Cool zone media.
Okay, I don't know if you've heard this one, but being a woman on the internet sucks.
It is bad.
It is so bad that maybe you just rolled your eyes at hearing me say it, like, well, a white millennial just said being a woman online is actually really hard, and not to be that brave white millennial. But yes, it really sucks being a woman on the internet, and it sucks so much that it's bad writing for me
to even tell you that. But if you're a woman, girl, non binary, really just not a cis man online and other random online users know that, particularly anonymous people, you'll get a crash course in gender discrimination the likes of which you could not imagine. And of course this happens across many lines, and intersecting marginalized identities tends to mean
worse abuse. That's why we have terms like misogynir to describe the elevated prejudice that black women experience, or why a study from the National Library of Medicine found that gendered racism against Asian American women has gotten worse in recent years, causing a community wide decrease in mental health. Trans women face threats of violence and violent actions at four times the rate of CIS women, compounded by the world's most powerful countries passing laws that invalidate their existence
at best and enable transgenocide at worst. And that's just studies that address people who identify as women. Non Binary people face a whole separate type of discrimination. There's billions of ways to be a woman online and most of them fucking suck. And that's because being a woman anywhere still tends to fucking suck. That's one of the first things you learn on the internet. Don't be marginalized in any way, or someone's going to threaten to kill you.
You could also fall in love or meet your best friend in my case, all of the above. That's the monkey paw of logging in. It's why when I was twelve and posting on message boards lying out of my app pretending to be a nineteen year old boy named Aaron who wanted to store the band, I got legitimate replies and asked what my favorite bands were. And when I panicked and admitted I was a twelve year old girl, the same people started asking me for pictures of myself
really cool stuff. And while there were many main characters of the Internet who became notorious or were pilloried for doing something. A father refuses to open a can of beans for his daughter to teach her a lesson. A husband loves his curvw wife a little too weird. And then there are others who become the character of the day for simply existing online. Come with me if you will to October twenty twenty two. Shouldn't be a super heavy lift. You know it's not not recent. The day
was October twenty first. Kim Kardashian tried to go to a fancy restaurant and an usher concert for her forty second birthday, but ends up at an in and Out instead. Liz Trust becomes the shortest lived UK Prime Minister of all time and really designs after only six weeks. Midnights by Taylor Swift comes out, introducing the extremely unpleasant lyric Someday, I feel like everybody is a sexy baby into the world. Swifties, Please don't contact me. I'm having a hard time right
now and I can't deal with you. Yes, October twenty twenty two. In two short weeks, I would give a speech at my friend's wedding and meet the man who would ruin my life For the next nine months next to a porta potty. So here's some obvious advice I can give you. Never talk to a man you meet next to a porta potty. The point is being a woman online or in the world, or me specifically, is a pain in the ass, and our main character is terrific.
Proof of that with a healthy dose of class dynamic discussion to boot the wife who drank coffee in the garden, your sixteenth minute begins. Now that's.
Stay.
On the morning of October twenty first, twenty twenty two, a twenty four year old woman named Daisy tweeted the following from her Twitter account at litl Plant.
Mommy, my husband and I wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to her garden and sit in for hours every morning. It never gets old and we never run out of things to talk to.
Love him so much, I know, really fucked up stuff. The story here is young woman enjoys coffee and talking with her husband for long periods of time. The reaction to this story, well.
I wake up every day with chronic pain carcel tunnel syndrome and wash my OCD medication down with an iced oat milk lattee.
But whatever, potato potato? Am I right? For hours?
Put?
What if we weren't inherently wealthy and have to work and stuff?
Lol?
This is cute and no all that did you think of all the people who wake up to where it grueling hours, wake up on this streets alone or with chronic pain? Before posting this, you should be mindful next time before bragging about your picture perfect life. You might upset someone.
What is the purpose of this communication? I'm happy for you, but it's just smug, self satisfied bragging. If it's true, your partner is most likely embarrassed by the tweet, or at least they should be. That is, unless you're flogging something.
Very nice story, But haven't you been married for less than four months? This phase will end, It always does. Please don't be disheartened when it does. Remember love is a choice, not a feeling.
No. No, they're a small business owner, so they are actively participating and taking advantage of other people's labors. They can have these blissful mornings. They are capitalism.
They are capitalism.
They don't even control the railways or the flow of commerce. I know it's not the same thing, but it feels like the same thing. I mean, Twitter is undefeated for finding me only people on earth who can be crueler to you than your own negative self talk, and that's just a fact. But to be honest, I was in a bad enough place when I saw this story that while I recognized that the backlash to this poor woman was ridiculous, I kind of resented her to every day.
I'm doing well financially, but I don't have talking to my partner for hours in the garden every day money. I don't even think I have garden money. And at the time, I hadn't met anyone to either drink coffee with or ruin my life with. But to my credit, I had the wisdom to not participate in this discourse. I did what I think is the much safer move, thought about it privately, and kept my fucking mouth shut.
At the time I'm writing this, this tweet from at Little Plant Mommy has three hundred and fourteen thousand likes.
This is about as close as it gets to a full on public siahhing for saying something that isn't only innocuous on its face, but also doesn't appear to be courting attention outside of Daisy's Twitter circle at this time, I think she technically qualifies as a micro influencer, so less than twenty thousand followers, not just a rando talking to people she only knows in real life, but by no means someone who is courting a massive audience. You
probably follow one hundred people like this. I'm basically this, And at the time this tweet was posted, Daisy had a discernible aesthetic and things that she talked to her audience about frequently, so for her, this tweet wouldn't have been outside of the realm of a very normal post that she would make about a year before this, the only other time the Wayback Machine Internet.
Archives saved her page.
Daisy's bio read as.
Follows naturopathic medicine student, white woman's student emoji, licensed holistic beauty specialist, branch emoji, sustainable gardener, white woman gardener emoji.
A few months before the tweet that shook the Earth, she got married to a man named Matt who it seems like she loved a whole lot. That's it, and her tweets were maybe what you'd expect based on that pretty niche with a lot of slightly woo woo wellness talk that isn't for everyone, but wasn't trying to be. As I read through some of her old stuff, I didn't agree with some of it. I mean, I don't think Dary is as bad as all that, but honestly, I probably never would have found her account if it
weren't for this story. People with as many seven to eleven loyalty points as I do are simply not buying what our girl Daisy is selling. And by the way, the reaction that some of these response tweets imply suggests that Daisy owned a business that personified the grueling puppy mill that is capitalism with the same energy as if
she were Jeff Bezos himself. Again, not true. Daisy ran a small time esthetician business called The Holistic Esthetician, and there's nothing wrong with that outside of being a little hard for me to say. It doesn't even seem like she has employees, and that might also explain her flexible hours. And I can't emphasize enough that for this fairly small account less than twenty thousand followers, this was not an unusual post. The tweets posted around the same time were pretty similar.
The perfect balance of love and light but also real raw and imperfect is what I'm always striving for. Balance. Baby, that some highlights and a couple haircuts yesterday after months of not doing hair, and they both turned out so pretty makes me missdoing hair?
So why did this tweet about drinking coffee in the garden blow up the Twitter algorithm? In a recent episode, I spoke with Taylor Lorenz about the phenomenon of the dress, and while Coffee Wife isn't a story she reported on at the time, she has a lot of experience in tracking stories like this, and what she found instructive about the drinking coffee in the garden story wasn't that it was more upsetting than your average woman doing something and
getting yelled at online story. It was that the stories boost in the algorithm required both backlash to what Daisy said and backlash to the backlash. Here's some of our talk about that.
Yeah, what was unique about that one too? Or what I think is happening more and more with these newer main characters, and I can think got to say Sidney Sweeny's a good example of this more recently too, is like somebody goes viral and everybody projects their ideology onto that person and they become this vehicle for making some point about society, and I think we used to not
do that as much with our main characters. I think they were just like we could appreciate that they were funny or they were in a viral video or whatever. And now it's like everything has to say something about the world. And that's what I noticed when that went viral. Initially people and.
I think I mean districtly based on how the engagement algorithm was working at that time, because a lot of people were like, let's yell at her.
Well, but it was not.
It was an equal parts let's yell at her and then people getting outraged that people were yelling at her, And that is It's really important to have like both of those, I think to reach the level of virality that this did. But you know this is right, like since Twitter has been leaning harder and harder into algorithmic recommendations for years, but I think we've really seen it,
especially since the Elon era like really take hold. And I think this is an example of Twitter leaning hard into algorithmic recommendations where suddenly this person is in your feed because everybody has an opinion on the commentary about it. And everybody wants to again project, they want to use this innocuous, benign, sort of generic tweet as a way to posture about whatever want to talk.
About totally, And I think, I mean, that's a really great point that, like, you know, the wave of anger towards this user is one thing, but the story doesn't really thrive unless.
She also has thousands of people coming to her defense, even though she's tweeting, you know, into presumably to her the void.
Do you remember when that sort of phenomenon.
Took Oh yeah, yeah, I was going to write about this recently because there was this sort of similar thing about door dash. Some person talked about door dash and suddenly it was like five days of discourse of people outraged about DoorDash, and then people outraged about the outrage. But the outrage at people that are expressing they're very you know, first of all, they shouldn't be expressing it at that woman. But I can understand things are triggering
on the internet. Whatever they get triggered, but then it's like the other people getting very triggered that anybody is triggered, and it's just it just goes bananas. But yeah, I mean, I think I'll so, just we're dealing with a lot of really big problems in society, and people can't reach the people that actually can affect change, and the people that can affect change and have institutional power don't give a shit what average people have to say if they
don't have money or access themselves to power. So these main characters kind of become the only outlet for voicing this anger, and people are used as props to make these arguments or statements or whatever because they're at least accessible. You know.
Yeah, how have you seen, as you know, as our feeds become algorithmically driven, how the treatment has changed with regards to gender.
Yeah, well, I think actually hatred of women is sort of fueled virality on the Internet for years, and especially since the beginning. I mean, I talk about it in the book, But the people that really pioneered the content creator industry and some of the people that put themselves online first were women. And there's a specific type of woman that gets a lot of hatred, which is sort of a semi attractive or seemingly privileged women, usually an
upper middle class white woman. In one sense, they do very well on the internet because they ascribe you know, they ascribe to traditional beauty standards. You know, they're usually somewhat attractive, somewhat privileged, enough to do well online or enough to get attention online. But they're also subject to some of the most vicious hate because it's just a favorite pastime of the Internet to tear women down, specifically wives, because there's this notion of like moms and wives like
always doing something wrong, or like it's misogyny. I mean, it's just coore misogyny. And then there's of course a separate type of really vicious hatred towards women of color or also just ripped apart constantly. The thing is, they don't really have the level of privilege, and so they often some of these wives. Curvey Wife is a good example, right, you know, she's sprung that into brand deals and has
a plus size clothing partnerships and all of this. Women of color are not able to take advantage of that virality and monetize it the same way. I mean, this Coffee Wife woman doesn't sound like she's leaned into it, but she could have released her own line of coffee cups or whatever, you know, like and I don't know what she looks like, but I think that people are more accepting of privileged women, almost pivoting, even though they
receive an outside hatred. If you're a conventionally attractive wife, mother, or seen as a slightly privileged wife and mother, you're gonna get torn apart because that is what misogynis on the internet. Love to come for Yeah, thanks.
Again to Taylor. Her book Extremely Online is available now. So talking with Taylor reset how I was thinking about this story a little. So to say that the legacy of Coffee Wife is that people hate women online is technically true, but a little undercooked. After talking to Taylor, I'm convinced that this story is also a pretty damning example of modern online algorithms gaming us to engage with
each other. Because, as I was going back through the quote tweets reacting to Daisy's bold statement, the mean tweets versus the defenses of Daisy are uneven. There's more nice comments coming to her defense for every tweet that says they are capitalism.
There's also this.
That lady said she enjoys mornings with her husband, and folks said not on my watch.
I can't afford coffee. The only thing I have to drink in the garden is bird bathwater. Because I'm a robin, I'm an actual bird. This tweet is not relatable to my experience as a literal bird. I can't get a house because I'm a bird and can't apply for a mortgage.
Privileged bitch eat the rich has gone from no one should be a billionaire to no one living above the poverty level treating themselves and their husband to morning coffee and their gardens should be happy.
I feel like this is called causing so much uproar because so many people are experiencing lovelessness and indifference from people they're even romantically connected with, and seeing someone experience friendship and love that seems calm, balanced and easy is infuriating.
And when it comes to the algorithm, once you've got a class war about the class war, you are cooking. In one of the last interviews Daisy gave on the subject in December twenty twenty two with YouTuber and Jellylouz, she described what it was like experiencing these waves of discourse in what felt like a void.
It just kind of like blew up within like ten hours of it posting. I posted it, I noticed that like a lot of people were like commenting and liking it, and it was kind of going a little viral, and like by the next day that I had posted it, it was just like totally blown up with lots of like lots of negativity and lots of like hate comments and people saying all kinds of like crazy stuff about
me and my husband, and that kind of continued. The negativity kind of continued for a little bit, but it got to the point by like day like two or three where like everybody was just coming in on the post and being like this is actually so cute and so nice, and like forget about all the haters and
like all of that stuff. And I feel like, I mean when I try to go into the tweet and like look for the negativity, I literally can't find negative comments anymore because there's been so many thousands of people that have just like drowned all of the like meanness
in positivity and kindness and love. And so then I kind of think that it like went in this wave of like negativity, and then there was like another wave where it was like where it got more popular, but then it was like turned into something really sweet and positive.
She goes on to describe the few days of constant attention and requests for comment by embracing the Coffee Lady persona, even briefly adding it to her Twitter bio. And not everyone would be able to do this, but she takes it in stride, leaning into jokes that suggest that this
was all some big, evil plan. She tweets things like this, this was all actually a big plot to draw everybody in and then teach them about how to grow their own food and heal the earth plant emoji and general reflections on the weird, still developing media cycle of those last few days in October, she directly confronts the criticism in a gentle series of tweets.
It's really sad to look at the thousands of hateful comments on this post, most saying spending time with your spouse is only for the rich, jobless trust fund kids, saying our marriage won't last. It really shows why a lot of marriages probably don't last. It's one thing to get to spend hours a day with your partner, We are very blessed, But most of the replies are implying that couples shouldn't have to spend time together and if they do you must be rich, y'all are truly silly,
but thank you to all the sweet comments. I love you so much, double heart emoji.
And to directly address her haters who claimed that she was capitalism, Daisy tweeted this.
To answer your questions, we are not rich by any means. We've worked extremely hard to get to where we're at. We live very minimally and consciously and work jobs that match our lifestyle and allow us to live the life that we do. Thank you for all the love that uplifting comments. You know who you are red heart emoji.
Daisy threads the needle pretty beautifully here.
Then.
I think this is a good example of how women have to conduct themselves very carefully online to not get anger from people. She's not ignoring it, but if it does upset her in any way, which it could be justified to do, she doesn't indicate that publicly. She and her husband post a number of other pictures in their garden, which it turns out is where they live in a community in northern California, where he teaches yoga and she
runs her small esthetician business. They tweeted pictures of them eating breakfast, drinking the famous coffee, and while they never dropped their tax returns or the degree of privilege that they grew up with, the question is, why should they have to? Because the algorithm said so, There's no way around it. This story was tailor made for the Internet
rage machine. Box writer Rebecca Jennings referenced as much in a December twenty twenty two essay called every chronically online conversation is the same, saying if you felt a creeping sense of dread while reading about Daisy and her husband enjoying coffee in their garden, it's possible you spend too much time online. That's because despite it seeming innocuous, Daisy's post has all the markers of Twitter rage bait, and by rage bait, I mean a person sharing an experience
that may not be entirely universal. I mostly agree with this and do feel that the anger towards Daisy is wildly misplaced. This is the kind of anger we reserve for Kardashians throwing parties during a pandemic, and this doesn't invalidate any of the anger or frustration that online users that were truly sorry triggered by Daisy's inoffensive post. Fault I mean hell, Daisy herself articulated this feeling better than anyone else here. She is on that same Angelilou's YouTube podcast.
You know, as far as what I could say to the people that were doing all of that is, I just think when you're exuding that much hate to other people, that comes from a place in your heart that's hurt, because I truly believe that you know everything that like, we're all just mirrors of each other, and something about me made them feel something about themselves that was probably trauma from who knows when in their life, and that caused something and caused them to feel that way. So
I think that that just comes. That kind of behavior just comes from someone being hurt. And I understand that, and I have compascity for those people because truly, maybe they know better, but they probably don't know any better. They're just dealing with their hurt and they're dealing with it like that instead of in other healthy ways.
You know.
So thankfully Coffee Wife had a mellow enough lifestyle to forgive and was offline enough to understand the anger without becoming enraged. Back when it comes to women behaving in a very particular way to not get a particular reaction. Daisy did everything right. All she did wrong was exist in a way that the algorithm was liable to boost.
When I started this show, the person who was most insistent, along with hundreds of others that I talk about coffee wife, was my best friend Julia, and I wanted to know why, because no matter where you fell at the time, what happened over the coffee in the garden tweet was a pretty classic public shaming. And Julia is a great comic and writer who wrote a controversial essay for Gawker in
twenty twenty two called in Defense of Shame. She's literally an authority on shame, and not just because she grew up Catholic in New England. But that certainly didn't hurt, and Julia feels strongly that Daisy was not deserving of the backlash she got. So when is shame a necessary tool and when is it? Whatever the fuck this is, I wanted to ask her about it first.
I am Julia Claire. I'm a comedian and writer at Crooked Media.
You are the person that I associate most with like intensely feeling about this story.
I am the person you most associate with the concept of shame.
Yes, yes, and so it really you've saved me an interview here by also because yeah, like you felt really strongly that this woman had been shamed improperly, but you do feel tell me your feelings about a proper shaming.
A few years ago, I wrote piece for gaker Rip called in Defense of Shame. Was kind of immediately criticized by people who didn't read the piece as a defense being a defensive shaming. People were basically saying that I was co signing dog pile culture, co signing shaming, which is not at all what I was talking about in the piece. I think of shame as any lapsed Catholic would.
Uh.
It's a very kind of like internal experience, more of a reflective experience, not an external experience. Shame is for Shame is for me. It's not for you, you know, it's like so to me. I mean basically, like my my defense of shame was that more people need to be kind of in touch with their own shame. And I honestly think that like a lot of the I think the fact that a lot of people aren't is the
reason why they end up projecting on other people. But yeah, this was one of those things like that was a clear case of shaming in a way that was completely needless and silly. Honestly, you're yelling at this twenty something woman because she's having a lovely morning, right, kill yourself.
Is there a productive way to shame someone on the internet.
That's a really good question. I think you have to. I think if there is, you really have to be punching up. Like the whole thing with Coffee wife is that she was just some kind of like random lady.
Right.
It's very different if we're all piling on to like I mean, there are some people who are really impervious to it. So it like, you know, Elon Musk seems to just revel in the fact that everyone hates him. But as far as a productive way to shame, to shame the average per I mean no, I don't think so, and I and I really again, I don't advocate for shame as an external force. I think all of our shame should be internal, and it should be between us
and the Lord. Your parents are going to be so pleased, I know, Father Leroy at Saint Edward's Parish, your impact has felt on this podcast absolutely.
Thank you so much to my best friend Julia Claire. But you can catch every day over at Crooked Media and we'll be right back with more of Coffee Wife's sixteenth minute. Welcome back to sixteenth minute today. I've had six cups of coffee and still no husband in sight. We're talking coffee wife. So not to twenty sixteen ghostbusters this situation. But take a second to imagine how this story would be different if it were a husband tweeting about enjoying time with his wife in said garden. I
really don't think the reaction would be the same. In the context of hetero couples. Husbands who adore their wives tend to be lifted up as wife guys in the same way that they're more easily rewarded socially for being an active part of their children's lives. And while there's intersecting issues that caused people to project onto Coffee Wife, I still think this boiled down to an Internet classic.
Women are fair game for just about anything. There's no social incentive for Daisy to say she loves her husband, because when a woman adores spending time with her husband, so what it would be selfish of her and not love spending time with him when a woman takes good care of and loves her children, So what, That's the natural expectation, and coming up short in either department is still met with easier, more reflexive criticism, even with gains made in general gender perception.
But while I do firmly.
Believe that Daisy was dragged online for simply being happy, I want to state the obvious and say, of course women can fucking suck online. There's plenty of precedent for that, because women are people, and there are clear patterns en mass and as individuals for assists white women specifically like Daisy and myself, to behave in an insensitive at best, bigoted and benefiting from the whiteness that patriarchy and capitalism rewards, and being generally a condescending piece of shit to people
who are more marginalized than themselves. That's a lot of words to say a no longer trendy term that is still somewhat useful, and it is girl boss. There's a bunch of conflicting definitions of this term. Some are as simple as quote a woman, especially a young woman who is ambitious and successful in her career unquote, and others as I think of the girl boss are connected more closely to women using the language of feminism to accrue
power while actively upholding the status quo. Probably the most famous example of this is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the best seller Lean In in twenty thirteen to encourage women to advocate for themselves in the workplace. She is the ultimate girl boss to me for a few reasons. First of all, she is a huge beneficiary of capitalism that is actively harmful. She was the COO of Facebook during
years and years of infinite growth. And second of all, she's using her position as a powerful woman to sell you something and not something. Is that the only thing holding you back as a woman in the workplace is not the system you find yourself in, but something you are neglecting to do it self. Helps snake oil that bullies the women who are reading it.
Here's a quote.
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh or surprises anyone, but this is where we are. If you want the outcome to be different, you will have to do something about it. Oh, it's your fault. She also says this, we need to stop telling women get a mentor and you will excel. Instead, we need to tell them excel and you will get a mentor Oh it's my fault, twenty dollars well spent, thanks Cheryl. That's the kind of girl boss shit we're talking about. So a very instructive term that is often
misused after being sucked into this linguistic, misogynist vortex. The difficulty with the girl boss tag gets to why I think Coffee Wife was done so dirty. There are people who aren't big fans of women who glommed onto this word to use it interchangeably with all women or women
who had any power over them at work. If your manager is a woman, that doesn't mean she is cynically using tools of the patriarchy to oppress you while assuring other women they're doing something wrong in order to personally profit. It's a very specific set of behaviors, and being a girl boss doesn't mean the women in question haven't experienced gender discrimination themselves. In fact, I'd wager that all of them have. This simply does not describe a woo woo
twenty four year old drinking coffee in the garden. The anger is valid, but it is misplaced. Daisy wasn't trying to make money by saying this. She wasn't aiming to change minds or hurt anyone, or, according to her, even
reach outside of her normal audience. She was just sharing something you know, like we're told is the whole point of social media, And given the state of Twitter in the fall of twenty twenty two and on this specific week, the algorithm pushing this high engagement story makes a lot of sense. There were a number of algorithmic shifts on Twitter and in social media writ large in this year. If you're a Twitter user yourself or I'm not going
to say X, please don't contact me about this. If you're a Twitter user yourself or a proud Twitter retiree, you might remember when their timeline became completely algorithmically driven instead of what it had been for years and years, which was a real time feed of people you had
chosen to follow. Now, people you didn't follow would be sorted to the top of your feed if the algorithm thought you were likely to interact with the post based on what you'd interacted with in the past, and the people you actually chose to follow might see their content
get pushed further and further down. Users got really pissed off about this, and Twitter tried to mitigate the issue by splitting everything into two feeds, So if you opened the website on your laptop, it would default the new shitty algorithm feed and you could shift over to the timeline you'd had for fifteen years. But it would take some effort, and it's ghost like daisies that would get sorted into this new algorithmically driven feed, the one you didn't ask for and the one that no one is
prepared to be sorted into. And within a week of the coffee Wi flare up, a looming Twitter acquisition was finally completed. After months of legal wrangling and negotiation, Elon
Musk has finally bought social media company Twitter. Earlier in twenty twenty two, Elon Musk, who I think we can all agree only had the best intentions and deserves the benefit of the doubt, offered to buy Twitter on a whim for fifty four dollars and twenty cents a share, just months after he'd become the company's largest shareholder at nearly ten percent. This put the prospective deal at forty four billion dollars, and Twitter accepted the offer very quickly.
They genuinely didn't seem to think he'd go through with it and accepted to all but resist a hostile takeover from Musk, But Musk, determined to pivot the platform to white supremacy, doubled down, declaring that his ownership would mean less bots and more free speech. He certainly made good on the former in the fascist content is king sense, but the crackdown on bots is pretty hilarious for a site that I can't even pay to stop auto posting my pussy and bio underneath pictures of me and my
infant nephew. So yeah, this change of ownership was famously a disaster. Elon Musk tried to back out of the objectively bad deal that was his idea in July, but wasn't able to and was all but forced to go through with the deal less than a week after. Daisy was declared the Coffee Wife, and what happened after that was well, it's why Twitter has been in sharp decline
ever since. Just a small sampler platter of incidents since this time, welcoming Donald Trump, Kanye and Alex Jones back to Twitter and generally promoting, challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match, and tanking the company's net worth by over fifty percent. There's a very depressing lens that we can see the coffee wife incident through as this dying gasp of old school misogyny on Twitter moments before it was about to get much, much, much worse, and how bad
hasn't gotten on the internet since twenty twenty two. I went to an expert, my pal Bridget Todd, host of the Incredible podcast there are No Girls on the Internet. Here's our chat. My name is Bridget Todd.
I am the host and creator of Iheartradios Tech and culture podcast. There are no girls on the Internet, And I guess you could say I'm a tech Internet enthusiast, aficionado, whatever you want to say.
I'm excited to talk coffee wife with you. Why do you think that people had such a strong emotional reaction to coffee Wife.
Well, one, I think it's absolutely algorithmic, right. I think that we know a lot about how algorithms work. I think that they absolutely are feeding us and pushing us content that is going to elicit strong reactions, emotional reactions from us. So even if you don't know this woman, don't follow this woman. She wasn't like somebody who had a ton of followers. She had a relatively small account. Platforms know this is content that it's eliciting strong reaction,
strong engagement. Let's make sure that more people see it, you know, that's the name of the game for platforms. However, I do think that the timeframe kind of matters, Like I think that this was a time where do you remember how in the very beginning of the pandemic we were Also there was a sort of novelty to it where it was like, who knows what's happening? But then that kind of were off, and then it was like, well, I guess this is just all of our lives now.
And I think that this happened at a time when a lot of people were just sort of grappling with that.
I think for me personally, it was a time where I was spending way more time than I should have been on screens on the internet, really paying a lot of attention to what strangers on the Internet were doing, because I didn't have a lot going on outside of that, right, I wasn't going out the way I used to all of that, And I also think we were all feeling the sort of like existential dread of how reality feels right now. Right, everything is expensive, Rents are rising, Inflation
is terrible. It just feels like we are being squeezed from so many different ankles.
And so when somebody comes along.
With just pure the pure joy of a you know, having coffee in their garden with their husband every morning, and you know, isn't this nice, it's like a trigger that It's not surprising to me that it was this big tension point for so many people.
That's so interesting. I think of all the conversations I've been having, I'd be curious what you think about that, Like how the pandemic sort of warped our relationship to the internet and what it looks like trying to sort of return to straddling real life and internet life.
Yeah, boy, do I identify with that and feel you on that.
I mean, I can speak for myself.
I am not proud of what the pandemic, how I responded to the pandemic socially, right, I also am a pretty socially anxious person. I'm somebody who's in my head a lot, and I'm not proud to say this, but I would bet that I'm not the only person who feels this way. I think during the pandemic. You know, we were watching people die, we were watching people lose
loved ones, we were watching people lose their livelihoods. It was a really tough time, and so it was hard for me as somebody who luckily was very privileged, and that that wasn't the case for me, right, Like I got COVID. People I know got COVID, but thankfully I didn't lose my loved ones.
It wasn't impacting me the way that it was.
I'm not an essential right, and so I think that for me personally, it was strange to deep to grapple with that, this feeling of like I am going through a tough time and so is everyone. I think it for me created this dynamic where I hate to say it, but I was very much like what about my pain? You know, Like why is like when is it going to be my turn for somebody to see me? Like I wasn't an essential worker. Nobody around me died, but
I still had a tough time. I was finding myself in this like almost very narcissistic place of wanting somebody
to acknowledge what I had been through. And so I think with Coffee Lady, I think it was a lot of people who perhaps were wanting someone to see their pain, wanting others to acknowledge their pain and their anxiety and their loneliness and their frustration, which is something that I can relate to really deeply, and so I think that's part of why, because some of the replies that she got would be like, I can't afford it, Garden, I
don't have a husband. You know, I'm alone here, I don't have any friends, Like people really making it about themselves and what they lack, and like something about that tweet I think highlighted the lack that a lot of people were feeling. And I just I really, it's easy to dunk on these people and be like, Wow, you're so dysregulated that that's that this woman, this random woman's tweet is making you feel that way.
But I also kind of get it.
You're totally right.
And I know I've been guilty of this in the past and probably during the pandemic era Internet, where you're taking like your personal pain and I've had moments where I'm like, I don't want to see someone happy right now because I'm not, And like, I think that there's a lot of that, but some of it is sort of manifesting as a political statement. I can't quite get my head around that phenomenon because I don't want to discount the fact that like class rage and class anxiety online.
I mean, it makes total sense. I experienced it a lot, especially it's sort of the further back you go, but she's so clearly not the person that can. I think it's interesting online when people dogpile on someone who cannot help them, right.
I do think there's a gendered aspect to it.
I haven't really kind of grappled with this too much just yet, but like I know, for me, when I'm scrolling TikTok or Instagram, there is something about the visualization of a woman who seems like she's got her shit together, she's got it all figured out. She wears the perfect two piece you know, workout set, she eats right, she starts her day with like lemon water or macha instead of coffee.
Whatever.
It is three gorgeous children who are wealthy act yeah.
Exactly, And so I think that coffee ladies tweet, at least for me, triggered a kind of very gendered, almost like politicized anxiety that there are women out there who are doing it right and bridget you are doing it wrong, like something about like like there has never been a day where I'm able to start my day.
Serenely drinking coffee in my garden.
I actually do have a small garden, and I never start my day out there because I start my day like most people, like frazzled late for a call, just trying to chug some coffee while I'm getting dressed, like doing a million other things. Sure I shouldn't be taking a moment smelling the flowers, journaling, YadA, YadA, YadA.
But yes, gratitude journal exactly.
But who does that right?
And so I think there is something where women are told that you have to in order to sort of signal that you have it together, your mornings have to look like X Y Z. And I think that something about coffee Lady, something about that tweet signaled to women like I've got it all together? Do you feel like craft that you don't. I don't think she was. I certainly don't think she was trying to do that. But that's I think that's probably how it hit some of us.
The Internet, I think, like a lot of things, is sort of built to make women angry at each other. Yes, and present each other and yeah, I mean, could you speak to that a little bit? I know that that's your beat.
Yes, I mean, it's just a document, a well documented fact. Algorithms want women to feel like shit. They want women to be comparing themselves to other women, they want women to be feeling bad. They want women to be feeling like crap all the time. And algorithms and platforms and tech leaders make money off of women feeling like shit about themselves.
That's just a fact, right.
And so if you've ever been scrolling Instagram or TikTok or whatever and you keep being surfaced content that makes you feel like crap, that's not you. You're not crazy or sensitive. Algorithms and platforms do that with intention because it keeps you on the platform longer, it keeps you coming back, and it makes them money. It is a very twisted dynamic that we are a cog in this cycle that is making other people, mostly men, rich off of our anxiety, off of our fears, off of us.
Being in competition with each other.
And rather than like celebrating the ways that we are different, celebrating the ways in which like, oh, well, like my brand is this, I'm a hot mess, I own it.
Whatever.
Whatever algorithms trick us into thinking that all of these great things that make us who we are are actually foibles, are actually bad And yeah, I mean there's been study after study that shows that the more time you spend on particularly Instagram, the more young women feel bad about themselves, the more body anxiety they have, the more likely they are to engage in things like food issues or disordered eating. And none of that is by mistake and it's all by design. It is a feature, not a bug.
And that and that would also apply to Coffee Life. That people were attacking her as if she was like the root cause of it. It was very strange. I forget who I was talking to the other day about how they felt like they had fucked up their algorithm because they said that they weren't interested in something and the algorithm kept serving that to them because they cared enough to say I'm not interested. And the only way to true, truly demonstrate you're not interested is to keep
scrolling and don't stop. But like if you are, if you theoretically you know, see like a coffee wife, TikTok come up and you care enough to say I don't like this, the algorithm will serve it to you again. And so I ran an experiment and it's completely true, like that the kind of content I went out of my way to say I don't like this. The algorithm responds by being like, well, maybe you'll interact with it negatively because it makes you feel bad.
Yes, And so it's so I've experienced the exact same thing.
I completely agree with you.
And imagine how harmful that is when it's content that you find triggering. Right, when it's content that you have identified like that might not be safe or healthy for me to see and engage with. Right if the algorithm has has gleaned like, oh, she has a little bit of an issue with X y Z. Let's keep showing it to her and see what happens.
Yeah, really, that cool.
The part that's hard is even when I'm looking for it, it's hard to escape the like emotional experience of I don't want to see that, and like feeling that your anger for whatever reason does seem to it routes at the person because you can't you know the real kind of Yeah, this sounds conspiratorial, but like the real enemy has no face right, And so I feel like there is this sort of very human instinct to try to place a face and a name to what is bothering you,
when in reality it is something much larger, like you know, social media algorithms that are trying to make you upset, like the concept of class and like these huge things. And it's finding a sort of villain of the day to take it out on, even when that person sucks. In this case, they didn't, but sometimes they do, but it still doesn't it's so unproductive.
Yeah, we are making a bunch of random people proxies for a lot of our very valid anger and pain and fear. That's why I always say, like, we're it's a game and we're all being played. The only winner here are tech platforms and people who run them and
people who make money from them. And so even if you are running a successful little grift for a while, engagement mating and all of that, all it takes is one algorithmic tweak and then no one's You don't have the eyeballs or the attention of the world any longer. And so, yeah, it's it's a game, and we're all being played.
What can we What can the collective learn from Coffee Wife.
Something that I found really interesting about the Coffee Wife saga was how everybody assumed she was wealthy because she has a garden. And I found that to be really interesting because she was like, Oh, it's not like a fancy garden, it's just a small garden in my like regular home.
I think that it.
Is very easy and I say this because I've done it to trick yourself into thinking, like, the things that I want I can't have. I am, I am, I could never have a garden. And I think that that really the Coffee Wife thing really showed me that a lot of us feel like we can't have things that
we actually can have. I don't know if that makes sense, but the fact that so many people were like, well, you have to be rich to have a garden, and it's like, well, actually, I don't think that's the case, and people who are not rich have gardens all the time, And like, why are you assuming that the pastime of gardening is something that only the wealthy can do. Even if you live in a small apartment, you can still
have like a window garden or something. I think that I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking the things that we want we cannot have.
So that's one two.
I would say, yeah, we really have to be better at understanding where we put our pain and who we make the proxies for our pain. I would say, if the person you are tweeting at cannot change the circumstances that you're upset about, maybe you're putting your rage and your anger and your emotionality in the wrong place, and that we should direct our rage and anger and emotionality to the right places.
Right.
I know those places tend to be structural and institutional and faithless, but we gotta really have a sense of what forces are actually making us unhappy, and it's probably not this lady drinking coffee in her garden.
Thank you so much to bridget Todd. Listen to there are no girls on the internet every single week, I sure do. So what became of our coffee wife legend? Daisy didn't respond to my request for an interview, and I respect that she just wants to be a person who does pleasant things with people she likes. Some people just don't want a dumb bitch podcaster interfering with their life, and I have to accept that as far as her
online persona, Daisy is no longer Coffee Wife. She is Daisy and appears to be spending her time generally not on Twitter nowadays. She lives in Bali, India, and is returning to her lashes business later in the year. I have no idea if she's a wife, if she drinks coffee, but she's certainly Daisy, and I like Daisy, and with that the coffee wife. Your sixteenth minute ends. Now, Okay, I'm on the couch with my boyfriend drinking coffee. Close enough.
Oh I should I guess it?
Should hold I should hold it.
You're right, get your coffee.
Yeah, but hey, coffee in the morning, even after I've gotten off my damn shift, coffee with my wife.
And we don't have a garden. We do have a.
Little deck, but I just kind of we have.
A bug in the house though, Casper, Casper, two.
Bugs, we do, two bugs.
I just the deck kind of stresses me out because there's so much pollution. Who we're across the street from a We shouldn't say where we.
Are, No, we should, but you can visualize the pollution because we can see.
All of the gathering dust.
Just so much dust the accumulated ducks.
So you just walked up to Casper and started kissing him.
They are, they're kissing right now, and there's looking Casper's forehead.
You love saying you're so dirty, You're so dirty. They're the same size.
Now.
It's great.
We could try this in a garden at some point though, don't you think.
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Special thanks to Grant Creator and Sophie Lichterman for doing voiceover and pet shout outs to our dog producer Anderson my cat's fleeing Casper and by pet Rothbert who will outload us all. Bye b