Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - overly attached girlfriend, pt. 1

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

In the summer of 2012, Laina Morris became an overnight viral star as the Overly Attached Girlfriend, a parody of the rampant Justin Bieber "Beliebers" of the era. The week after, she had to decide if she'd drop out of college or pursue the life of a job that didn't quite exist yet -- a full-time YouTuber. In part 1, Jamie takes a look at Laina's ascent, and how the image of the YouTube star was first conjured from thin air by a bunch of Silicon Valley weirdos, and perfected by YouTubers themselves. Net week, Jamie speaks exclusively with Laina Morris in part two! For more on the history of the social media algorithm, check out "The Chaos Machine" by Max Fisher: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-chaos-machine-the-inside-story-of-how-social-media-rewired-our-minds-and-our-world-max-fisher/18203720 For more on YouTube celebrity, check out "Extremely Online" by Taylor Lorenz: https://bookshop.org/p/books/extremely-online-the-untold-story-of-fame-influence-and-power-on-the-internet-taylor-lorenz/19718842?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwrp-3BhDgARIsAEWJ6SwYyF8sigAMNiXmi3fokHCkE2bzkcSOCaQ7nB0cdh3vmpjNcJS4rVAaAhV6EALw_wcB Follow Laina on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@lainaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app, search all the smoke and listen now. The U.S. Open is here and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Cool Zone Media For as long as women have existed, they've been called jealous and clingy. I just want to be a part of your life. Oh, this is the way you do it, huh?

Showing up in my apartment. What am I supposed to do? You won't answer my calls. You change your night. I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan. I'm your number one fan. There is nothing to worry about. You're going to be just fine.

I'll take good care of you. I'm your number one fan. Come me! Comey, come me, come me, come me, come me, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me. Oh, kissy-kizzy! That was Alex Forrest from Fatal Attraction, Annie Wilkes from Misery, and Miss Piggy, respectively. Klingy, stalky, obsessed by the man of their desire.

While the same can't be said in reverse, although with Kermit, it's complicated. Characters like these have appeared in media for as long as there's been media. And while many are iconic, it's pulling from this fairly gendered playbook, right? Because there's obviously a difference between this behavior characterized as clingy and actual dangerous stalker behavior sometimes. They're not the same thing. And like no shade to Miss Piggy, but all three of the above characters are stalking.

But that's what makes it kind of hard to talk about, right? There is a clear, unhealthy, obsessive quality to these characters that poses a danger. But there's also this warning quality about them. Like this capacity lies within every woman on the planet. People recognize this as more of a trope. today, but this murky line of what constitutes clingy versus what constitutes dangerous is something that's been discoursed to death. Every year, there are scores of

personal essays about the stigma of being viewed as clingy by a partner and how the term can be used to describe something as reasonable as respect and clear communication by someone who doesn't want to give the consideration. This same label, clingy, can be used to describe violent stalking, and the behaviors are equated in a really unproductive and confusing way. There's a number of writers who have spoken on the connotations of the term in casual dating and how clinginess being weaponized to make them feel bad is a way to make them stop asking for foundational respect and a relationship. But as entrenched in stereotypes as clinginess and emotionality and womanhood are,

it can't be funny to see these tropes poked fun at, particularly if it's from women or the people being teased in the first place. It's fun seeing a character with a lot of intensity that isn't being shamed and just is. I mean, Miss Piggy is the perfect example of that. But it's a hard needle to thread. Here's another fun stereotype. Women, young people, queer people, really anyone inclined to enjoy pop music, are often portrayed as shallow obsessive.

There are literal doctoral theses on this topic because modern fandom can get genuinely terrifying. So for the sake of this conversation, I'm talking about your average big fan, loves the music, doesn't miss a tour, but isn't like hiding in the walls of the artist and sending death threats over Spotify streams. You know what I mean. Over time, the concept of fandom has really shifted. There's a proven trend of mocking fandoms as a way of making fans feel silly and ashamed about liking something or someone that isn't traditionally masculine. This has happened since time immemorial, putting down what young people, usually the girls and gays, in order to make them seem silly or less deserving of respect. We see this time and time again from the Beatles to Twilight to drag race fans. And then on the other hand, there's the effect this strong parisocial fan behavior has on the relationship between idol and idolizers.

That is, fans do take it too far a lot of the time and often act entitled to an idol's time, attention, virginity. Yes, I went to a Jonas Brothers concert during their chastity belt era. Fun fact. And while this is often young people feeling extreme passion and excitement and feeling like they know a celebrity, because they don't know any better, it can be unsafe for the celebrity. There's a recent strain of discourse going on to that effect right now

with Chapel Roan making clear boundaries with her fans. Would you be offended if she says no to your time because she has her own time? Would you stalk her family? Would you follow her around? Would you try to dissect her life and bully her online? This is a lady who don't know, and she doesn't know you at all.

These stereotypes around fans, women, and clinton. have been with us for a long time, and the early internet was no exception to this. In the front half of the 2010s, a fandom that was frequently mocked were fans of Justin Bieber, or the Believers. You really had to be there. In 2012, Beber Mania was at an all-time high. He'd been discovered on YouTube as a 13-year-old. by mega producer Scooter Braun, became a protege of Usher

and released his first EP, My World, in 2009. He basically became a thing right away. A pop heart throb with swoopy bangs who was known for his effect on teen girls, who were also his main audience. The songs he sang catered directly to them in those teeny bopper years. Songs like One Less Lonely Girl, Favorite Girl,

and in early 2010, the iconic, ludicrous, featuring Baby. And going back now, nearly 15 years later, it's a little spooky watching old videos of child Justin Bieber, because beneath this carefully curated and marketed image, you do get glimpses of a normal, talented kid who's in way over his head. Hey, what's up, internet?

Guess who? It's Justin Bieber, and I've taken over Funnier Die. It's mine. I bought it. And now it's Bieber or Die. Anything that's not Bieber dies. And in many ways, he was in way over his head. In the meantime, Bieber's career continued to grow. He had a gigantic social media following from the moment he became famous,

and in 2010 was said to account for 3% of all Twitter interactions. The Beliebers flocked to all things Bieber, including a 3D concert movie that I saw as a joke. So I claimed at the time I wanted to see it. It was fine. He released a Christmas album and began work on his third studio album called Believe. And to announce his lead single, he did what any wholesome celebrity would do in March of 2012. He went on Ellen.

It was his 18th birthday, and he announced that his first single from the album would be called Boyfriend. All right, the last time you were here, we were talking about Boyfriend, your new song that no one has heard yet. I was trying to guess what the song would sound like. And so it was, released in March 2012 ahead of the full album in June, and it shot right to number one. And just a quick aside here, because Justin Bieber has had a number of high-profile scandals, incidents, etc., many of which I think were connected to him not being adequately protected as a kid. This period of time I'm talking about was before any of that. Believe came out in summer 2012, and there's no real meaningful Bieber tabloid moment before 20. So at this point, he's Mr. Sweetie.

He's Mr. Dating Selina Gomez. He's Mr. Boyfriend. So during the launch of Believe, a few months later, there were countless tie-ins run by Beaver Incorporated to promote the album. I'm going to single out, too. There was a fragrance released called Girlfriend, which is pandering to young girls hard in the ad copy. Take a lesson. Justin Bieber launches his second perfume dedicated to his girl fans. Girlfriend Fragrance is described as flirty, personal, and inviting.

Top notes are designated to represent a chance in love and provide an exciting splash of Mandarin, blackberry, pear, and strawberry. The heart is marked as dream and includes accords of pink frisia, star jasmine, apricot, and orange blossom. The base is a kiss containing sensual notes of vanilla orchid, luminous musk and white amber. Jesus Christ. The second was a promotion called the Girlfriend Sing-Off Contest.

Justin announced the contest in a now-lost-time video saying the following. My new fragrance is called Girlfriend. And I wanted to do this whole idea where my fans will basically take my song Boyfriend and make it into their own girlfriend version. Make your own version, rewrite it however you want to. I'll pick the best one and fly that person out to one of my concerts and have a meet and greet and stuff. It'll be fun. So make your own video right now.

And I love you. I friggin' love you, Justin. Oh my God. So girls were encouraged to rewrite the song, Boyfriend, to be called Girlfriend, Compulsive Heterostyle, right, 2012. And in the contest, they would sing over a karaoke track of Boyfriend, including the weirdly long intro. Entries would be uploaded by users to YouTube, and the Bieber team would pick their favorite. Eventually, I guess a person named Hallie won, but no one remembers Hallie. There is but one girlfriend contestant that withstood history itself.

On June 6, 2012, a YouTube user called WZR-0713 uploaded an entry to the contest that became instantly iconic. In spite of the user, not just being a complete unknown, but at first no one even knew her name, but you know her face. It's a high-contrast video on an old webcam and a college sophomore's clinically white dorm room with collaged posters. The girl in the video has a side part, a green shirt, and huge blue eyes. It starts like this. Yeah, this is the intro. boyfriend and it goes on for nine seconds. And for all nine of those seconds, the girl in the video is staring down the barrel of the camera with her huge eyes and huge smile, not blinking, barely

breathing, sitting a little too close to the camera, looking like the last thing you see before you die, right? She's a combination of this trooped out obsessive woman and the obsessive fan. She's so tweaked out on whoever's on the other side of the camera that it's hindered her ability to use her eyelids. She is Alex Forrest. She is Miss Piggy. She is a believer. And then she launches into her parody lyrics. If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the wall. Question here with. Yeah, I'd always call and call. I wouldn't call it jealousy. Just looking out for you. Reading all your text, watching everything you do. Nag, nag, nag, nag on you. If I was your girlfriend. I never let you leave

without a small recording device taped under your sleeve 48 hours later this clip made by a college student in Texas who had just gotten off a shift at the pack and mail had over a million views and had gone viral on Reddit. They called her

the overly attached girlfriend, a.k.a. Lorna Morris and her 16th minute starts now. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, but I'll be perfect all the time To make me a start Let's take it too far And give me one moment

Sixteen minute Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of faith with me I'm not so bad when he's in my mind I have a chance

and say so he'll die Goodbye Smokey the Barre Then you know why Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through Remember please be careful it's the least that you can After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at smokybear.com, and remember,

Only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Force Service, your state forester and the ad council. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday, I'll be sure. sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all. Childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side.

My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential to inform it, but he wasn't shot on the street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. 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. 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 him 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 IHeart Radio 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 weighed 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 lock 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. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a look back at the Internet's most famous characters of the day and figure out how their moment changed their lives and what it says about the Internet and us. My name's Jamie Loftus, and I recently co-hosted a screening of Chicken Run at a famous Los Angeles movie theater in full-sex. chicken drags. So yes, my career is going great. And today, we are talking about one of the first

memes I feel like I was really fully present for. A meme that communicates to you that it came out in 2012 strictly with the blown out high contrast webcam aesthetic. Our character of the day this week is indeed the overly attached girlfriend. An early YouTube star whose career and departure from the platform is a cool case study on how YouTube stardom has evolved over time. Because Lana gets started when YouTube is just starting to seem like a legitimate career path. And by the time she's at the height of her popularity, American kids were saying that being a YouTuber was a more popular job choice than being an astronaut. So today, we're going to talk about how that shift happened and where YouTube came from and how fame on that platform became a thing at all. And next week, we'll talk to

Lena. So as the kids say, let's fucking go. It was so fun revisiting this story. 2012 is a very nostalgic era of the internet for me. It was a time I used something called stumble upon to find people's blogs. It was a time where fail compilations got millions of views of people just falling down. It was nanorima before the AI allegations. It was Rebecca Black's Friday. It was a time where I'd troll on eating disorder tumblers to find a new way to hate myself. That last one was sad, but I promised to tell the truth on the show. 2012 was a time. And when we have the sacred duty to return to, if we are to understand the overly attached girlfriend's place in internet history. So come with me, if you will, to June 2012.

Madonna launches a tour in Tel Aviv, the same day the IDF launches an airstrike on Gaza. Nothing fucked up about that, there is a surge of gonorrhea in England. And WZR. 0713, who the world would quickly learn was a college student named Lena, uploaded a joke entry to a Justin Bieber contest that would change her life. This is a story that wouldn't have had the sheer reach it did without the help of two major social media platforms, ones that remain with us today, YouTube and Reddit. And while Reddit has a thorough and terrifying history all its own, this week we're going to to the platform that Lena chose to find her creative voice on. YouTube.

I think the fact that YouTube is the cultural juggernaut that it is today might surprise Lena Morris if I could teleport back to 2012 and tell her. YouTube has weathered a lot of waves of social media turnover. It's outlived MySpace, BlogSpot, Snapchat, Vine, and I do believe it will ultimately outplay TikTok on a longer timeline. But it's changed a lot over the years. from a business standpoint, from an algorithmic standpoint, and for the sake of this story. So I want to give you a snapshot of where YouTube and social media personalities on YouTube

were at in 2012, because it truly was another world. Half of the people at the height of their careers at this time have since been thoroughly canceled or moved on to other projects. Keep in mind, this was three presidencies ago. This was before all of the Twilight movies were out. Renee and Nesme. And I was thinking Renezmi. You get it.

And to bring us there, there were two books that were massively helpful to me, and they were written by guests who have appeared on this very show. The first is Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine, and the second is Taylor Lorenz's extremely online. So, classes in session. What is YouTube? YouTube, can, I regret to inform you, trace its roots back to some of the world's most embarrassing and powerful men, those being Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It was founded in 2005 by three expats of PayPal, which Teal co-founded and Musk joined on the ground floor. And like other rising social media star Facebook, YouTube started as a botched attempt at a dating service that women had absolutely no interest in. Founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jowid Karim failed to launch YouTube as a dating service hard. In fact, they at one time offered women 20 bucks on Craigslist to upload videos to the server.

and still could not get any traction. But YouTube did have one thing that was head and shoulders above other sites. It had a really solid video uploading platform that anyone could use for free. Lorenz covers the history of how content creators on YouTube became the platform's core appeal and extremely online, and it's not as linear a path as you might expect. The founders ditched the dating angle pretty early on, as they watched the site gain users who seemed more interested in in uploading whatever, home videos, clips of TV shows they liked.

And within its first year, this was enough to get YouTube funding from a well-respected Silicon Valley venture capital firm and rack up around 100,000 views in the space of an average day. Which you've got to admit is not bad for the guys who were literally paying women to upload content that they didn't actually believe just a couple months earlier. Early viral successes included an unlicensed re-upload of the lonely Island's Lazy Sunday sketch from SNL.

And this actually really helped legitimize the site, as well as calling into question what was legal to post on YouTube if it wasn't actually your work. I still don't think that they've really figured that out. But soon after that, regular users started to look at YouTube as a chance to not just dump videos from their camcorders, but really build out a creative vision. Early successful YouTubers were really low-fi and often pretty young. I'm honestly surprised at how many people who started their channels in 2006 are still around. But for longtime fans, think Smosh slash Anthony Padilla, the angry video game nerd,

Lucas Cruikshank, aka Fred, and I Justine. They all launched their channels in 2006 and are still around to some extent today. But the early standout when it came to a YouTube channel that really held people's attention was the infamous web series, Lonely Girl 15. And I won't get too deep into the lore behind Lonely Girl 15 because I very much would like to make an episode about it. But if you're not familiar, Lonely Girl 15 was a scripted web series

starring actress Jessica Lee Rose playing a teenage character named Bree. She'd speak to the camera of vlog style while her friend Daniel hung out in the background and chimed in every now and again. As the channel continued to upload videos, it became clearer that Bree's family was a part of a freaky cult and she was slowly being primed to participate in an occult ceremony. It's a really lo-fi teen sci-fi series, right?

But the thing about it was, the series pretended to be completely real. And for the first few episodes, viewers really thought that Bree was a person uploading vlogs and realizing that her family was dangerous over time. And in an early instance of YouTube fan-detectiving, someone IP traced and geolocated where they were, so it was revealed pretty early in the show's run that Lonely Girl 15 was scripted and that Brie was an actress. This was a creative experiment by a bunch of young people in L.A. But what seemed to surprise the YouTube brass was that even after it was exposed as scripted, the viewership kept climbing.

People were really invested, and the reveal that the series' authenticity was a hoax only increased its popularity. For a long time, it was the number one channel on YouTube. And part of that seemed to be because the show was good. And while the material was scripted, the creators were complete unknowns. But all of a sudden, they'd gotten views and attention on par with independent horror directors on zero budget and more eyes. By the end of 2006, the stars and creators of Lonely Girl 15 had Hollywood representatives and were appearing in mainstream magazines like The Hollywood Reporter as an example that YouTube was a place for regular people to be creative

and potentially even legitimized in the mainstream. But, it should be mentioned, the first season of Lonely Girl 15 aired before YouTube had ever begun monetizing its videos, meaning they made no money on it. There's another big change to YouTube at the end of 2006. A little company called Google purchased the platform for a then and still massive $1.65 billion to avoid competition with Google's inferior product, Google Video. At the time, the buy was viewed as foolish.

It was helmed by then-Google exec, later longtime YouTube CEO, the recently passed Susan Wojitzky. But Google was quick to investigate what it was about YouTube that was bringing in now millions of viewers. And they wanted to figure out how to best monetize whatever it was. Going into 2007, a lot more early viral sensations blew up on YouTube. Think Charlie bit my finger, Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain, David after Dentist, but there was still no clear way to maintain that virality. In 2007, users were able to monetize their videos, and the invite-only partner program was introduced,

but few were able to actually cobble together a for-real living. In the mid-to-late 2010s, YouTube also became a place where musicians could be discovered, like a young Troy Zivan, or most famously, one Justine Biber in 2008. So with the increasing audience that was flocking to YouTube, Estimates put around 200 million people having accounts by 2010. There were a number of attempts inside and outside of the company to make YouTube stardom fit into a box that resembled fame by the late 2000s. And during this period of growth, there were a few interesting developments.

A new breed of talent agents that specialized in online stars, creator-driven YouTube studios, known as multi-channel networks, and YouTube itself tooling with its algorithm to maximize viewership, ad revenue, and creator retention. The agent part is pretty interesting, in no small part because it was a job that basically had to be invented. The most notorious YouTube agent was named Ben Lashes, who started by representing the keyboard cat,

which is a re-upload of a video of a cat from the 80s that had since died. You know this video. He went on to negotiate sponsorships and helm the careers of the likes of Doge, Success Kid, Skumbag Steve, the Irma Gerd Girl, the ridiculously photogenic guy. Oh, I feel like I'm losing my mind. He did not, however, represent Lena Morris, the overly attached girlfriend. Ben Lashes basically invented this job, and other agents soon followed suit. But it's these creative, multi-channel network. networks that I think has the most powerful effect on what YouTube stardom could look like

at this time. Multichannel networks held massive influence over the creator sphere and helped address the gaps in revenue that YouTube's own partner programs weren't providing. The first was a company called Next New, which started in 2006 and built out multiple successful channels while taking a percentage in exchange for handling the business and advertising side. They built channels around themes, pop culture, fashion, automobile, let the creators focus on the creative, and then they would find the advertising dollars YouTube wasn't so everyone could make a living. Then there was Maker Studios, founded in 2009 by successful YouTubers like Kassum G, Sheikh Karl, Philip DeFranco, Lisa Donovan, Danny Zappen, the list goes on.

This studio was modeled on the idea of United Artists, which was founded in 1919 by Charlie Chalphan. D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. And the intention of it was to liberate and empower artists to choose their own projects out of the confines of rigid studio contracts and still make a good living. Originally, Maker Studios aimed to do that same thing for YouTube by nurturing new talent through what were then referred to as super channels, the most famous of which was called The Station. The Station is also another whole story, but it served is a prototype for the YouTube and Vine collab houses that would become wildly popular in the 2010s into the early 2020s. The premise of the station channel was that basically Maker Studios

rented a nice house on Venice Beach and invited any successful YouTube to live there and cross-collaborate with each other and create a ton of content for the channel. It was really popular. While he wasn't a part of the company, a young YouTuber named Bo Burtum was said to couch surf at the station house from time to time. Eventually, the house would be shut down due to safety concerns and excessive partying. A lesson that future social media stars definitely learned from. The hype house caused, you know, 600,000 of damage. Nevertheless, Maker Studios normalized the reality that YouTube was nothing without its creators,

and that if the company didn't compensate and promote them accordingly, well, they would go somewhere. else and find a way to do it. As Taylor Lorenz gets into, the success of Maker and Next New Studios, which, by the way, would be folded into Disney and the YouTube creator program respectively by the mid-2010s, emphasized how important individual personalities were to the platform. And for popular creators who weren't quite sure how to turn this into a career, signing with a Maker or a Next New made a lot of sense, and they'd often end up launching series exclusively with a specific company. It was this model that actually led to the first episode of this show.

Brooklyn-based YouTubers the Gregory Brothers developed their auto-tune the news series under Nextnew and launched a little something called the Bed Intruder Song that made one Antoine Dodson a permanent and complicated figure in internet history. Well... Listen to that episode for more. After the success of these companies, other multi-channel networks with niche specialties started to launch. And all of these companies were raising a lot of capital to continue growing their stable of YouTube talent. They were so successful that a former YouTube

executive named George Strumpolis actually left the company to launch a YouTube multi-channel network of his own called Full Screen. And that became a huge success in the early 2010s, prompting YouTube to acquire Next New in retaliation in order to stay competitive. So by the early 2010s, the idea that YouTube was a talent-driven supernova was well established. But what a creator's fame could or should look like still remained a little bit opaque. Because these multi-channel networks were headquartered mainly in L.A., this period of time meant most famous YouTubers lived in Hollywood. And this kind of spoke to the general feeling of where people seemed to think YouTube was headed. There was this feeling of

maybe this is a new pipeline to mainstream stardom. The feeling of no one is going to be a YouTuber forever, right? YouTube fame will translate to movies or music. And these days, that is not really an idea that exists anymore. Sure, there are exceptions. There's people like Bo Burnham, Sean Mendez, the Green Brothers, one third of Derek Comedy,

some guy named Donald Glover, Lindsay Ellis and Liza Koshy have parlayed YouTube fame into mainstream success. But for many, the continued user growth and MLN success left some creators realizing that YouTube could actually be their job and maybe even their whole career. YouTube continued to pour money into its partnership funds to retain talent, and there are a few isolated examples of YouTubers attempting to cross over into the mainstream around this time. I'll call back to the Fred character. Remember him? Remember Fred?

Hey, it's Fred! And it's really nice out, so I think I'm going to go swimming later. My mom found this really cool pool at the dump. It's really big and really deep. BTSD. I hated Fred. But the mainstream was determined to make Fred work on television. That clip is from a Nickelodeon movie where John Sina played Fred's dad. And of course I'm going to want to play a clip of that.

Dad? What do you think? I should do. The secret is ruthless aggression. It is. You gotta look at yourself and say, my time is now. Show what kind of man you really are. And for what it's worth, the actor who played Fred, Lucas Crookshank, is still on YouTube

and has a good sense of humor about all of it. I mean, he was a teenager at the time. But still, bread, God. But while most YouTubers flopped out of mainstream entertainment, you also had your Justin Bieber's. And while creators were navigating this in the 2010s, YouTube itself was pretty preoccupied with a terrifying concept called Infinite Growth. And this is where Max Fischer's The Chaos Machine comes in and gives a lot of context on the history of the YouTube algorithm and what kind of users it was boosting. The book explains that in the early 2010s, the company had an increased focus on maximizing the

YouTube algorithm to generate video recommendations that would keep people on the platform for as long as possible. Fischer uses the example of a French AI expert named Guilom Chaslow. I know I said that wrong. Who was brought to YouTube in 2010 and was tasked with raising average watch time on the platform. He literally received an email saying, Watch time and only watch time. The focus of the company was developing an algorithm that effortlessly catered and even anticipated the desires of viewers, making it impossible to switch to something else.

Search engine expert Christos Goodrow, who was also working at YouTube at the time, told Fisher, Our job was to keep people engaged in hanging out with us. More watchtime begets more advertising, which incentivizes more content creators, which draws more viewership. The YouTube algorithm was significantly improved throughout the early 2010s, using machine learning to simulate the kind of curation that used to be done by clueless old men in boardrooms. Now, it was done by an evil computer. Cool.

Shaslow echoes this feeling, singling out the year 2012, the same year Lena Morris goes viral. He says, Within a few months, with a small team, we had an algorithm that increased watchtime to generate millions of dollars of additional ad revenue. So it was really, really exciting. YouTube was absolutely running their pre-roll ads, sure. But the real value of the company was the technology that it used that detected down to absurd detail what you watched

and how long you watched it. A truly ridiculous amount of data that users were just handing over. But as this went on, Chaslow became concerned with what developing such an individual, addictive relationship to the platform could potentially mean, or like, the world. I'll quote for Max Fisher one more time here. As the system honed its powers, Shaloh noticed it developing strange habits. It began nudging lots of users to watch videos espousing anger at women.

Sometimes, particular women, like the game culture critic Anita Sarkisian, sometimes women generally. Men were spending 40% more time on YouTube than women were, a legacy in part of the enormous quantity of video game-related content on the site in those days. The natural thing for the algorithm to do, Jillo realized, would be to privilege more male-centered content. And if you know anything about internet history, you'll know what this algorithmic tendency led to on a long enough timeline. Gamergate, a brutal, misogynist harassment campaign led mainly by male gamers between 2014 and 2015. which led a number of women in the gaming industry to be doxed, to be threatened, and to fear for their lives.

And if you know any more internet history, you'll know that this same playbook is still used to harass marginalized people by mobs of egg-profiled assholes ever since. But this is 2012, and Shazlo doesn't know any of this is going to happen. All he knows is that he wants to prevent this slowly radicalized recommendation algorithm from getting worse. So we started spending time on a side project that attempted to train the current algorithm to counterbalance this effect and not just push hateful rhetoric to young male viewers for profit. But before he could make any meaningful progress on this goal, or really tell anyone what he was working on, YouTube leadership announced at a conference in summer 2012,

just a few months after overly attached girlfriend went viral, that there was a new goal for the company. employees were told that by the end of 2016, just about four years later, YouTube wanted a billion hours of content to be consumed a day on the platform. This was ridiculous. This was 10 times the amount of viewership they were getting in the summer of 2012. And it was a goal that they achieved, by making the problem that Shaslow was concerned about, get much worse.

Because his whole algorithmic ethics project was sidelined immediately, in favor of the opposite, juicing the algorithm to feed users anything without any quality control of the truth or hatefulness of the content that was pushed. So by the mid to late 2010s, YouTube was a full-on radicalization machine, one that Fisher mentions was quite literally left unsupervised

in order to achieve this billion hours a day goal. And it's so wild to think that the overly attached girlfriend's launch happens at this pretty major precipice in internet culture. 2012 was a precipice in the way content creators viewed themselves. They were moving from the idea that they would abandon the platform for movies and realize that they might just be able to support themselves and then some just by staying on YouTube. And it's a precipice for the algorithm. Taking Shaslow's account into consideration,

overly attached girlfriend probably came to prominence in the last few months before the YouTube algorithm was unleashed to a violent degree. It's heavy. It's a lot. And then there's this. If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the wall. Question here you're with, yeah, I'd always call and call. I wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you. Reading all your texts, watching everything you do, nag.

And when we come back, Lena Morris gets swept up into this triple-decker cyclone cluster fuck. If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy. If a baby is crying in the back seat, they're probably hungry. But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there? When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher. It can happen to anyone. Parked cars get hot fast and can be dead.

deadly. So get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave. The message from NHTSA and the ad council. 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. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all. Childhood, trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the stream to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house.

Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. 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.

My name is Ed. Everyone say hello, Ed. I'm from a very rural background myself. My dad is a farmer, and my mom is a cousin, 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 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. Well, 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. 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. Lyotra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority,

we weighed 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. Our IHeart Radio Music Festival,

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Welcome back to 16th minute. This morning, my cats are doing this thing where it looks. Looks like they're having sex, but they're not. One is just sitting on the other like he's an egg that's going to hatch. It seems like they're both fine with it. I just don't like, someone let me know what this is. And today, we're talking about one of these seminal early celebrities of YouTube, Lena Morris, the overly attached girlfriend. So, okay, we know about the Justin Bieber contest.

We know about the both very intense and pretty scattered view of what YouTube fame could look like at the time the meme went by. viral. But what happens after the initial viral moment? To remind you, Lena Morris went viral on two platforms at the same time in slightly different ways. On Reddit, it's just an image of Lena that goes viral. The wide blue eyes, the brunette side part, the vacant smile, the green shirt. And you might remember how this meme was formatted. Here's some examples. You don't want me to be your girlfriend anymore? Of course I'll marry you. I told all of of your friends that you hate them. Now we can hang out every day. That girl commented on your

status. She's a slut. Surprise. I stopped taking my birth control two weeks ago. You get it, jealous, clingy, possessive jokes from 2012. And separate from Reddit, Lena goes viral on YouTube, where you can hear the full parody song and the launch of this character. But the upload, titled J.B. fan video, pulls in over a million views in its first two days and gets a additional traction when Reddit realizes that the source of the overly attached girlfriend image has a fuller piece of content attached to it. And the mainstream media picks up on it. Headlines like,

Girls' Justin Bieber Girlfriend Parity is unbelievably creepy. Overly attached girlfriend is the meme you've been waiting for. You know the type of post. And by June 15, 2012, Lena publicly acknowledges in a tweet that she is the person everyone's been meming for the last week and a half, saying, I'm always amused by the overly attached girlfriend tweets. Then I realize my face is associated with it, and I'm slightly disturbed. Still awesome.

From here on out, what is mercifully and consistently true of this story is that everyone basically seems to be in on the joke. It's immediately clear in early interviews with Lena that she's doing a bit, and while nearly every interview she does in these early days and for years after demands that she does the eyes of the overly attached girlfriend. No one is conflating this character with the real person. And I actually do feel the need to specify that because I think the men of today's internet

might genuinely struggle to detect a bit. I blame the algorithm. Originally, the overly attached girlfriend uses the name Lena Walker to protect her true identity. Remember when we cared about that? And Lena sets up public-facing Facebook and Twitter accounts. Because however sudden things had been in the last 10 days, her decision seemed clear, Lena was going to lean into the meme and was not shying away from the newfound fame it had brought her.

This was further confirmed a few days later on June 18th, when Lena uploaded a second parody song video as Overly Attached Girlfriend to YouTube. This time she wrote lyrics to then massive hit Call Me Maybe by Justin Bieber-backed Canadian Carly Ray Jepson. Here's the overly attached girlfriend version. Hey, I just saw you with that lady, paid for her dinner, that's kind of shady. Remember you're mine. You say you're dating. I know you're kidding.

So I'll be waiting. And this goes mega viral too, meaning the first two YouTube videos Lena ever made were numbers one and two on all of YouTube. And keep in mind that in 2012, this was not an easy feat. there was a lot of money and clout to combat with. But she was on a role and signed with a manager shortly after, though at 20s she wasn't exactly sure what she wanted to do yet and wasn't ready to uproot her life in Texas overnight. But she is ready to commit to YouTube

and soon decides to not return to school. And of course, a few crummy imitators crop up, the overly attached boyfriend, the underly attached girlfriend, The regularly attached girlfriend meme made from more normal pictures of Lena. But she's focused on building her own brand and starts collaborating with other big YouTubers, as was the trend back then. And as she pivots from full-time college student to full-time YouTuber,

a still murky job title at the time, Lena continued to make appearances in mainstream media for the next year. Because keep in mind, the viral lifespan of a meme personality in 2012, was significantly longer than it is today. And so she gets opportunities like hosting the red carpet of the AMAs in 2012, and in 2013, has a staring contest with Jessica Alba on stage at the Social Star Awards. Just look into those big, sexy, creepy eyes and get it on. As well as a memorable appearance on Jimmy Fallon.

And while Lena makes a lot of the moves one would expect from a YouTuber of this era, meaning vidcon appearances, fan conventions, an appearance in a truly wild 2015 Delta Airlines safety video that featured every meme personality at the time demonstrating a safety joke? I'm just going to link it in the description. It's impossible to explain in an audio medium. But of course, Lena's moment as a heightened mainstream media figure

passes eventually, leaving her to maintain and grow her YouTube audience. She ultimately decides to stay in Texas, not going the way of moving into the standard house, or making a YouTuber movie, which rarely goes well anyway, or pursuing a legacy acting or pop music career. Instead, Lena goes into business for herself and begins to write, perform, and edit her weekly content in addition to maintaining the front-facing relationship with her viewers. Pretty soon, she's got audiences on Twitter, on Instagram, on Snapchat, you name a popular social media between 2012 and now, and she's brought her follower base along there with her.

And it's interesting to trace the way this content grows and changes over time. At the beginning, Lena focuses most of her weekly YouTube stuff on the overly attached girlfriend throughout 2012 and 2013. Here are some examples. Welcome to Behind the Means, tonight's episode, overly attached girlfriend. This mother's day, you have a choice. Who would you rather spend it with?

Your mother or the mother of your future children? For some reason, men love it when women make them sandwiches. It's one of the fastest ways to his heart and one of the best ways to make sure he'll stay with you forever. But as time goes on, Lina shares more of her own personality, formerly separating herself from the character and in classic jump-cut YouTube comedy style would perform sketches as herself

talking to the overly attached girlfriend. And while some of it's dated, Lena avoids a lot of the tropes of this era of YouTube comedy. She's not screaming at the top of her lungs, she isn't going edge lord, she's making stuff that she and her audience enjoy from week to week. And if all you have to go on are these videos, If you're watching Lena's content for the next few years, it genuinely seems like she's having a good time.

As the years pass as a full-time YouTuber, Lena develops a couple of their characters that appear regularly on the channel and makes sketches along with whatever was trending on the algorithm at that time. Food review videos, reaction videos, you name it. But behind the scenes, fans would learn years later, Lena was not as content as the image she projected in the videos. In fact, she'd been having mental health struggles and issues with creator burnout for years, going back to her first years on YouTube. She'd been in therapy for some time after really struggling with the anxiety of producing weekly content she felt proud of, the pressure of navigating what a YouTuber's career was supposed to look like, of feeling isolated from her peers making things by herself.

And while many of the YouTubers she'd come up with had risen and fallen in the time she'd been regularly posting, between 2012 and 2019, Lena hit a wall, and on July 24th, 2019, she posted a video called Breaking Up with You, Tube. After about a year and a half of doing it, I started to feel a bit depressed. And starting around like 2014, I would say, the beginning of 2014, I would say, I was, I'd sort of landed myself in a real deep depression and I was keeping it a real deep secret from everyone around me. I felt shamed and I felt guilt for being stressed and overwhelmed in a world and with a job and opportunities that were so great. I didn't understand why I couldn't handle it.

It's a half-hour-long video and is uncharacteristically confessional for Lena. She gets into topics that were far less trendy to discuss at the time, talking about a feeling that a lot of online creatives were starting to discuss at this time. Earlier in 2019, writer Anne Helen Peterson published what I consider to be a seminal essay about life online during late capitalism called How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. And it went viral because it articulated so many feelings. that young people did not then have the language to explain. And Lena alludes to feelings like that in much of this essay,

along with just struggling with depression. She felt like a fraud. She didn't want to let her audience down. She felt very disarmed being at the whims of the algorithm. She was exhausted and angry and critical of herself and ashamed that she felt so unhappy while experiencing what by that time was the number one dream job for American kids, YouTuber. It's an emotional video, and Lena says it's time for her to step back for her own health.

Here's another clip. My relationship with YouTube, honestly, like, started to become more negative than positive, and I'm just in a place where, like, I know as much as I don't want to admit it, I know that this part of my life is done, and it's time to say goodbye. How's it feel to be broken up with by the overly attached girlfriend? Anyway. The comments on this video were overwhelmingly supportive, thankfully, and Lena did leave YouTube after that to focus on herself for years. She didn't leave social media completely.

Occasionally, she'd post on Instagram or Snapchat. She eventually started at TikTok when that became a thing to do, and would even perform as overly attached girlfriend from time to time. But now, it was on her terms, not the strict full-time schedule she'd enforced her. on herself for five years in an ever-changing, pretty punishing YouTube landscape. In 2021, Lena does, I think, the only controversial thing I've heard of in her entire career and sells an NFT of the original overly attached girlfriend meme for over $400,000 to a music company in Dubai because, sure. Thankfully, the NFT boom has now ostensibly passed, but we're understandably very controversial in the early 2020s for being yet another

predatory tech bubble that wasted a shitload of energy. But at the time, selling NFTs was viewed as a way for people who had been memed to death over the years to make some money from their likeness. Other meme expats like The Disaster Girl, that picture of a little girl smiling mysteriously in front of a house burning down, people like Success Kid, Bad Luck Brian, and the Ermogurd Girl all sold NFTs during this time. And yes, I'm not going to argue that the blockchain is anything but a nightmare, but I do understand the reasoning, which was consistent across those selling.

The internet had been using these people's image for nearly or over a decade by this point, and most hadn't been able to control or even vaguely profit from that. NFTs are fucked, and I can't really blame any of these people for wanting to get compensated for years of their image being parlayed while they had to navigate the world. No ethical consumption, right? And for what it's worth, Lena seems to have complicated feelings

about having done it now. And in the years before and since, she's been a genuinely kind and thoughtful person in how she's handled her public and private persona. She popped up on YouTube one more time in 2022 to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the original meme, but at the time I started working on this episode, that was it.

And then, on August 4th of 2024, Lena posted a video to YouTube for the first time in years in a video titled Five Years Later, five years from the moment that she left YouTube. And I was really excited because it's Lena seeming a lot more comfortable with herself. She gives some updates on her life, but mostly she's just the person people fell in love with over a decade ago. I haven't done YouTube full time since I was in like my mid-20s and I don't know that I ever had a healthy relationship with YouTube. And I'm curious now as, you know, someone who's like been through it and is older and has worked on my mental health and still loves creating things and making content and connecting with you guys. I'm really curious what that looks like when I'm in a healthy place. I'm curious what a healthy relationship to YouTube looks like.

And the main takeaway of this video is she's thinking about coming back to YouTube. Her audience, of course, was stoked, and that was when I knew I needed to reach out to her to better understand this very specific journey she's been on. And next week, I speak exclusively about the highs and lows of life online with the overly attached girlfriend herself, Lena Morris. See you then. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Heart Radio.

It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Laughness. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock. Bert, who will out with us all. Bye.

Goodbye. It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I had the skill and I had the talent. I didn't have the opportunity. Yeah.

We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed opportunity. is not. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Eye Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to All the Smoke podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama. Folks find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people, you're sitting in their kitchen tables, and they're talking like we're talking. You know, you hear our

story, how we grew up, how I grew up, how where I grew up, and you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app. Search All the Smoke, and listen now. Smokey the barry. Then you know why Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through. Remember, please be careful.

It's the least that you can do. Don't play with matches. Don't play with five. After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smoky Bear lives within us all. Learn more at smokybear.com. And remember, Only you can prevent wildfires.

Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. The U.S. Open is here. And on my podcast, good game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure. And, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open.

The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain and IHart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports Network. 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 Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an IHeart podcast.