Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The case against logging off

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Every week, there’s a new warning: TikTok is poisoning the youth, Facebook is radicalizing your uncle, and the only way to save ourselves is to log off.But what if that’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing? What if this push to disconnect isn’t about protecting us, but instead about disempowering us?Aidan Walker is a meme researcher and author of the Substack newsletter How to Do Things With Memes. Today, he joins me to talk about why we shouldn't log off and how the internet, for all its flaws, can be a powerful tool for change. The reality is that the internet—messy, chaotic, and algorithmically manipulated as it may be—is one of the only spaces where everyday people can assemble, communicate, and exert collective power. Governments, the media, and people in power want you to stay offline, because a public that is fragmented and disengaged is easier to control. People in power want you to believe that social media is nothing more than an addictive distraction, rather than the battleground where narratives are shaped, movements are built, and institutions are held accountable.***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co ***** Subscribe to my newsletter:https://www.usermag.co⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenzhttps://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzhttps://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social

The platforms themselves want to be governments. I think that's their aspiration. And so being on them and moving things around and moving attention becomes a way of moving money, of moving opinion, and who gets seen and how. Recently, there's been a relentless moral panic about the internet. Politicians, media elites, pundits and tech executives are all insisting that social media is rotting our brains, destroying democracy, and making us miserable.

Every week, there's a new warning. TikTok is poisoning the youth. Facebook is radicalizing your uncle. And the only way to save ourselves is to log off. This afternoon, the Senate overwhelmingly passed landmark legislation aimed at keeping kids safer online. The final vote, 91 yeas to three nays. And it comes six months after an apology on Capitol Hill from meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to parents who say their kids were harmed online. But what if that's the exact opposite of what we should be doing?

And what if this push to disconnect isn't about protecting us, but is instead about disempowering? us. The reality is that the internet, as messy, chaotic, and algorithmically manipulated as it might be, is one of the only spaces where everyday people can assemble, communicate, and exert collective power. Governments, the legacy media, and people in power want you to stay offline, because a public that is disengaged and fragmented is far easier to control. People in power want you to believe that social media and the internet is nothing more than an addictive distraction rather than a crucial battleground where narratives are shaped, movements are built, and institutions are held accountable. No one knows this better than Aidan Walker, a meme researcher,

and author of the substack, how to do things with memes. Today, he joins me to talk about why we shouldn't log off and how the internet, for all its flaws, can be a powerful tool for progressive change. Hi, Aidan, welcome to Power User. Hi, great to be here, Taylor. Okay, so Aiden, And you wrote this fantastic, in my opinion, post called Don't Log Off. And just to get people started, I think there's so much discussion today about logging off. It seems to be what everybody wants is to spend less time on their phone, spend less time on the internet. Can you explain really succinctly your argument for why people should not log off right now? The Internet is the most important thing happening in the world right now.

It is where power is moving. And if you look at the winds, every wind is blowing towards the Internet being more important. and being more of a site of governance and authority and activism. And I think if you miss that boat, then you're going to get stuck on the beach and the beach is going to burn down. And we've known from internet history that the most powerful group there is everyday people. A lot of our media and academic narratives emphasize that the companies are really important and the tech is important. And that's all true. But the internet is user generated.

You know, what you post really does matter. You're not just a consumer. You're a producer. Yeah. I feel like, I mean, online attention. and I wrote about this a lot in my book, I would argue, is sort of one of the most powerful forms of currency today. And I think what you've talked about is leveraging online attention for good.

I think that that is really compelling. And I agree that that work that people are doing online is labor. But I guess I would say, like if somebody was to ask me that question, I'm curious your thoughts, like the internet is probably the most powerful tool for change that we've ever seen in our lifetime. It is radically upended our media environment, our communication systems. It is so incredibly powerful because it's the first time in human history that we've been able to connect at scale globally. And it seems to me that a lot of these efforts to get people to log off and to not participate in the online world are really just efforts from sort of powerful people to wield the internet in the ways that they want to wield it.

And if people don't get involved, kind of like what you're talking about and aren't like participating in these systems and, you know, inflicting their own changes on the internet or sort of wielding it in their own ways. for good, it will only be used for bad. And we will not be taking advantage of such a powerful tool. I don't know if any of that kind of like verges with the way that you think about it. I think it totally does. And I completely agree. The caveat I'd sort of add is that it's the most radical tool for change in our lives, both positively and negatively. I'd say, you know, technology is usually neutral. And it's how people choose to use it that matters, how different people in history make decisions that matters. And the internet for me is currently a story of radical change. It started out at CERN, kind of very decentralized network, Web 1.0. And then you had this

sort of enclosure with the big companies coming up. And you had new forms of hardware that allowed them to gather more data. You know, like a phone in your pocket is better than a desktop. And all of that has now been used to kind of centralize and create an authoritarian sort of structure and way of governing, because that's often the work that they're doing. But I think those very same tools in the same way that, you know, the tools of a bureaucracy or railroads or television or radio could be used by a regime that wants to control people from the top down could also be used from the bottom up. And I think we've seen hints of that in the past in the internet and we need to kind of aim for that bottom up direction. Well, yeah. I mean, we've seen sort of,

quote unquote bottom up movements, really social movements emerge on social media like Black Lives Matter or Me Too or some of these like social justice movements that have gained enormous traction online and obviously have led to real world change. I guess the criticism, I think that a lot of people will levy at things like that or people say, well, we just need to use the internet for good. If we just post enough, right, like we can mainstream a lot of these social movements is that ultimately these platforms belong to corporations, not people. And these corporations will bend. the platforms to push whatever they want. I mean, Twitter is a really good example of this now, right? Like, does it really benefit anybody to go on there and post a lot when Elon Musk completely controls the algorithm and controls, like, what people see? So I guess how do you think of that tension between like the internet as this liberatory and democratizing force that sort of anybody can use versus, like you mentioned, this platform-controlled ecosystem that I would argue people, like, isn't very liberatory for a lot of people. Yeah, I'd say the platforms are parasites on people's creativity and desire to connect. And it is true that they've kind of dominated in this top-down

manner. And when you're posting on Twitter, you're in Elon's playground. And so I think there's a lot of reason to use these platforms strategically. I think it's not worth it to kind of surrender it to them. And I also think in our histories of the internet, we've often kind of thought of them as these fiefdoms, which may be legally corporate-wise, they are. But they aren't just websites that They're, you know, places where people come together and meet. And they're often maintained like, you know, Reddit is maintained by admins. You know, Twitter is only interesting because you have posters and reply guys and the whole ecosystem of people. And so I think while, you know, maybe the name on whatever paper is the ownership feed of Twitter is Elon Musk in practice.

And I think in our hearts and minds, maybe less so now that it's changed to X. The people who own the internet are the people on the internet. I mean, the real power and the value of these social platforms comes from the user base, right? It comes from people. And you're right that sort of ultimately users do dictate the way certain platforms go. I mean, Vine didn't shut down, right? Like, users stopped using it. And that is part of the reason why it shut down was sort of this like user-driven revolt of the platform.

So I guess when you think of people exerting power, like if you accept that these social platforms gain their power, or an influence from users, how can users exert more control over the platform landscape when we have such a strong, I guess, tech duopoly with like meta and Google and then now X is kind of in the mix too? It feels like we just have an ever-shinking amount of platforms that we can post on and connect on. I think that tech duopoly is a very big restriction on us. And it's definitely a moment where it feels like the internet is very dark, and I feel that as well. And I do think it would be very easy, for example, now that if you consider TikToks to be kind of a hostage of the Trump administration, that they could just, you know, tweak the

algorithm and decide to treat different creators or different people a certain way, which many of these platforms have been clearly done in the past and sued over and so on and so forth. But I think users, every day, there's things like Al-Safe. go speak where users talk around the algorithms. There's things like, you know, people do manage to fundraise. People do manage to do activism. And some of that is a little cosmetic. And the core of it remains that it is top down controlled. But I think you see this desire among people to move to new platforms or create new spaces. And that's part of what I meant by saying like skills like being an admin or a moderator or being, you know, a steadfast and productive reply guy or being a creator who,

you know, build space for others as well as taking up space yourself, I think those will be essential. Whatever new platform is created or where people go. And so I'd say, I can't pretend to have the answers, but looking at the history of the internet, everything changes every five years. You know, it's a totally new situation. And this duopoly we have now or triopoly or whatever it is is going to be temporary. I don't know about that because I think it's been for the past like 15 years. I mean, the only reason TikTok was able to even remotely compete with meta is because they sold them, you know, musically sold to ByteDance and ByteDance poured a billion dollars in app download ads alone in 2019 just to get the app off the ground. It's those levels of resources that you

need to even compete with Meta or Google. And if you don't have those levels of resources of endless billion dollars, whether you're getting them from Elon Musk or a Chinese tech conglomerate, it's almost impossible for any new social platform to gain traction. I mean, I guess I'm just thinking of even like Snapchat, right? Like all of these other apps have been so successfully and aggressively driven out of business by Meta and Google over the past decade. I don't know. I guess like, do you see signs of that ending? I see one sign of that ending just in terms of the broad dissatisfaction. see with these structures? I mean, I think TikTok did have massive financial backing and they did, you know, run a very savvy campaign, but people also wanted to go there. It is, you know,

a convergence of factors, you know, a moonshot. Then there have been tons of aggressive marketing campaigns, tons of kind of aggressive ways of putting thumbs on the, will it be like the scale that, you know, haven't worked out. But I think that's a little bit what I mean by my argument of thinking more about the bottom up and putting agency there rather than in the top down. You know, maybe factually it is true that, you know, we are the Chinese whatever, the conglomerate or Elon Musk or Zuck and Google and all the money is sloshing around and that's what's moving attention and moving eyeballs. And certainly it's a part of it. It might even be the largest part of it. But I think for me, it's almost like a little bit of like a Pascal's wager. You know, I want to believe that it is possible to change from the bottom up. And I think, you know, in history, a lot of people. people, you know, rather than assigning agency to like, oh, Napoleon, you know, conquered all of

Europe or whatever. It's like, no, he had an army. You know, there are everyday people. There was a way the economy was set up. And I think it's important in the history of these apps and their adoption and maybe in what can come next to, to focus on the bottom up. Even if it empirically isn't necessarily the explanation, I think politically it is the most useful lane to explore and to open people's eyes to is to say, you know, yeah, sure, it was, you know, a top-down, highly effective corporate. But at the same time, people adopted it. And then all these other apps copied it because people liked it. I do think that TikTok also, I mean, you could argue, was, sure, it was adopted primarily because of a lot of this aggressive marketing and positioning and because

it's just a far superior product to anything Instagram or Google was offering. But as you mentioned, it's also this tool that's been used for activism. I mean, this is ultimately what, got the app shut down was the pro-Palestine speech that was happening there in the way that people were leveraging the app for progressive activism. So I do think that TikTok is a good example of like, I guess the mob behavior, uh, sort of dynamics of social media being used for good. When we think of a platform ecosystem that's evolved, I mean, I think maybe even if social media kind of starts to decline in the next few years and we see the rise of AI or some of these other platforms or more decentralized like internet, how can people,

build movements that are successful because I think part of the way that you're able to get, you know, mass momentum on something like Black Lives Matter or Me Too or some of these other platforms is that you're orchestrating those campaigns on these apps that are like hubs that millions of people are on that sort of everyone has to pay attention to because you have all the journalists on them. You have all the celebrities on them. If we move into this more like disparate bottom up decentralized social landscape, how can you replicate the like momentum of those movements that happen on the bigger social apps. If I knew how I would start the social movement right now, but in a broader sense,

sort of sketching out like what I think the direction to sort of think along towards that would be. I think a lot about sort of the fact that these do happen because you have this massive accessible platform that everybody is on. And you can get a hashtag in front of millions of eyes like in the course of a day or video in front of thousands, millions of eyes. And we've seen both social movements and memes move along this same machinery. And it's one of the most powerful kind of machines that's ever been invented for removing attention and moving people's ideas and stirring their hearts.

But I think there's also still something to be said about density of interaction. And I think one thing that I've observed in following a lot of memes is there is the viral moment where it is on the front page of the internet and everybody sees it. But there's also the quieter kind of more intense communities. Like you think of the role of particular subreddits for fostering and making memes go big. Often, you know, it's better to have, I think you know this as a content creator too. It's better to have 100 people who really care and it will be paid subscribers than, you know, 2,000 people who, you know, will casually open an email, every 10th email that you send. And so I think you need both.

And maybe, I guess, you've really made me think more about my piece that maybe the way that these skills that I'm talking about people building are getting leveraged is that we might have an internet where it's easier to build that small, committed knot of people, but harder to reach that larger pool. And maybe in this era of algorithmatized massive platforms, it's been easier to have that massive pool and harder to build that little knot, which I think has often been the criticism of doing activism on the platforms is that you're reaching a bunch of people who are engaged in a shallow manner rather than sort of reaching the crew you want to ride or die with. I think of the internet, and I wrote about this so much in my book, but I think of the internet as like an attention machine and a way to connect people at scale, right?

I mean, that's sort of the fundamental goal of the internet is to connect people. And that can be used for good or bad, right? You can connect political extremists for really bad things, or you can connect people for progressive social movements that will do wonderful, amazing things in the world, right? I guess, like, especially as we move into this world of, like, more AI and algorithmic-driven platform, It seems like people used to determine who got attention, and now algorithms a lot of the time determine who gets attention online. So if we want to go back to this world where people are determining who gets attention or what gets attention or what to pay attention to, how can they circumvent those algorithms?

There's two sides I think of with this. The first is that algorithms are extremely powerful, but I think they're more powerful in the way a hammer is powerful than in the way a knitting needle is powerful. It's a blunt force. Often it is targeted and specific, but I think so many memes that have just popped up on feeds and been weird or so many experiences that people have. I remember I looked at TikTok's ad content preferences and it thought I was female. Often these algorithms don't really know who we are, even as they are extremely powerful. They're powerful in the way of a blunt force instrument. And so I think we do have a lot of wiggle room, even on the algorithmic platforms, to kind of counterprogram. I think a lot of memes.

you see that counter programming happening in a lot of activism, like the pro-Palestinian stuff on TikTok. You see that people, either they're, you know, kind of inventing ways to go around the algorithm or the algorithm actually isn't that good at stopping them. I think often, you know, every situation is different, but the algorithm's not the puppet string. It's the hammer. That's sort of the first side I think of. And then the second side I think of is because the algorithm is often, you know, a complex set of procedures. it's algorithms plural, most likely.

It can't respond with a lot of specificity. And if people are really nimble and cunning and experimental, and if you sort of do have these kind of more tighter knit, more kind of producing oriented types of online groups or sort of behavior that, as a lot of people have on TikTok, they want to train the algorithm. You know, there'll be a video come up and they'll be like, I'll save it, I'll use the audio so this gets more spread.

I think that people can plan and be savvy around it. Yeah, I think that as algorithms are becoming more prevalent, more people are realizing how to manipulate the inputs into the algorithms. Like you mentioned the whole idea of like click to save, click to share, even if you don't click, people realize that like just clicking the share button and copying that link, again,

whether or not you ever send it anywhere is a signal to the algorithm to boost it. And you've seen a lot of activists sort of like leverage those tactics. Or like you mentioned, use things like product-focused language when they're talking about activism in order to tap into like the TikTok shop algorithm and get their content boosted because the algorithm thinks that they're talking about shopping. So I do think like there are those ways to circumvent. You also talk about trolling the adversarial ecosystem of right-wing influencers and you talk about this as another way. And to me, this also seems like a way of manipulating the algorithm where you're kind of

of hopping on the algorithmic boosts that a lot of these extremists are getting, but you're redirecting that conversation with sort of trolling, I guess. Can you talk about what role you think like trolling plays or why you think this is an important part of like being online? Because I think a lot of people are encouraged to log off. Don't feed the trolls or whatever. Don't respond. But I think you wrote like this actually is necessary for change. To me, it's important to maybe not feed the trolls, but not to ignore them, in part because I think it is important to have, like, countervailing voices that will oppose these right-wing talking points. But, and maybe this is a little counterintuitive. I think that putting up a fight against the trolls is a way of galvanizing

and getting, you know, our own side excited. I mean, you see people saying they want democratic politicians to, you know, fight back more. And I think that by engaging in troll-to-troll combat, Like Will Stansel, love him or hate him is one of the big people out there doing it. For people who don't know who that is, he is a, I guess liberal, such a centrist, liberal commentator that, yeah, I think we'll quote tweet absolutely anything he disagrees with and will very much die on the hills that he wants to die on. Yeah, so I can't blink it endorse everything Will Stancel has ever tweeted. But I do think people like him, a few examples of this are menswear guy who posts on Twitter. critiquing right-wing fashion or Ali Lukes, who got her PhD at Oxford and was kind of attacked by the mob but fought back in a way that was very valiant. And I think there's an important role to be

played in participating in these debates because they can galvanize our own side. You know, people want democratic politicians to fight back more. And I think online by, you know, showing a strong voice, pushing back on this stuff, even if it is sometimes cringe, even if it does seem to not be pandering to the better angels of our nature. I think it is, is important to show up. And that's part of how you build a movement is it is going to be adversarial online debates. A lot of attention moves there. Well, I think like what you just said is is the key, right? It's about attention. And I think that I totally disagree with the whole like don't feed the trolls idiom in the sense that I think it's so important to redirect attention. And we see that,

especially on the right, these right wing influencers are so good at leveraging attention and derailing conversations. And I feel like when you don't have strong responses to that, whether it is like, a menswear guy or this random, you know, British academic. Yeah, it just creates this vacuum where like there is no like counter narrative, I guess. And so I think it's so important, like you said, to create that like appearance of resistance, even if you are going up against algorithmic like downranking because of it, because sometimes you can successfully kind of turn the conversation away from something bad. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things I really admire you for. I don't know if this is something you are, you know, inter receiving praise about,

but I think like your coverage of lips of TikTok on X and stuff like that, it's reporting, but it's also a way of, you know, I think just modeling that this isn't okay. People are paying attention to it and they're saying it's not okay. And I think just having that out there on the platform in whatever form it was, I think that did have an impact. Well, one thing I think that's so important to note with your work too is like you talk about this idea of like not logging off and being really online and I think that the sort of underpinning belief behind it too is which I agree with is that the internet is very much real life and this is like real there are real stakes like I think hopefully in 2025 nobody is arguing otherwise but I know for years and even now I mean you do hear it on blue skies

sometimes people will be like just ignore these people and they'll go away or they have these sort of misguided beliefs about platforming where it's like, well, if you, you know, if you respond to these trolls, you're quote unquote amplifying them. And, you know, that might be true. It's just someone with like 200 followers or something. But when you're responding to these big right wing figures, it seems important, right? Like, I mean, I just, I guess like, can you kind of talk about that idea of like platforming or amplifying? Because to me, it feels like a very like dated view of the internet, where it's like, well, if you just ignore this corner of the internet, it'll go away. when I think we've seen that when you ignore it, it doesn't.

It often just creates a vacuum for those communities or those influencers to flourish. I'd agree with your take that it's sort of an outmoded way of approaching it. To me, that feels very like 2016, 2017, when the barbarians were still outside of the gate. Maybe that's a weird way of putting it. But now that we are in a media ecosystem where these people are more listened to than the mainstream platforms that are, virtuous and true, I think that there's, it's unavoidable. You know, you either push back against it or let them take up the power vacuum, yeah. Given the ease at which online movements can be kind of infiltrated or derailed online and conversations can be derailed online, how do you suggest kind of

protecting people's ability to speak truth to power on the internet? Like, when you think of digital organizing, I guess, it seems like one thing that it's very vulnerable to on the internet is infiltration or getting derailed by like bad faith actors, how do you see people kind of being able to fight against that? If the internet is so crucial and should be sort of the hub of where a lot of activism is happening today, yeah, how do they protect or safeguard against that? I don't know, honestly. I mean, there are technical things you could do, you know, signal VPNs, which I mean a lot of posters in countries that do have censorship regimes have used and innovated and done well with. I also think that in general, there's a weird paradox where

I know from putting my face on TikTok and yapping and talking that you get some amount of influence on the internet by increasing your visibility and vulnerability to other people. And I don't know if there's really a way around that or out of that. And it's something I think about a lot that, you know, just in a literal sense, my face is out there for people. to say, oh, you know, I hate this guy. He's wrong. He has bad takes. And maybe I do, you know, but it's also out there for people to say, oh, you have a bump on your forehead that I'd never noticed myself. And then I was like, oh, wait, I do have a bump on my forehead, you know. And so in a way, I think it is like, it goes to the territory and it's something I haven't figured out.

You know, it's a major challenge to building these sorts of movements. And I think it's another reason why it is important to practice. It is important to build skills and networks for dealing with it and protecting people. And in a way, I don't know. I haven't been in the trenches necessarily. Yeah, I guess like what I would think about that is, is that like, I mean, if you can consider how easy it is for conversations to be derailed, it sort of goes back to that need of having a tight-knit community

and having ways to connect in really deep ways online. Like, I think that movements that are able to get derailed quite effectively are usually really disparate movements without deep connections. and they're sort of like loose connections online where things can like it can just break apart more easily. But if you have those more like deep networks or like you said, they sort of come from these like tight-knit communities, it's harder to to like force people apart, I guess. I mean, I also think of it and this overall thing we've been talking about in the context of like the 1800s

and like the long 19th century, you know, this sense of French Revolution. evolution happened. You know, it felt so good. 1848 revolutions, there's, you know, more liberty, more rights, whatever it is. But then throughout most of Europe, throughout most of the world, with the colonial empires, with the monarchies, you have like a century where really it is autocracy that is in charge. And the whole time there's organizing happening, the whole time there's people fighting back. And a lot of it gets erased because it's censored or repressed or whatever, but that still remains there. And it's the foundation of whatever it is that has been built today or can be built is what people were doing back then. And there's been so many times in history where it's felt so over and so insurmountable in the same ways and where, you know, the fields of public discussion were controlled. That doesn't give me optimism necessarily, but, you know, it's not unprecedented what we're facing. I guess, like, you know, you've talked about, you know, these times in the past when there was really bad stuff happening or things seemed really down and it seemed like people weren't going to.

be able to exert any power over their own sort of material conditions. And then there was a revolution or things changed. And obviously, like history has shown us that things can change very quickly. And I do kind of believe that that can happen with the internet. But I guess what signs are you seeing today that make you think that things might change in a positive direction? I see kind of the ineffectiveness of a lot of the algorithms, the insidification of the platforms, as core doctoro, the Canadian thinker, would put it. they're getting worse at providing the services. And, you know, it's not that precise a tool in a lot of ways. I also have some optimism because there's still parts of the old web that are still

alive and that people still care about. And then another cause for optimism is, you know, the contingency, the unpredictability of things is, it's always changing. I guess like what I would say aside from those things, which I totally agree with you on, I think that we've seen actually a of appetite for people seeking to exert collective power online, whether it is through, you know, things like the game stop, meme stock movement, like meme stocks, yes, there usually can be for really bad things, but we've seen a lot of people kind of channel attention towards different news events or causes or personalities or whatever to try to like, right now it's for financial gain. But I think that you're seeing, especially on the right, people leverage that attention also

for political gain. I mean, Trump is kind of an example of that. actually. And then I, you know, I think you cited this piece in your, in what you wrote to. But there was this great piece by this woman, Heidi Pullig, about Mr. Beast and viewing someone like Mr. Beast as almost like a vehicle for change. Like people don't look at him as much of a sort of a top down creator, but they view him as this vehicle for charity. I think you talked about this too with VexBoltz, right? VexBoltz is a content creator and streamer who came with the Let Him Cook meme. And at the time of kind of the end of 2024, he had a moderate following. He was famous. He was well known. But suddenly people started with this meme of let's mass

unfollow Vexbolts at like the stroke of the new year of 2025. And so something of like three or four million people chose to follow Vexbolts. And his follower count surged in the last days of 2024. And then they all mass unfollowed him at the stroke of midnight. This is profoundly silly, but perhaps me wanting to optimistically read it was like, this is a crazy flex of power. You know, people can make this man suddenly famous and then make him suddenly unfamous. And I think every content creator to some extent feels, you know, more at the whim of their audience than kind of in charge of them. Even though they are called followers, you're following them most of the time. And with Mr. Beast, the theory there that was in a paper at the University of Kent as well is that his audience aren't, you know, fooled by his.

retention editing. One of the reasons they're there is because they know their attention turns into money, which he either spends, you know, curing the blind or building wells, or that he'll spend in, you know, put it in a briefcase and pass it to you when you're in Walmart looking at the feastables aisle of his chocolate bars. And so there's the sense that you're watching translates into money, translates into power, and that on mass you can give or take away this attention. And I think a lot of memes are very like obsessed with that. And you see it even in earlier stuff. he could say what, what else was Harambe? What else is really any meme? Well, the world record egg, I think it's a good example of this, right? When people tried to make, they successfully did make

this picture of an egg the most like Instagram post. And it was sort of supposed to send this message to Kylie Jenner, who previously had the most liked post that like we have the power. We determine who gets famous. So, I mean, when you think, when you do see things like that, and I think we're seeing more and more of those types of memes, I don't know if there's a term for them or not. But I would say, like these sort of participatory memes and content creators where their fame is predicated on that kind of participatory fame. So I guess when you look at these like participatory memes or participatory creators, do you see people being able to replicate those dynamics and seize that collective power for political means? Well, that's how I interpret Brat Summer as being kind of the same

dynamics brought to an explicitly political thing. I think looking back earlier, that's sort of the right-wing 2016 mean magic alt-right thing, whatever that was, it was a way of using these internet tools to organize and, you know, create a movement and move stuff politically. And I'd say my larger view is that the internet isn't just a machine for communication. I think it's a new kind of governance form. And as we spend more and more of our, you know, free time being entertained by these platforms, as we spend our time working through them, if you want to find a job, you got to be on some platform that has an algorithm. If you want to find a date, you got to do that. If you want to make money, if you want to sell a product, everything's getting bundled into these things.

And so this space and these influencers who are both content creators, but in the case of Mr. East, also a business owner, also taking some kind of administrative stuff, that's the political connection for me. The platforms themselves want to be governments. I think that's their aspiration. And so being on them and moving things around and moving attention becomes a way of moving money, of moving opinion. in and I think also of moving the actual infrastructure to the extent that you can influence the algorithm a certain way or do a mass follow, mass unfollow. You're changing the way that space is built and who gets seen and how. Exactly. And I think that last part is so important of who gets seen and how because we also see these movements skyrocket influencers to fame, lips of TikTok

lady, perfect example, was basically collectively mainstreamed into existence by her following and relies on a lot of like crowdsourced content also for her following. There was this piece that I think I sent it to you that I hated so much in 404 media. And the headline is you can't post your way out of fascism. Authoritarian and tech CEOs now share the same goal to keep us locked in eternal doom scroll instead of organizing against them. I'm curious your response to this piece. I hated it so much because it completely ignored basically like all digital activism. I don't know, like some of the most important digital activism that like people have done over the past few years and completely dismiss the way that the right has leveraged these tools. Like it sort of just gave into this idea that the internet is dominated by the right.

And so kind of we have to like log off and I don't know, do stuff IRL. How we would plan that stuff IR. I don't know. I guess certainly not online. But what do you make of this argument of, you know, that basically you can't post your, you know, we can't post your, you know, we can't post. our way out of authoritarianism. Yeah, with that article, one of my biggest takeaways was it seems true to like an experience of being on Twitter at a specific point of time with a specific set of people. And if that's like the only online sphere you're in, then maybe that is an accurate,

you know, take. But the internet is so big. And I know there's stuff going on that I have no idea what's happening there. You know, I'm not even on Tumblr anymore. Who knows what's going on? corners of TikTok I'm not on. So the internet's a very big place. And there's always stuff going on. And the experience we've had on Twitter isn't the only thing. Well, right. And I guess what I was imagine that author would say is like, well, that quote unquote stuff going on is like people participating in the same corporate driven incentives as all social media. Right. Like I totally agree with you that the piece was so like journalism, Twitter brained. And I think that's why so many like journalism, Twitter blamed people were sharing it also because they just completely

ignore the work of like disability justice advocates or just other people who's like primary form of activism is online. But I guess what bothered me is like again, it's just this idea of like abdicating the internet. And that doesn't mean and you know, I think the piece does talk about like discord and not and is really against sort of like top down corporate social media, which sure it's bad. But it does seem so stupid to kind of like abdicate this idea or to inherently fetishize like offline activism as opposed to online activism and this idea of like, oh, you're just like keyboard warriors, you know, because again, look at what the right has done. Look at the way the far right has weaponized the internet and leverage the internet to mainstream these politicians into power

and to seize control of the conversation and to dominate the media cycle and to build these massive influencers platforms. Like, in my opinion, like, that's just such a further case for, you know, remaining online. and trying to replicate that. And I think that a lot of people in progressive circles, like, they, I think they're so against corporate social media that they sort of want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I would agree with that. And I'd also say it is a bit of a false choice. You know, anybody who's doing in person activism effectively is also going to be online and vice versa. And ideally you're doing both. You know, you don't just pick one and not do the other. That might be part of the issue there is that people kind of fetishize a certain type of activism, as you were saying, and then they don't engage in others. But yeah, you know, the internet is such a crazy tool at our disposal. And we've seen it used in the past, used imperfectly, maybe didn't go far enough. You know, if people really want big change, you know, we can learn from the mistakes of the past in the internet history. Or not even the mistakes of the past, just the obstacles that existed that were put up by, you know, authority or whatever.

And, you know, none of it is like in one point in the essay I said these obstacles aren't, they don't have to be walls. so they can just be things to jump over. One big obstacle, I would say, is surveillance and speech. And a lot of these terrifying laws that we're seeing like the Kids Online Safety Act or these age verification laws where there's just aggressive restrictions happening around speech on the internet. And I'm curious if you've been following any of that stuff, like the fights against COSA, if you're involved in any of that or any of the fights against these efforts to curtail speech. Because I think even though a lot of these people maybe on the left don't want to acknowledge the liberatory nature of the internet, like people in power certainly have recognized it.

Again, this is why we have the TikTok ban. This is why we're having these restrictions where they want to keep young people, especially offline. They don't want them to learn about things like reproductive justice or LGBTQ rights. So yeah, I guess like how do you see those efforts to curtail speech and how can people fight back against them? I definitely agree. there's tons of efforts to curtail speech happening. And it's both at the legislative level in these bills that, you know, I've called my congressman and stuff and gun protests and so on.

But I think also just on the daily, you know, that they're going to censor certain terms or, you know, algorithmically promote one thing over another. And I'd say that one way to fight back against it is to use the tools that, I guess, are at our disposal as citizens. And another way to fight back against it is to use the tools at our disposal as posters, you know, to continue to provide. that information, whether it's, you know, like a hard link to your own website on the, you know, algorithmized platform, whether it's just sort of concerted posting. In a way, I feel unqualified

to like talk about these questions of like tactics for like running an online protest movement. I think my interest is sort of in the level of this is possible, you know, like don't close down the road that we haven't yet driven down a lot of us. our culture at large, you know, because it's there, you know. Yeah, but also I think recognizing why people in power want to censor speech online and not just like regurgitating this moral panic BS. Like, oh, the internet is the bad place or, oh, you know, social media is destroying kids' mental health.

It's ruining everyone's when there's absolutely, as I've reported, no evidence of that. We see evidence to the contrary, actually. And, you know, we shouldn't just see these spaces. and I don't think we should seed the framing on the internet either. Because I think the right and people in power have so successfully kind of demonized the internet and demonized online connection and made everybody think that it's this bad thing. And we should get rid of our smartphones. And we should just go back to the world as it was in 1995 when there was top down power.

And it's really bad. So, I mean, I think, yeah, posting is really good. I think fighting against these laws are really good. and just like advocating for a pro-tech future that isn't dominated by, yeah, corporate evil corporate power. And I think that's like part of why I always think further back in history to times of where there was other technological disruptions. And some people always want to go back. And in a way it's emotionally understandable. You know, it's the world they grew up in that they feel comfortable with.

They also have their own, you know, self-interested motives or whatever, profit, you know, whatever it may be. But as the world is changing in these ways that are deeply destabilizing, time and time again, we learn that there is no going back. The cat never goes back into the back. And I think the internet, the story right now for me isn't so much that there's like, you know, an old order that's hanging on and is like oppressing us as we kind of try to start a new thing online. It's that the internet itself is a space of contestation. And you have the right wing billionaires, Peter Thiel, that sort of thing, actually winning online right now. And so we got to be. about to fight back online, fight fire with fire. Well, Aiden, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Where can people find you? So you can check out my substack, how to do things with memes. I write about meme history and platforms, or you can find me on TikTok at Aiden, et cetera. Awesome.

That's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter atusermag.com. That's usermag.com for all the latest tech and online culture news delivered stream. to your inbox. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.