CZM Rewind: the dress

on the Mani Sphere. Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to everyone in the LA area who has been kind enough to come out to my solo show. There is a bonus show that has been announced that will be happening on November twenty ninth at the Lyric Hyperion Theater. We're going to be doing one extra workshop of the show. So if you weren't able to get tickets because all the other shows sold out, feel free to come out this week. Feel free to come out

on Friday to the show. That's November twenty ninths. And finally, because Thanksgiving, as I hope you know is a crock of shit. I wanted to encourage everyone in joining me this week in donating and contributing to the Native Women's collective and nonprofit that nurtures the health and safety of Native women in the US. So if you're interested, the link is below, and with that, please enjoy this re release of our episode on the Dress. See you next week. Clickbait.

If I had to define it, clickbait is a combination of fake news and a freak show. It was a sign of the declining state of reliable journalism in the Western world and an early symptom of where American journalism

finds itself. As I record this, major newsrooms are shuttering or vastly reduced during an election year, and most major newspapers are owned by billionaires who resist criticism, resulting in the remaining papers running on people pleasing fumes, setting cocourage their readers to turn their heads from massive human atrocity. Ten years ago, things were bad, but not as bad,

which is something people in the present always say. Ten years from now, we'll be pining for the salad days of twenty twenty four as we enlist our third gradiers in the Water Wars but for now it's true. The clickbait culture of the mid twenty tens was alarming, it worse annoying at best, but it didn't feel existential in quite the same way. The word clickbait was a runner up for the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year in

twenty fourteen, tied with normcore and man's plain. And if there's a more twenty fourteen sentence than that, I am not aware of it. Here are some major headlines you could find at this time. What were in Hillary's emails? We have some guesses. The gritty Power Rangers reboot with James Vanderbeek is the stuff of nightmares. Thirteen unconventional things to do with your Gallantine this year you know garbage and can say I'm being mean because these are headlines

I wrote. Come with me if you dare to. Twenty fifteen The Big Short Steve Jobs, the movie the Boring One, not the hilarious Ashton Kutcher one, fifty Shades of Gray. We're at peak, justin Bieber peak, Fettiwop, the year of hotline bling and Hamilton. Obama is rounding out his second term. It's the year he allows an airstrike on a children's

hospital in Afghanistan. Gay marriage will be legal across the US this June, and ten days after that, a dumb bitch named Donald Trump will go down and escalator in New York and announce he's wonning for president. I have managed to graduate from college as semester early, and in fighting for my life at my first proper writing job at the Boston Globe. My job, as will become relevant

to this story, is writing click bait. Or that's not totally right, because yes, I reported to the Boston Globe building. I ate my grilled Jesus among them, but very rarely was I writing actual news. For the most part, I was creating hashtag clickbait content, very little of which required original reporting. While I technically worked for the Globe and was in their newsroom, I was practically two steps removed.

Boston dot Com was the Globe's hyperlocal sister site, and a now defunct vertical called Bdcwire was their clickbait site. I was one of three writers at BDC Wire, populating the site with stories as if there were ten writers, and in twenty fifteen I worked two full time jobs, first at this now defunct website as well as co managing a now defunct improv theater and Cards on the Table. I was fired from The Globe not six months later for refusing to take down a tweet about comm I

don't know, you're only twenty two months. I'm getting distracted. Early twenty fifteen, I did. We'd get to do some original reporting here and there, but my main gig was sourcing viral news and rephrasing my sources with citations that sites like these would adorably and deceptively call hat tips.

And I'd love to tell you what more of these stories were, but as any journalist who started working in the age of the Internet knows, almost none of it is available now without the assistance of the Internet Archive. BDC Wire is gone, along with those articles I wrote, like ten reasons Chris Evans being from Massachusetts is the one reason not to end at all, or whatever I was reading on today's Internet, Bdcwire never existed, So just a reminder you are listening to a future piece of

lost media. But in the mid twenty tens, a lot of writers got their start the same way I did at this time, including probably writers you like now, from young gen xers to elderly zoomers. We were tasked with regurgitating stories that social media cared about and regurgitating them to make them seem like actual news. We weren't making shit up like tabloids, but there was a sense that one writer was vomiting into another writer's mouth, and so on and so on to maximize site traffic and profit.

We the writers never got paid equitably, but for places like The Boston Globe and other major news organizations who were hemorrhaging money due to the inability to adapt to the Internet when the moment counted, these clickbait sister sites became a temporary attempt at increasing cash flow, or, as I knew it, tricking a group of twenty two year olds into thinking they were real writers in exchange for bad pay and a content mentality. So basically, I was

working for a regional ripoff of early BuzzFeed. And to be clear, I am not conflating BuzzFeed the website with BuzzFeed News, which is a Pulitzer winning and recently tragically shuttered news division. Nor am I saying that working at a BuzzFeed content mill was bad or even uncreative. I mean, I think that my BBC wire magnum opus. I saw Shrek the Musical five times colon. This is my story

fucking ripped, not that you can read it anywhere. What's interesting is that this regurgitation media strategy, inspired by BuzzFeed combing the Internet to fill their website full of clickable, eccentric hashtag content, often legitimize Internet characters of the day as legitimate news figures, and this was never more true than in the mid twenty tents. A quick brief on BuzzFeed.

At this time, the company had been around since two thousand and six, and its legitimate news arm, BuzzFeed News, wouldn't be launched until a year later in twenty sixteen. Founder Jonah Peretti had made BuzzFeed an algorithmic project from the start. In a twenty thirteen profile of Paretti in New York Magazine, early BuzzFeed is described as Peretti's quote out algorithm to call stories from around the web that

were showing stirring the virality. In return for functioning as a sort of early warning system, BuzzFeed persuaded partner sites to install programming code that allowed the company to monitor their traffic. Like a lot of social media we discussed today. Peretti's original project begun while he was working at the similarly click minded Huffington Post, was collecting a shitload of data at best. He wanted to know what people were

interested in. If I'm being cynical, he wanted to sell it back to us in an easy to consume package,

and we were happy to do it. By twenty fifteen, BuzzFeed had grown exponentially and started creating original content in addition to their bread and Butter, which was both curating and rephrasing viral stories from other corners of the Internet to drive traffic, and one thousand different quizzes on which ice cream flavor you were based on your mental illness diagnosis something like that took them all, no judgment, min

chocolate chip, OCD, bipolar whatever. Much of early BuzzFeed was extremely goofy and what I think is now sort of associated as being an embarrassingly millennial thing, but there was no shortage of talent there. Quinta Brentson produced a lot of her early viral stuff at BuzzFeed, and many people in their writing and performance stable ended up bailing on BuzzFeed because they were treated like mill workers and not artists think comedians and writers like Gabe Dunn and Alison

Raskin think. Super successful YouTubers like Sophia and Nigard think whether you love them or you hate them for cheating on their wives, the try guys, But regardless of the level of talent, there's no point in denying it. A lot of early BuzzFeed was rehashed stuff, either sent in by users or gently lifted by a fleet of young, aspiring writers like myself to proliferate a sticky story that

someone else had posted online for free all ready. The goal show it to a wider audience with some light commentary and yield a massive profit for Daddy BuzzFeed and one of BuzzFeed's greatest main character cosigns in its history came on February twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, a day that launched two huge viral stories. One was about a pair of lamas that escaped in an Arizona retirement home.

never made a mistake. And even though it sounds old timey, I mean, after all, we're talking about an optical illusion that resulted from an objectively shitty phone camera. It's kind of hard to overstate what a sensation the dress became. I remember this day so clearly because this story broke my second week working as a professional writer and as a kid who'd been brought in to write clickbait. It

was like a gorgeous gift had descended from space. As I was reflecting, I wanted to make sure I wasn't fluffing the memory in my mind, so I reached out to my buddy Kevin Slain, who was one of the other three writers working overtime to create hashtag content on BDC Wire to be read by hashtag nobody for hashtag seventy hours a week, and he remembered this day really clearly too.

this was like our first media job. And I just felt simultaneously like enthralled by the conversation but also repulsed, and I felt, you know, probably undeservedly above it all. And so the thing was that back then they really had like a flat hierarchy in terms of like who could say what, and everyone would just send all staff

emails all the time. And I remember pulling out my phone and looking and seeing that our old homepage had like three stories on the dress right on the top, and there was like an active email chain going on about this, and me, very drunk, just was like, this is ridiculous. I can't believe we have three stories on the dress on the homepage. And whoever did that got like, you know, offended that I said that rightfully.

to weigh in about the dress. And there's a video I can't find of him talking about the dress, which I wish I could find, because I think that.

cliff notes of what happened in February twenty fifteen. A Scottish couple was preparing for their wedding and the bride's mother texted her daughter a photo of the dress she was considering wearing the dress. It's not a great picture, but it is a very mid twenty ten's mother of the bride dress. There is this little cropped jacket, some color blocking, unnecessary lace elements. But the color that was the question. The bride, Grace posted the photo of the

dress to her Facebook and explained the dilemma. Her mom assured her that the dress was blue with black lace, but Grace was seeing it as white with gold lace, so she posted the question to her Facebook so her friends could weigh in, and a week long debate was sparked. So the dress first became a main character in her small community in colin Say, Scotland. Then the wedding happened

and Grace's mom wore the dress. It was a topic of discussion at the wedding too, and it's actually members of the wedding band that take the dress from a local phenomenon into a global one. Singer and guitarist Caitlyn McNeil, who was a close friend of the couples, said of the dress, iurl we forgot about it until we saw it at the wedding which the mother of the bride

was wearing, and it was obviously blue and black. In any other timeline, this would be a footnote that Grace's mom would half remember when giving the dress to Goodwill a decade later. But this was a time on the Internet where viral stories were social currency, and Katelyn McNeil had taken up the mantle of the dress. It was her who ended up posing what would become the viral seed that would take this story global. On her tumbler, the post attached to a picture of the dress said, guys,

please help me. Is this dress white or gold or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the fuck out. I can't handle this. It got about five thousand notes, and if you aren't tumbler literate, that was a lot of interaction on the platform for the time. And here's where BuzzFeed comes in, As the legend goes BuzzFeed writer Kate's Holderness was running the BuzzFeed tumbler at that time and was tasked with what a lot of writers were back then, finding popular

garbage to amplify. But this was not petty content theft. Katelyn McNeil was writing so high on the dress fumes that she sent Holderness her post saying, BuzzFeed, please help. I posted a picture of this dress. It's the last post on my tumbler, okay, and some people see it blue and some people see it white. Can you explain because we are going crazy? Holderness replied, holy crap, it's blue and black. I don't understand. I made a poll, and she links to what she posted off of Caitlin

McNeil's tip. A classic BuzzFeed post published in the early evening. As Kevin correctly recalled, the post was simply titled what color is this dress? There was a poll to vote black and blue or white and gold. The post started doing well right away, but pretty much everything on BuzzFeed at that time did. It was after folks left for work that things went nuts. The dress was literally an

overnight success. When the BuzzFeed team returned the next morning, Holderness's post had reached eight hundred and forty thousand views per minute. At its peak, it had broken BuzzFeed's traffic record, becoming its most successful post of all time, and once the BuzzFeed post took off. The dress became a popular subject of discussion on virtually every social media platform at the time, but Twitter tends to be the thing that

people still talk about these days. Facebook is for moms and creepy cousins, but in twenty fifteen, it was Twitter where famous people ruined their own lives by weighing in like some freaky plebeians just like us. It was right before celebrities all realized in Unison that they needed their own social media managers, and so you could be pretty sure that it was the actual Justin Bieber saying.

of course made more content about the dress. Twenty four hours after the first post about the dress went live on the site, nine out of ten trending BuzzFeed posts were about the same dress. They were fucking relentless. Why are people seeing different colors in that damn dress? The dress is blue and black, says the person who saw it in person. This second photo of the dress definitely proves that the dress is blue and black. What the

dress color you see says about you? And the one post that wasn't about the dress, here's the first picture of Eddie Redmain as transgender painter Lily elba Oh twenty fifteen. And don't forget at this time, BuzzFeed's video vertical was also really popular on YouTube, and that was also going nuts with traffic from the dress.

this fucking story. There was even this bizarre essay by then editor in chief Ben Smith, saying that the dress phenomenon was this sign of BuzzFeed's power.

that the dress succeeded. Smith continued, we are interested most of all in what a story does, not just in how many people read it, but in what effect it has on their lives and on the world. Kate's post delighted people and connected them to steal an idea from z Frank, Its power was less in the encapsulated item itself than in the network around it. That's true of a brilliant piece of entertainment. It's true of a recipe

or a DIY suggestion. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is getting millions and millions of impressions from this story, one that Kaitlyn McNeil literally handed to them. But it's BuzzFeed that keeps the profits from the engagement. At a time where impressions were what defined your success and your advertising profits, as is so common in these stories, it was like everyone was benefiting from the dress story, except, of course, anyone involved in the actual story. It didn't take long for completely

unrelated businesses to start commenting on the dress. To capitalize on the trend, Pizza Hut posts a picture of a shitty pizza with the caption It's white and gold. Two newscasters wear the dress on air as a bit The original dress on a website called Roman Originals sells out immediately. Brandon Silverman, the the former CEO of social media monitoring site crowd Tangled, said this when asked about the range

of institutions that wanted in on this story. This is from a twenty sixteen retrospective on the Day of the Lama and the Dress from twenty sixteen, written for where Else BuzzFeed, Silverman says.

something that started in twenty fifteen. Although that said, I do think there's a case for saying that the success of posts like the Dress tells people in tech developing social media algorithms at this time what kind of stories are distracting for people, leading to an era of the

algorithm favoring engagement driven posts over carefully reported news. To talk about what made the dress special in terms of what it said about where social media was picking its main characters at this time, I turned to a writer who has spent her career writing about the Internet, often

meaning the Internet turns on her. Taylor Lorenz released her book Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet last year, taking a look at the short and eventful history of online influencers, including a fair number of characters of the day, and yes, the dress herself. We caught up on Zoom about this very particular moment in Internet history.

a call center for a while. I was just kind of making money and I discovered Tumblr, which back in two thousand and nine was ascended as a social platform, and that was kind of my gateway into blogging, and I just started blogging about stuff. At the time, I was really against the mainstream media because they were writing really stupid things about tech and millennials and it was making me mad, and so I would just go on my blogs and ran about whatever I felt like ranting about.

I was really inspired by this woman, Katie Natopoulos, who yes, she was blogging back then too, and she had this website. She had all these funny like blogs and sites, and she seemed to be like the only person that I thought was. She was like a couple years older than me and seemed really cool, and I just thought, I'm going to try to write about the Internet, but like from the perspective of somebody that actually uses it.

and repackaging it on the website. Because that was an era when not a lot of people were going and spending a lot of time and getting their news and information and entertainment from social media directly itself. It wasn't as widely adopted. People didn't know how to navigate the Internet yet, so Buzzheed would just sort of like mine this content. Kates was working at BuzzFeed at the time, found a Tumblr post about the dress and was like, wow,

this is kind of crazy. It was getting a little bit of traction on Tumblr, and she thought, let me post it on the BuzzFeed website, because that's kind of again the business model at the time was finding what did while on Tumblr and then bringing it to this wider audience, the BuzzFeed, And of course she publishes it on BuzzFeed and it just goes insane.

from traditional advertise to digital advertising. The traditional advertising had been with newspapers and traditional media, and so the thinking was back then was all those traditional ad dollars are going to go to the digital version of the news media that the advertisers were advertising with. So there was this website like vox and you know, other sites were sort of created to capture those ad dollars. Obviously that

didn't happen. The money actually ended up going to Facebook and Google directly, which is why that whole crop of digital media companies died pretty much or like as a shell of themselves. But traffic was the most important thing. Traffic was so important because the more views you got, the more digital like display ads you know we're seeing, the more money the platform would make. And this is when a lot of platforms, including Facebook, were prioritizing link posts.

They hadn't pivoted to video yet. There wasn't a lot of multimedia because the Internet speeds weren't there yet, so it would make the sites really slow and clunky to load. Instagram was barely had video at that time, so links were really kaying and if you could create a very shareable link, you could get tons of traffic. Therefore the

company would make tons of money. And BuzzFeed was just expert at this because BuzzFeed realized very early that Internet users at that time didn't want to go through Reddit. You have to remember this was pre algorithmic feeds. Algorithmic feeds were not really a thing back then. I think Twitter only rolled out their algorithmicfeed in twenty sixteen twenty fifteen.

It was really like the Internet was very manual, and so if people went on a platform, they couldn't especially Tumblr at that time was completely reverse chronological, right, so if you went on the platform, it was hard to kind of find the most interesting viral content. So you relied on this intermediaries like BuzzFeed to go into these platforms scrape out the most engaging content and presented to

you all in one place. On this case too, I think it's really interesting that the dress post it was posted on a Tumblr that was like a fan tumbler for this girl, Sarah White show White ChIL. I always mispronounce her name, even though yes Lovely who was like a YouTuber manager. So it was just like the chances of somebody finding that Normally, yes, it was getting reblogged on Tumblr, but BuzzFeed was really like the amplifier.

Why were people seeing this dress as two different color schemes? This was a major subject clickbait from clickbait at the time, most notably a Wired piece published the day after that ended up racking up over thirty two million views. In that piece, writer Adam Rodgers asked professor Bevill Conway, who studied color and vision at Wellesley College, to comment, and Professor Conway said that it was some combination of the varying ways in which people perceive light, and that the

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

like Quinta yelled about in the BuzzFeed video. So if you were a neuroscientist with a focus on vision, and I know you're not, this actually prompted a pretty rich scientific discussion. The Journal of Vision dedicated a whole issue to the dress with some pretty interesting findings. They spoke to fourteen hundred p respondents, with fifty seven percent seeing black and blue, eleven percent black and brown, thirty percent

white and gold, and two percent. Other tests included showing the dress in artificial yellow and blue light to see if that's shifted by us, and a study from Pascal Wallash showed the really interesting trend that people who woke up early were more likely to see the dress as white and gold, and people who went out at night

moore were likely to see black and blue. And I'll admit reading about why your brain makes you see the dress as one thing or the other is really really interesting, even when what's being explained to you is a pretty straightforward optical illusion. And even though as I'm writing this episode this only happened about nine years ago, it feels like it's longer. It reminds me of a targeted ad I got for a T shirt sold by ClickHole, which, if you're not familiar, is a spinoff of the Onion

that specifically satirized clickbait. The shirt says the Internet nineteen eighty three to twenty fourteen, and it gets at this feeling I'm having that shortly after the dress, the Internet became less fun. Of course, this is coming from a very Western, privileged perspective, but it's pretty commonly held that in the US, around the time that the twenty sixteen election cycle began, social media became less fun. Let's not

to say it was a cakewalk before. There are many stories of discrimination and harassment that took place here, many of which I'll cover on this show. But I'm trying to get at the ratio of fun stories to existentially terrifying stories, the ratio of hey, what color is this? To bigoted conspiracy theories in the mainstream. The dress kind

of feels like the end of an era. Early twenty fifteen wasn't an Internet that wasn't poisoned with hate, but it felt like an Internet whose hate didn't poison everything, and less than a year later that didn't really feel true. I didn't speak to anyone involved in the original dress story for reasons I'll get to, but I wanted to better understand how the Internet shifted in the year after the dress to bring us to the kind of viral stories we were seeing in twenty sixteen. Just a year later.

For Perspective, their Ringers round up of twenty sixteen viral stories included some classics like Chewbacco Mom, but also just the word Nazism. So yeah, there was a mainstream shift that had taken place. And this was for a reason, not just because of the heightened bigoted extremism in the Western world, but because of how our social networks were functioning. It's something that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti commented on as recently as twenty nineteen, less than five years after the

dress story. In November twenty nineteen, he told Max Read at Intelligencer, the dress was.

content as the same as primetime for television. People are sharing content and looking at content later.

has changed even more. Paretti pulled the plug on his Pulitzer winning news operation only seven years after it launched in twenty twenty three, and is currently focused on rerouting BuzzFeed to AI. Depressing, yes, but not surprising, because after all, Paretti start the company to operate on algorithms with no creative at all, and now he has robots instead of writers,

and the company is worth less than ever. I talked to a second author who published a great book about social media and full disclosure, he's also my best friend's boyfriend. He's the best and pertinent to you. He has a thorough knowledge on how social media algorithms have been forcibly evolved and monetized to serve those that make them money,

not their users. Max Fisher currently co hosts Offline on Crooked Media, and wrote about this very topic in twenty twenty two's The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of how Social Media rewired our minds and our world. Here's some of our talk.

and that social media algorithms really like. And we were trying to do not the dress exactly, but we were trying to do like, you know, the policy Wonk version of the dress every day. So we thought it was like this amazing moment that we paid a lot of attention to.

the story. And that's great, and that's so nice that social media can be there to help us reach a larger audience. So I was aware of it, but thought of it as kind of a relatively neutral force, like, sure, maybe you play up certain emotions in your headlines and certain ideas that you know are likely or to go viral,

but again maybe like a lot of people. It wasn't really until after Trump was elected, like a year and a half after that, that I started to think of social media and social media algorithms as something that could be bad. At this point, I really thought that they were just a good thing.

all these ad impressions. We can have a sustainable business again, and won't that be so great for like the future of the industry. And like before I worked at Fox, I worked at the Washington Post, and they'd loved the idea that you would do the journalism you were going to do anyway, but right in in a way that will please algorithms, or right the headline in a way that will please algorithms, so that we can make more

money and continue to pay for foreign correspondence. So it is a very starry eyed era that boy has sure not aged well.

of the social media business model. The era before algorithms, social media was a loser business that didn't make any money, and people didn't spend that much time on like rimbor MySpace, You didn't spend that much time on the site live journal. After they developed algorithms, that is when people's time on site exploded because they are so effective at making the experience of being social media very engaging and addictive, and

that's what turned social media companies into huge businesses. So for a long time, the way that those algorithms worked from their first invention and like the end of the two thousands, like Facebook kind of starts it in two thousand and six with the Facebook news feed, but it takes a while for their platforms to catch up up through like the era of the dress, the way that it worked, the old quote unquote old algorithm promoted whatever

content was. They tend to promote outbound links, like it will promote a link to some other website or news site, even if it's like a lollcat or something something off the platform, and it would be whatever is the link that people would click on the most. And what that

tended to privilege is if you remember like upworthy. Upworthy was like a website that existed to create content specifically to cater to like the old Facebook algorithm, because it was like curiosity gaps or it was like you won't believe what happened next, so you're like, oh, I guess I'll click on that link, and then you click on that link, and then Facebook or Twitter learns, okay, we promote that link to a lot of people, they will

click on it. And the dress is kind of the last gasp of that old algorithm because it is again you see the link and the way that it displayed on not just Facebook, although Facebook was the big one at the time, but all of the platforms read it Twitter, it would displays you would see a cutoff image of the dress, and then you would see a headline about people see it in different colors, So it really makes

you want to click. So everybody who saw this link on their news feed you were like, oh, I have to click through and figure out what color the dress is, even if you only spend eight seconds on that post. The algorithm learns that serves it to everyone on the platforms because it creates these outbound links, and that is when BuzzFeed starts to get you know, a million people a minute or whatever the numbers were.

a different set of things. The language that Facebook uses for this, and they are kind of like leading the charge at this point because they're still dominant way back in this era, is that they want to start privileging

quote emotionally engaging interactions. And what that means is that instead of pushing up to the top of your feed whatever is the link to an outbound website that they think you were likely is to click on, they want to promote whatever content in your feed, whether that's a link, or it's a discussion, or it's a Facebook group or it's a photo that is going to generate the most

discussion on that post. And the reason they do that is they want to keep you on the platforms because if you click that outbound link, now you're on BuzzFeed, and Facebook doesn't make any money from you spending time on BuzzFeed. They want you to spend as much time

on Facebook in discussion whatever as they can. And they frame this it's like, oh, we're going to start giving you They call it like meaningful connections or like meaningful interactions as if it's going to bring you, like all sorts of love and friendship, but of course that is not at all what it brings, because these algorithms are incredibly ruthless in running billions of what are basically tests

like little social science experiments every single day. And what is the exact kind of content that will get people to engage in these quote unquote emotionally engaging interactions, not just to spend time on the site, but also to post back in the site in ways that we'll get other people to spend time on the site. And like, what is the content and the set of emotions that are going to be most engaging. And like, you know, as any any student of human nature will know, it's

not the nice stuff. It's not you know, here's your friend's baby, you know, your cousin got a new job promotion, your aunt had a great it's outrage primarily, and especially moral outrage. And it's anything that expressed fear or hatred

or discussed with some sort of social outgroup. And that might be you know, political partisans on the other side that for a lot of people, that's racial groups, religious groups, immigrants, anything that cultivates a sense of like there is a social group out there that I don't like, and I find them to be scary, or I find them to be offensive and I want to rally my in group

against them. That is the thing that the algorithms, as they are being introduced to all of these platforms over twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, learn to surface above all else. And Facebook's own researchers are tracking all of this, and they're finding both that this is enormously successful at making people spend more time on the website, but also that it's really bad for them. There's this paper that's kind of the last gasp of when Facebook used to put

publish research into what their algorithm does with users. In May twenty fifteen, Facebook's researchers, because they have accessed all this data, published this paper warning that this change to this new algorithm was sorting people into not just like minded discussions, but within those discussions was consistently surfacing whatever was the angriest or most emotional or most extreme viewpoint that everybody agreed with, and that that created an effect

that was quote associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over time and misperceiving facts about current events, which is a somewhat euphemistic way of saying that people became more extreme in whatever beliefs they already held, and that they became likelier to believe misinformation or conspiracies, because of course, if you already are angry about something, a conspiracy about it will make you feel even angrier.

of course like profit is why that happens. But I at what point do these platforms sort of switch to infinite growth?

can sell ads against it. And they realize around twenty fourteen that they've kind of reached saturation collectively on how much of that they hold. Where at this point people spend As of twenty fourteen, people on average are spending more time on social media platforms than they do interacting with other people socially in real life, which is staggering.

And that gap, of course has only grown since. So what they realize when they get to this point where they realize, okay, we've kind of saturated the market for how much human attention we can captures, they get into this arms race with each other for who can hold

more of that attention. And that is when they go from just having a existing business model of infinite growth to needing to, like you said, take every step that they can, no matter how extreme, to try to outcompete each other for how much of that attention they hold. And this is when all of the social media companies again is around like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, higher up,

all of the big names and artificial intelligence. Like every major European and American researcher at every big research university suddenly works at Facebook, which is like that seems unsurprising now because these are trillion dollar companies, but at the time that was really shocking because this is just like

this was like Fancy or MySpace. This is just like a weird little website, and all of a sudden, all of these like rock stars of artificial intelligence work for them because what they are doing is they are trying to make the social media algorithms that govern what you

see as smart and as ruthless as possible. This is when YouTube sets towards this big internal goal they have for one billion hours of daily watch time, meaning that everyone who uses YouTube will collectively watch one billion hours of video every single day, which is ten times what they had across the platform at the time they set

this goal. So they're starting to really design their business models and their engineering around the idea that they need to in order to survive drastically increase the stickiness and addictiveness of being on their platform, which is when they kind of start getting into all of these dark arts of emotional and psychological manipulation.

that was. Like a big watership moment is around twenty fifteen, when gamer gait goes from being this thing that is happening on the fringes of Reddit and the fringes of YouTube, where it's like a bunch of like young white guys are really mad about video games for some reason I don't understand why, to all of a sudden it's completely dominant on all of the social platforms, and it's the like number one thing day after day on the platforms, and all of these like weirdo gamer Gate characters like

Milo Gianopolis and Mike Cernovich, all of a sudden they're like mainstream political figures. And that is we know now in retrospect, because this is the time when social media algorithms started to realize that stuff like gamer Gate was going to be so so effective at increasing engagement. So that's why when you go away from the social media algorithms of the era of like the dress what you get instead of the social media algorithms of gamer Gate, which I would not consider a trade up.

social media algorithms is definitely Brightbart. There was this huge Harvard study or it was like led through Harvard, but it was a ton of different scholars that came out after the twenty sixteen election and was kind of trying to ask, like, Okay, what happened, what was the like something the internet played some role in the twenty sixteen election. Social media played some role, but we're I'm not quite

sure what it is. So let's do like a big systemic investigation into what the social web looked like in the run up to the twenty sixteen election. And one of the big things they found is that from May twenty fifteen to November twenty sixteen, when the election was held, which is kind of the onset of that era of the new social media algorithms, Breitbart was the third most shared media outlet on all of social media, which is crazy when you know that Breitbart has like no staff,

they have no budget. It's a terrible experience to be on their website. They don't produce very many articles. And before this algorithmic shift, they had been a teeny tiny little website with no readership. And there was like this kind of narrative that like, oh, yes, Steve Bannon, who's running Breitbart, is some like genius of the dark arts of the social web. And what we learned from this Harvard study and from a lot of subsequent investigations is

that he was not. The people of Breitbart were not these geniuses. They were passive beneficiaries of the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter, basically plucking this website and similar websites out and pushing them in front of huge audiences of people. Like Breitbart got more audience and engagement on Facebook than Fox News did in the run up to the election, and Fox News is like a bajillion dollar company with hundreds of reporters.

from a news source that is saying shit. I now most of us get our news from people who are just saying shit on social media, and we kind of like trust or hope that the like viral posts that we're reading is at some point sourced from something real, and sometimes it is, and it's just spun in a way to like get more engagement on social media. But you know, it's just as possible that it's made up, or that it's exaggerated, or that it's out of context.

So it is, in retrospect, like the start of a larger shift to the just saying shit era of media consumption, because on some level, you know, even though we do all care about getting accurate information from credible sources, our brains unfortunately are really really drawn to things that are emotionally satisfying or that delivered like outrage which feels very affirming to indulge in, or that deliver a sense of like moral righteousness or in group versus out group, and

that can overpower that desire that we do also feel for real credible information, which is of course only gotten worse since twenty sixteen.

longer future. To this day, there's an entire page about the dress on the Roman Original's website where it was manufactured, calling it the quote phenomenon that revealed differences in human color perception, which have been the subject of ongoing scientific investigation in neuroscience and vision science.

they want to talk. After all, the dress was for someone's wedding, and the mom who wore the dress stated at the time of the incessant optical illusion that she was annoyed that she was being excluded from most news coverage. Cecilia and the married couple got the classic fifteen minutes treatment for this era, the married couple Grace and Keir and Cecilia and her partner Paul, were flown out to la to be on the Ellen Show, and the couple

got a briefcase full of ten thousand American dollars. The mother and stepfather of the bride got underwear for some reason, half black and blue and half white and gold, and that was it, and Cecilia was pissed from a Guardian piece from late twenty fifteen.

kill wife. I don't want to rehash it too heavily here, but the relationship had been tremendously abusive since before the dress and their marriage, culminating in husband Keir making repeated violent attempts on Grace's life isolating her from friends and family and attempting to murder her during the spring of

twenty twenty two. He then went to court and denied all charges and most clickbait in twenty twenty three because yes, all of the same outlets reported on this story again made the somewhat lazy observation that the dress had previously been used in a domestic violence awareness camp pain in South Africa back in twenty fifteen, featuring a woman wearing the dress in white and gold while covered in black and blue bruises. Why is it so hard to see

black and blue? The ad asked. I think this ad is very weird, even if the intention was well placed, and the wave of twenty twenty three press connecting it to the real life terror campaign taken out on Grace felt just as wrong because virtually all of those pieces, while sympathetic to her, ended in some tired version of By the way, the dress was black and blue and as of this month. In May twenty twenty four, I am recording this a month after we finished this episode.

Kiir Johnston is being held in prison after pleading guilty to attacking and attempting to kill Grace back in twenty twenty two. At the time, Grace called and texted people for help after years of reporting abuse and said that her husband was trying to kill her after she was violently attacked, strangled, and was threatened with a knife. As of this recording, the case is ongoing, and we wish Grace nothing but peace and getting as far away from

any of this fucking discourse as she needs to. And it's further proof that any Internet story on a long enough timeline begins to reflect the ugliness of the world

that the Internet reflects and so often warps. Okay, cutting back into the original episode here, I'm sort of hesitant to say that there's a clear lesson to be learned from the saga of the dress, but it certainly encapsulates a moment in Internet history that feels ungo backable, and there's no better example of that than all the writers who were paid at the time to make it mean something outside of being an increasingly rare monocultural moment that

swirled in normal people with tech profits and our attention. So the dress means something, but what exactly that is is a little elusive. Almost ten years on, I feel kind of nostalgic for a time where the Internet could unite over a neutral issue. But as a twenty two year old clickbait writer, I didn't even have the time to appreciate it because I needed to form an edgy, smart,

adjacent opinion about it as quickly as possible. Here's a passage from a reaction to the dress and the Lama's success as stories on the heels of the net neutrality decision. The essay is called the open Internet will keep us stupid and happy. At this point, it's unfathomable to think of anything short of a gale force windstorm full of knives that could prevent the Internet from brimming with memes, gifts, and asenine materials from content farms.

I wrote this, and what the fuck was I talking about? Anyways? Good for her. I'm sure she'll never overthink anything again. Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted, and executive produced by me Jamie Loftus. Our other executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans,

and our supervising producer and editor is Ian Johnson. Our theme song is by Sadie Dupui and I would like to thank all of the pets, Anderson the Dog, Mike, Kats, Flee and Casper, and my pet rock Bird, who will outlive us all. Bye e