overly attached girlfriend, pt. 1

Characters like these have appeared in media for as long as there's ben media, and while many are iconic, it's pulling from this fairly gendered playbook right because there's obviously a difference between this behavior characterized as clingy and actual dangerous stalker behaviors. Sometimes they're not the same thing, and like no Shade to Miss Piggy, but all three of the above characters are stalking. But that's what makes it

kind of hard to talk about right. There is a clear unhealthy, obsessive quality to these characters that poses a danger, but there's also this warning quality about them, like this capacity lies within every woman on the planet. People recognize this as more of a trope today, but this murky line of what constitutes clingy versus what constitutes dangerous is

something that's been discoursed to death every year. There are scores of personal essays about the stigma of being viewed as clingy by a partner and how the term can be used to describe something as reasonable as respect and clear communication by someone who doesn't want to give the consideration. This same label clingy can be used to describe violent stalking, and the behaviors are equated in a really unproductive and

confusing way. There's a number of writers who have spoken on the connotations of the term in casual dating and how clinginess being weaponized to make them feel bad is a way to make them stop asking for foundational respect and a relationship. But as entrenched in stereotypes as clinginess and emotionality and womanhood are, it can be funny to see these tropes poked fun at, particularly if it's from women or the people being teased in the first place.

It's fun seeing a character with a lot of intensity that isn't being shamed and just is. I mean, Miss Piggy is the perfect example of that. But it's a hard needle to thread. Here's another fun stereotype. Women, young people, queer people, really anyone inclined to enjoy pop music are often portrayed as shallow obsessives. There are literal doctoral theses on this topic because modern fandom can get genuinely terrifying.

So for the sake of this conversation, I'm talking about your average big fan loves the music, doesn't miss a tour, but isn't like hiding in the walls of the artists and sending death threats over Spotify streams, you know what I mean. Over time, the concept of fandom has really shifted. There's a proven trend of mocking fandoms as a way of making fans feel silly and ashamed about liking something

or someone that isn't traditionally masculine. This has happened since time immemorial, putting down what young people usually the girls and gays, in order to make them seem silly or less deserving of respect. We see this time and time again, from the Beatles to Twilight to drag Race fans. And then on the other hand, there's the effect this strong parasocial fan behavior has on their relationship between idle and idolizers.

That is, fans do take it too far a lot of the time and often act entitled to an idol's time, attention virginity. Yes, I went to a Jonas Brothers concert during their Chastity Built era. Fun fact. And while this is often young people feeling extreme passion and excitement and feeling like they know a celebrity because they don't know

any better, it can be unsafe for the celebrity. There's a recent strain of discourse going on to that effect right now, with Chapel Roone making clear boundaries with her fans. Would you be offended if she says no to your time because she has her own time?

My World, in two thousand and nine. He basically became a thing right away, a pop heart throb with swoopy bangs who was known for his effect on teen girls,

who were also his main audience. The songs he sang hated directly to them in those teeny bopper years, songs like One Less Lonely Girl, Favorite Girl, and in early twenty ten, the iconic Ludicrous featuring Baby and going back now nearly fifteen years later, it's a little spooky watching old videos of child Justin Bieber, because beneath this carefully curated and marketed image you do get glimpses of a normal, talented kid who's in way over his head.

I wanted to see it. It was fine. He released a Christmas album and began work on his third studio album called Believe, and to announce his lead single, he did what any wholesome celebrity would do. In March of twenty twelve, he went on Ellen. It was his eighteenth birthday, and he announced that his first single from the album would be called Boyfriend. All right, the last time you were here, we were talking about Boyfriend, your new song that no one has heard yet.

real meaningful Bieber tabloid moment before twenty thirteen. So at this point he's mister sweetie, he's mister dating Selena Gomez, He's mister boyfriend. So during the launch of Believe a few months later, there were countless tie ins run by Bieber Incorporated to promote the album I'm going to single out too. There was a fragrance released called Girlfriend, which is pandering to young girls hard. In the ad copy take a Lesson.

history itself. On June sixth, twenty twelve, a YouTube user called WZR seven one three uploaded an entry to the contest that became instantly iconic in spite of the user not just being a complete unknown. But at first no one even knew her name, but you know her face. It's a high contrast video on an old webcam and a college sophomore's clinically white dorm room with collaged posters. A girl in the video has a side part, a

green shirt, and huge blue eyes. It starts like this, Yeah, this is the intro to boyfriend, and it goes on for nine seconds. And for all nine of those seconds, the girl in the video is staring down the barrel of the camera with her huge eyes and huge smile, not blinking, barely breathing, sitting a little too close to the camera, looking like the last thing you see before you die.

the first memes. I feel like I was really fully present for a meme that communicates to you that it came out into strictly with the blown out, high contrast

webcam esthetic. Our character of the day this week is indeed the overly attached girlfriend, an early YouTube star whose career and departure from the platform is a cool case study on how YouTube stardom has evolved over time, because Lena gets started when YouTube is just starting to seem like a legitimate career path, and by the time she's at the height of her popularity, American kids were saying that being a YouTuber was a more popular job choice

than being an astronaut. So today we're going to talk about how that shift happened and where YouTube came from, and how fame on that platform became a thing at all. And next week we'll talk to Lena. So as the kids say, let's fucking go. It was so fun revisiting this story. Twenty twelve is a very nostalgic era of the Internet. For me, it was a time I use something called stumble Upon to find people's blogs, and it was a time where fail compilations got millions of views

of people just falling down. It was Nano Raima before the AI allegations. It was Rebecca Blacks Friday. It was a time where I'd troll on eating disorder tumblers to find a new way to hate myself. That last one was sad, but I promised to tell the truth on the show. Twenty twelve was a time and when we have the sacred duty to return to if we are to understand the overly attached Girlfriend's place in Internet history. So come with me if you will to June twenty twelve,

Madonna launches a tour in Tel Aviv. The same day the IDF launches an airstrike on Gaza. Nothing fucked up about that. There is a surge of gonorrhea in England and WZR seven one three who the world would quickly learn was a college student named Lena uploaded a joke entry to a Justin Bieber contest that would change her life. This is a story that wouldn't have had the sheer reach it dead without the help of two major social

media platforms. Once that remain with us today YouTube and Reddit, And while Reddit has a thorough and terrifying history all its own, this week, we're going to stick to the platform that Lena chose to find her creative voice on YouTube. I think the fact that YouTube is the cultural juggernaut that it is today might surprise Lena Morris if I could teleport back to twenty twelve and tell her YouTube is weathered a lot of waves of social media turnover.

It's outlived MySpace, blog Spot, snapchat, Vine, and I do believe it will ultimately outplay TikTok on a longer timeline. But it's changed a lot over the years from a business standpoint, from an algorithmic standpoint, and for the sake of this story, so I want to give you a snapshot of where YouTube and social media personalities on YouTube were at in twenty twelve, because it truly was another world.

Half of the people at the height of their careers at this time have since been thoroughly canceled or moved on to other projects. Keep in mind, this was three presidents years ago. This was before all of the Twilight movies were out. Brannan is me and I was thinking vanesme you get it and to bring us there. There were two books that were massively helpful to me, and they were written by guests who have appeared on this very show. The first is Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine

and the second is Taylor Lorenzz Extremely Online. So classes in session, what is YouTube? YouTube? Can I regret to inform you trace its roots back to some of the world's most embarrassing and powerful men, those being Peter Teel

and Elon Musk. It was founded in two thousand and five by three expats of PayPal, which Teal co founded and Musk joined on the ground floor, and like other rising social media star Facebook, YouTube started as a botched attempt at a dating service that women had absolutely no interest in. Founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Johwito Kareem

failed to launch YouTube as a dating service hard. In fact, they at one time offered women twenty bucks on Craigslist to upload videos to the service and still could not get any traction. But YouTube did have one thing that was head and shoulders above other sites. It had a really solid video uploading platform that anyone could use for free. Lorenz covers the history of how content creators on YouTube became the platform's core appeal and extremely online, and it's

not as linear a path as you might expect. The founders ditched the dating angle pretty early on as they watched the site game users who seemed more interested in uploading whatever home videos, clips of TV shows they liked, and within its first year this was enough to get YouTube funding from a well respected Silicon Valley venture capital firm and rack up around one hundred thousand views in the space of an average day, which you've got to admit is not bad for the guys who were literally

paying women to upload con that they didn't actually believe just a couple months earlier. Early viral successes included an unlacensed re upload of the Lonely Islands Lazy Sunday sketch from SNL, and this actually really helped legitimize the site, as well as calling in to question what was legal to post on YouTube if it wasn't actually your work.

I still don't think that they've really figured that out, But soon after that, regular users started to look at YouTube as a chance to not just dump videos from their camquorders, but really build out a creative vision. Early successful YouTubers were really low fi and often pretty young. I'm honestly surprised at how many people who started their

channels in two thousand and six are still around. But for longtime fans, think Smash Slash, Anthony Padilla, the Angry Video Game Nerd, Lucas Crookshank Ka Fred, and I Justine. They all launched their channels in two thousand and six and are still around to some extent today. But the early standout when it came to a YouTube channel that really held people's attention was the infamous web series Lonely

Girl fifteen. And I won't get too deep into the lore behind Lonely Girl fifteen because I very much would like to make an episode about it. But if you're not familiar, Lonely Girl fifteen was a scripted web series starring actress Jessica Lee Rose playing a teenage character named Brie. She'd speak to the camera of log style while her friend Daniel hung out in the background and chimed in

every now and again. As the channel continued to upload videos, it became clearer that Bree's family was a part of a freaky cult and she was slowly being primed to participate in an occult ceremony. It's a really low fly teen sci fi series, right, But the thing about it was the series pretended to be completely real, and for the first few episodes, viewers really thought that Bree was a person uploading vlogs and realizing that her family was deans.

Over time, and in an early instance of YouTube fan detectiving, someone ip traced and geolocated where they were, so it was revealed pretty early in the show's run that Lonely Girl fifteen was scripted and that Brie was an actress. This was a creative experiment by a bunch of young people in LA But what seemed to surprise the YouTube brass was that even after it was exposed as scripted,

the viewership kept climbing. People were really invested, and the reveal that the series authenticity was a hoax only increased its popularity. For a long time, it was the number one channel on YouTube, and part of that seemed to be because the show was good and while the material was scripted, the creators were complete unknowns, but all of a sudden they'd gotten views and attention on par with

independent horror directors on zero budget and more eyes. By the end of two thousand and six, the stars and cre creators of Lonely Girl fifteen had Hollywood representatives and were appearing in mainstream magazines like The Hollywood Reporter as an example that YouTube was a place for regular people to be creative and potentially even legitimized in the mainstream. But it should be mentioned the first season of Lonely Girl fifteen aired before YouTube had ever begun monetizing its videos,

meaning they made no money on it. There's another big change to YouTube. At the end of two thousand and six, a little company called Google purchased the platform for a then and still massive one point sixty five billion dollars to avoid competition with Google's inferior product, Google Video. At

the time, the buy was viewed as foolish. It was helmed by then Google exec later longtime YouTube CEO the recently passed Susan Wojitski, But Google was quick to investigate what it was about YouTube that was bringing in now millions of viewers, and they wanted to figure out how

to best monetize whatever it was. Going into two thousand and seven, a lot more early viral sensations blew up on YouTube think Charlie bit my Finger, Payzon Day's Chocolate Rain, David after Dentist, but there was still no clear way to maintain that virality. In two thousand and seven, users were able to monetize their videos and the invite only partner program was introduced, but few were able to actually

cobble together a for real living. In the mid to late twenty tens, YouTube also became a place where musicians could be discovered, like a young Choiceavon or most famously

one Justine Biber in two thousand and eight. As you pull it so with the increasing audience that was flocking to YouTube, estimates put around two hundred million people having accounts by twenty ten, there were a number of attempts inside and outside of the company to make youtubess artem fit into a box that resembled fame by the late two thousands, and during this period of growth, there were

a few interesting developments. A new breed of talent agents that specialized in online stars, creator driven YouTube studios known as multi channel networks, and YouTube itself tooling with its algorithm to maximize viewership, ad revenue, and creator retention. The agent part is pretty interesting in no small part because it was a job that basically had to be invented.

The most notorious YouTube agent was named Ben Lashes, who started by representing the Keyboard Cat, which is a re upload of a video of a cat from the eighties that had since died. You know this video. He went on to negotiate sponsorships and helm the careers of the likes of Doge, success Kid, Scumbag, Steve the irma gird girl, the ridiculously photogenic guy I feel like I'm losing my mind. He did, not, however, represent Lena Morris, the overly attached girlfriend.

Ben Lashes basically invented this job, and other agents soon followed suit. But it's these creative multi channel networks that I think has the most powerful effect on what YouTube stardom could look like. At this time, multi channel networks held massive influence over the creator sphere and helped address the gaps and revenue that YouTube's own partner programs weren't providing.

The first was a company called Next New, which started in two thousand and six and built out multiple successful channels while taking a percentage in exchange for handling the business and advertising side. They built channels around themes pop culture, fashion, automobile, let the creators focus on the creative, and then they would find the advertising dollars. YouTube wasn't so everyone could

make a living. Then there was Maker's Studios, founded in two thousand and nine by successful YouTubers like Cassum g Shaik, Carl Philip DeFranco, Lisa Donovan, Danny Zappan, the list goes on. This studio was modeled on the idea of United Artists, which was founded in nineteen nineteen by Charlie Chaplin, d W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, and the intention of it was to liberate and empower artists to choose their own projects out of the confines of rigid studio contracts and

still make a good living. Originally, Maker Studios aim to do that same thing for YouTube by nurturing new talent through what were then referred to as super channels, the most famous of which was called the Station. The Station is also another whole story, but it served as a prototype for the YouTube and vine collab houses that would become wildly popular in the twenty tens into the early

twenty twenties. The premise of the Station channel was that basically Makers student rented a nice house on Venice Beach and invited any successful YouTube to live there and cross collaborate with each other and create a ton of content for the channel. It was really popular. While he wasn't a part of the company, a young YouTuber named bo Burnham was said to couch serve at the station house

from time to time. Eventually the house would be shut down due to safety concerns and excessive partying, a lesson that future social media stars definitely learned from the high house coused you know, six hundred thousand damage. Nevertheless, Maker Studios normalized the reality that YouTube was nothing without its creators, and that if the company didn't compensate and promote them accordingly, well, they would go somewhere else and find a way to

do it. As Taylor Lorenz gets into the success of Maker and Next New Studios, which by the way, would be folded into Disney and the YouTube Creator Program respectively by the mid twenty tens, emphasized how important individual personalities were to the platform and for popular creators who weren't quite sure how to turn this into a career, signing with a Maker or a Next New Made a lot of sense, and they'd often end up launching series exclusively

with a specific company. It was this model that actually led to the first episode of this show. Brooklyn based YouTubers the Gregory Brothers developed their auto tune the news series under Nextnew and launched a little something called the bed Intruder Song that made one Antoine Dodson a permanent and complicated figure in Internet history. Well listen to that

episode for more. After the success of these companies, other multi channel networks with niche specialties started to launch, and all of these companies were raising a lot of capital

to continue growing their stable of YouTube talent. They were so successful that a former YouTube executive named jo Orde Strumpolis actually left the company to launch a YouTube multi channel network of his own called full Screen, and that became a huge success in the early twenty tens, prompting YouTube to acquire Next New in retaliation in order to

stay competitive. So by the early twenty tens, the idea that YouTube was a talent driven supernova was well established, but what a creator's fame could or should look like still remained a little bit opaque. Because these multi channel networks were headquartered mainly in La. This period of time meant most famous YouTubers lived in Hollywood, and this kind of spoke to the general feeling of where people seemed

to think YouTube was headed. There was this feeling of maybe this is a new pipeline to mainstream stardom, the feeling of no one is going to be a YouTuber forever, right, YouTube fame will translate to movies or music, and these days that is not really an idea that exists anymore. Sure, there are exceptions. There's people like Bo Burnham, Shawn Mendez, the Green Brothers, one third of Derek Comedy, some guy named Donald Glover, Lindsay Ellis, and Liza Koshey have parlayed

YouTube fame into mainstream success. But for many, the continued user growth and MLN success left some creators realizing that YouTube could actually be their job and maybe even their whole career. YouTube continued to pour money into its partnership funds to retain talent, and there are a few isolated examples of YouTubers attempting to cross over into the mainstream Around this time. I'll call back to the Fred character,

remember him, Remember Fred? Hey, It's fine, It's really nice out, So I think I'm gonna go swimming later.

also had You're justin Bieber's. And while creators were navigating this in the twenty tens, YouTube itself was pretty preoccupied with a terrifying concept called in And this is where Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine comes in and gives a lot of context on the history of the YouTube algorithm

and what kind of users it was boosting. The book explains that in the early twenty tens, the company had an increased focus on maximizing the YouTube algorithm to generate video recommendations that would keep people on the platform for as long as possible. Fisher uses the example of a French AI expert named Guillem Chaslau I know I said that wrong, who was brought to YouTube in twenty ten and was tasked with raising average watch time on the platform. He literally received an email saying.

game culture critic Anita Sarkisian, sometimes women. Generally, men were spending forty percent more time on YouTube than women were, a legacy in part of the enormous quantity of video game related content on the site in those days, the natural thing for the algorithm to do, Shilo realized, would be to privilege more male centered content.

by mobs of egg profiled assholes ever since. But this is twenty twelve and Chaslou doesn't know any of this is going to happen. All he knows is that he wants to prevent this slowly radicalized recommendation algorithm from getting worse, So he started spending time on a side project that attempted to train the current algorithm to counterbalance this effect and not just push hateful rhetoric to young male viewers

for profit. But before he could make any meaningful progress on this goal or really tell anyone what he was working on. YouTube leadership announced at a conference in summer twenty twelve, just a few months after Overly Attached Girlfriend went viral, that there was a new goal for the company. Employees were told that by the end of twenty sixteen, just about four years later, YouTube wanted a billion hours of content to be consumed a day on the platform.

This was ridiculous. This was ten times the amount of viewership they were getting in the summer of twenty twelve, and it was a goal that they achieved by making the problem that Shaslow was concerned about get much worse, because his whole algorithmic ethics project was sidelined immediately in favor of the opposite, juicing the algorithm to feed users anything without any quality control of the truth or hatefulness

of the content that was pushed. Though, by the mid to late twenty tens, YouTube was a full on radicalization machine, one that Fisher mentions was quite literally left unsupervised in order to achieve this billion hours a day goal. And it's so wild to think that the Overly Attached Girlfriend's launch happens at this pretty major precipice in Internet culture. Twenty twelve was a precipice in the way content creators

viewed themselves. They were moving from the idea that they would abandon the platform for movies and realize that they might just be able to support themselves and mend some just by staying on YouTube. And it's a precipice for the algorithm. Taking Schaslow's account into consideration, overly attached girlfriend probably came to prominence in the last few months before the YouTube algorithm was unleashed to a violent degree. It's heavy, it's a lot, and then there's this.

overly attached girlfriend. So okay, we know about the Justin Bieber contest. We know about the both very intense and pretty scattered view of what YouTube fame could look like at the time the meme went viral, But what happens after the initial viral moment? To remind you, Lena Morris went viral on two platforms at the same time in slightly different ways. On Reddit, it's just an image of Lena that goes viral. The wide blue eyes, the brunette

side parts, the vacant smile. Sir, and you might remember how this meme was formatted. Here are some examples. You don't want me to be your girlfriend anymore?

of this character. But the upload, titled JB fan video pulls in over a million views in its first two days and gets additional traction when Reddit realizes that the source of the overly attached girlfriend image has a fuller piece of content attached to it, and the mainstream media picks up on it headlines.

character with the real person. And I actually do feel the need to specify that, because I think the men of today's Internet might genuinely struggle to detect a bit. I blame the algorithm. Originally, the Overly Attached Girlfriend uses the name Lena Walker to protect her true identity. Remember when we cared about that and Lena sets up public facing Facebook and Twitter accounts Because however sudden things had been in the last ten days, her decision seemed clear.

Lena was going to lean into the meme and was not shying away from the newfound fame it had brought her. This was further confirmed a few days later on June eighteenth, when Lena uploaded a second parody song video as Overly Attached Girlfriend to YouTube. This time she wrote lyrics to then massive hit Call Me Maybe by Justin bieberback Canadian Carly Raid Jepson. Here's the Overly Attached Girlfriend version.

in Texas overnight. But she is ready to commit to YouTube and soon decides to not return to school, and of course, a few crummy imitators crop up, the overly attached boyfriend, the underly attached girlfriend, the regularly attached girlfriend,

mime made from more normal pictures of Lena. But she's focused on building her own brand and starts collaborating with other big YouTubers, as was the trend back then, and as she pivots from full time college student the full time YouTuber, a still murky job title at the time, Lena continued to make appearances in mainstream media the next year because keep in mind, the viral lifespan of a meme personality in twenty twelve was significantly longer than it

is today, and so she gets opportunities like hosting the Red Carpet of the AMAS in twenty twelve, and in twenty thirteen has a staring contest with Jessica Alba on stage at the Social Star Awards Just look into those big, sexy, creepy eyes and get it On, as well as a

memorable appearance on Jimmy Fallon. And while Lena makes a lot of the moves one would expect from a YouTuber of this era, meaning VidCon appearances, fan conventions, and appearance in a truly wild twenty fifteen Delta Airlines safety video that featured every meme personality at the time demonstrating a safety joke. I'm just gonna link it in the description it's impossible to explain in an audio medium. But of course, Lena's moment as a heightened mainstream media figure passes, eventually

leaving her to maintain and grow her YouTube audience. She ultimately decides to stay in Texas, not going the way of moving into the standard house or making a YouTuber movie, which rarely goes well anyway, or pursuing a legacy acting or pop music career. Instead, Lena goes into business for herself and begins to write, perform, and edit her weekly content in addition to maintaining the front facing relationship with

her viewers. Pretty soon, she's got audiences on Twitter, on Instagram, on snapchat, you name a popular social media between twenty twelve and now, and she's brought her follower base along there with her. And it's interesting to trace the way this content grows and changes over time. At the beginning, Lena focuses most of her weekly YouTube stuff on the Overly Attached Girlfriend throughout twenty twelve and twenty thirteen. Here are some examples. Welcome to behind the means tonight's episode

Overly Attached Girlfriend. This Mother's Day, you have a choice. Who would you rather spend it with? Your mother or the mother of your future children.

on are these videos. If you're watching Lena's content for the next few years, it genuinely seems like she's having a good time. As the years pass, as a full time YouTuber, Lena develops a couple other characters that appear regularly on the channel and make sketches along with whatever was trending on the algorithm at that time, food review videos, reaction videos, you name it. But behind the scenes fans would learn years later Lena was not as content as

the image she projected in the videos. In fact, she'd been having mental health struggles and issues with creator burnout for years, going back to her first years on YouTube. She'd been in therapy for some time after really struggling

with the anxiety of producing weekly content. She felt proud of the pressure of navigating what a YouTuber's career was supposed to look like, of feeling isolated from her peers, making things by herself, and while many of the YouTubers she'd come up with had risen and fallen in the time she'd been regularly posting. Between twenty twelve and twenty nineteen, Lena hit a wall, and on July twenty fourth, twenty nineteen, she posted a video called breaking Up with You Toobe.

at this time. Earlier in twenty nineteen, writer Anne Helen Peterson published what I consider to be a seminal essay about life online during late Capitalism, called How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and it went viral because it articulated so many feelings that young people did not then have the language to explain. And Lena alludes to feelings like that in much of this essay, along with just struggling with depression. She felt like a fraud. She didn't want

to let her audience down. She felt very disarmed being at the whims of the algorithm. She was exhausted and angry and critical of herself and ashamed that she felt so unhappy while experiencing what by that time was the number one dream job for American kids YouTuber. It's an emotional video, and Lena says it's time for her to step back for her own health. Here's another clip.

in ever changing, pretty punishing YouTube landscape. In twenty twenty one, Lena does I think the only controversial thing I've heard of in her entire your career and sells an NFT of the original overly Attached Girlfriend meme for over four hundred thousand dollars to a music company in Dubai because sure, thankfully, the NFT boom has now ostensibly passed, but were understandably very controversial in the early twenty twenties for being yet

another predatory tech bubble that wasted a shitload of energy, but at the time, selling NFTs was viewed as a way for people who had been memed to death over the years to make some money from their likeness. Other meme expats like the Disaster Girl, that picture of a little girl smiling mysteriously in front of a house burning down. People like success Kid, bad Luck Brian, and the Erma

Gerd Girl all sold NFTs during this time. And yes, I'm not going to argue that the blockchain is anything but a nightmare, but I do understand the reasoning which was consistent across those selling. The Internet had been using these people's image for nearly or over a decade by this point, and most hadn't been able to control or

even vaguely profit from that. NFTs are fucked, and I can't really blame any of these people for wanting to get compensated for years of their image being parlayed while they had to navigate the world no ethical consumption right and for what it's worth, Lena seems to have complicated feelings about having done it now and in the years

before and stance. She's been a genuinely kind and thoughtful person in how she's handled her public and private persona she popped up on YouTube one more time in twenty twenty two to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the original meme, but at the time I started working on this episode, that was it. And then on August fourth of twenty twenty four, Lena posted a video to YouTube for the first time in years, in a video titled five years Later, five years from the moment that she

left YouTube. And I was really excited because it's Lena seeming a lot more comfortable with herself. She gives some updates on her life, but mostly she's just the person people fell in love with over a decade ago.

and produced by me Jamie LASiS. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad thirteen and Pet. Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kat's flee and Casper and my pet Rockbert, who will outlive us all Bye.