within the confines of the app that has made you, apart from in a few cases where you can break free and become

a legitimate celebrity, but really you remain trapped within the ecosystem that has grown you and that feels very of its time. That is the kind of modern, where we've ended up with content creation and internet virality, which does. Yeah, it has a feeling of being more manufactured and just not as unique, not as you can't be as weird with it because you're trying to sell to Garnier. Thank you so much for listening. Remember, as well as these Friday episodes, you can also listen to us every single Wednesday. This week's Everything in Conversation was about the viral morning routine that seemingly defied the laws of physics and time. If you want to talk to us about our topics and help us decide what to talk about in our

conversation episodes, then please don't forget to follow us at Everything is Content Pod on Instagram and on TikTok. And before you go, do leave us a rating and a review on your podcast player app. Please, please, please. It helps us to keep making the podcast, which we love to do and we hope you love to listen to. See you next week. Bye.