Panic World - The women the internet loves to hate (with Caroline Calloway)

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Caroline Calloway became internet famous for living a fantasy, at least that's how it appeared on Instagram. Then, she became infamous when the public turned on her. We talk with Caroline about the long history of the women and teenage girls this has happened to before, and what it's like for this generation's version of E Girls, the Simp Queen. Our guest Caroline Calloway is an author. You can buy her new book Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway's Guide to Life online at https://carolinecalloway.com/ or at your local bookseller, and you can and should follow her @carolinecalloway. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Garbage Day readers and Panic World listeners, if you want to come to a live show that incorporates the general vibes and atmosphere of those two things, you can do that at the Bell House next week in Brooklyn, October 23rd. We have great guests, including semaphores Ben Smith, writer Magdalene Taylor, podcaster Akila Hughes. She was on her episode last week and Morning Bruise Dan Toomey. It'll be very fun. It's all about the election. The show will never happen again in last. I don't know, we end up with the exact same election in four years, which is possible, I suppose, but probably not. So you can get tickets.

The link will be into the body of today's show. You can also find tickets over on Garbage Day. I will see you all there. I love you. One quick note, before we get to today's episode, our guest, Caroline, decided that it would be better to record her side of the interview on the floor of her condo's gym because she said the Wi-Fi was better there. and then at one point she has to move to the lobby of her condo because someone needed to use the gym. So that would explain certain audio things that will happen during today's episode. It'll be fun, trust me.

It's like hot ones, but for crazy internet stories. Oh, I love it. This is like my ideal situation. The only way this could be better is if we were actually doing hot sauces as well. I am also a hot sauce person. Okay. Next interview? The three of us get together in person and we do, we do hot ones, but in this Florida gym, obviously.

I love it. Perfect. I think that's perfect. Yeah. So I want to start with a question, which is, who is the first internet woman, woman on the internet that you were obsessed with? Part of me is thinking, like, you know, maybe like the popular girls from my boarding school, like stalking them on Facebook. Maybe Emma Watson, like stalking her on the internet. So the reason I asked this is because everyone, Every internet era had girls that people obsess over and freak out about. You know, a community latches onto these women or these girls. They create this parasocial relationship that's fueled by all kinds of resentful attraction.

And it usually ends with, I mean, usually, yeah, a cyber army of men trying to ruin their lives. So this is Panic World. And I'm Ryan Broderick. This is a show about the witch hunts, moral panics, and viral freakouts that boil up out of the weirdest, most confusing corners of the internet. And we wanted to bring you on today, Caroline, to talk about the internet women that the internet loves to hate and how this cycle has sort of progressed throughout internet history. And so I want to start with, I think, maybe kind of a complicated question, which is how would you describe your internet journey concisely? For people who don't know who you are, sort of like, what are the spark notes there? I was one of the first people on Instagram to sort of like pioneer using the long form narrative caption when it was still like a very, very weird thing to do.

And I used it to tell stories about my time as an American undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. Balls and castles and starlight and tuxedos. But there was also a lot going under the surface. I was really struggling with amphetamine addiction, like Adderall, hook over my life. Oh, my God. Thank God. It's not an old person coming to work out. Although, can you imagine how iconic that would be if we just had like an elderly

Florida, like octogenarian just doing bicep curls in the background of this interview? I just feel like that would be. I think it's a good aesthetic. I think it's really good. Yeah. I feel like it would be viral as hell. Oh, a big part is I bought. followers. Not all my followers, just the first 40,000. I buy them. I hire my best friend to help

me write captions for an audience of no one. Fast forward three years later, I'm ready to leverage my now real half a million following into a book deal, but I'm way too addicted to Adderall. So I call up that girl again, having fallen out of touch for three years. And we co-write a document that we sell to publishers about this fairy tale version of my life. And that's when things sort of collapse. As soon as I'm forced to turn that, forced is the wrong word. As soon as I pushed, comes to shove and it's time to turn the book in,

through my own stupidity, my own 22-year-old stupidity sold to publishers. When it came time to write that, I didn't want to. And book deal fell apart. And then that best friend years later, that friend when I got canceled for that contacted the cut I don't know why I keep calling her a friend that's so crazy ex-friend pitched the cut a version of that same story I just told you but where she leaves out those three years where I built a brand by myself and so she really positioned herself as like that I was just too I was just a dumb influencer who which really fits that mold of what

what kind of women people love to hate on the internet what I think is really fascinating is this sort of like version of your life that the internet consumes and the version of your life that is real. And when we started to look back at kind of like the infamous women of each internet age, we kind of noticed the same dynamics playing out. And we wanted to start at the very beginning, as far as we can tell. In 1996, have you heard of Jenny Cam? No. So this is really interesting. So Jenny Cam.

I love internet lore. You know, I collect memoirs by YouTubers. I have a whole ass, like, pyramid of them at my house. Tell me about Jenny. Okay. So Jenny Cam, real name is Jennifer Ringley. She's a junior in college. She buys a web camera.

She writes a script for the web camera that takes a photo every 15 minutes. And she puts it on a website. And she basically starts documenting her life through like snapshots on this website. What? She wrote. So what is she like a computer science major? She wrote like an algorithm. And is the camera handheld?

Or is it like a text to a computer? It's like a little webcam. So it's like taking these photos and she gets so popular that at one point she kisses a guy on camera and it like crashes her website. Like that's how popular she gets in this early internet age. We tried to find some examples of like what she was doing, but they're kind of lost to history. But we did find this. I want to read this to you from her FAQ section. So it says, what can I expect to see on Jenny cam?

And it says anything I may be doing in my dorm room, reading, writing email, watching TV, playing with my hedgehog. spree, rearranging my room, doing aerobics, just about anything. Since my dorm room is my house, I do anything in here and any person would do in their whole house. And at the peak, Jenny, when she switched over to live streaming properly, she was doing four million page views a day and was being written about by over a hundred different publications across the internet. And this was in the late 90s. Yeah. Wow. She also had a subscription program for $15, which I think is pretty cool. Wait, that's so cool.

You know, I always think of Tila Tequila as the first influencer, but she had my space. So this is like way predating that, way predating that. Way predating that. And things were really, yeah, yeah, yeah. How are we to change clothes? She would just change in front of the camera. Yeah, it was like, well west days of the internet. Okay, I'm obsessed to Jimmy Pam.

Yeah, at times she'd be naked, but mostly it was boring and pretty wholesome, especially compared to, you know, what it would be like now. Take a guess what community of internet people made this less wholesome? Oh, men, I'm already thinking that. I'm asking about her changing. Like, that's my first thought is like, how are we dealing with the sexual, the inevitable sexualization of this? Well, specifically, it was men who were collecting screenshots of her feet and chronicling

them on a separate website. So it was the foot guys that came first for Jen. Oh, interesting. Well, actually, not all men, just all feet men is what you're trying to say. All feet men. The problem is that, like, Jenny Cam's setup was, like, getting weirder. Her fan base was getting stranger, but also her profile was getting bigger. So I want to send you a clip.

We're going to watch this together. This is Jenny on the David Letterman show. And I'm going to ask you to skip to a minute 3.30, and we're going to watch it together. I'm saying, you know, we can see you naked on this thing occasionally? If I happen to be naked, then, yeah. Whoa. What about? You have a boyfriend?

I sure do. Now, does he live there with you? For now, he does. Well, see, now that's not good. We don't want him in the place. And what about intimate moments? Intimate, you know what I'm talking about. Joffrey's not comfortable with that.

Sometimes he kind of, like, loosens up a little bit, but most of the time we turn off the lights and pull up the covers. But it would be fine with you to have an intimate moment on the camera. Sure. Really? Like, I'm not going to dump Joffrey just because he's got a little shy street in. Well, think about it. You're going to volunteer?

I would, yeah. I'll be happy to you. I'll come over and we'll see what goes. You know what I'm saying? My number one feeling is that is giving Circe and Tyrie and Landista. Like that could be a real conversation.

My second thought that's not completely Game of Thrones coded is a question I used to get a lot is what would you do if you didn't have social media? and I always used to joke, or I always have the same sort of slapstick answer, which is like, if I were born in medieval times, like, I would just be like in the town square, like, writing on pamphlets about like the avocado toast I had for breakfast that morning being like, here, here you, and like trying to hand them out. And although that is really just meant to be a punchline, there's like a real kernel of truth in it.

I think a lot of people who don't feel that way and who don't share those aspects of self sometimes, like, really judge me or a tribute to malice. Like, you know, like, especially with women, we think of them as attention horrors or, you know, fame, obsessed narcissists. And I really think it's so strange that we just, like, don't have more just, like, gentle acceptance. for like people who are just fundamentally interested in that. So the second thing I think is that I just, it's not often that I see someone else express that fundamental interest in, in making art out of the self.

And it's, it's so honestly a little sad to see someone who was trying to grapple with that same feeling before like the technology that I was born with. Like in 1996, I was five. Like I would, but she was like ready to start making her art. And so she had to what? right this crazy algorithm. So I feel, I feel sad and grateful is what I think. This all bubbles up to a point where Jenny is very well known. She's being written about. She makes friends with another life streamer. This early term is beginning to form. Her name is Courtney. Courtney and Jenny become friends.

Jenny graduates from college. Courtney helps remove. Jenny meets Courtney's fiancé. Jenny hooks up with Courtney's fiance on camera. That is the end sort of of this story. And so this is how Salon sums it up. They write in 2000, Pioneering WebCam exhibitionist, Jenny, is paying a price for stealing her best friend's boyfriend in full view of thousands of outraged fans. Her peeping Tom followers are

elbowing each other aside to spew stinging Jenny insults on public message boards. And then the quote is, I watched this train wreck for over two hours and enjoyed it, wrote Benji Lafave, a Jenny Cam fan in Fitchburg Mass. I will no longer support someone who is

so evil as to humiliate a friend in such a public way. And then they describe it as sounding and looking like the Blair Witch Project when she hooks up with him on camera, which is wild. This is just an absolutely wild historical artifact as far as I'm concerned. I am loving this. Like, honestly, like, what do you mean the second part of the podcast won't be this? Can we just do this for both parts? Do you have another story ready to go?

I'm obsessed. We got a bunch. We're building to you. So we're getting there. Yeah. Hold on. So we got more. So hold on.

So Jenny and the guy, they get into a relationship after the affair episode. It doesn't go well. It feels too public. The infrastructure of the internet is a lot more malleable back then, though. So when she finally decides to kind of vanish from public life, she can. Jenny essentially pulls everything down. We found one modern interview from her, which was reply all in 2014. And she said that I was exhausted at the end.

I had to develop a pretty thick skin for both the good stuff and the bad stuff. And then she said, I don't want to distrust every stranger. I don't want every good thing or bad thing to make me feel defensive or proud. It became almost too thick of a skin. So what are your thoughts about the Jenny episode? How do you kind of feel about it? I feel so protective over and I feel so much empathy for it. I always felt really like I didn't have the language in my own brain to talk to others,

but even myself about the experiences that I was going through, like what it was like receiving so much criticism, what it was like being so watched at such a young age and in college, just like Jenny. And I also didn't know, like, it was sort of like when people, the early days of social media, which I'm realizing I was, maybe wasn't even in the early days. Like, Jenny was caveman era.

I was like, you know, mid, you know, second dynasty, Egypt. Like I had irrigation and domesticated animals. I was actually way better off than I thought I was. But she, like, I always think of how we used to not know that, like, smoking was as bad as it was. And, like, people could smoke on planes and it wasn't a problem. And, like, now we know smoking, like, really causes cancer. I really documented my relationship with my boyfriend at the time at Cambridge on my Instagram. And I really didn't know what sort of effect it would have on our relationship and the tax that it would, like, the social.

human tax that that sort of documentation would take. Had we only traveled back in time and done this strange Jenny Cam hot ones, Syrica 2012, I could have saved me a lot of trouble, thanks Ryan, but I didn't know about Jenny Cam. And I didn't know, there were no examples for me of what would happen if you documented a relationship online. I would never do it again. but that's definitely a lesson I learned that I did not know at the time. So I really just think like, God damn, like, wow, even though you say she was so lucky to be able to delete the trail, I look at her and I think like she's so unlucky because she was so alone going through these things. Although I always saw it glass half empty at the time, like there's so few of those other people.

At least there were other people. Jenny was completely alone. But she also wasn't the only one for long, and things do get more extreme for Jenny's predecessors. And we're going to talk about that right after the break. We're doing a big Q&A episode over on our Patreon this month. If you have any burning questions for us that involve a screen and or being outraged at it, you can send those questions to PanicworldPod at gmail.com. We're going to be dropping that episode later this month.

You can also shoot me a question on Discord. All of those notifications go to the same place because in the world of smartphones, push notifications are virtually meaningless. The middle period between Jenny and you, I think, is this really strange, quick evolution. And we found a couple examples of this middle to late 2000s period. Are you familiar with Cracky Chan? Have you ever heard of Cracky Chan? No. Where in the fuck are you getting?

these people. Okay, actually, what year is Jackie? Okay, so Cracky Chan appears in 2005. Yeah. And so the next two internet women we're going to talk about became famous in a very niche and very kind of confusing way on a little website called 4chan. Sorry, did you say 2005? 2005, yeah. Got it, got it. I was born in 1991. So I'm 14 now. This is my first year of high school. This is like, Facebook has not yet come to high school. Here, here's. Here's. Here's. Here's. Here's a blast in the past. Here's a photo. I'm going to send you in the chat.

This is Cracky Chan. This is the photo that she posted to 4chan in 2005 that made her an underground internet celebrity. Oh, it's a link to know your meme.com. This photo is a girl with clown makeup and a hand that says sup 4chan and Sharpie on it. With her clown makeup, she's also wearing one of those navy blue and white sort of Japanese-style sailor girl outfits. I feel like this is, this meme should be.

we have Dasha at home, and it's just this photo. Yes. So, Fortune, I think it'd only been around for like a year or two, if that. This girl uploads this photo, and she became such a fixation on the message board that moderators had to step in and literally filter out CrackyCham. They had to, like, block conversation about her. Block her. And there was 20 other kind of, like, MySpacey photos of her that were uploaded.

And the attention was out of control. It, like, actually scared her. And this is, here's another example. Here's another link for you. So this is, I'll read this. So this is a, this is a 4chan post about Cracky Chan from 2005. I'll never forgive you assholes for chasing that adorable girl away. You are all horrible, disgusting people.

And I hope there's a God. And he makes you suffer in hell. I'll never again be able to fall asleep without thinking of her warm, cute, smiling face. You've ruined my life completely. All I do all day now is think stuff up to post about her on troll talk, which I think is like a message board. to get people to talk with me about her because that's all that's left. I'm going mad.

No, you're speaking it's all caps. It's all caps now. It's because that's all that's left. Now it's all caps. Keep going. Okay. I am going mad. I hope you're happy with what you've done.

If I ever see someone mention fortune in real life, I'll fucking beat him to death with my belt. Eventually, I should be able to kill all those responsible for this. Discuss. Yes. And then discuss is all lowercase. The grammar in that kills me.

So this part of it is very funny. And then obviously, as these things do, it gets dark pretty quick. So they break into her live journal. They steal her photographs that were on her live journal and post them to 4chan. They become obsessed with her. She then breaks 4chan. Like the activity about her breaks 4chan. It goes offline briefly.

They're talking about it to the point where they're banning her picture. They're banning her name. There are spin-off sites created. And then by 2006, she has to literally post a photo just being like, you stop, like, leave me alone. They even found out where she was working, which was a blockbuster, which is very 2000s. Wow. Wow. So, yeah.

So this is a dedication to Cracky Chan that somebody has written fairly recently, which reads, I rewrite this so often. It's sad. I never know what I would say to you if I was given the chance. But I guess a small thank you would be a good place to start. I feel like there was something missing in my life before I found you, and I'm sure that sounds cheesy. Your images helped me through a rough time when I was a kid. I was having severe family issues, and I felt like I could not go on. I was just a girl with a lot of issues.

You helped me with that. At what cost, though, because I feel like if I could give up that happiness, I got for you to be able to be happy. I probably would. That sounds dramatic, but yeah. Which I think is like a really interesting dynamic in these early stories, which is like, there are armies of creepy men. And then there are like people who do seem to be genuinely like, thank you for sharing your life with me as little as you have. It's a bizarre kind of parasycial relationship, don't you think?

There's that great James Baldwin quote that I'm is on my list of quotes to memorize so that I can sound smart and not just absolutely butcher it when I want to reference it. But it's like it goes something like I always thought I was alone until I read books and that all my heartbreaks were unique. and that all the tragedies that befell me were singular and then I read. And I, you know, I was talking earlier about how it's like hard. We still don't have like the language to really express some of these very real emotional experiences that we're having on the internet with our connection to content and how content affects us and our relationship to these creators. But I do think it's very interesting that we feel no shame in feeling moved by.

other types of more what we would consider legitimate art. Like a beautiful photograph, if it was framed hanging in a prestigious gallery, and it made us feel less alone. We'd have no shame in that, or no problem explaining why we felt less alone. We'd be like, ah, yes, because it's art, and that's what art does. But I think we really look down our noses and sneer at the same photograph hanging on a wall in a gallery and the same photograph posted on 4chan are still at this exact moment in time,

literally considered of lesser values. And it's something that I really care about because as someone who wants to be a writer, the same sentence typed by my thumbs into an Instagram caption, no matter how smart or beautiful or evocative I make it, it's inherently worth less than the same sentence printed in a book.

And I just think even though we're talking about what is ancient internet history, we actually, when it comes to consider internet content, valuable sources of creative expression, we still haven't come that far at all. Not much has really changed since 2005, which is unfortunate for those of us who really feel inspired making, expressing ourselves creatively online through content. I was also a teenager in the 2000s. I'm 89 like Taylor Swift.

And I, uh, don't mean. Don't mean to brag. Yeah, I'm jealous. I'm not so a lie. Yeah. So when I think about the 2000s, like one thing I don't see spoken about often is this thing in the 2000s where teenagers are coming online for the first time. Like in the 90s, like you really kind of needed to go to college to get a real access to the internet. Obviously, you could if you had a family computer or something.

But there wasn't a lot of like teen oriented spaces. And I think in the 2000s with the rise of MySpace and Live Journal and Zanga and neopets and all these sort of different like teen oriented sites, teenagers are like meeting each other. And there's like a slice of life that had not really been documented before that's appearing. And so when I think of like really early 4chan drama, I'm like, yeah, I'm sure there's like a lot of really weird adult men in the mix here. But there's probably like a lot of teenagers who are just like acting insane because like that's what teenagers do. And they've never seen teens on the internet before. Like it's a new idea. 100%. I also don't think that those comments are like, I know we laughed at the first one because

it's funny, but both of those comments had you told me that they were commented today, I would believe you. Like, the number one thing I was struck by is how little the internet has changed with those comments. They found so modern. We have always been people on the internet. And one of the main reasons why we wanted to start with Cracky Chan in this section was because she's kind of the precursor for what I think is arguably like the queen of fortune the sort of the the biggest of these like early underground internet artists um have you ever heard of uh an internet woman named boxy you know what is so crazy is right up until jenny cam waltzed into my life at the beginning of this podcast episode i really thought myself a historian of women on the internet who the fuck is

Boxy. Oh, I'm excited. Okay. There's a good chance you'll recognize her, but let's start with, let's start with, let's hope so. Let's start here. So this is a screenshot. I just sent you.

This is from her Gaia online profile. Kind of walk us through this screenshot. If you could read, read us the MySpace speak that it's written in. That would be fantastic as well. Okay. I'm just pulling it up. Yeah. Wow.

This is incredible. Oh, hey, I'm Boxy. I love an. Oh, Hey is spelled O-H-A-Y. Of course. You've got to spell it that way. That was very big back then. And this is all in caps lock.

I love space, semi- not space, but I'm... The grammar is I love space semicolon. Yeah. That deliberate space between love and semicolon. I have to. Locky. 4D-1 pants. Wafiel.

Was that waffles or something? I think it's waffles, but I don't know. But like in like a dumb little like millennial. Oh, I think these are other users. I think it's... Oh, yes, you're so right. I think it's... And Mo, Chan and Tyehubby, all users.

Yes, girl to left is me. No, I is not hot. GtFO, I'm not. And then a really like angry, frowny yelling face where it's like capital D, colon, and then like the angry eyebrows, V. I'm okay with that. smiley face. I love my life. Oh my gosh. She's so not like other girls. Yeah, she's the best. Click my signature to help with my quest, please. PLS.

Bena little emoticon typed out V and 3 for heart. Melanie S. All my art. I L.H. I love her. I believe. Oh, I love her. I believe. I'm going back to my days of AOL and Submessinger. I think that's I love her. Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. You're totally right. So Boxy's story is kind of interesting because it starts very differently than Jenny cams, where Jenny Cam and even Cracky Chan to some extent are, you know, these girls and women who use the internet to communicate with an audience. Where Boxy, she gets famous because she's using YouTube to speak specifically to her friends. She was not trying to become famous.

She buys a webcam. She makes a video with it. And she says hi to her internet friends that she was talking to one guy online. So here's some good internet speak for you. This is another screenshot. I want to get in on some of this. I want to read this one. So, oh, hi, guys.

I didn't see U. D-R-H-Y-E-W-D-R. I was too busy making 4D-D-1 a video. I loo you guys. Wow, this is incredible. And the whole thing culminates in a video that goes very viral. In fact, it's probably one of the most early viral YouTube videos of that era. We're going to watch the first 40 seconds together.

I have to watch an ad because I don't have YouTube premium. I should get YouTube premium. I may not have Wi-Fi, but I have YouTube premium. Wow. Just not to face with you like that, but... That's so cool. All right. Are you ready?

Are you jealous much? I am jealous. I'm very jealous. All right, so here we go. Three, two, one. Go. Okay, hi. Okay.

My name is Boxy. Most of you know me as, well, most of you know me as boxy. I suppose if you're watching this, you probably know me as boxy. But, and I told my Gaia online friend, buddy, one second, I'm uncomfortable. I told my Gaia online buddy friend, Admiral Awesome, that I would make a video just for him. So I'm doing it. Here it is, Addy, I love you. I love you.

And my first thought is, you know, just because Adderall wasn't good for me, I don't think it should be discontinued. Some teenagers definitely need it. That is definitely true. Yeah. You know, all jokes aside, there was such a stark difference between Cracky Chan, which, oh, my God, just saying that, I feel like I'm going to get canceled. Like, I just feel like that should be, like, illegal to say. Like, I feel like I'm saying a slur, honestly, when I say that username. but she seemed a lot more just like, you know, teenage girls have always expressed themselves through different media throughout time.

I mean, like, you have, oh, Victorian scrapbooks are such a good example of teenage girl art. And I just think, you know, kids of both genders, humans have why we make artists such a mystery, but it's very clear that we've always made it and we've felt a need to express ourselves to some people more than, others, but Cracky Chan was just a girl who was expressing herself and got caught up in something. She didn't even, couldn't even imagine. She just, her content was too fire for her own good. And she, like, honestly suffered the consequences of that fire-ass content. And with Boxy, I think she falls more in the Jenny category where I look at her and I see someone who likes to perform and who, you know, maybe her end game in life is not content creation.

I mean, I'm so excited to hear about how she grew up and what became of her. But, like, you definitely look at her and you think, like, that's a theater kid. Yeah, she's also so casually online where she's, like, rattling off screen name. She's, like, plugging her Gaia online character. Like, she's very, it's definitely, like, a switch has happened. And, like, sort of, like, there are kids now who are kind of a little more internet savvy than they were, like, let's say, two or three years ago. But in Boxy's case, nobody notices this video for, like, a year. It has, like, a couple thousand views.

It's kind of it. Then it gets posted to like one of those early link aggregators called I Am Bored. Okay. She gets flamed. Like, I mean, this is like the, this is the peak like no women club internet, which is still true. But like this was bad back then. And then from there it goes to 4chan's random board B and take a little guess like how that goes. How do you think the guys on 4chan deal with Boxy?

Make her suicidal? Well, not quite. Um, they, they, they, they, it's a lot of like older men being like, I'm in love with her, which is super weird because she's a teenager. Uh, and it starts to like, same thing, like Cracky Chan. They're spamming the board with her. It becomes an inside joke. And she makes a video responding to this.

So just for comparison, the video that I first showed you of Boxie has 6.2 million views on YouTube right now. This video, her responding to her 4chan virality, which I just sent you, has, 24 million views. People fucking love drama. You know, the way she talks also, I feel like the way she talks is what the critics of Honor Levy's prose accuse her of writing like. You know?

That makes sense, though. I buy that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, but critics, not me. I do think you're touching on something real, though, which is that, like, when young women speak unfiltered on the internet, people lose their minds. And it doesn't matter what time period you're talking about. Like, there's a lot of cultural power there.

And then the backlash happens. So like exactly like this, Boxy responds. The video gets 1.2 million views in a week back in 2009. What year is this? What year is this? What year is this? That's crazy. Crazy.

She becomes the most subscribed YouTube account in January of 2009. And so this obviously leads to her being the target of hacking groups, which were very big in the late 2000s. So there's a hacker group called Operation Valkyry that tries the docks her but can't. There's another group called the Center for Boxy Controlled Restriction that, like, issues a press release demanding that she like be removed from the internet. And then they find her real name, which is Katie. They find her MySpace. They break into her YouTube account.

They delete her videos. They replace her videos with a video that says that if she uploads again, they'll leak her identity. it's this total playbook that we have seen basically ever since. And it's all because this teenage girl put out a message to her friends. I'm so stressed. I'm so stressed. Okay, do you want to count me down to watching it? Yeah, yeah.

So three, two, one. Okay, hi. So my name is Boxy, and it's been a while since I made a new video. So I decided that because of recent events that I could make a new video. new video. I don't do drugs. No, I know that you all think that I do drugs, but I don't actually, and I actually don't have ADD either, which is funny to me.

And then, like, you people's were all like, you was trolling, and I was like, I am Maxi, you see? And, like, um... Okay, okay, pause it there, pause there, time out. So, so, yeah. So first things first, Boxy, I'm not saying you. do do drugs. I'm saying you should do drugs. Let's be so fucking clear right now. Now I'm joking. Now I'm part of the problem. Now I'm part of the like the boxy doxers or whatever the fuck.

She knew the criticism. She knew. She knew. Which I think it's like important to point out that like she was clearly doing like a character. Like this is obviously kind of a joke between her friends. Like it's harmless. And in fact, luckily for for the end of this little part of the story, the hackers that do sort of attack her and tear down her accounts and stuff eventually realize that they're just like bullying a child and do they release a statement and they say her videos were annoying and affecting many people throughout the internet however she definitely does not deserve to have her life ruined and then they apologize and give her her shit back yeah like that is crazy i i i i'm so glad you didn't ask me to guess what happened next because i would never have gotten even close to that that's That's amazing. That's such a good, I love when internet stories have happy endings. That's amazing. What happened to Katie? I'm so glad you asked. We have a video of post-boxy Katie, and I'm going to send it to you. I went on to the internet to check up on things, and then people would just be saying these really mean, awful things about me. And I was like, oh, okay, like, awesome. And I didn't really want to be there because I felt really, you know, hated. So I would just be. sort of keep to myself and yeah.

And so then people are like, oh, she never spends any time with us. And it was just sad. So let's pause it there because she says something really interesting where she's talking about how people are really horrible to her, but then they're also criticizing her for not being on the internet, which I think is like such a fascinating dynamic where it's like they're horrible to her and then they're demanding her more of her attention. Yeah. At the beginning of the episode, when you were like, you concisely explain your story, I really

I struggle doing that. Like I always, I don't think I've ever, I do so many podcasts because I love the sound of my own voice. No, I'm just kidding. Who doesn't? It's great for selling books, honestly. Caroline, we all have a void inside of ourselves that can only be filled with attention. That's why I podcast.

I've got to do it. I don't think all of us. I think just the theater kids, just the artist. It's like that great Bobernam lyric where it's like, you know, the kid at the birthday party who's screaming and he'll grow up to be some kind of artist. Not all the kids at the birthday party are screaming for attention. It's just the insufferable artistic types. But at the beginning when you were like, go, do the concise version.

But one of the things that I just didn't get to because it sort of happened later was I had a Reddit that to this day, I'm like sort of, I feel like this November, it'll be like, three, two years since I've looked at it. And I went through different seasons of how I handled this Reddit because I would look at it and it was awful and I couldn't stop myself from looking at it. It was terrible because I just felt like I couldn't win. It's like, you know, if I didn't post, they wanted me back. If I did post, they tore me apart and it just seemed impossible. But, you know, something that really helped me deal with it and sort of move past where I think. boxy is emotionally in this video and where I myself have been as well is I a couple years ago, I did this documentary for Vice where they paid me and my best friend just like an outrageous lump sum

and flew my best friend from England to Florida and gave us money to make a little documentary about my Reddit. And as part of it, I like posted a phone number, like a burner phone. number on the account. And I called these people up and I talked to them and sort of going into it, my hypothesis was that people would fall into like one of two categories. I sort of thought they'd either be like, I'd pick up the phone and it'd just be like undiluted rage, just screaming vitriol the second I answer the phone. They'd be as angry and disgusted and repulsed by me as they are in their comments.

Or I thought there might be some strange thing that happens where when they get off the phone, they'd be like really sycophantic almost and they'd like suddenly switch and be super nice. Sure. And what actually happened was neither of those two hypotheses. What happened was they were, they mainly just talked about themselves. And they, which I found really surprising, seeing as for years, these were people who had contributed where for years the only reason I knew these people is that they had made floor plans of my apartment they had circulated my nudes they had just like every single comment they made

was like about me and it was so strange that when they finally had just like one-on-one direct access to me that they were just like pouring out their life life stories and I let them talk yeah and obviously in a perfect world I would hope that you know hating me and making me feel, I don't know, bad about my weight or you would wish that they could find that belonging in acceptance without doing that. But it just, that's not the way it is. And they do find acceptance from doing that. So you just have to just sort of metabolize it.

So yeah, when I watch that video, I just see someone who just hasn't yet found that piece because she's really young and I didn't have that piece at that age either. So like no judgment on her. I will finish her story for you, which is that she moves on. she makes YouTube content a little bit longer. She starts going by her real name, Katie Wayne. She gets some acting gigs. She voices some cartoons.

And she quits YouTube in 2017. Yeah. She kind of vanishes from the internet. She was part of the cycle of like memes that made NFTs during that boom to kind of like make a little bit of money. Oh, that's great. I'm so glad she got her bag. She got her back. But when you talk about sort of like this desire for understanding why people are acting this way,

about these young women, I think what is really fascinating in our timeline as we kind of getting to your appearance on the web is that there's one more important thing that happens that I think addresses this issue in a really bad way, unfortunately, which is that in 2014, Gamergate arrives. So in these three examples, up until this point, people, mostly men, are creeply obsessed. They kind of want to destroy the girl, but they are desperate for her to post and give them attention. And I think the most important sort of piece of this, you know, when we're talking about setting up the modern age of this sort of internet girl phenomenon, is that GamerGate gives an ideology to this kind of bullying. It's not just that I'm attacking a young woman on the internet.

There's a, there's a, there's a culture war that's backing me up. Are you familiar with sort of the broad strokes of Gamergate, like sort of the basics of it? You know, I would say yes, but please explain it to me again. Sure. Real quick. So. He's a why an explanation. In 2014, actually

10 years ago this month, we're recording this in August of 2024, a man named Aaron Gajoni publishes what's called the Zoe Post. And he posted it to different forums, including 4chan. It's 10,000 words attacking his ex-girlfriend,

game developer Zoe Quinn. And he accuses her without any evidence, totally baselessly, that she was sleeping with a video game reviewer for positive reviews of her indie video game. And it becomes a scandal largely because a guy named Steve Bannon, who would eventually go work for Donald Trump, was running a website called Brightbart News. And he hired a games writer named Milo Yonopoulos to cover this story in the video game sphere. Wait, I didn't know Milo Unopoulos was covering video games at Breitbart. Was he covering other stuff or was he literally like their video game reporter?

So this is literally a quote. So this is from Milo about this. It's easy to mock video gamers as dorky loaners and yellowing underpants. Indeed, in previous columns, I've done it myself, occasionally at length. But the more you learn about the latest scandal in the games industry, the more you start to sympathize with a frustrated male stereotype because an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers are terrorizing the entire community. And this was a literal concerted effort that Steve Bannon has later said, like, I saw Gamerade happening and I sent Milo in to 4chan to cover it to turn it into a political story. And I think it's a really important thing to remember, which is that there has always been women on the internet being bullied by armies of men. But after 2014, the whole internet starts to act like they're a jury deciding whether, you know, a woman online deserves to be harassed. And that's where your story really begins. And we're going to talk about that right after the break. The year is 2012. And you enter Instagram, essentially.

You sort of break through the scene. Can you tell me, you've talked a little bit about it already, but can you sort of talk about how Instagram as a platform function and how you were using in the very early days of your internet career? Well, it was really just because of a character limit. I've always wanted to be a writer. I promise for the listeners at home, Ryan just took a sip of something and choked. He wasn't just, you know, absolutely wheezing in my face at the idea that I wanted to be

a writer. He's not part of the problem. He's part of the solution, guys, okay? I thought your captions were really good. I thought they were really well done. But, um, yeah. My inspiration, and this is honestly so Milo, Brightbark Gamergate coded of me. But my whole inspiration for my entire brand was weirdly Tucker Max.

Did you ever read his books? Holy shit. Wow. Yeah. Wow. You, yeah. Okay. Tucker Max.

I, you know, okay, I actually kind of see that. I kind of, okay, I kind of, wait, connect. Basically, listen, listen, connect the dots for us. It's not his philosophy that I was obsessed with. Or like, I wasn't like, oh, he's my role model because I want to go be terrible and come all over sorority girls who I like don't call back and then like make fun of them in my writing. It was because I saw that he had this really smart business model, which was, give away humorous, compelling stories about yourself for free on the internet. But at the end of the day,

you can leverage that into traditional publishing and get a book deal and have this security that your book will sell once you do get that book deal. But I really saw this sort of like overall trend happening where I, you know, BlackBerry's had just turned into iPhones. We were carrying our computers more and more. Those computers in our pockets were becoming more and more capable. And I really thought that there would be a shift away from going to these like third-party websites where it's like, you know, to go to a blog, you have to like type in that blog name and like make a choice to go there. And so I wanted to do the Tucker Max model, but without the Caroline Calloway.com being the source of the stories. I wanted to make it available through social media. So I'm at NYU in 2000.

I buy those 40,000 fake followers, hire this best friend, worst business choice of my life to write these captions for this audience of robots. No one's reading them. I'm having to buy the likes on every photo just to like keep up appearances, which back in that day, I feel like an old person being like, soda pop used to cost a nickel. But like, because Instagram was so just not valued by the culture at all yet, it was this little app for kids to To buy likes for every post was, I mean, it was, it was pennies. Was the idea that like if you had enough, you would get caught in a recommendation feed and like, then they would become real? Or was it just like kind of like a goofy experiment? Like, what was sort of the thought process?

So my, the story I was telling on Instagram and the content I was using to tell it changed so drastically between those, that year and a half at NYU, those New York years and what would become the Cambridge years where I really down the New York season the Cambridge season yeah the New York season was so different but that that concept really was it's it's hard to make even people who were alive then and using social media then truly remember what Instagram in 2012 was like I mean a normal it was for places it was a place to put photos of my PBR can uh with a orange filter on it that's what it was for. And then your hashtag would be like hashtag

Valencia. You know? Yeah, dude. That was the filter. That filter was so good. That was the caption. You'd filter it and then you'd like hashtag it with the caption and it'd be like an aerial shot of like a PBR can casting a long ass shadows. You know, it's sunset with like a white border. It was not gross rooftop. Yeah. What are the significant thing? Developments in Ryan's life.

it was almost so cringe and embarrassing to like put something so real and momentous and vulnerable on Instagram. And so it really took me a year of just sort of missing the mark with my content and just sort of. And, you know, honestly, the influencer wasn't, it wasn't only now it's a cool job and what kids want to be. It was not yet a job. Right. My biggest goal was just to get actual readers. Like, I never thought it could be, I was really just trying to get on the explore page. It would be like a photo of me holding a bouquet from the, it was very tumbler-coded.

Of course. Okay, view from the Empire State Building and be like, hey, guys, I went on an adventure today. Have you ever seen, like, have you ever, I don't know, woken up early just to do something crazy? Like, it was radical for 2012. You have to believe me. It was like, it was strange content for then, but it was nowhere near as radical and strange as my content would be for the context of 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016. When I really, when I left that X-friend behind, moved to Cambridge, fell out of touch,

and I really started finding my voice. But, you know, the pressures really started piling up as well. I really don't think that. That's what I wanted to ask about, actually. Sort of like, because you've mentioned, you've mentioned the book deal and sort of the creativity workshops and there's there's clearly like this moment in your narrative where things are becoming intense and they're sort of spinning out of control and and this is you know what we've kind of been talking about this episode which is like there's always this moment where like you've hit

critical mass and things start to get wobbly and I would love to sort of hear about like when did you wake up one day and be like uh oh yeah you know I really this is a really hot controversial take, but I am not mad at all or feel any sort of judgment for Logan Paul filming that dead body in the suicide forest in Japan. You know, I'm not either. I totally get why, how you could get to that point, to be honest. I really did it. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like I'm really allowed to have this hot take since my father killed himself. I'm allowed to have problematic suicide faves, you know? but um but i think it's i find it easy oh i can go out into yeah sorry i'm going to work out no worries no worries i'm going to go i'm going to go back into the lobby i'm going to finish this in the lobby proper um and i made a new friend yeah that's good so you're talking about Logan paul in the suicide forest and sort of like the moment where like yeah mania kind of takes over i don't even know if it's mania but i think it's the same thing as what happened with um

With Jenny Cam and her sleeping with her friend's ex-boyfriend, you're making content day in, day out. Like every day you're expected to generate this stuff and to have it do well and you know what sort of stuff performs well. And you like the attention and, you know, there are obviously so many downsides and it's very confusing and you don't have any help processing these new. very, very new experiences that you're accumulating faster than you can unravel them. And, you know, even though it's so hard, it's also your dream, you don't want to let your

fans down and fall off and start making bad stuff. And I just feel like all that stuff can really lead you to do something too radical that you just like are... The incentive structure is screwed up, right? Like it's like the internet is sort of feeding into these impulses that like it's almost like hyper real, right? Like it's like it doesn't feel like the the real world and the online world are communicating anymore. And you can kind of make these decisions that in the moment I feel like makes sense. Then you, I know I've done it when I look back.

I'm like, that was weird. Why would I do that? And it's like because the internet was goading me on, I think. Yeah. No, totally. Like I've made posts where I that I look back on it. like that was crazy you asked like what was the day where you like woke up and you're like this on too far and for me that day didn't come until i like got my drug problem under control like

i really that would make sense yeah i couldn't have like the clear-eyed um like wearwithal to look around my life and actually just perceive with clarity what the fuck was going on because I was just like high as balls on amphetamines. I don't want to seem reductive, but I'm just curious like Adderall is such a specific drug in terms of like output and productivity and energy and sort of this need to be present. Do you feel like it's connected to this point in your life where you are operating? on this massive stage, you're producing all of this content, you're like specifically on Stim's posting.

And I feel like that, yeah. I mean, was there a connection there? You know, I didn't, I didn't choose a downer. Like, you know, I didn't become, I didn't become a stoner girl as I tried to like, get my Cambridge degree, have a full-time job, right, have a social life. And like, I don't know, also have a relationship and try to be a good daughter and help my dad, like, it was definitely a high achieving drug. But I honestly think the truest answer I could give you is that I really struggled with

the depression that took my father's life. And you know how we look back at like French kings and syphilis? And like at the time when like French kings died, we'd be like, I guess he has the French disease. And now we're like, that was syphilis. Like we're able to have. Well, it turns out most Frenchness is caused by syphilis. That is a real fact.

Yeah, most French deaths. but I just like we have the medical knowledge today to retroactively diagnose physical illnesses that people didn't understand at the time that they were killing people and affecting lives I sometimes wonder if 100 years from now we'll look back at mental illnesses that we just didn't understand and I the truest answer I could give you of why Adderall it wasn't just that it's sort of like a high, high achieving, high productivity drug. It's that it clipped into my depression, like a puzzle piece. Right. Well, the way, I don't want to lose this thought because you said something really interesting, sort of this idea of like the French, you know, French just

being caused by civilists. But this idea that like there's an entire generation of people who have grown up online and we're sort of looking at them through computer screens and like gawking at them or demonizing them or terrorizing them. And I've been covering internet culture in some form for almost 15 years now. And I've interviewed like a lot of people who have gone viral. And I would say like eight to nine times out of 10, there is like this underlying other thing going on that we're only seeing a fractal of through a screen. And because we're only seeing a fractal of it, people can be really cruel to these people who are like through whether it's an undiagnosed mental health disorder or it's a substance abuse problem or both or some other

personality defect has put them in front of our computer screens and we sort of just like throw tomatoes at them. Oh, totally. And it does, it creates this like total lack of control, this total like issue of gleaming back control. And, and, and what I wanted to talk about with you specifically right by the way, I'm loving this conversation. I can totally stay later. Okay, that's, that's great to hear. So you're really interesting because I see you as the pivot point between like, this previous era of the internet where it is mob violence and it is like Gamergate nonsense and 4chan bullshit and women just being demonized for expressing themselves and then like this urge to glean back control from it. Whether it's figuring out why you're doing what you're doing

or figuring out how to like monetize it, trying to figure out how to like own it in some way. And I think you are sort of the pivot point. And the reason I want to talk about it here is because you, as far as I'm concerned, you are the first mainstream viral celebrity. Let's call it that, right? To explore. Oh, okay. You're like to actually be a terrible person to end. I want to give you credit, but I can't say you're the first viral celebrity.

I'm sure there's some cat in the 90s. I think it's keyboard cat is, but. Yeah, I hope you watch the surprise in my voice. I was like, dang, that's crazy. But I do think you are one of the first ones to, to like very much in public figure out, like, how can I gleam some ownership back? Whether that's through monetization, through only fans, through publishing your own work, like, you, you seemed very quick to me to kind of be like, okay, there's something here. And I want, I want to own this. I want to get some control back.

I would love to just sort of hear, like, what made you decide, like, okay, like, enough of this? Like, I want to be in the driver's seat again. Like, how did you sort of make up your mind to do that? Well, number one thing, I cannot emphasize this enough. I stopped self-medicating my suicidal depression with Adderall. I got excellent psychiatric help. I got on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. And that was, truly that took like three years.

Like the Adderall addiction was like really difficult to untangle. And even once I, you know, figured out how to think myself through the day without like the zooming euphoria of study drugs. I was still left sort of like blinking and startled and sort of like sleepily waking up within this like smoking ruin of a life that like I myself had dropped bombs on that was like shelled by me personally. Like I was in a hundred thousand dollars of debt to my publisher. because of this book, I had sold them, and my choices, once I've sold it, are sort of like, either I can turn in the book that I sold, which is not lying outright, but very much lying by a mission.

Because my life, I was a drug addict who was like on the brink of suicide, was going to spend the rest of their life signing copies of a memoir about drinking champagne and castles and ball gowns. Like, it just, it felt so. I wanted to be an author for that James Baldwin quote to make people feel less alone in their heartbreak and their tragedy, not to make them feel the worst fomo of their entire goddamn life because they weren't drinking champagne in that castle with me. Like I just felt like I had to start over, but to start over, meant going into $100,000 worth of debt. And so it took a couple of years just to get stable and to get back on my two feet. And the first thing I did was the creativity workshops.

And I was still very much working through, like, my newfound amphetamine sobriety. So the plan I came up with to begin telling this story was sort of workshop it like a comedian at Open Mic and have these like 40 people serve lunch, like salad, gift bags. I tell stories in person. I can sort of see what lands, what hits. And I can sort of market this like meat and greet. take this tour for like my 40 most intense fans in like major city areas. Yeah. And so when I do this, it goes absolutely viral.

And this, one of the Reddit haters retweets a thread, um, calling my event a scam, which was honestly, if I had seen this thread, I would have thought it was a scam too because, because I hadn't touched my Instagram since I left Cambridge. So I'm planning these events on stories, and the events change so much. You know, first it's everyone will get an orchid plant, and then it turns out, then I look at the prices of orchids, and that's out the window. Orchids are goddamn expensive. And so this woman from the Reddit makes this really, really compelling Twitter thread where she takes real screenshots from my Instagram story.

That's like, everyone will get an orchid plant and compares it to the day of where people do not get an orchid plant. and very smartly just doesn't include any of the screenshots where I talked about it changing. And who knows? Maybe she even really didn't believe it was a scam. Like maybe she thought she was doing something really good. But the way that I handled that was that I apologized. I'd never been canceled before. I'd only ever been written about in like Teen Vogue as like a fairy tale.

Fairy tale was the word everyone always used. And so I apologized. I refunded everyone. I canceled the tour. I lost so much money just because I bought all the stuff from vendors. Like this wasn't like a fire festival situation where like we didn't have water or like things hadn't been bought yet. Like our problem was we had bought everything. And I just couldn't withstand the criticism.

I want to stop you real quick because I want to talk about this outrage cycle. We'll loop back to your story in a second. So one of the most interesting kind of threads that we sort of discovered doing research for this episode is that like the the outrage cycle that you experience, that like moment of cancellation where things are kind of spinning out of control and you're trying to like, you're trying to figure out like how do I get in front of this? So for you, you apologize. You gave refunds. Great stuff. That has evolved in the last couple of years. And that is where we're going to end our story today with sort of if we if this was a if this was a Christmas Carol.

So we did ghosts of Christmas past, Ghost of Chris's present. Now we're doing Ghost of Chris's future. So now we're going to look towards the future of being a girl online. And I want to send you a video, and I'm not going to give you any context because I want you to tell me what you think is going on here. And maybe you've seen it. Maybe you haven't. But here's the video and just give that a little play. We don't have to sync up because it's short.

I please my man in every way. All the ways wake him up. He gets to nut. Before he leaves out the door, he's leaving empty nuts. At work, I am calling him, like, come outside. It's your lunch break. It's time for you to get your nut off. When he gets home, he's getting fed.

He is getting another nut and one before bed or two, if he's lucky. That's it. That's a secret. Okay. So are you ready for some context here? Because I promise you that we showed you this for a reason. So this woman's name is Victoria Banks. and this clip is from her Instagram.

She does not have a podcast. She creates videos that look like she has a podcast, and she says extremely salacious things that look like they're part of a podcast interview to outrage men to advertise her only fans. That's so interesting. It's so interesting. And there's a whole world of essentially sex workers on Instagram

that piss men off specifically as a way to monetize the outrage to send them to OnlyFans. And what I think is so interesting is when you look through the history of sort of all these blowups around like women who would go viral without their consent or they'd go viral for reasons that were like lacking context, there's now like a totally new generation of creators that have realized this cycle is a thing, realize men will go out of control and are now trying to experiment with how they can monetize that outrage, which I think is actually pretty cool. That's so smart. you know, and especially she's really playing on the trope of like all this sort of style of like fresh and fit podcasts where they have Instagram models or like OnlyFans models as guests to sort of get to. I am so happy you brought that up. When I saw this, that's what I assumed it was clipped from. I think that's so interesting that she doesn't even have a podcast or she wasn't a guest on a podcast.

That's so crazy. And now check out this clip, which is truly awful. but it is the new ecosystem that we're in. At some point, there's going to be a history of you doing that. As beautiful as you are, you're stunning, you're a pretty girl, but no man that is going to be in your league is going to put up with it. And so the question is, if you were truly in love and you had true desire for a man that will put his foot down with you and tell you how it was going to be,

would you or would you not give up your only fan? No, I wouldn't. Same way if I wanted to really expand my dating goal. Then you do not genuinely desire that man. You would not be in love with that man. So this is from a podcast called Whatever. It's run by this weird in-cell pickup artist guy, and he brings on Only fans models and he just sort of ridicules them.

But then the women, they share the clips and they're like, if you want to see more, follow me here. And they put a link to their OnlyFans. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I want to understand the payment model. So the women go on the podcast and they get the podcast, the podcast isn't giving away the content for free. So he gives the content to the girls to put behind their paywalls. That doesn't make sense.

This guy brings on OnlyFans models and he clips those moments. and puts them on Twitter or X or whatever, the women share it, they quote tweet it being like, if you want to see more of me, here's my only fans link. So it's like a rushing nesting doll of viral marketing. So in your case, back in 2019, you know, you found yourself on all these different scandals and you wanted to apologize and explain, but you realize you could also capitalize the controversy. But now there's tons of women online who do that. They're goading people and trying to provoke outrage and then they make some money off of it.

But the most interesting sort of example of this, of this system that we've, we've, we've sort of been looking at. Do you know that Twitch streamer Amaranth? Have you ever heard of her? Yes. Yes. Now we're, now we're in territory that my YouTube T videos cover. Okay.

So just for. Yeah, I do too. I think she's like an amazing story to kind of end with to go from Jenny Cam to you to Amaranth. I do think there's like a, there's a link there of like documenting your life in ways. that are sometimes messy and then reconciling with how you own that and how you how you deliver that to people. And so for people who don't know Amaranth, she's a Twitch streamer.

She's a cosplayer. She joins Twitch in 2016. And she blows up. She has like 3.7 million followers on X right now. She gets banned all the time from Twitch for like streaming in hot tubs and like pushing the boundaries of content moderation. It then comes out that she was like being financially abused. by her husband, and a lot of that behavior was because of him pushing her to make more and more content.

She then seems to have, I think, like, separated herself from him. She then buys a bunch of gas stations. Do you know about this? No, I don't know about the gas stations. She took a bunch of her Twitch money and bought gas stations around the country to make passive income. Incredible. Wait, I don't know how I missed this. She's like huge into personal finance.

I know she's making like crazy money from only fans, too. And so she's kind of figured out this. I mean, it's an uneasy, it's like different spheres of influence. And they don't fit together perfectly, but they do give her a lot of money, which gives her a lot of power, which gives her a lot of like ways to invest in gas stations and like own her life. And I think, I don't know, I would love to hear your sort of take on her because I think she is very much in the legacy of what you have been doing as well, which is sort of like, you've gone viral. Okay.

Now what? How do you claw back control? I don't think many people realize that I went viral twice in the same year in 2019 for two different things. I think people really just remember the cut and how I responded to the virality of that article. And not many people realize that what set up both, you know, my ex-best friend pitching the story in the first place, what teed up the sort of the publicity online kindling to like for that article to go viral was this creativity workshop stuff in the very beginning of 2019 like January. I went viral for that the same week that both remember when both of those Fire Festival documentaries dropped in like the same week.

I think you got unfairly roped in with the Fire Festival Moral Crisis. The headline, this Instagram influencer is a one woman fire fest. I remember that one, yeah. That went so viral, and that was the reason she pitched that story to the cut, and that was the reason that the cut story went so viral, and it was also the reason why I responded to the cut story the way I did, because what I learned from going viral for the creativity workshops nine months before I would go viral for the cut was what,

wouldn't work. And you know how for the laws of gravity, how there's like quantum physics, but also like Newtonian laws of gravity for here on Earth? I sometimes think of how I tried to handle the creativity workshops, Firefest virality, as trying to apply Newtonian laws of gravity to like the zoomed out large scale of like heavenly bodies and planets. Like I was trying to handle the situation as I would, if it were a relationship with one person instead of a soccer stadium of angry fans inside the portal of my phone. Like, I tried to

understand where they're coming from. I tried to apologize. I tried to refund. I tried to cancel the tour. Like, I tried to really, you know, if one day your friend shook you by the shoulders and screamed on your face, you're a one, you are Billy McFarland. You'd be like, okay, I have no idea what you're talking about, but like, we're going to get to the box of this. And I will do everything in my power to empathize. I actually found that when it comes to such a large scale of people, all the laws of how you should treat a single person go out the window and you need to start using quantum physics. You need to start using just a totally different set of laws about what you know about gravity. And so when it came to the cut thing, I didn't apologize. In fact,

I doubled down on it. And so I just tried to do everything. everything, the opposite of what I did before. And it's, I feel a little bit, like, toxic preaching this because it's like, never do, just never do what I'm saying to a friend. Like, never be like, I'm never going to apologize. Another comparison I often use is that the rules of going viral in a bad way are the same as surviving a riptide. Like, you never want to fight against the current. You'll expend all your energy too quick, too soon, you'll drown. You have to switch into the current. And I think you're right because like the rules have changed since you went double viral. In fact, we found this really good piece.

I wanted to quote this before I forget. So this is from Michigan Daily written by Ava Burski. And she writes, so it's a little harsh at the beginning, but just bear with me. It gets better. So she says of you, Caroline, she is a scammer, which I don't agree with. But we can get to that. But she receives a level of hatred and malice that it completely supersedes her artificial Instagram origin and half-bank attempts at creative projects.

She may have been shocking in 2019, but even low-grade influencers have grifts that are far more violent than anything Calloway has ever done. Calloway may be wasted $165 in a few hours of her fans' time, whereas Jake Paul has led a series of cryptocurrency projects designed to fail and rob his fans of thousands of dollars. And like, I actually, like, the scammer line is obviously like a bit of good marketing because like any controversy on the internet like is good to a certain degree until it spins out of control obviously. But like if you do think about like how the influencer game works now, it is almost primarily driven by grifts and outrage and how you monetize those griffs and

outrage. Whereas like I look back at what you were doing in Instagram and like it seems much more in line with someone who like was not prepared for the riptide of virality that was about to arrive. Not at all. In the same way that I had never seen what documenting a relationship online, how it can really warp that relationship. In fact, I saw the strangest thing happen before my eyes. Over the three years that the boyfriend that I wrote about and I dated in college, I started writing about the person that I knew he wanted to be and how he wanted to be perceived. But by the time we broke up, as I had shaped the way that hundreds of thousands of people, saw him. I shaped the way he saw himself and he had sort of become the character that I

wrote about in a way that was very spooky and that I never want to be involved with again. And the same thing with, um, leaving out all the, all of the messy, raw, vulnerable details of my life, you know, I started leaving them out honestly because I was just, I just didn't have the courage and I just didn't, my attitude. in 2013 and 2012 was no one's owed details of my life, which hasn't changed. I still stand by that part of my belief. But I also had the belief that, you know, it would be fine if I just like, that there's, what could go wrong?

There's a YouTuber I really like named Brian David Gilbert. And I'm mentioning him here now because this story is good, but also I want him on the show eventually. But he used to have very long hair. How about Brian? Yeah. Hey, Brian. Come on the show.

He used to have very long hair. and then he cut his hair short. And in the first video with his new hair, he was like, I cut my hair and you aren't allowed to have an opinion about it because none of you are my friends. And then he just started the, started the video. And I was like, that's so good. Like, that's like, that's kind of how you have to like, you have to create those boundaries. And I think a lot, like, I think a lot of people like the Jake Paul suicide force thing,

which we can all agree. Like Logan Paul, two different Pauls. Like the Logan Paul suicide force, which I think we can all agree. like don't film in a suicide force like good rule totally but don't tell a book you never want to write right right right i would recommend that to anyone but i will say like if you see people online who are not creating those boundaries with their followers with their fans not creating those boundaries with themselves and their own behavior nine times out of ten there's a reason why they're not doing that and it's not a good reason like like there's usually something else going on i think

the history of the internet girl if we want to call it that is a hidden one And it's like one that's like punctuated by like these horrible outrage cycles that are like largely just like going after young women for kind of like rewriting the rules of how we act. And then five years later, everyone's doing it. And everyone's like, oh, why did we care about that? And it's like, because a young woman was doing it. That's why you cared about it. That's why you were mad about it. That's it.

You know what's really interesting about ending on a note of rage bait since my first book, Scammer, which happy ending guys. I finished the book. I moved to Florida. I buckled down. It got rave reviews. The Washington Post called it a masterpiece. The Washington Post also called me a lunatic. They were right on both counts.

But I don't think I'm really out of the woods yet in terms of like that rip tide. I really think that even though I published the scammer book, I showed that I'm a great writer, that the ghost writer claims were, you know, if not blown out of proportion, perhaps entirely false. I think most people are on that page now. Even though I prove myself to that degree, you know, I'm nowhere near to being seen as like a Sally Rooney, even though my reputation is in such a better place than it was, even like two years ago. I think she's kind of a rip off Caroline Calloway, to be honest. Okay, you heard it here first.

But my next book is called Elizabeth Wardsall and Caroline Calloway's Guide to Life, because I want to be able to tee up publications to take the stance of like Caroline Calloway wants to tell you how to live. Like, I want to tee them up for that easy rage bait by writing an advice book. I want to give all publications the built, and all reporters, the built-in angle of like, won't it make you so mad to like hear about what Caroline Calloway wants to tell you. She wants to tell you how to live this messy girl, this fuck up. Like, I think that's like a really smart angle for book to. It's a very smart angle and it's a perfect place to end this conversation, which I have to

thank you for spending so much time with us today. This was amazing. I had the best time. Panic World is a garbage day production. You can subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by me, Ryan Broderick, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis.

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