Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - CZM Rewind: the dress

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Hello Sixteenth Minute heads! We'll be back next week with a brand new interview with the guy from the ~*sHe cAmE dOwN iN a bUbBlE bRo*~ video, but this week we are re-airing our episode on the 2015 phenomenon of The Dress. Tickets to Jamie's show 11/29 in LA: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-tiny-man-is-trying-to-kill-me-tickets-1089424250259?aff=oddtdtcreator Donate to the Native Women's Collective: https://www.nativewomenscollective.org/ --- In 2015, the world was gripped by one question: is this dress black and blue, or white and gold? No, no, I refuse to argue with you about it — but the story of The Dress is the dying breath of a pre-algorithm driven social media, the peak of Buzzfeed, and contains some dark truths about the internet. Featuring interviews with Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz), author of Extremely Online and Max Fisher (@maxfisher22), author of The Chaos Machine.  Original Air Date: 5.21.24See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace.

You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the I, IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our IHeart Radio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas.

September 19th and 20th. On your feet. Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen. Brian Adams. Ed Sheeran. Fade. Glorilla.

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The offspring. Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now. AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story. Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life.

This is Wisecrack, available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CoolZone Media. Hi, everyone. Jamie here. We're taking a week off at Cool Zone for the holiday. So this week is going to be a rerun, one of the very early episodes of 16th minute on The Dress. I just wanted to say a few things at the top.

We will be back next week with, I'm thrilled to report because I just did the interview. an interview with the guy from the Wicked Witch of the West she came down in a bubble bro video Matt Pissero, that'll be out next week followed by our three-part series on The Manosphere. Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to everyone in the LA area

who has been kind enough to come out to my solo show. There is a bonus show that has been announced that will be happening on November 29th at the Lyric Hyperion Theater. We're going to be doing one extra workshop of the show. So if you weren't able to get tickets because all the other shows sold out, feel free to come out this week. Feel free to come out on Friday to the show. That's

November 29th. And finally, because Thanksgiving, as I hope you know, is a crock of shit, I wanted to encourage everyone in joining me this week in donating and contributing to the Native Women's Collective, a nonprofit that nurtures the health and safety of Native women in the US. So if you're interested, the link is below. And with that, please enjoy this re-release of our episode on The Dress. See you next week. Clickbait. If I had to define it, clickbait is a combination of fake news and a freak show. It was a sign of the declining state of reliable journalism in the Western world and an early symptom of where American journalism finds itself as I record this. Major newsrooms are shuddering or vastly

reduced during an election year, and most major newspapers are owned by billionaires who resist criticism, resulting in the remaining papers running on people-pleasing fumes that encourage their readers to turn their heads from massive human atrocity. Ten years ago, things were bad, but not as bad, which is something people in the present always say. Ten years from now, we'll be pining for the salad days of 2024 as we enlist our third graders in the water wars. But for now, it's true. The clickbait culture of the mid-2010s was alarming at worse, annoying at best, but it didn't feel existential in quite the same way.

The word clickbait was a runner-up for the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year in 2014, tied with Norm Corps and Mansplaine. And if there's a more 2014 sentence than that, I am not aware of it. Here are some major headlines you could find at this time. What were in Hillary's emails? We have some guesses. The Gritty Power Rangers reboot with James, Vanderbeak is the stuff of nightmares.

13 unconventional things to do with your Galentine this year. You know, garbage. And you can't say I'm being mean, because these are headlines I wrote. Come with me, if you dare, to 2015. The Big Short, Steve Jobs, the movie, the boring one, not the hilarious Ashton Coucher one. 50 shades of gray. We're at peak Justin Bieber, peak Fetty, Wop, the year of Hotline, Bling, and Hamilton.

Obama is rounding out his second term. It's the year he allows an airstrike on a children's hospital in Afghanistan. Gay marriage will be legal across the U.S. this June, and 10 days after that, a dumb bitch named Donald Trump will go down an escalator in New York and announce he's wanting for president. I have managed to graduate from college a semester early and am fighting for my life at my first proper writing job at the Boston Globe. My job, as will become relevant to this story, is writing clickbait. Or that's not totally right. Because yes, I reported to the Boston Globe

building. I ate my grilled cheese among them, but very rarely was I writing actual news. For the most part, I was creating hashtag clickbait content, very little of which required original reporting. While I technically worked for the Globe and was in their newsroom, I was practically two steps removed. Boston.com was the globe's hyper-local sister site, and a now-defunct vertical called BDC Wire was their clickbait site. I was one of three writers at BDC Wire, populating the site with stories as if there were 10 writers. And in 2015, I worked two full-time jobs. first at this now defunct website, as well as co-managing, a now-defunct improv theater. And cards on the table, I was fired from the globe not six months later for refusing to take down a tweet about come.

I don't know, you're only 22 once. I'm getting distracted. Early 2015. I did get to do some original reporting here and there, but my main gig was sourcing viral news and rephrasing my sources with citations that sites like these would adorably and decide. acceptively call hat tips. And I'd love to tell you what more of these stories were, but as any journalist who started working in the age of the internet knows, almost none of it is available now without the assistance of the internet archive. BDC Wire is gone. Along with those articles I wrote like 10 reasons Chris Evans being from Massachusetts is the one reason not to end at all or whatever I was reading. On today's internet, BDC Wire never existed. So just a reminder,

You are listening to a future piece of lost media. But in the mid-2010s, a lot of writers got their start the same way I did at this time, including probably writers you like now. From young Gen Xers to elderly zoomers, we were tasked with regurgitating stories that social media cared about and regurgitating them to make them seem like actual news. We weren't making shit up like tabloids, but there was a sense that one writer was vomiting into another writer's mouth and so on and so on to maximize site traffic and profit. We, the writers, never got paid equitably,

but for places like the Boston Globe and other major news organizations who were hemorrhaging money due to the inability to adapt to the internet when the moment counted, these clickbait sister sites became a temporary attempt at increasing cash flow. Or as I knew it,

tricking a group of 22-year-olds into thinking they were real writers in exchange for bad pay, and a content mill mentality. So basically, I was working for a regional rip-off of early BuzzFeed. And to be clear, I am not conflating BuzzFeed the website with BuzzFeed News, which is a Pulitzer-winning and recently tragically shuttered news division. Nor am I saying that working at a BuzzFeed content mill was bad or even uncreative.

I mean, I think that my BDC Wire magnum opus, I saw Shrek the musical five times, colon, and this is my story, fucking ripped, not that you can read it anywhere. What's interesting is that this regurgitation media strategy, inspired by BuzzFeed combing the internet to fill their website full of clickable, eccentric, hashtag content, often legitimize internet characters of the day as legitimate news figures. And this was never more true than in the mid-2010s. A quick brief on BuzzFeed at this time.

The company had been around since 2006, and its legitimate newsarm BuzzFeed News wouldn't be launched until a year later in 2016. Founder Jonah Peretti had made BuzzFeed an algorithmic project from the start. In a 2013 profile of Peretti in New York magazine, early BuzzFeed is described as Peretti's, quote, algorithm to call stories from around the web that were showing stirrings of virality. In return for functioning as a sort of early warning system, BuzzFeed persuaded partner sites to install programming code that allowed the company to monitor their traffic. Like a lot of social media we discussed today, Paredes' original project begun while he was working at the similarly click-minded Huffington Post, was collecting a shitload of data. At best, he wanted to know what people were interested in.

If I'm being cynical, he wanted to sell it back to us in an easy-to-consume package, and we were happy to do it. By 2015, BuzzFeed had grown exponentially and started creating original content in addition to their bread and butter, which was both curating and rephrasing viral stories from other corners of the internet to drive traffic and 1,000 different quizzes on which ice cream flavor you were based on your mental illness diagnosis, something like that. I took them all, no judgment, mint chocolate chip, OCD bipolar, whatever. Much of early BuzzFeed was extremely goofy and what I think is now sort of associated as being an embarrassingly millennial thing.

But there was no shortage of talent there. Quinta Brunson produced a lot of her early viral stuff at BuzzFeed, and many people in their writing and performance table ended up bailing on BuzzFeed because they were treated like mill workers and not artists. Think comedians and writers like Gabe Dunn and Allison Raskin. Think super successful YouTubers like Sophia Nygaard. Think whether you love them or you. you hate them for cheating on their wives, the try guys.

But regardless of the level of talent, there's no point in denying it. A lot of early BuzzFeed was rehashed stuff, either sent in by users or gently lifted by a fleet of young aspiring writers like myself to proliferate a sticky story that someone else had posted online for free already. The goal? Show it to a wider audience with some light commentary and yield a massive profit for Daddy BuzzFeed. one of BuzzFeed's greatest main character co-signs in its history came on February 26, 2015,

a day that launched two huge viral stories. One was about a pair of llamas that escaped in an Arizona retirement home. In Sun City today, this may have been the very definition of the Wild West, a slow, sometimes high-speed pursuit of two llamas on the loose, breaking away from their owners at times from each other, seizing their moment, and their shot at freedom. And the other one is one whose impact is still, almost bafflingly still, enduring today. The Dress, your 16th minute, starts now.

I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, going on, well, can't be perfect, all of the time. To make me a start, let's take it too far, then give me one moment. Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame One more minute in a face I'm not so bad when you take me a mind

I'm going to another character to say you're so goodbye The dress. It's a potent and memorable piece of internet lore, one where your perception mattered. Was this dress, which was first posted by Scottish Mother of the Bride, Cecilia Blesdale, in this weird, blown-out photo from a designer outlet in England, was this dress blue and black, or was it white and gold? It was blue and black, and I knew that right away, because I'm perfect and I've never made a mistake.

And even though it sounds old times, I mean, after all, we're talking about an optical illusion that resulted from an objectively shitty phone camera. It's kind of hard to overstate what a sensation the dress became. I remember this day so clearly because this story broke my second week working as a professional writer. And as a kid who'd been brought in to write clickbait, it was like a gorgeous gift had descended from space.

As I was reflecting, I wanted to make sure I wasn't fluffing the memory in my mind. So I reached out to my buddy Kevin Slane, who was one of the other three-year-old. writers working overtime to create hashtag content on BDC wire to be read by hashtag nobody for hashtag 70 hours a week. And he remembered this day really clearly too. My name is Kevin Slane and I am a staff writer at the Boston Globe covering entertainment and culture. Hi Kevin. What's up? Not much, Jamie. How are you? I am good. After all these years, I'm good. Real throwback talking to you today about this day. I know about this historic day that is over nine years ago now, which feels not great.

Okay, so I just wanted to go, because I feel like I was writing out like how I imagined this day. I think it was like certainly in my first month working at BDCWire. Do you remember the dress day in our little corner? So I remember what I did that. day, and at least in my case, we're talking about Thursday, which was kind of like the dress dropped at night, you know, it was, the way of the day went for me was I was at work. I wrote a story about the llamas, which was the big immediate predecessor to the dress. I drew some llamas. I can't find it on the way back machine, but I was like, okay, okay, llamas first. Llamas are the story.

I had to go back through my Twitter archive and I found that I tweeted out the story that I wrote about the llamas. Thank God. Which was just, you know, our house style at the time. Lots of gifts, lots of old text. Just, you know, us trying to be BuzzFeed, I guess.

Yeah. But anyway, so I did that. And then a bunch of us went to a happy hour at the Banshee, which was just where a lot of us went after work. and I proceeded to get really drunk and sing a lot of karaoke and at some point someone pulled out their phone and started showing it to everyone being like,

check this out. This dress thing is crazy. And I reacted to it the way that I think I did to a lot of that stuff for the time because this was like our first media job and I just felt simultaneously like enthralled by the conversation but also repulsed and kind of felt, you know,

probably undeservedly above it all. And so the thing was that back then they really had like a flat hierarchy in terms of like who could say what and everyone would just send all staff emails all the time. And I remember pulling out my phone and looking and seeing that our old homepage had like three stories on the address right on the top and there was like an active email chain going on about this. And me very drunk just was like, this is ridiculous. I can't believe we have three stories on the dress on the homepage. And whoever did that got like, you know, offended that I said that. Rightfully so. Well, I mean, that's a lot.

I didn't remember there being three stories. But that also makes sense because there were like three different verticals sort of all like going to the same place. And we were all trying to get clicks on the same thing that we were all sort of ripping off from. BuzzFeed. It was just like weird. It was a weird time. It really was. And I even went and then looked at the like the next day. I looked in the way back machine. It was even more of that. It was like the night producer who wrote like a short little thing. And then our old boss who I won't name wrote this like very ridiculous in his own voice style post. And then someone else wrote like their take on the dress. And then another of our old bosses then asked John Henry to weigh in about

the dress and there's a video I can't find of him talking about the dress which I wish I could find because I think that I wish we had the John Henry footage that's unhinged right like who needed that well thank you thank you for for reminiscing with me this was beautiful yes it's weird to think about now and I know it's objectively not true it was a totally different time and you can't help but look back at it fondly despite the fact that I was hating myself through the entire portion of it. Thanks so much to Kevin, who is a real writer

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So like it's not like What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke but that really was my reality nine years ago. I'd just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. On stage stood a comedian

with a story that no one expected to hear. The 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now.

Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting his.

the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but... Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us.

I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we wade through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's walk in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated. throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities,

concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So this day was genuinely a huge day for news on and about the Internet. The FCC had just voted to classify internet service providers as public utilities, effectively creating net neutrality. But the dress was indisputably the main character. Here's the cliff notes of what happened. In February 2015, a Scottish couple was preparing for their wedding, and the bride's mother texted her daughter a photo of the dress she was considering wearing.

The dress. It's not a great picture, but it is a very mid-2010s mother of the bride dress. There is this little cropped jacket, some color blocking, unnecessary lace elements. But the color, that was the question. The bride, Grace, posted the photo of the dress to her Facebook and explained the dilemma. Her mom assured her that the dress was blue with black lace, but Grace was seeing it as white with gold lace. So she posted the question to her Facebook so her friends could weigh in, and a week-long debate was sparked. So the dress first became a main character in her small community in Colise, Scotland.

Then the wedding happened, and Grace's mom wore the dress. It was a topic of discussion at the wedding, too, and it's actually members of the wedding band that take the dress from a local phenomenon into a global one. Singer and guitarist Caitlin McNeill, who was a close friend of the couples, said of the dress IRL, we forgot about it until we saw it at the wedding, which the mother of the bride was wearing, and it was obviously blue and black. In any other timeline, this would be a footnote that Grace's mom would half remember when giving the dress to Goodwill a decade later.

But this was a time on the internet where viral stories were social currency. And Caitlin McNeil had taken up the mantle of the dress. It was her who ended up posting what would become the viral seed that would take this story global on her Tumblr. The post, attached to a picture of the dress, said,

Guys, please help me. Is this dress white or gold or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the fuck out. I can't handle this. It got about 5,000 notes, and if you aren't Tumblr literate, that was a lot of interaction on the platform for the time. And here's where BuzzFeed comes in. As the legend goes, BuzzFeed writer Kate's Holderness was running the BuzzFeed Tumblr at that time

and was tasked with what a lot of writers were back then, finding popular garbage to amplify. But this was not petty content theft. Caitlin McNeil was riding so high on the dress fumes that she sent Holderness her post, saying, BuzzFeed, please help. I posted a picture of this dress. It's the last post on my Tumblr. Okay, and some people see it blue, and some people see it white. Can you explain because we are going crazy?

Holderness replied, Holy crap, it's blue and black. I don't understand. I made a poll. And she links to what she posted off of Caitlin McNeil's tip. A classic BuzzFeed post published in the early evening, as Kevin correctly recalled. The post was simply titled, What color is this dress?

there was a poll to vote, black and blue or white and gold. The post started doing well right away, but pretty much everything on BuzzFeed at that time did. It was after folks left for work that things went nuts. The dress was literally an overnight success. When the BuzzFeed team returned the next morning, Holderness's post had reached 840,000 views per minute at its peak. It had broken BuzzFeed's traffic record, becoming its most successful post of all time. And once the BuzzFeed post took off, the dress became a popular subject of discussion on virtually every social media platform at the time. But Twitter tends to be the thing that people still talk about.

These days, Facebook is for moms and creepy cousins, but in 2015, it was Twitter where famous people ruined their own lives by weighing in like some freaky plebeians just like us. It was right before celebrities all realized in unison that they needed their own social media managers. And so you could be pretty sure that it was the actual Justin Bieber saying, And for everyone asking, I see blue and black. And it was the real Taylor Swift when she said, I don't understand this odd dress debate and I feel like it's a trick somehow. I'm confused and scared. P.S. it's obviously blue and black.

Or Mindy Kaling with one of the most 2015 tweets of all time. The dress is worse than the Sony hack to me. Beyonce said nothing. This is all a little pedestrian for Beyonce. buzzfeed was at the top of their game and so of course made more content about the dress 24 hours after the first post about the dress went live on the site

9 out of 10 trending BuzzFeed posts were about the same dress they were fucking relentless why are people seeing different colors in that damn dress the dress is blue and black says the person who saw it in person this second photo of the dress

definitely proves that the dress is blue and black what the dress color you see says about you And the one post that wasn't about the dress? Here's the first picture of Eddie Redmayne as transgender painter Lily Elba. Oh, 2015. And don't forget, at this time, BuzzFeed's video vertical was also really popular on YouTube. And that was also going nuts with traffic from the dress. You are seeing white and gold.

Where are you looking at? Oh, just changed white gold! No, you're kidding. You heard correctly. That's Quinta Brunson. I just think that's really funny. So yes, the dress is a goofy sensation, and it even trickles down to lowly worm regional BuzzFeed rip-off writer Jamie Loftus. But keep in mind, BuzzFeed is a business, and people with any monetary stock in BuzzFeed were doing donuts in their Mercedes about this fucking story.

There was even this bizarre essay by then editor-in-chief Ben Smith, saying that the dress phenomenon was this sign of BuzzFeed's power. He said, The explosion of Kate's Holderness's post about the dress, white and gold, by the way, is a reminder that while we now do so many more things, we've never moved away from our roots. Indeed, we launched the cute or not app yesterday. Sir, your underpaid employee reblogged a Tumblr post, but by all means, keep talking. This post in particular is so weird to reflect on now, it sounds so certain that BuzzFeed will be the vanguard of what makes something special on the internet,

and that a post like the dress is all a part of the game of 5D chess that BuzzFeed is playing, and that they're the reason that the dress succeeded. Smith continued, we are interested most of all in what a story does, not just in how many people read it, but in what effect it has on their lives and on the world. Kate's post delighted people and connected them. To steal an idea from Z Frank,

its power was less in the encapsulated item itself than in the network around it. That's true of a brilliant piece of entertainment. It's true of a recipe or a DIY suggestion. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is getting millions and millions of impressions from this story, one that Caitlin McNeil literally handed to them. But it's BuzzFeed that keeps the profits from the engagement, at a time where impressions were what defined your success and your advertising profits. As is so common in these stories, it was like everyone was benefiting from the dress story,

except, of course, anyone involved in the actual story. It didn't take long for completely unrelated businesses to start commenting on the dress to capitalize on the trend. Pizza Hut posts a picture of a shitty pizza with the caption, It's White and Gold. Two newscasters wear the dress on air as a bit. The original dress on a website called Roman Originals sells out immediately. Brandon Silverman, the former CEO of Social Media Monitoring site CrowdTangled, said this when asked about the range of institutions that wanted in on this story. This is from a 2016 retrospective on the day of The Lama and the Dress from 2016, written for where else? BuzzFeed.

Silverman says this. We've seen other stories go viral, but the sheer diversity of outlets that picked it up and were talking about it was unlike anything we had ever seen. Everyone from QVC to Warner Bros to local public libraries to Red Cross affiliates were all posting links to it on their social accounts. That kind of diversity in who sharing a story pretty much never happened. and certainly never to that degree. And of course, no internet main character would be complete without the backlash, which in the case of the dress came in the form of people bemoaning that this story had overshadowed more important news from the same day.

And even this mentality feels a little bit dated now. Yes, it's important to discuss the other news of the day, but favoring something goofy and meaningless over hard news wasn't something that started in 2015. Although that said, I do think there's a good news. case for saying that the success of posts like the dress tells people in tech developing social media algorithms at this time what kind of stories are distracting for people, leading to an era of the algorithm favoring engagement-driven posts over carefully reported news. To talk about what made the dress special in terms of what it said about where social media was picking its main characters

at this time, I turned to a writer who has spent her career writing about the internet, often meaning the internet turns on her. Taylor Lorenz released her book, Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet last year, taking a look at the short and eventful history of online influencers, including a fair number of characters of the day, and yes, the dress herself. We caught up on Zoom about this very particular moment in internet history. I'm Taylor Lorenz, and I'm the author of Extremely Online, the Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. your beat for some time. How did you become the person to talk to about the internet?

Yeah. Well, I'm like peak millennial. I graduated directly into the recession, the 2008 financial crisis. And I had had like random internships in college and summer jobs, but I didn't really know what I was doing. And so I was working retail food service. I worked for a messenger company. I was babysitting. I worked at a call center for a while. I was just kind of making money. and I discovered Tumblr, which back in 2009 was ascendant as a social platform. And that was kind of my gateway into blogging. And I just started blogging about stuff. At the time, I was really against the mainstream media because they were writing really

stupid things about tech and millennials. And it was making me mad. And so I would just go on my blogs and rant about whatever I felt like ranting about. I was really inspired by this woman, Katie Natopoulos. who she was blogging back then too and she had this website she had all these funny like blogs and sites and she seemed to be like the only person that I thought was just like a couple years older than me and seemed really cool and I just thought I'm going to try to write about the internet but like from the perspective of somebody that actually uses it there are stories

that feel or my my feeling at first was it feels very connected to a certain type of platform or like certain era in social media. When I was reading extremely online, I was like, oh, right, the dress was kind of this cross-platform success story. Could you unpack that a little for me of like how the original story and then BuzzFeed kind of had a mutual role in this story's success? Yeah. Well, just to kind of like explain the landscape, throughout the early to mid-2010s, you had

this explosion of digital media sites. by VC funding, you know, BuzzFeed, Mike.com, where I used to work, mashable, like, there were all these, like, digital media sites. And the primary way that they were gaining traffic was going into sort of what were then the depths of the internet, mostly Tumblr and Reddit, getting the most viral content off those platforms, and repackaging it on the website, because that was an era when not a lot of people were going and spending a lot of time and getting their news and information and entertainment from social media directly itself. It wasn't as widely adopted.

People didn't know how to navigate the internet yet. So BuzzFeed would just sort of mind this content. Gates was working at BuzzFeed at the time, found a Tumblr post about the dress and was like, wow, this is kind of crazy. It was getting a little bit of traction on Tumblr and she thought, let me post it on the BuzzFeed website because that's kind of, again,

the business model at the time was finding what did well on Tumblr and then bringing it to this wider audience of BuzzFeed. And of course, she publishes it on BuzzFeed and it just goes insane. A bunch of other places immediately published their own versions of that story. But BuzzFeed got like all the upside kind of from it. Like they got all the traffic.

They were able to monetize through ads on that article page. Like nobody was clicking through as much to the original Tumblr that day. I was cruising the way back machine and I was like, this is what I think of as like peak BuzzFeed. How did they?

get there? Like what made BuzzFeed special or early to this kind of content mining? BuzzFeed was one of the first true sort of like digital media companies of that wave. There was this idea in the 2000s. It's really spurred by the rise of blogging that you could build digital media platforms and capture digital media ad dollars. There's all this money moving from traditional advertising to digital advertising. The traditional advertising, the traditional advertising had been with newspapers and traditional media. And so the thinking was back then was all those traditional ad dollars are going to go to the digital version of the news media that the advertisers were advertising with. So there was this websites like Vox and other sites were sort of

created to capture those ad dollars. Obviously that didn't happen. The money actually ended up going to Facebook and Google directly, which is why that whole crop of digital media companies died pretty much or like is a shell of themselves. But traffic was the most important thing. Traffic was so important because the more views you got, the more digital like display ads, you know, were seeing the more money the platform would make. And this is when a lot of platforms, including Facebook, were prioritizing link posts. They hadn't pivoted to video yet. There wasn't a lot of multimedia because the internet speeds weren't there yet. So it would make the sites really slow and clunky to load. Instagram was barely had video at that time.

links were really king. And if you could create a very shareable link, you could get tons of traffic therefore the company would make tons of money. And BuzzFeed was just expert at this because BuzzFeed realized very early that internet users at that time didn't want to go through Reddit. You have to remember, this was pre-alorithmic feeds. Algorithmic feeds were not really a thing back then. I think Twitter only rolled out their algorithmic feed in 2016, 2015. It was really like the internet was very manual. And so if people went on a platform, they couldn't, especially Tumblr at that time was completely reverse chronological. Right. So if you went on the platform, it was hard to kind of find the most interesting viral content. So you relied on this intermediaries like BuzzFeed to go into

these platforms, scrape out the most engaging content, and present it to you all in one place. On this case, too, I think it's really interesting that the dress post, it was posted on a Tumblr that was like a fan Tumblr for this girl, Sarah Whitechill, I always mispronounce her name, even though lovely, who was like a YouTuber manager. So it was just like the chances of somebody finding that normally, yes, it was getting reblogged on Tumblr, but BuzzFeed was really like the amplifier, basically. Thanks so much to Taylor and check out extremely online in stores now. And we'll be right back with another interview about why the success of the dress marked the beginning of the end for dumb fun on the internet.

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the 2015 post. Was SNL's ISIS sketch too offensive? As fascinated as I am about how the dress went viral in what now feels like an almost old-fashioned way, I wanted to do. I wanted to take a second to do my due diligence. Why were people seeing this dress as two different color schemes? This was a major subject of clickbait from clickbait at the time. Most notably, a wired piece published the day after that ended up racking up over 32 million views. In that piece, writer Adam Rogers asked Professor Beville Conway, who studied color and vision at Wellesley College, to comment. And Professor Conway said that it was some combination of the varying ways in which people perceive light,

and that the picture was just shitty quality and really blown out. Here's his fancy science explanation. Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis. People either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.

This also connects to the maddening feeling of the dress-switching colors before your eyes, like Quinta yelled about in the BuzzFever, video. So if you were a neuroscientist with a focus on vision, and I know you're not, this actually prompted a pretty rich scientific discussion. The Journal of Vision dedicated a whole issue to the dress. With some pretty interesting findings, they spoke to 1,400 respondents, with 57% seeing black and blue, 11% black and brown, 30% white and gold, and 2% other. Tests included showing the dress in artificial yellow and blue light to see if that shifted

bias, and a study from Pascal Wallish showed the really interesting trend that people who woke up early were more likely to see the dress as white and gold, and people who went out at night more were likely to see black and blue. And I'll admit, reading about why your brain makes you see the dress as one thing or the other is really, really interesting. Even when what's being explained to you is a pretty straightforward optical illusion. And even though, as I'm writing this episode, this only happened about nine years ago. It feels like it's longer. It reminds me of a targeted ad I got for a T-shirt sold by Clickhole,

which, if you're not familiar, is a spinoff of the onion that specifically satirized clickbait. The shirt says, the internet, 1983 to 2014. And it gets at this feeling I'm having, that shortly after the dress, the internet became less fun. Of course, this is coming from a very Western privilege perspective, but it's pretty commonly held that in the U.S., around the time that the 2016 election cycle began, social media became less fun.

Let's not to say it was a cakewalk before. There are many stories of discrimination and harassment that took place here, many of which I'll cover on this show. But I'm trying to get at the ratio of fun stories to existentially terrifying stories. The ratio of, hey, what color is this, to bigoted conspiracy theories in the mainstream. The dress kind of feels like to be it. the end of an era. Early 2015 wasn't an internet that wasn't poisoned with hate, but it felt like an internet whose hate didn't poison everything. And less than a year later, that didn't really

feel true. I didn't speak to anyone involved in the original dress story for reasons I'll get to, but I wanted to better understand how the internet shifted in the year after the dress to bring us to the kind of viral stories we were seeing in 2016, just a year later. For perspective, their ringers roundup of 2016 viral stories included some classics like Jubacabam, but also just the word Naziism. So yeah, there was a mainstream shift that had taken place. And this was for a reason, not just because of the heightened, bigoted extremism in the Western world, but because of how our social networks were functioning. It's something that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti commented on as recently as 2019, less than five years after the dress story. In November 2019, he

told Max Reed at Intelligencer. The dress was a kind of perfect thing to catch fire at that moment. The internet was less polarized and politicized and it had shifted to mobile fully so people were looking at mobile devices. With the dress, if you saw it on your phone and you were with people, you could hold the phone up and say, what color is this? Plus, in the early days of BuzzFeed, our traffic would die in the evening because people would watch television or go out with their friends.

Now, with mobile, we see primetime for our kind. as the same as primetime for television. People are sharing content and looking at content later. Keep in mind, this is a quote from less than half a decade later, but the difference between 2015 and 2019 on the U.S. Internet made it feel like he was talking about 20 years ago. I mean, hell, on the Internet, 40 years passed between November 2019 and November 2020. And since this interview, BuzzFeed has changed even more.

Peretti pulled the plug on his Pulitzer, winning news operation only seven years after it launched in 2023 and is currently focused on rerouting BuzzFeed to AI. Depressing? Yes, but not surprising. Because after all, Peretti started the company to operate on algorithms with no creative at all. And now he has robots instead of writers, and the company is worth less than ever. I talked to a second author who published a great book about social media, and full disclosure, he's also my best friend's boyfriend. He's the best and pertinent to you. He has a thorough knowledge on how social media algorithms have been forcibly evolved and monetized to serve those that make them money, not their users.

Max Fisher currently co-hosts offline on Crooked Media and wrote about this very topic in 2022's The Chaos Machine, the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. Here's some of our talk. My name is Max Fisher and I'm a journalist and podcaster. Because we're talking about the dress today is what is your personal recollection of the dress saga? You were working in media at the time, right? I not only say working in media, but I was working not at BuzzFeed, but at Vox.com, which was a fellow kind of web, you know, new journalism, left-leaning startup that was trying to chase audience on social media. So it felt very much kind of in our wheelhouse. It was something that we were all really excited. about, wow, look, a post can get this much attention by, you know, doing something that Facebook

really likes and that social media algorithms really like. And we were trying to do not the dress exactly, but we were trying to do like, you know, the policy wonk version of the dress every day. So we thought it was like this amazing moment that we paid a lot of attention to. So I know that you've spent a lot of recent years thinking about how our algorithms work and, you know, the implications of that. Were you thinking about this 10 years ago? What did that algorithm chasing look like? I was thinking about it, but like a lot of journalists, I think, of our generation, I thought of it as just purely a good thing as just a thing where it's like, oh, if I write my piece that I was going to write anyway on, you know, the Iran nuclear deal,

but I phrased the headline in a certain way, then Facebook can deliver me thanks to its algorithm, huge amounts of traffic and eyeballs and people who want to read the story. And that's great. And that's so nice that social media can be there to help us reach a larger audience. So I was aware of it, but thought of it as kind of a relatively neutral force. Like, sure, maybe you play up certain emotions in your headlines or certain ideas that you know are likelier to go viral. But again, maybe like a lot of people, it wasn't really until after Trump was elected like a year and a half after that that I started. started to think of social media and social media algorithms is something that could be

bad. At this point, I really thought that they were just a good thing. And also just, I think certainly on my end, there was a lack of thinking about how this algorithm chasing translated to money, which in retrospect feels very naive of me. But there was at the time, it seems like money to be had from, you know, taking these stories that you would find on social media and then, you know, delivering them and making, you know, question mark a shitload of money. Right. I mean, the idea for the web startups of that era was that you will get so many more eyeballs on social media. And then so many more people will click through to your website and they will see ads on your website.

So then you will make more money. And we weren't thinking of it. And maybe you guys were, we're raking it in the Boston BuzzFeed. But almost impossible to conceive that we were. I mean, we were, maybe this was idealistic, but we were thinking of it as this will be great because it will make journalism sustainable. Like we were all veterans of the 2008 financial crisis. So we had all lived through a time when there were no jobs to be had because the industry was collapsing because the internet and social media had taken all of the revenue that used to go through classifieds. So the idea that, aha, now we're going to leverage that same social media to get all the.

these ad impressions, we can have a sustainable business again. And won't that be so great for like the future of the industry? And like before I worked at Fox, I worked at the Washington Post and they'd loved the idea that you would do the journalism you were going to do anyway, but write in a way that will please algorithms or write the headline in a way that will please algorithms so that we can make more money and continue to pay for foreign correspondence. So it was a very starry-eyed era that boy, has sure not aged well. Used a phrase that just feels very inherent to what the dress is. You used a phrase, the old algorithm.

What do you mean when you say the old algorithm? Oh, yeah. Okay. So I think we all know that algorithms are what drive everything and how you experience social media. They're the programs on every platform that select what you see, the order you see it in, that choose what kind of emotions to surface, what kind of like political valence to surface for you. They're the absolute core of the social media business model.

The era before algorithms, social media was a loser business that did make any money. And people didn't spend that much time on like, remember MySpace, you didn't spend that much time on the site, Life Journal. After they developed algorithms, that is when people's time on site exploded because they are so effective at making the experience of being social media very engaging and addictive. And that's what turned social media companies into huge businesses. So for a long time, the way that those algorithms worked from their first invention at like the end of the 2000s, like Facebook kind of starts it in 2006 with the Facebook news fee, but it takes a while for their platforms to catch up.

Up through like the era of the dress, the way that it worked. the old quote unquote old algorithm promoted whatever content was they tend to promote outbound links like it would promote a link to some other website or news site even if it's like a lull cat or something something off the platform and it would be whatever is the link that people would click on the most and what that tended to privilege is if you remember like upworthy Upworthy was like a website that existed to create content specifically to cater to like the old Facebook algorithm because it was like curiosity gaps or it was like you won't believe what happened next so you're like oh I guess I'll click on that link and then you click on that link and then Facebook or Twitter learns okay we promote that link to a lot of people they will click on it and the dress is kind of the last gasp of that old algorithm because it is again you see the link and the way that it displayed on not just Facebook, although Facebook was the big one at the time, but all of the platforms, Reddit, Twitter, the way that it would display is you would see

a cutoff image of the dress and then you would see a headline about people see it in different colors. So it really makes you want to click. So everybody who saw this link on their news feed, you were like, oh, I have to click through and figure out what color the dress is. Even if you only spend eight seconds on that post, the algorithm learns that serves it to everyone on the platforms because it creates these outbound links, and that is when BuzzFeed starts to get, you know, a million people a minute or whatever the numbers were looking at it. A section of your book covers really thoroughly, like 2015 is a really important year for this shift. So the way that the algorithm looks in late February 2015 and at the end of the year seems pretty different. What is changing with how algorithms are used on social media throughout this era? So there's not like a moment of shift, like they don't pull a big lever and go over to a new set of algorithms, but...

Bummer. Bummer, I know. But over like 2014 and 2015, the big social media platforms make a bunch of incremental changes that shift to a set of algorithms that just fundamentally privilege a different set of things. The language that Facebook uses for this, and they are kind of like leading the charge at this point because they're still dominant way back. in this era is that they want to start privileging, quote, emotionally engaging interactions. And what that means is that instead of pushing up to the top of your feed, whatever is the link to an outbound website that they think you are likely as to click on, they want to promote whatever content in your feed, whether that's a link or it's a discussion or it's a Facebook group or

it's a photo that is going to generate the most discussion on that post. And the reason they do that is they want to keep you on the platforms because if you click that out on link now you're on buzzfeed and facebook doesn't make any money from you spending time on buzzfeed they want you to spend as much time on facebook in discussions whatever as they can and they frame this as like oh we're going to start giving you they call it like meaningful connections or like meaningful interactions as if it's going to bring you like all sorts of love and friendship but of course that is not at all what it brings because these algorithms are incredibly ruthless in running running billions of what are basically tests, like little social science experiments every

single day, and what is the exact kind of content that will get people to engage in these quote-unquote emotionally engaging interactions, not just to spend time on the site, but also to post back in the site and ways that will get other people to spend time on the site. And like, what is the content and these set of emotions that are going to be most engaging And, like, you know, as any student of human nature will know, it's not the nice stuff. It's not, you know, here's your friend's baby, you know, your cousin got a new job promotion, your aunt had a great day. It's outrage primarily and especially moral outrage. And it's anything that expressed fear or hatred or disgust with some sort of social outgroup.

And that might be, you know, political partisans on the other side that for a lot of people, that's racial groups, religious groups, immigrants, anything that cultivates a sense of like there is a social group out there that I don't like and I find them to be scary or I find them to be offensive and I want to rally my in-group against them. That is the thing that the algorithms, as they are being introduced to all of these platforms over 2014 and 2015, learn to surface above all else. And Facebook's own researchers are tracking all of this, and they're finding both that this is enormously successful at making people spend more time on the website, but also that it's really bad for them. There's this paper that's kind of the last gasp of when

Facebook used to publish research into what their algorithm does with users. In May 2015, Facebook's researchers, because they have access to all this data, published this paper warning that this change to this new algorithm was sorting people into not just like-minded discussions, but within those discussions was consistently surfacing whatever was the angriest or most emotional or most extreme viewpoint that everybody agreed with. And that that created an effect that was, quote, associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over time and misperceiving facts about current events, which is a somewhat euphemistic way of saying that people became more extreme in whatever beliefs they already held and that they

became likelier to believe misinformation or conspiracies because, of course, if you already are angry about something, a conspiracy about it will make you feel even angrier. Right. I was fascinated to read how that information was at one point public and how it feels completely inconceivable that they would publish anything like that to the public just five years later or even two years later and how you know it was it was well known internally and it seems like i mean you explained i think inside and also outside of facebook the sort of attempted uh the attempts to blow the whistle on like hey this is really not good for us so i mean it's Of course, like, profit is why that happens, but I, at what point do these platforms sort of switch to infinite growth?

So that had always been the business model since those first days of the newsfeed back in the late 2000s. But what happens, actually around the same time, around 2014, is they start to realize that the pool of human attention. tension is finite. And that's what they trade in. That's their like asset that they are chasing is seconds of your day that you're spending on the platform so they can sell ads against it. And they realize around 2014 that they've kind of reached saturation collectively on how much of that they hold, where at this point, people spend as a 2014, people on average are spending more time on social media platforms than they do interacting with other people socially in real life, which is staggering, and that gap, of course, has only grown since.

So what they realize when they, like, get to this point where they realize, okay, we've kind of saturated the market for how much human attention we can capture as they get into this arms race with each other for who can hold more of that attention. And that is when they go from just having a existing business model of infinite growth to needing to, like you said, take every step that they can, no, matter how extreme to try to out-compete each other for how much of that attention they hold. And this is when all of the social media companies, again, this is around like 2014, 2015, higher up all of the big names in artificial intelligence.

Like every major European and American researcher at every big research university suddenly works at Facebook, which is like, that seems unsurprising now because these are trillion-dollar companies. But at the time, that was really shocking because this is just like this was like fancier MySpace. This is just like a weird little website and all of a sudden all of these like rock stars of artificial intelligence work for them because what they are doing is they are trying to make the social media algorithms that govern what you see as smart and as ruthless as possible. This is when YouTube sets towards this big internal goal they have for one billion hours of

daily watch time, meaning that everyone who uses YouTube will collectively watch one billion hours of video every single day, which is 10 times what they had across the platform at the time they set this goal. So they're starting to really design their business models and their engineering around the idea that they need to, in order to survive, drastically increase the stickiness and addictiveness of being on their platform, which is when they kind of start getting into all of these dark arts of emotional and psychological manipulation. It feels so clear now, and at the time we're like, well, this is weird.

Why am I so upset all the time? Well, the thing that I always think about that I did not appreciate at the time, I didn't get its significance, but looking back, I'm like, oh, okay, I see how that was like a big watershed moment is around 2015 when Gamergate goes from being this thing that is happening on the like fringes of Reddit and the fringes of YouTube. where it's like a bunch of like young white guys are really mad about video games for some reason and I don't understand why to all of a sudden it's completely dominant on all of the social platforms and it's the like number one thing day after day on the platforms and all of these like weirdo Gamergate characters like Milo Giannopoulos and Mike Cernovich all of a sudden they're like mainstream political figures and that is we know now in retrospect because this is the time when social media algorithms started to read

realize that stuff like GamerGate was going to be so, so effective at increasing engagement. So that's when you go away from the social media algorithms of the era of like the dress, what you get instead of the social media algorithms of GamerGate, which I would not consider a trade up. This is also the time where, which I feel like ties right into the Milo stuff, where Breitbart really starts to to pop off. And it feels to me, I mean, very. diabolical match of the BuzzFeed model of like luring people in with really splashy headlines

as we're like coming out of this era of the dress and things are getting more politicized and engagement driven to you know really monetize and push outrage what are the success stories and how do they sort of shape what the new algorithm favors that's a great way to put it I think you're exactly right that if BuzzFeed and like upworthy were these sites that embodied and benefited from the kind of pre-2015 social media ecosystem and algorithms, then the site that embodies and most benefited from the post-2015 social media algorithms is definitely bright part. There was this huge Harvard study, or it was like led through Harvard, but it was a ton of different scholars that came out after the 2016 election and was kind of trying to ask like,

okay, what happened? What was the, like something, the internet played some role in the 2016 election, social media played some role, but we're not quite sure what it is. So let's do like a big systemic investigation into what the social web looked like in the run-up to the 2016 election. And what are the big things they found is that from May 2015 to November 2016 when the election was held, which is kind of the onset of that era of the new social media algorithms. Breitbart was the third most shared media outlet on all of social media, which is crazy when you know that Breitbart has like no staff, they have no budget. It's a terrible experience to be on their website.

They don't produce very many articles. And before this algorithmic shift, they had been a teeny tiny little website with no readership. And there was like this kind of narrative that like, oh, yes, Steve Bannon, who's running Breitbart is some like genius of the dark arts of the social web. And what we learned from this Harvard study and from a lot of subsequent investigations is that he was not. The people of Breitbart were not these geniuses. They were just passive beneficiaries of the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter basically plucking this website and similar websites out and pushing them in front of huge audiences of people. Like Breitbart got more audience and engagement. on Facebook than Fox News did in the run-up to the election.

And Fox News is like a a bajillion-dollar company with hundreds of reporters. I mean, and certainly in the case of Breitbart, it was just saying shit and presenting it as news. And, you know, like I wasn't saying fascistic shit, but there were times where I was just kind of saying shit. And they're like, and she's a reporter. I don't know. It's interesting to reflect on. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I haven't thought about that before, but you're right that this was kind of the first stage and a shift that now feels much more complete from getting your news from a news source to then you're getting your news from a news source repackaged for social media to then you're getting your news from a news source that is just saying shit.

And now most of us get our news from people who are just saying shit on social media. and we kind of like trust or hope that the like viral post that we're reading is at some point sourced from something real and sometimes it is and it's just spun in a way to like get more engagement on social media but you know it's just as possible that it's made up or that it's exaggerated or that it's out of context so it is in retrospect like the start of a larger shift to the just saying shit era of media consumption Because on some level, you know, even though we do all care about getting accurate information from credible sources, our brains, unfortunately, are really, really drawn to things that are emotionally satisfying or that deliver like outrage, which feels very affirming to indulge in or that deliver a sense of like moral righteousness or in-group versus out-group. And that can overpower that desire that we do also feel for real credible information.

which is, of course, only gotten worse since 2016. Thanks so much to Max for speaking with me. And full disclosure, his cat is so large. Now, I have to be honest, in the interest of contextualizing the dress in real time, I did leave something off about its longer future. To this day, there's an entire page about the dress on the Roman Originals' website where it was manufactured, calling it the, quote, phenomenon that revealed differences in human color perception, which have been the subject of ongoing science.

scientific investigation in neuroscience and vision science. I mean, sure. And while some subjects on this show will require a bonk on the head to fully remember, who is chilly neighbor? Who is being dad? Sidebar, the main character is so often, insert name of food, insert type of person, whatever. But the dress rarely needs introduction if the person was online at the time. There were retrospectives of the dress story being written as recently as last year. When I'm building out episodes for this show, step one is to reach out to the main character themselves to see if they want to talk. After all, the dress was for someone's wedding, and the mom who wore the dress stated at the time of the incessant optical illusion that she was annoyed that she was being excluded from most news coverage. Cecilia and the married couple got the classic 15 minutes treatment for this era.

The married couple, Grace and Keir, and Cecilia and her partner Paul, were flown out to L.A. to be on the Ellen show. And the couple got a briefcase full of $10,000 American dollars. The mother and stepfather of the bride got underwear for some reason, half black and blue and half white and gold. And that was it. And Cecilia was pissed. From a guardian piece from late 2015. Should it be on display somewhere?

Please Dale wonders. Should it be in a vault or whatever? It still got sweaty marks on, though. Needs a clean. So nine years later, I wanted to see where everyone was. And that's where this story takes. and especially dark turn. When I went to find out where that couple is now,

I found this headline from July 2023. Man behind viral blue-black dress illusion charged with trying to kill wife. I don't want to rehash it too heavily here, but the relationship had been tremendously abusive since before the dress and their marriage, culminating in husband Keir making repeated violent attempts on Grace's life,

isolating her from friends and family and attempting to murder her during the spring of 2022. He then went to court and denied all charges. And most clickbait in 2023, because yes, all of the same outlets reported on this story again, made the somewhat lazy observation that the dress had previously been used in a domestic violence awareness campaign in South Africa back in 2015, featuring a woman wearing the dress in white and gold while covered in black and blue bruises. Why is it so hard to see black and blue, the ad asked.

I think this ad is very weird, even if the intention was well placed, and the wave of 23 press connecting it to the real-life terror campaign taken out on grace felt just as wrong, because virtually all of those pieces, while sympathetic to her, ended in some tired version of, by the way, the dress was black and blue. And as of this month, in May 2024, I am recording this. A month after we finished this episode, Keir Johnston is being held in prison after pleading guilty to attacking and attempting to kill Grace back in 2022. At the time, Grace called and texted people for help after years of reporting abuse and said that her husband was trying to kill her

after she was violently attacked, strangled, and was threatened with a knife. As of this recording, the case is ongoing, and we wish Grace nothing but peace and getting, as far away from any of this fucking discourse as she needs to. And it's further proof that any internet story on a long enough timeline begins to reflect the ugliness of the world that the internet reflects and so often warps. Okay, cutting back into the original episode here. I'm sort of hesitant to say that there's a clear lesson to be learned from the saga of the dress, but it certainly encapsulates a moment in internet history that feels ungo-backable. And there's no better example of that than all the writers who were paid at the time to make it mean something

outside of being an increasingly rare monocultural moment that swirled in normal people with tech profits and our attention. So the dress means something, but what exactly that is is a little elusive. Almost 10 years on, I feel kind of nostalgic for a time where the internet could unite over a neutral issue. But as a 22-year-old clickbait writer, I didn't even have the time to appreciate it because I needed to form an edgy, smart, adjacent opinion about it as quickly as possible. Here's a passage from a reaction to the dress and the llama's success as stories on the heels of the net neutrality decision. The essay is called, The Open Internet will keep us stupid and happy. At this point, it's unfathomable to think of anything short of a Galeforce windstorm full of knives

that could prevent the Internet from brimming with memes, jiffs, and asinine materials from content. farms. Hell, I used to write for a content farm in Boston. And yes, I have written an article called How Seth McFarland's A Million Ways to Die in the West can teach us about how to run our tech companies. And that is objectively gross. The internet is stupid, but it was almost stupid and expensive. Thanks to the net neutrality vote passed yesterday, we won't need to worry about our access to llamas and confusing dresses being hindered. For now, anyway. Yeah, I wrote this. And what the fuck was I talking about? Anyways, good for her.

I'm sure she'll never overthink anything again. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Heart Radio. It is written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our other executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans, and our supervising producer and editor is Ian Johnson. Our theme song is by Sadie Dupuy, and I would like to thank all of the pets, Anderson the Dog, My Cats Flea, and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all.

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