Taylor Lorenz Is Uncovering The History Of The Internet

Photo by Brian Treitler

I often see memes of the exasperated social media manager, struggling to keep up with the latest tool to plug into an already-overloaded content calendar. Last summer, after Twitter, now known as X, spiraled into catastrophe, Meta presented Threads as a dubious option for creators looking for a home. I, like many other media workers, stopped and asked — should we really be at the whim of these platforms? In Taylor Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, she chronicles how the internet has revolutionized and disrupted both our personal lives and careers. The central premise of the book is that users and creators, not tech CEOs or the venture capitalists, are the ones who drive a platform’s success.

With Extremely Online, Lorenz, who covers online culture for the Washington Post, presents an engrossing history of the internet that treats influencers as legitimate workers and highlights the detrimental outcomes of the social media age such as rampant misogyny, the spread of harmful misinformation, and creation of toxic media ecosystems. In precise detail, Lorenz covers how TikTok and Instagram became everyday products and shows how behemoths relentlessly exploited their users and influencers. The book covers how and why the titans of yesteryear — Friendster, MySpace, and Vine — drifted off into irrelevance.

A couple weeks prior to the book’s release, I chatted with the tech columnist about revisiting some of internet history’s most memorable celebrities, the current state of independent digital media, and the development of the internet culture beat.